The IMAREAL in Austria offers a series of lectures called "Materielle Welten" , and the one upcoming on November 6 is in English. The lecture starts at 17:00 MEZ and is titled "Seal Bags and Relics: The Case of Thomas Becket", held by Jitske Jasperse from Madrid.

You can join in for free; find out more about the series here (page in German) and about the upcoming talk here. 

I'm absolutely ready for the weekend to come - having successfully wrangled the tax paperwork stuff for the last quarter of the year*, it's now on to finishing the orders to be sent off, and then... weekend.

Next week will see the final prep stuff list for the wool festival in Backnang worked off (making lots and lots of distaffs has already happened), and then I will dive into a flurry of activity with the exhibition opening in Bamberg, the wool festival in Backnang, and then the Textile Forum.

Maybe I should start calling the time from mid-October to mid-November or end of November "Crazy Season"?

* Dutifully assisted by the cat, who came to sleep on my desk while I was doing it. Fortunately I was quick enough this time to take the stack of paperwork from her very-near-future resting place and put it to the side, so I could at least work on it. It has happened before that I was not quick enough and had to postpone tax work or book-keeping, as there's no way the individual papers can be pulled out from underneath the furry paperweight!

When I was small, I remember there being a regular children's magazine coming into our hose, and that included a "Bastelbogen" on the center pages (at least some of them did). So you could cut out and glue together a little house, or something else. They'd quite often find their way onto the train scenery that came downstairs from the attic around Christmas time. (I think the scale more or less fit, but frankly I didn't really care. The important thing was that I'd get to cut and fold and glue and then have a little something to put there.)

Later on, I once made a large cardboard castle... which then stood on top of a cupboard for ages, getting a little messed up and dusty and deteriorating a bit over time. These days, I usually pass when given the chance to buy one -  I still like the idea very much, and I'd enjoy the making, but then I never know what to do with the models. (I guess one could glue them to the ceiling and make an upside-down landscape there?) In case you also have a liking for those lightweight mini buildings, and don't mind having them stand around then, you might want to take a look at the Schreiber-Bogen website or, to be precise, their English shop. I've linked you straight to the churches, but there's also houses, ships, and whatnot.

Me, I always get a little nostalgic seeing these paper model sheets. One day,  though, when I have too much time...

I think I mentioned more than once that one thing that I really like about this line of work is that you can always expect something unexpected to come up. Case in point?

I've recently learned about a non-toxic stand-in alloy for quicksilver, and just ordered some for the upcoming Textile Forum. Why? Because there's a find of artificial pearls embroidered onto a tablet-woven band, and we're planning to try and find out how they might have been made.

There's an analysis of the remnants (which is mostly plaster and some protein), and there's a few surviving recipes from the late Middle Ages. Those quite often contain some base material like ground-up soft stone, egg white as protein, and... quicksilver. (Some also have fun stuff like the bones from the skulls of carp, and young doves to put the half-ready pearls in, then to be wrapped in bread dough and baked... but we'll stay with the simple stuff.)   

So. While I'm all for keeping as close to the original as possible, using real quicksilver for our trials was out of the question. On the other hand, though, the fact that it appears in a number of the recipes hints toward it having an actual function in them... so it felt like not the best option to just omit it. To my great happiness, there's a new alloy of different metals that is used to replace quicksilver these days. The trade name is "Galinstan", it's liquid at room temperature, it looks silvery, and we'll see if it will do the trick.

Now to organise and order the rest of the stuff that we'll need... and then on to the normal, boring housekeeping stuff like book-keeping. 

In the NS era, archaeology was used for a lot of propaganda things, usually to show that Germans are The Best Thing Ever and everybody else was, at best, second grade, and that from the Stone Age onwards. Or so. (This, by the way, is said to be one of the reasons why German archaeology after the war became this hard-facts-only science that is rather sparse with interpretations, if compared to how things are done in other countries.)

The Kreismuseum Syke is working on a case that will give some information about archaeology in that era, and while doing the prep and research for that, they stumbled across an interesting history surrounding a Thanksgiving present to Hitler. If you read German, you can follow that story in a digital exhibition on the museum website. (If you don't read German, you're welcome to look at the pictures and old letters there, but the whole thing is heavily reliant on the texts - and it's quite interesting how the writing styles changed over time.)

I think it's a very good idea to do that exhibition case, and the digital exhibition too!

...here is one:  

Unfortunately, I was not so happy as to sleep on the computer, as there were things to do on it. (The paw placed strategically where it was not supposed to go did not help...) 

Some things are taking on shape, though. Including a credit card payment method for the webshop, which will hopefully pass the testing phase soon! 

It's quite amusing how some fields suddenly have a cross-over with an entirely different one. Remember the pdf I linked to a while ago, with the vegan sausages? Published under "physics of fluids". 

Similarly, braids have been a topic for mathematicians as well, and that for a good while. Maybe you have seen one of the "mystery braid bracelets" at some point, usually a three-end braid made by cutting two slits in a piece of leather (so that the three ends that makes are still solidly connected at both top and bottom) and then braiding it. Yes, that works. Go try it if you've never done so before, it's fun!

Anyway, there's a whole mathematical paper written back in 1962 about braids that can be done with both sides of the ends connected. If you'd like to see it, it's available at JSTOR (where you should be able to get a free account with limited free articles per month to read it).