There's an online symposium about "Thy Father's Instruction: Reading the Nuremberg Miscellany as Jewish Cultural History by Dr. Naomi Feuchtwanger-Sarig", hosted by the Goldstein Centre, on September 14. It's to celebrate a book launch and starts at 18:00 Israel time, so you might want to check your timezone if you'd like to attend; it's free but you will have to register. Read more about this on the Centre's website, where you can also register. 

Not online, and not free, but well worth it if you're in German Living History and interested in the topics covered: the Nobilitas-Akademie. Nobilitas is a group to preserve old crafts - which means they also organise crafter's markets, or events at museums that involve historical crafts. They also try to spread knowledge, and help people exchange knowledge and network, and one of the possibilities to do that is their Akademie. 

It takes place in a castle-turned-youth-hostel, and this year's academy is on November 11 to 13. There's talks about medieval cooking, fighting, Cisterciensians, technical knowledge of the Middle Ages, and more. Apart from the presentations, there's time to talk and network with the other participants, and the last time I've attended, there was also some medieval gaming. Check out their programme on the Nobilitas website, where you'll also find their registration form.

Autumn is coming, and with it the Textile Forum is drawing nearer, and that always marks my own personal Season of Madness - as things are getting sorted out and planned and organised. 

There's long lists of stuff to check, or pack, or look into - and since this year's focus topic is "making threads" which includes splicing technique, there was a little bit of nettle harvesting today:

These grew on public ground, and quite obviously on a piece of public ground that they found pretty nice, as some of the stalks are more than my height in length. Now I'll have to figure out what best to do with them until we need them in November. Ret them? Let them dry? Freeze them? Hm... 

If you're interested in the complex weaves Taqueté and samite, there's a workshop at the Haus der Seidenkultur in Krefeld coming up in September. It's held by a lovely colleague of mine, Barbara Thomas, and she's doing it once in German and once in English.

The project "Ancient Silk Splendour – recreated" led to the development of a weaving class, designed by experts from the German Textile Museum and the House of Silk Culture from Krefeld. The class teaches the theoretical basics of ancient patterned weaves, but also how to practically recreate them.

The dates are 19.–23. September 2022 (for the class in german) and 26.–30. September 2022 (for the class in english). The fee is 635,- € per participant, with a maximum of 8 participants per class.

If this sounds interesting for you, you can find out more about the workshop and how to register at the Haus of Seidenkultur website. 

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...