Birka is a rather well-known find place for quite a few textiles, including tablet-woven bands, and a frequently cited resource. The publications are not the newest, and in this case, it's in our favour - they are old enough to be offered as pdf files, for free, on the site of Historiska.se, the Swedish history museum.

You can find the Birka publications here, and if you have a bit of time, also check out their English homepage - which even features a test where you can find out which character from the Norse mythology you might be. (It tells me I'm Skadi... and something about me not minding deadlines, because I'm already done when they approach. Ah, if only.)

We're having construction work being done (the heating system in our house needs to be replaced), and I find that I'm all out of practice ignoring construction work sounds. That used to be much, much better in the days I was digging more, with all the construction site noise right beside you day in, day out, so you'd get used to tuning it out.

Though admittedly it's something else again when it is in the same building, as it's not only the noise, but also the vibrations and the workers going in and out the door. Which is visible from my workspace and adds to the distractions. Usually there's not much traffic down our garden path, or much noise here in the quarter, so it really helps me to appreciate even more the circumstances I can normally enjoy!

Speaking of enjoyable things - I finally got on top of my email pile again, and things feel more or less caught up, though the next deadlines, I'm sure, are already conspiring to creep up on me. While I have more of an opportunity to take care of long-overdue things, I'm quite happy to do so. And in the course of this I finally found a programme that will do the angle measurements I need for my spinning documentation in the way that I want them: several of them permanently shown in the picture, with a label with the angle beside it. And it's even possible to lock in the angle tool so I don't have to select it again for every single measurement, plus there's a list of measurements and the automatic calculation of the average. Yay!

The programme is called Digimizer, and like so many good and helpful research tools, it is completely free. (ImageJ will also measure angles and label them, but I haven't been able to trick it into keeping the first angle when doing the second one. Just now, while doing this post, I find that there's a new version of the programme, ImageJ2, as well as an offspin called Fiji - and I might check them out for other analysis purposes.)

I've been pointed to a map/collection thing called The Textile Orchard, where you can find artisans, textile researchers, museums, dye and fabric producers, and historical sites related to textiles.

It's always a nice thing to have collections of resources, and I'm happy to now be part of the growing Orchard, as you can see from the small blue star in the south of Germany:


The red star across to the left is my friend and colleague Margit from Alte Künste, by the way.

If you are a textile person yourself, or have a place or museum to add, you can quickly and easily do so with this questionnaire. You can also follow the Textile Orchard on twitter via @textileorchard.

There's a German proverb saying "Alles neu macht der Mai" (May makes everything new), and it looks like that is the case at least in some parts - because today I stumbled across the new, just-gone-online-a-few-days-ago version of the beloved image database IMAREAL.

Go check it out. It's new, it's shiny, it has more features and the usual breathtaking amount of pictures!

 

Here is, again, a stack of things you might find interesting:

A 17th century manuscript tells you how to organise your land surveying journal. Or, if you'd like to read about something else, that site has a huge collection of Early English books!

Aarhus University Press has a new free ebook this month, and it is "Past Vulnerability. Vulcanic Eruptions and Human Vulnerability in Traditional Societies Past and Present", edited by Felix Riede.

Ask the Past tells you how to improve your memory, 16th century style.

Semi-Rad talks about being new at the climbing gym and trying new stuff in general - and yes, I totally agree that being new at things is a wonderful opportunity, and has its own very nice and special delights!

Textiles, Trade and Taste - Portugal and the World is a networking project looking at textiles and their trade from the 16th century onward. The project was launched in 2011 and has since developed into a networking group that looks, among other things, at colours in textiles (that was their focus in 2016).

They have recently launched a project website, and there you can find articles, lists of events and more resources, like Portuguese museums that have early modern textiles. Plus you will see some gorgeous pictures on the site, so go take a look!

Occasionally, really cool things happen in this world... such as the Met making its images all open access. That means 375,000 images of public domain works to share, remix, or use in any way you want to, under a Creative Commons Zero license.

This is wonderful!

You can go read more about the open access here, and here is the starting page for image and data resources so you can go have a rootle. They also have an extensive list of publications that are available online and for free, and you can find those here.

And I think the Met now has a few more people loving it...