Here I am, slowly unpacking all the lovely stuff brought home from NESAT. Extra slowly, as most of my worktime yesterday and today is eaten up by doing the tax paperwork. Which is due at the end of this month - anyone hear that "whoosh" sound the approaching deadline makes? (I had wanted to do the tax stuff before NESAT, but with all the other things happening, that had not worked out, so I had planned on spending the start of this work week on it. Progress is according to plan, more or less, so all things are good.)

Anyway, let's return to unpacking, and I will give you a glimpse of the things I brought home from the conference. First of all, stuff from the conference bag - there was the book of abstracts, and the usual info material (a map and information about the city, and about Prague as preparation for our excursion), plus a nice little pen, a pocket programme (glorious idea!) and, woven in the university:


a cloth bookmark with the NESAT emblem, hanging out on the abstract booklet here.

With a bookmark, it is obvious that at least one book has to be bought, right? I made it two:


The one on the left is in Czech, but with a good English summary, and it has lots and lots of photographs of the finds from Prague... which include garment details (buttonholes, for instance). The second one, Chrystel's PhD thesis, contains a lot of meticulous research about early medieval finds from the Netherlands, and those include several hats and headdresses, which makes me really happy, and I'm looking forward to having a nice cup of tea and a read of this thesis.

Now... buying books at a conference is rather normal. It's also not entirely unexpected to find something nice in the conference bag, in addition to the usual things. What came as an utter surprise to me and all the other speakers, though: We, as well as those chairing one of the sessions (which means you are the one introducing the speakers and making sure they finish on time, plus, if necessary, keeping the discussion from getting too short, too long, or too hot), all got a present.

One woven in the university. After a find from the second half of the twelfth century... a piece of samite with gold thread pattern. (Made, in this case, from artificial gold thread and viscose, and not one hundred percent the size of the original, but very close.)

So I now have this:


and I am endlessly delighted with it! It will get a nice spot on one of the walls here, looking utterly beautiful!

I'm back home from NESAT - and it was utterly, utterly glorious.

This was my fourth NESAT conference. The first three had all been splendid, breathless experiences full of interesting papers and posters and with many, many lovely people and brilliant weather and good food and nice surprises, and I was hoping for something in that range - and I'm happy to tell you that NESAT XIII was no exception at all to what seems to be the rule for this conference. Time just flew past, with a (modern) loom presentation and posters and reconstructions to look at in the breaks. There was traditional Czech food, there was coffee galore, there were intense discussions about textiles and many, many other exciting news of what people had done or were planning to do. One of these things that made me totally geek out? The CTR in Copenhagen is working with Motion Capture technology to record and analyse textile techniques, and they are planning to link this up with neurological scans, to see which brain areas are firing when you are, for instance, spinning on a hand spindle. Isn't that awesome?

To give you an inkling of how packed that programme was - we had 48 papers over the course of three days, there was a festive lecture, there was poster presentation time, there was a festive evening. On the fourth day, we had an excursion where we got to visit three exhibitions (one specially made for us in the textiles depot, one in the Hrad, and one in a beautiful museum in the city).

I managed to only buy two books - one about the Early Medieval finds from the Netherlands, and one about Czech finds. I also brought home a bit of Czech chocolate - and almost a sunburn from the one and three quarters day in Prague that I spent with four other conference participants, having an inordinate amount of fun (and coffee). We also managed to walk more than 21 km on the excursion day altogether, which means we slept really, really well that night!

Now, my coffee, water, and exhaustion levels are all slowly settling back towards a normal range. The place for the next NESAT, in three years' time, has also been settled: it will be in Finland... so I now have three years to save up and two-or-so years to come up with something exciting to offer for a paper. Because, you know... after NESAT is before NESAT!

My bags are packed, tickets are bought and printed out and sit where I will not accidentally leave them, I have pens and paper and something to read and something to knit, and - the most important thing - my paper is done and polished and hopefully I will manage not to talk about too many extra things on the spur of the moment and in all the excitement and run over time. (It's amazing, by the way, how much prep time a 20 minute presentation can take. I think it's about the same amount of time as a one hour presentation, as you need to compress so much into so small a timeframe that every slide needs to be polished and scrutinised and polished again. And then sometimes cut after all...)

On Monday, it's off to NESAT, and I can't even begin to describe how excited I am. It's so nice to get together with so many other textile archaeologists, meeting again and chatting and catching up and learning oh so many new things. With one of these glorious conferences only every three years, there's also quite a lot to catch up on, and it's always a rather long wait for the next one.

So I'll be spending the next week in nerd heaven, and for me, the conference will even start earlier, as I'll be travelling together with three more colleagues going there. Hooray!

For you, though, this means no blog posts during next week - I'll be back blogging the Monday after, though. See you then!

The Early Textiles Study Group is hosting a conference called "Precious Cloth and Court Culture AD 400-1600", which takes place at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, on September 16 and 17.

The conference will explore court textiles and furnishings from both European and Asian courts. It will examine precious cloth as symbol of power and authority across the medieval world. Individual speakers drawn from institutions across England and from abroad (and including prominent independent scholars), will explore many aspects of the chosen theme. They will examine weave, braid and lace techniques, iconography and symbolism of precious cloth motifs, the role of the public display of the precious textiles (ceremonial and ritual), and many further issues (social, political, ecclesiastical, and economic  impacts of precious cloth across cultures from the West to the Near East).

You can find more information about the conference, including the programme (which sounds very interesting) plus a booking form, here.

Time for a post about interesting things, some of which you can participate in!

If you are in the Southampton area, there's a project about dexterity in flintknapping:With motion capture. How cool is that!

If you're more on the other side of the globe, there's the meeting of the Society for the History of Technology October 26-29, where there's a session about textiles and early industrialisation in planning. You can read more about the Society and their conference here.

There's also a conference about "Embellished Fabrics: Conserving Surface Manipulation & Decoration." It is the 11th North American Textile Conservation Conference, taking place in Mexico City, Mexico, November 6-11, 2017. The website is www.natcconference.com, and it will provide more information in case you're interested.

And another conference, this time in Poland, in June: Dynamics and Organisation of Textile Production in past societies in Europe and the Mediterranean. International Conference, Łódź, 21-22 June, 2017. The preliminary programme looks really nice and interesting!

For those of you who understand German (or for the adventurous of you who don't), there's a TV show where one guy participates in a club for one day, looking at the stuff people do in their spare time... and one of the clubs is a Living History group. You can watch the half-hour show here.

Some more interesting things - Jim Hines has done a survey about novelist's incomes. So if you've ever wondered whether writing a novel will make you rich, you might want to read his long, really interesting multi-part blogpost, starting with part 1 right here.

In 2011, a tunic was discovered in a Norwegian Glacier, and it has since been reconstructed. You can read a bit about the reconstruction and watch a video here. (I'm not totally happy with the spinning part of the video, as you might guess when watching it...)

And that's it for today. Hope you find something you enjoy among these!

As of today, registration for the IMC in Leeds is open, and there is even a late call for papers. Registration will remain open until May 14.

I've been to the IMC once, and it was an utterly glorious time (even though it was clearly not an archaeology-heavy conference). This year, it is on July 3-6, and the special thematic strand is "Otherness". If that tickles your fancy, and you can go there, I can heartily recommend it - the IMC is a huge, huge thing and a really interesting experience, with the opportunity to meet lots and lots of people from different mediaevistic strands of research. (Also, you have the IMC to thank or blame, for the fact that the Beast actually got finished at some point in time.)

If you'd like to know more about the conference, you can read the latest newsletter on their site with all the information necessary, or if you've already decided to go, venture straight to the registration page.

I'm travelling to Paderborn today to take part in a workshop about object-oriented research on clothing... so you're not getting a proper blog post. Nor will you get any blog post tomorrow, as I'll still be workshopping and travelling, to return late at night (and am, as usual, not ahead of my schedule...).

My paper for the workshop is about the reconstruction of historical tailoring techniques, and I'm really excited about it (plus, as usual, I hope that I have included all the bits that are of interest to the others attending, and left out all the boring bits). There's a long train trip where I'll hopefully be able to get some other work done, and then there will be the workshop, and there will be a conference dinner, and I'm quite delighted to get to see Paderborn again - I was there ages ago with a university excursion to see a big exhibition, and I remember it as a really nice place.

All sunshine and delight! Apart from the tiny little fact that I still have to go through my presentation at least once, and pack my clothes, and get a few other things done... and have to get up at oh-dark-hundred tomorrow morning to catch the train. (I think it's really past time that someone invents a new travelling method. A really fast one, that uses little energy and is okay for the environment...)