After a few logistical issues that had to be solved, I'm absolutely thrilled that we finally have a date, place, and focus topic for the ETF 2024. Hooray! We will indeed be in Mayen again, and it will run from November 4 to November 10. Our focus topic will be "Edges and Embroidery".

The European Textile Forum started in 2009, and from the start on, it was intended to connect practical and theoretical aspects of textile research. There've also been quite a few archaeological experiments throughout the years - and I'm already looking forward to find out what we will be up to this year in November!

You can find out more about our Forum 2024 on the Call for Papers page, and you can register for the Forum week here.

And now I'll go and celebrate a little more that things have been solved, and the Forum will happen in November!

The Early Textiles Study Group conference this year is taking place in Cambridge, Britain - or you can join in virtually online. Registrations for both kinds of attendance is now open, and you can have a look at the preliminary programme on their website, too.

 Edges are definitely a very interesting topic!

I'm currently working on translating (and shortening...) our NESAT presentation for an upcoming conference in German, and this, together with some other things, has made me ponder how presentations at NESAT, but also other conferences, have changed during the past years. Or maybe I should really say decades, but that makes me feel old.

Back when I started out in Uni, standard was still having slides, and one of the guidelines that a tutoring archaeologist gave us was two slides (shown in parallel) per minute when you are planning your presentation. 

Then came the advent of PowerPoint, and the utter freedom to have as much text, and as many pictures, as you wanted. In as quick a sequence as you wished to, because you're doing the clicking yourself and don't have to say "weiter" (or knock) so your helper puts in the next slide.

At the last NESAT, we had one old-style paper presentation (with powerpoint, but the rest of how it was designed was really more like back when slides were the usual thing), and the rest of them were all "modern style". The big difference, for me, was that the old-style presentation was slow enough in both text and images that you had enough time to jot down the key points and you could even have made a quick sketch of the key parts of the images. With the modern style presentations, you stand no chance. Information density and slide speed is so high that you cannot write fast enough for all the key points, let alone try and sketch something. Very few exceptions apply, but for me, the way to get the most out of the papers in modern style is to write down the things I find important or interesting that the speaker says, but that are not written as bullet points on the corresponding slide - and I make a photo of the slide in addition to that. 

Thinking back, this has changed over the past years too, I remember being able to write down more of the content that was presented. I don't think I have gotten that much slower in writing; my impression really is that the papers have become more densely packed with information all the time. (I do confess guilty of trying to fit as much into my presentations as possible, so I have definitely played my part in this development. Case in point - our NESAT presentation had 47 slides in total, for a run time of max 20 minutes. That's about 25.5 seconds per slide if you distribute the time equally.)

Looking at it like this, it's a small wonder we were all so tired after the conference days! It also seems to be quite different in other disciplines... which I also find very interesting. Maybe I should venture out to more neighbouring discipline conferences in the near future, to compare. 

 There's an exhibition opening this weekend - in Lauterbach, about the everyday life on Burg Wartenberg. The exhibition includes some finds that have never been shown before and are not published anywhere as images, plus some finds that have been newly evaluated.

Alas, I won't be able to go there, as I will be in Kamenz demonstrating spinning - but I do hope I'll be able to see the exhibition at some point! 

I'm already looking forward to NESAT - this conference is always a highlight of the three-year-period that NESAT takes place. This time, it will be in Warsaw, Poland. I've been to Poland once already, many years ago, for an excavation, and I have a lot of good memories of these weeks, so it will be really nice to re-visit some of the local delicacies. And, of course, meet with the friends and colleagues from all over Europe.

The conference programme looks quite stuffed with interesting things - you can find it on the website, in case you are interested.

This June, there will be a German conservator conference, called "Neu verflechten", which will even be hybrid - so if you're interested, here is some more info:

27. bis 29. Juni 2024

Neu verflechten!

Textile Netzwerke und Perspektiven im musealen und archäologischen Kontext

Die Fachgruppe Textil und die Studienrichtung Textilien und Archäologische Fasern des Instituts für Restaurierungs- und Konservierungswissenschaft (CICS) der TH Köln laden zu einer gemeinsamen Fachtagung unter dem Titel "Neu verflechten"! Textile Netzwerke und Perspektiven im musealen und archäologischen Kontext" vom 27. bis 29. Juni 2024 an der TH Köln ein.

Die Tagung setzt sich mit den aktuellen Herausforderungen im Umgang mit musealen und archäologischen Textilien auseinander und soll dazu dienen, neue kollegiale Netzwerke zu bilden – zu verflechten. Das Tagungsthema ist bewusst offen gestaltet, um allen aktuellen Themen der Textilrestaurierung Raum zu geben.

Viele der Präsentationen und Poster sind interdisziplinär. Themenschwerpunkte sind vor allem die Textilrestaurierung in der Archäologie, aber auch in der modernen Textilkunst, sowie die Anwendung von Methoden und Materialien anderer Fachgebiete. Begleitend zur Tagung wird eine Ausstellung mit Vernissage (Textiles & Beyond. Positionen zeitgenössischer textilverarbeitender KünstlerInnen. Ausstellung am CICS, Raum 11, 17. bis 29. Juni 2024) angeboten. Bei einem gemeinsamen Abend mit Aperitivo haben wir die Möglichkeit für den Austausch und ein gemütliches Zusammensitzen. Am Ende der drei Veranstaltungstage bieten wir außerdem Führungen durch die Fachbereiche des CICS an.

Wir bieten unsere Tagung in diesem Jahr erstmals hybrid an, sodass auch eine kostengünstigere Online-Teilnahme möglich ist.

Mehr Informationen zur Tagung (Programm und Link zur Anmeldemöglichkeit) hier auf der VDR-Seite.

I will also be there, presenting our membrane thread project - and I'm already looking forward to this a lot! 

I'm back, I've taken a bit of time off yesterday to make up for the weekend, and now it's playing catch-up with all the tasks left to do this week. 

The weekend was lovely, and fun, and a little exhausting (for everyone, probably, not just for me). Friday morning, as I was ready to go to the train station, I got a message from the app that the train I was planning to take would be 98 minutes late... which, knowing how things go, means it would arrive even later by the time it was supposed to arrive, and I would not be able to catch the second ICE, and would travel at least double the amount of time scheduled. 

Now... if it would have been a 2-hour journey, I would have considered doing it. But it would have been almost 6 hours as scheduled, so... no. Which meant I did take the car after all, and drove there, and I did that rather early to avoid getting caught in Friday evening rush hour traffic. (Plan worked.)

I spent a very nice afternoon and evening with the organiser of the workshop and one of the other participants, and then on Saturday I set out with them to make a lot of brain cells work hard. In theory, tablet weaving is very, very easy - you have to be able to tell light from dark and count up to two. In practice, putting all the things together and remembering all the new rules can make heads spin...  

We started with warping (as I usually do in my workshops) and went on to explore threading and turning directions, stripes and monochrome surface weaving before moving on to diagonals and freestyle diagonal patterning. 

As usual, I took way too little photos during the whole thing... I am always too distracted to remember to do so. This time, it was a little better thanks to "take photos" cues in my workshop script - which means that I can at least show you a photo of part of the room:

That was taken during a break, with everyone getting some nice food and filling up on coffee.

And in case you're curious: Installing the edge tablets did go quite well, but next time I will do the installation a little later, in hopes that that will make things a little bit easier. 

After the end of the workshop on Sunday afternoon, I packed up everything, was gifted with a bit of food for the road and set off for home, tired but happy.