Part of this day was spent on doing things for the European Textile Forum. We do have a date (November 7-13), we have a topic (spinning and making thread in the wider sense), we have a location (we'll return to Mayen), but there's a few things that have to be organised in a different way this time around. Biggest of them all is our catering - the company that used to provide us with food (including very creative uses of canned pineapple in a lot of dishes where I would not have expected it) seems to have gone under during the pandemic. Which means... getting a new caterer.

That's not quite as easy as it sounds, as options in a small place are limited, and we have specific requirements that have to be communicated properly. That is under way.

Another bit that has to be set up again is the registration form - the software that I used previously is not compatible with the current version of Joomla that the Forum website runs, so I've had to find a new one and am now getting acquainted with it. And building the form - so registration can finally happen. 

There'll be a bit of a price increase for this year's conference, as everything has gotten more expensive. I'm a little sad about this, but, well, it can't really be helped.

So... it does look like I've figured out and tested that form thingie, and the updated cost estimate, and now all that remains is finishing the info bits and the CfP, and then the thing can actually go online. Hooray!

I'm back from my gallivanting across the countryside, all the way down to the boot heel of Italy, and it was glorious.

I hadn't realised how much I had missed meeting up with colleagues for a conference and working together until I went to Vienna for a EuroWeb workshop and now to Italy. It was a three-day workshop about embroidery, and two days of travelling there and back each, and almost every minute of it was pure bliss.

Travelling took a while since I was not going to fly if avoidable at all, and it was avoidable by using a night train. As the direct flight connections to Brindisi or Bari were not convincing for her as well, I joined up with a friend in Munich and we travelled together, which just added to the fun. We had a night train from Munich to Rome, and then it's several hours again to get to Lecce and then Muro Leccese, where our workshop took place.

We had wonderful warm and sunny weather, delightfully delicious food, lots of Italian coffee, and incredibly nice people. There was a workshop on filet netting and embroidery, an exploration of Bronze Age embroidery stitches, an introduction to Punto Maglie (which is a kind of needle lace, which is something I'd wanted to do for ages and had never gotten around to), a number of presentations about embroidery-related research projects, many chats and discussions with colleagues, and oh, did I mention the food? I was in food heaven. 

I also worked on my appreciation of coffee without milk, or with very small amounts of milk - as I didn't want to be one of the touristy Germans who order cappuccino after breakfast. (When, on the last day, I discovered there was hot milk with the coffee break supplies, though, I did have a cup of coffee with lots of milk. And then a second one straight away. Due to remaining little bits of sense left in my brain, I didn't have a third one, though...)

I also learned a great deal and finally got to meet, in person, a few of the people I had met over Zoom beforehand, plus some new people. 

All things taken together, and the great hospitality of the local conference team (which even organised a little evening sightseeing trip to Otranto for us) added up to utter bliss for several days in a row. Utter, extreme, perfect bliss.

That was, by the way, the first time I've been to Italy. (I've been to South Tyrol before, but as both Italians and people from South Tyrol will tell you, that does not count as Italy. It's basically an extension of Austria where you can speak Italian, if you so wish, but German is spoken and understood about everywhere too.) I couldn't have wished for a better place to fall in love with the country.

My only problem now? My new favourite café is very, very far away from home...

I may or I may not be sitting here dressed in the Bronze Age women's clothing - trying it out (or on) before it goes on its happy journey to its final work place. I may also have taken a quick mirror-selfie before sitting down here to write this blog...

I may also have managed to resurrect the Textile Forum website, and wait for all the mails to go out (there's a restriction on how many mails can be sent in a given time, to avoid spamming and hogging of resources that you have not paid for, so sending out a few hundred mails takes a bit of time). 

  Just in case you're wondering, by the way: I managed to kill the Forum website by clicking the wrong button at the most inopportune moment ppossible to do so. Which removed the database (not good!) and some of the files. Resurrection was mostly a question of finding the correct set of files (that matched the re-uploaded database) and getting them back into their proper place.

Now things are running again, though it still does not look pretty - the site still suffers from template issues, which have been unresolved due to the need of getting a new one anyways, with the switch to Joomla 4. Which is on my schedule to do once the mails are all sent out, and then, hopefully, things will be easier to look at again, and the photos will also come back.

For now, though, the most important, and most urgent, bit was to get the date and time for the next Forum online. Which will be November 7-13, and we'll be in Mayen, Germany, at the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology again. Our focus topic will be making yarns and threads: "Simple, Special, Spun or Spliced: Yarns, Threads, and Their Making". You can find out more about it on the website of the Forum.

I've been trying to get the Textile Forum website up to speed, and I was working along happily, and everything was looking good, and then I managed to seriously botch up. So, at some point in the process of getting the site updated and back to functional, I managed to kill it. Whether that is a fixable kill or a really bad one will have to be seen. 

Possibly tomorrow, as it might just be that I'll run out of brain juice pretty soon. Even though Madame the Cat is warming my arm as I type, and purring along. At the moment, I'm extracting a backup and hope that uploading the relevant files will fix it - if not, I'll have to do things to the database as well. Sigh. 

Ah, for those IT things to once work really smoothly. At least, though, I should be able to relatively quickly re-write the texts I wrote today, and that of course got eaten up by the botch. They were written in my quest to prepare for the next Forum... which will happen in November, and take place in Mayen, and I'm already looking forward to it.

So. Keeping my fingers crossed that things will not be too badly killed...

I'm back home, and back at work. There's tea, there's the very helpful cat (who has now moved to her cat bed again and stopped putting her paw onto the touchpad at the most inopportune moments), there's things with deadline to take care of. 

But first - let me tell you that Vienna was glorious, and wonderful, and really exhausting. It was so good to meet with colleagues again and discuss things in person, with hands-on materials to try out what cannot just be described, and to mingle and chat and have all the extra networking opportunities that you just cannot get over online get-togethers or online conferences.

The organising team did an utterly splendid job at filling our three days with exciting and stimulating tasks. There was discussion of the papers and articles that we all had read in preparation; there were presentations putting those theoretical aspects into context of our own research and projects; there were clothing reconstructions that we looked at (and tried on) from different aspects, and two excursions to see garments - some secular ones preserved in a crypt underneath St. Michael's church, and some very spectacular old ecclesiastical garments still in use in St. Stephen's Cathedral.

There was also an entirely adequate number of coffee breaks, with coffee and tea and biscuits and chocolate and cake. Plus the continued discussions, and extra discussions, in those breaks. There might also have been some hanging out together in the evening, getting food and some drinks.

On the last morning, I felt like there's not enough coffee in the world anymore to get my brain up to the wakefulness and speed that I'd have liked it to be at. There was enough, though, to get me through the day and thoroughly enjoy it up to the last minute, when all those of us who were dead tired did do the adult and reasonable and sensible thing and went home, or into the hotel room, and to bed.

I spent my last morning in the beautiful city having a relaxed breakfast, buying food for the journey home, and getting a bit of bouldering in (there's a gym very close to the main train station) before sitting on my butt for several hours on the train. Where there was wi-fi, and theoretically the possibility to catch up on work, but - see above - there just wasn't enough coffee in the world anymore.

So let's see if I can catch up today, and actually get all the things on my list done...

There's conferences coming up, and CfPs are out - here's what I found in my diverse feeds:

Dressed, The Widespread Role of Clothes, Textile Production and Clothing Concepts in Society. June 22-24, via Zoom. Deadline for submissions is April 20. Find out more at dressconference.org. 

Also looking for contributions: The conference "What's in a Name?" taking place in June this year in Braga. Deadline for contributions is April 15 - yes, that's short notice, sorry.

Finally, the conference Interwoven Society takes place November 14-17 in Lübeck, Germany. This will focus on the impact of textile industry on society; CfP is open until April 17. You can find out more, and find links for submitting abstracts, at H-Soz-U-Kult here. 

I will definitely not be able to attend the last conference mentioned - we have a date for the European Textile Forum this year, and it will be November 5-13. More about that soon, here and on the Forum website!