... and so I'm doubly excited about next October! Why? Because we are organising a get-together for historical textile crafts at the wonderful open air museum in Eindhoven.

I have heard a lot of people in the last years utter something like "it is a pity that living history and current research don't communicate more". And we could surely all profit from more and better communication and better sharing of experiences. But how, and where? During the Exar conference in Oldenburg last October, we decided to give it a try and organise such a meet-up possibility.
At long last, there will be a place and time for professionals, researchers and living history/reenactment people to get together and hopefully learn from each other.

Today I spent the whole morning getting the website up and running, just so you can have a sneak peek at www.textilforum.org (and so I can finally spill the beans about it). There are no pictures yet and of course we don't have the full programme already, but you can subscribe to the newsletter and get an update whenever the website or our planning does.

If you are working in historical textile crafts, do take a look - and I hope that you get as thrilled about the Textilforum as we are!

I have made a resolution to do some academic housekeeping (a.k.a. filing of papers) every day to reduce the huge stack of copied papers that are still left from the time of thesis-writing. Since filing here means taking the paper and typing all the necessary data like author, editor, title, year, journal or book title, ... into my database before actually punching holes into the sheets and binding them together and physically filing them, this is not one of my favourite jobs - it can get pretty tedious after a while. At the moment, I am filing mostly papers written in Czech, which means "after a while" translates as "after the third or fourth article". Even with a keyboard heavily altered to include almost all special characters that are needed for writing Czech, Polish, French, and the Scandinavian languages, getting all the words typed out correctly is taking a lot of concentration.

Yet keeping such a database is a huge help when looking for that "something I once read somewhere", not to speak of citing things in papers and articles. I would not want to be without that database - I am using Endnote, but if you are looking for a literature database, you might want to look at Zotero, a free plugin for Firefox doing the same job as Endnote. I bought the commercial programme a few years ago because it included an add-in for MS Word, and there was no alternative product on the market. I was convinced before buying that adding references to texts with a flick of the finger really is something, and I never regretted buying the software. Even better if you can get the same functionality for free nowadays!

So now I'm tackling the paper stack three or four papers at a time, and I'm looking forward to the day in the future when all the sheets have been filed into one of my file folders. And I hope it will come soon!

I feel like I've never done so much planning so far in advance before, and this might be true. After all, this is my first year of working freelance in full-time, not just part-time in addition to studies.

All these dates and deadlines and things that are already filling up my calender make me a little queasy in the stomach region, but on the other hand, I get really excited about them. At least I won't be dying of boredom next year! There is a bunch of conferences during the year, some that I have already applied for and more that would love to go to - and how can you not want to go to a conference that calls for papers like Borderlines XIII? Though there's a family birthday on that date, which is kind of sad since I can't be there and here at the same time. Then I need to figure out how much time all my projects will eat, so I don't plan too many trips and conferences.

For the moment, I have two presentations/lectures coming up, one in January and one in March, at the conference about colours in the Middle ages, so it is time to prepare for those. Powerpoint, here I come!

Yes, there is no way to ignore it: Another blog has seen the light of day, struggling for readers. Do we really need this? Do I hear a "Yes!" there? Somebody?

So, welcome to this sparkling, nice, brand-new blog. I am a medieval archaeologist specialising in textiles or, more specifically, in medieval garments and their reconstruction. For a living, I am currently giving talks and workshops, writing about medieval garments, tailoring garments for museums and exhibitions, and I am fully enjoying myself doing it. I have a few nice things for next year in planning too, and you will hear about them here as these projects take shape. In addition, I will blog about all kinds of freelance things here, garment reconstruction and research, gadgets that spice up my computer and that I don't want to be without, and whatever else I can think of. I have no idea how this will all turn out - but as with every brain child, I hope for the best!