There's a presentation about (Re?)Building Textile Archaeology in the Nile Valley, hosted by the CTR, on December 9 - it's the inaugural lecture of Elsa Yvanez. You can join in with a pre-registration; more information about the lecture and how to attend can be found on the CTR website. 

The Conversation has an article about the DNA of medieval Jews - apparently some mutations of the Ashkenazi subgroup can already be seen in gene samples from the 14th century.

An interesting site if you're looking at images with Christian content (and there's so, so many of them if you're looking at medieval art): christianiconography.info is a "Guide to Christian Iconography: Images, Symbols, and Texts". 

It's always nice to stumble across a new portal for research and for discovering (and looking at) museum objects. My latest discovery in that regard is the portal bavarikon, which - to my and hopefully also your delight - is available in both German and English. 

You can find all sorts of things there, ranging from 3D images of some special items to online exhibitions and accompanying material, such as the reconstruction of how liturgical chants may have sounded - chants that are embroidered onto the blue cope of Kunigunde, which is preserved in the museum of Bamberg Cathdral. 

Have fun exploring!

I don't know about your email inbox, but mine contained today several mails informing me about advent calendars. Most of those are not really interesting to me, as they're telling me to buy things at a discount every day.

There's one advent calendar I'm really looking forward to every year, though, and that is the one made by Maria and Amica from Historical Textiles. The two (self-declaimed) textile nerds show some of their favourite textiles every year, often with links to more pictures on the corresponding museum page. It's a true gem, and every year I admire them for all the time and effort they invest in that count-down.

Here's the link to their December 1 calendar blogpost. Enjoy, and I hope you will enjoy the following posts as well!

A chunk of it was eaten by some more research into the photo database problem; then there was a bit of writing; there was a bit of textile work; some organising; there was lunch at some point inbetween, and woosh, the day was gone.

Speaking of time, just a few days ago I was chatting with a friend about wages, and pay, and freelance employment. A few years ago, I had found an online calculating tool that helped in calculating a sensible rate for freelance work, with a list covering expenses and taxes and all these things, but that has long since gone the way of the Dodo Website.

A quick search, though, found a page called, very fittingly: The Freelance Rate Calculator.  Clicking the link there sends you to a google spreadsheet that you can download and fill in, to find out what you will need per hour to earn the money you need. It does, very handily, remind you that you might want to have some savings too... so a very smart thing.

In case you consider going freelance: Check out this sheet, or something similar. You definitely want to find out if you can turn whatever you are planning to make your main job into a business that will sustain you... before you take the plunge.

Well, not here, but on this site called "Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church: A Developing Catalogue".  I'm not sure about how up-do-date the "developing" is, since the copyright notice says "-2018", but it is a very nice collection of murals in churches. 

I've stumbled across it looking for Genesis scenes, which are a premium source for images of Eve spinning. (I've learned, though, that it's not always the spinning woman in those scenes, sometimes she has other occupations.) I hope you enjoy having a look at the paintings.

While I was doing the website relaunch, I had to look at this and that. Which, obviously, included the site structure, and some of the texts. 

Among said texts were some in need of a bit of editing, or changing, or other tender loving care - and while I'm not finished with all the things I want to get up to date, or nicer to read, or both, I've at least finished one of them recently. That's a collection of online resources: Books and articles that are available for free in .pdf form. 

You can find the list under the main page category "Ressources and Helpful Things", and it's titled "Books and Articles" (much to everybody's surprise, I'm sure).

Because I try to keep my pages fully bilingual, with the same content, the page is also available in German. The contents are about the same, though the sorting is a bit different, and of course the explanatory text is in German. 

I hope you enjoy it, and find something useful in there!

The Royal School of Needlework has celebrated its 150th anniversary by making a Stitch Bank - a website where you can explore and learn different embroidery stitches. It's up to 200 now, with the latest addition of 50 newcomers in January.

You can find the Stitch Bank here. The stitch entries usually feature a series of photos and illustrations to show you how the stitch is done, plus a video. If you are all delighted with this and would like to support the project, there's the option of donating to adopt a stitch.

On a related note, here's an article about the meaning of traditional Ukrainian embroidery patterns.