After the conference is before the conference, or so it is said... I think. Well, it's true, after all, and planning for the next European Textile Forum has started - we do have a date fixed for the conference, which will be November 5-11, 2018. There is no focus topic fixed yet, though (suggestions are welcome).

We're also thinking about making a few changes to the conference structure to make it easier for people to attend. As we'd much prefer making things better by knowing exactly what to do, we've drawn up a survey to get a better idea of what you like and don't like, and what you would prefer to see unchanged. If you are interested in the conference, you can help us a lot by going here and filling out the survey. We want to get people together to network - both from the academic and from the practical side. Connecting craft experience with academic research is immensely helpful for both sides, and we'd like to do an even better job at this in the future.

While drawing up the survey, I've also finally managed to give the website a long-due overhaul. It now has a nicer, cleaner design; there's a section with result summaries added, with the first ones already in, and hopefully more to come in the nearer future, and it is now a secure site, using https.

So. Some work done, more to come - and I'm very curious to find out what the survey results will be. The first ones are already in, with some very helpful remarks to think about!

Here, stuff is progressing. Coffee is being drunk.
I'm still hard at work on the Forum webpages, getting them into a nicer order and stuff on them easier to access. Putting more stuff in there, too - which means I might need to up my contract with my provider a notch, to have more space for the stuff.

I'm also trying to finalise a little survey about the Forum to see where we might be heading. I love the format of having one full week, and the combination of a lecture and some practical part, but it might pose too much of an initial hurdle to those not already straddling the line between theoretical or academic work and crafts practice and experience. I also have the suspicion that a full week is too long for quite a few people - so Sabine and I have talked it over, and Michael and I have, and we might do a bit of a change, this year or next, depending on how it goes.

The survey is not quite finished yet, but I hope to get it done and out and tested later today, and then it will be time for a newsletter and spreading it out, hopefully gaining a lot of insights. Ideally, I'll also get the site done and polished before it goes out, but I think I might not, and I'd rather have more time for the survey than less - so it all depends on how productive I'll be today. And possibly early tomorrow. So... I should get back on it, right?

I definitely need more hours in a day. Or more nights that miraculously turn out to be working nights, yet still deliver rest. Or something like that.

Yesterday, for instance, was totally gobbled up by work on the Textile Forum site (and no, it's not visible yet, I am working on a local copy of the page to make it into a nicer and more functional thing).

So somehow, all the small things that need to be done teamed up with the bigger things and ate the day. Again. It's not the first time this has happened to me, but I had only wanted to spend the morning on that page work, and do something else the rest of the day. Like planning for a possible kickstarter campaign (which is thoroughly scary), and doing some more archaeology-related writing, and some translating.

Sigh. At least I did manage to snap a photo of the nicely blooming hellebore out in the garden, which I can now share with you:

The stacks on my desk have shrunk a bit (at least enough so that I don't get an instantaneous flight reflex when entering the room), the cat is happily draped over my forearm again, putting her paw on my touchpad at the most inopportune moments, and most of the stuff that I dragged half across the country is back in its proper place on the storage shelf.

Not that I'm out of things to do, mind you - there's more sorting to do, the stack of emails is still towering, and of course after the season is before the next one. Which means there's planning for events, planning for markets, and planning for the next Textile Forum.

Especially the latter is interesting, as we're considering making a few changes to the programme structure, and to the conference as a whole. The aim of these changes will be to become more accessible to participants who can't spend a whole week at a conference. Of course, we want to get it right, so I'm currently working on a little survey to send around. There are also plans to slightly re-structure the website and to add some more things as information about past experiments, tests, trial runs and topics. It's all very exciting, and I hope the survey will give us a good amount of feedback on which to act, so that our little conference can saunter on into the future, doing an even better job at connecting people from the practical side of historical crafts to researchers looking at the actual pieces.

Like everything, making a survey turns out to be a time-eater, though. And even if I'm tempted to go on straight away working on it... I've already done enough survey drafting for today - I need to get a few other things done.

Such as putting the remainder of the goods into their place. And finally finishing an article that is due...

I am back home from the Forum, and it was wonderful - a whirlwind week, as it usually is. Every time, I am surprised at how quickly time flies past when we are in Mayen, and every time I'm delighted with how much is happening. Little detail problems are suddenly thrown into the spotlight, and then people throw themselves at the problems and try to figure out how something was made, or why something might look as it does.

This year, we had an array of really interesting discussions and tests. The effects of the de-gumming on silk when dyeing was one of them, and first results were really interesting - the de-gummed silk takes on less colour than the gummy silk. A number of little test skeins were dyed, and they have gone home with Ruth, who will do light-fastness, wash-fastness and rub-fastness tests with them in order to see how well the dye sticks to the various samples.

[caption id="attachment_3461" align="alignnone" width="304"] Silk being dyed...


[caption id="attachment_3460" align="alignnone" width="465"] ...and the skeins after rinsing.


We also had some reeling of silk, some tablet-weaving and, to my great delight, some hacking of slits into pieces of silk to explore the pinking and slashing techniques. That was not only extremely interesting, but also a lot of fun - and the slashing does explain why some fabrics might have been woven in just the way they were done.

There were also really good discussions about swastika motifs in tablet weaving and the problems this motif can lead to today (especially if you are based in Germany), and discussions about the terminology of wild vs. domesticated silk.

And of course there was lots of coffee. There was chocolate. There was the traditional stroopwafel spinning...



it was a wonderful week!

I'm off to teach a full weekend's worth of workshops - spinning, tablet weaving, loopbraiding, and sewing techniques, and I'm all excitement.

Especially about the tablet weaving course. It's been so long in the "I would like to do this" stage, followed by a very long planning stage, and then, a while ago, the test run. Then some more smoothing of rough edges and planning and updating the plan and the printouts... and now it's going to get its first run out in the wild. Proof of this? A huge stack of stuff sitting in the car, waiting to be ferried off. This is by far the most material-intensive course that I teach, because I use clamps to set up the warps (mimicking the medieval tablet-weaving stands).

[caption id="attachment_3447" align="alignnone" width="902"] Starting off easy - a few straight lines, a bit of doubleface, getting an understanding of how things work.


Since I'm currently also doing brain-bending exercises with free patterning, it's an especially nice feeling for me to be teaching a method that will allow the new weavers to do their own on-the-fly patterning, from a deep understanding on how these things work. At least that is my cunning plan - and the system I teach is quite robust in regard to mistakes, too.

Well. Let me put that a bit more into perspective. If you make a mistake, the system allows you to unweave the bad bits, then re-sort the tablets into their two packs as you un-weave the last correct pick that you made, then do the last pick again and work your way forward once more, hopefully correctly. You will not need a drawing or pattern draft to re-align tablets. You will need, however, patience and an adequate assortment of sighs, curses, or motivational beverages of choice, depending on your character. As always, the best thing is not to make the mistake in the first place...

[caption id="attachment_3446" align="alignnone" width="403"] Speaking of the brain-bender, here's the current status. As you can see, I have done my best to try out how to deal with mistakes. Those, by the way, are mostly due to my weaving in the evening at the moment, when I'm already a bit tired... as a robust system should be up to a tired weaver, right?


By the way, there will be a similar-ish workshop on patterning at the European Textile Forum, and due to last-minute cancellations, there are two spaces left once more...

There's two events coming up where I will give a presentation or paper: the European Textile Forum in November and, shortly after that, the Symposium to celebrate 30 years of Living History by IG Wolf, and I'm really excited about both of them.

The European Textile Forum, as a dear child of my heart and Sabine's, will be focused on silk, that lovely luscious material, and the preliminary programme is already rather lovely and varied. There's still a good bit of organising work to do for me, scheduled to happen during the next few days (whenever I'm not busy preparing for the fair at Bielefeld), but so far, everything is fine and I'm already really, really looking forward to it. The presentation I've planned means that I will have to sit down and do some more nice, brain-bending tablet weaving, too... something I'm also looking forward to. Yay!

The second one - IG Wolf is one of the groups doing Living History, and LH demonstrations, with lots and lots of attention to detail, and lots of love and enthusiasm to go with it. They have been going strong for 30 years now and are celebrating in style: not with a party, but with an actual symposium for a whole weekend, featuring a number of papers under the motto "Theorie trifft Praxis". I'll be talking about spinning and fabric reconstruction/recreation, with all the many problems that can (and probably will) come up.
You can have a look at the programme here - and if it tickles your fancy, there's good news: they still have space available and take registrations until September 15, so you can register here and join the fun!