I have received a call for papers (on the usual labyrinthine ways these things take) for next year's Early Textiles Study Group conference that will be held in the UK. The theme will be colour and the organisers are aiming for an even contribution of technical and sartorial papers.

So since the organiser in her original mail asked to pass this on to interested parties, for all the dyers and colour people out there, you can find the full CfP as a .pdf behind this link.

During the Forum week, we of course chatted about all kinds of things (though most of them fibre-related), and of course there were requests to share this or that link or site.

So here's the Brain Test, my part - let's see if I can remember what I was supposed to.

First of all, of course, there's Phiala's String Page (where I made my first braiding steps many years ago) and where the now-famed and coveted pdf about tablet weave structures may be found. The accompanying talk lit quite a few lightbulbs in tablet weavers' heads!

There's a video on Youtube I talked about - no, wait, there's more. First there are the two wonderful and calming videos showing short-draw and long-draw spinning by Ruth MacGregor that I linked already here. (At the Forum, I had the joy of getting taught long-draw by Ruth herself. I can now spin thick and fluffy yarn, hooray and huzzah! And Ruth in person is even more calm and friendly than her videos suggest.) Then there's the incredibly speedy weaving on an inkle loom, to be found here.

Then there was mention of the Tsarina of Tsocks. If anyone can tempt me to add knitting to my stash of textile techniques, it is her with her incredibly beautiful socks! There's also a blog where she writes about tsocks (who would have guessed?)

Another thing I frequently mentioned to several persons (mainly day-guests and visitors, though) is Therèse de Dillmont's book. If you have not yet found out about it, go visit the webpage where the whole book (in the English version) is available for free!


Oh, and I am also supposed to put up pictures of the event (and the spinning) on the Textilforum website, send around the list of adresses of the participants and analyse and evaluate the data from the experiment. Which will all happen, and soon.

I took the day off yesterday (well, mostly) and had a wonderfully relaxing time just reading, snacking, relaxing and napping, so now my wakefulness-levels are almost normal again.

Now that I'm in the quiet of my own little study again (crammed full with the boxes of the experiment), I really start to miss the chatter and bad jokes and friendly banter and "string talk" of last week. And slowly I realise that the Textilforum has indeed taken place, that we really did it, that the experiment was really wildly successful, and that I have a heap of things to remember the wonderful week by, including my first ever badge for making a fire without more than two matches (heehee! All that training was worth it!), the most ugly cardboard-piggybank ever made by man or woman (and a very well-fed one at that, thanks to the generous people at the Forum) and the now-famed cat timer that usually resides on my workdesk but had taken a venture out and did some important work in the spinning experiment.

There are already some pictures online at Phiala's blog, summing up nicely all the things that went on, including the silliness. Here's a random picture taken during the spinning experiment (they are not sorted yet, of course...):

I arrived back home from Eindhoven yesterday evening, after a week of all things good and fibrey (or stringy). More than a hundred of spindles were spun upon, masses of tablets turned, waffles and chocolate eaten, large quantities of coffee and tea consumed, and laughter and fun abounded.

The Textilforum was everything I had hoped and wished for: A meeting place for craftspeople and scientists, a place to chat and exchange knowledge and personal experiences with different historical techniques, to network and have fun together, a place to do some shopping for textile-crafts-related things and tools that cannot be found just everywhere, and an opportunity to have some nice, juicy bits of science that requires more than just one or two skilled craftspersons. So overall, a complete success, and I am sure that every visitor to the Forum also went home with something new and delightful learned.

For the experiment, I had the joy and privilege of working together with fifteen wonderful spinners to generate a really large dataset that will help a lot for researching spinning and spindle whorls in the future. This dataset and lots of number-crunching from it will probably keep me on my toes for the next few days and weeks, but the data already looks very, very promising. The first results were already presented to the spinners and lecture audience on Saturday evening, and more results are the topic of my talk at the liveARCH conference in Hungary in October. A good reason to set to work on all the cops of yarn and questionnaires!

As this blog's regular readers will know (and even the semi-regular readers, as much as I've blogged about it), this week is Textilforum week at Eindhoven, and I will be busy with running the spinning experiment and chatting real-life with lots of other historical textile enthusiasts.

For you, this means you can come to Eindhoven and have a chat with me as well - or wait for regular blogging to resume probably Tuesday week after next.

And if Eindhoven is too far away from you, but Erlangen is not, and you are looking for some hands-on experience: I will be giving an introductory course at the Begegnungszentrum Bruck on eight Monday evenings, starting on the 21st of September.

I have a really hard time believing that the Textilforum will be so soon. After preparing for it since we conceived the idea last year in October, which feels like ages ago, it's a kind of weird feeling that it all actually happens. And I am really, really excited about it, packing, printing and preparing like a madwoman. I would like to take my entire stack of things, projects and literature, but alas - I will have to sort out a few things that are most important to me and take only those.

While I'm busy, you can go and look at two Youtube videos about spinning worsted style and woolen style, posted by Ruth MacGregor (who will also come to the Forum). She's showing how to spin woolens and worsteds, and I finally really understood the difference between them. Besides, when you can't do some actual calming, comforting spinning, these videos are almost as good for calm and comfort - thank you, Ruth!

(And watching this video made my fingers itch. Badly. Very, very badly. I think I need to sit down for some quiet wheel time one of these days...)

Since yesterday afternoon, fourty plywood discs in two different sizes and thicknesses are peacefully lying on a heap together, completing my selection of experimental spindle whorls. Thank goodness for the invention of power tools and "circle cutters"! Though even with that multi-watt support, it took me a while of fiddling with the large plywood sheets, the cutting gadget (a very cheap tool and accordingly fiddly to use) and the drill in its stand before I found out how to best cut the discs. But in the end, the archaeologist prevailed!

Now all the hard bits of the preparation are finally finished, and the whorls have turned out not to be perfect, but at least very good, and absolutely sufficient for the experimental purposes. So whew! The power of trial runs and solid calculations (with a huge lot of help from André Verhecken) is proven again.

A lot of the wool is already portioned and packaged, and today I'll take care of the rest of packaging before finishing the plywood with a light sanding around the edges and then... glueing the spindle whorls and spindles together.

This is something I would never do under ordinary circumstances. Who would want a spindle that can't be equipped with a different whorl, after all? "Those folks" back in the middle ages certainly didn't need glue to keep their spindle whorls on the spindle, the double-conical form was enough.

But since I am using chopsticks as spindle sticks (totally non-medieval, just like the plywood and the modern glue for assembling these), and since the plywood needs some glue to keep on the stick, and because I just want to make sure that none of the whorls slips off during the experiment, glue it is.

After the spindles are assembled, there's not much left to do for the experiment - preparing the documentation, writing down my notes for the "prep talk" before we start and packing all the things needed for transport to Eindhoven, no more. And well that this is so, since the experiment will start on Tuesday morning next week.