Here's a truth about me that you probably already know: I really like coffee. (I also really like tea, cats, cakes, and chocolate, though I do not consume cats. As opposed to the other things.) I like the varieties best that have little acidity. I drink it with milk, and like it strong enough to get a good coffee taste with a bit of bitterness, but not too strong - the "French" or "Norwegian" coffee at the Textile Forum is usually too much for me, and I water it down. (A lot.)

I also like coffee cups. There are so many funny, fancy mugs in our household that even though we do have "proper" coffee cups that match the rest of our tableware, we usually grab one of the non-matching mugs. Well, more or less non-matching, as there are a few sets - one with cartoon animals doing seasonal stuff, with the mugs aptly labeled "spring", "summer", "autumn", and "winter", and one set of two cups where one is "pro!" and the other "contra!"

And from that rich assortment of cups, there are a very few that sort of belong only to the most patient husband of them all (as in only he is using them and we also don't give them to guests to use), and a few (admittedly a few more) that are mine and mine alone. Because they are my favourites. (One of these, curiously, used to be a favourite of his, until I sort of usurped it, and it has been ages since he last drank out of it.) Another favourite is a raku-ware cup that a friend gave to me on my last birthday, hitting several sweet spots at once - my love for raku and handmade things, my love for nice and rather large cups, and my colour preferences. Yet another one is a souvenir cup I brought home from a visit to a conference in Poland, years ago.

All these have one thing in common - they are a bit or a significant bit larger than the usual coffee mug (which in turn is much larger than a normal coffee cup). There's just one of my fave mugs that is normal mug-sized... but it's still the coolest coffee cup ever:

[caption id="attachment_2576" align="alignleft" width="228"] That's tea stains in the cup. I had a cuppa tea before I had coffee. Sue me.



I bought this a few years ago at the game fair in Essen, in the comics area. It's the ultimate cup for a coffee-loving archaeologist, and in case you are one or know one or just need that cup too anyways, here's the webshop where you can get it. (The shop is in German, but it should be straightforward enough.) There are a few more nice cups in that shop, too, and not all of them have a strictly German pun such as this one. (Ziehen, in German, both means "to draw" if you are talking about a gun, and "to steep" if you are talking about tea.) Enjoy. Don't blame me if you end up with another mug or two. (These things are herd animals anyway. Just like spinning tools. Or bicycles. Right?)

Textile terminology, as many of you will probably know, can be a never-ending headache. Especially when you are looking at texts in a foreign language. Consequently, there have been a few attempts at making glossaries or catalogues; sometimes, there is a small multi-language glossary or dictionary in the appendix to a book or article. Burnham's "Warp and Weft" also states the terms for different weaves in several languages.

However, there's a whole book with textile terminology that I had never heard about before: “Nordisk textilteknisk terminologi- Förindustriell vävnadsproduktion”, written by  Elisabeth Strömberg, Agnes Geijer, Margrethe Hald and Martha Hoffman and published in 1967. The title of the book translates to “Nordic textile technical terminology - pre-industrial fabric  production”. The book consists of Swedish term definitions, with synonyms in Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Finnish, English, French and German. The edition was revised by Geijer and Hoffmann in 1979. The Icelandic and Finnish terms were compiled by Elsa E. Guðjónsson.

So there's a whole book out there - and it gets even better. Amica and Maria from historicaltextiles.org have brought together KulturNav, a website where museums and other organisations can have shared lists of things hosted; the Textile Museum in Borås, who agreed to manage the dataset from the book, and friendly help from fellow nerds to convert the whole book into a database.

And now it's done - the Terminology is online and available, for free, via KulturNav. You can find the whole back story, and some instructions on how to use the database, on the Historical Textiles blog, including instructions on how to contribute should you find something is missing, or would like to suggest a change.

This is a wonderful thing - and my thanks to everybody involved who made this possible!

I've discovered Yoga a good while back (in spring 2013, actually) and have been doing a little bit of yoga once a week, sometimes skipping it, and sometimes adding in a bit of extra yoga time since then. With the sort-of "life reboot"* that I have going on at the moment, started off by the weight-loss-myth-busting book that I read in early January, I've returned to the mat with more dedication again - and yesterday, I discovered that Do Yoga With Me (which is still my favourite place to go to for yoga class videos - if you're interested in yoga at all, do go check them out) has a 14-day challenge up, featuring fourteen classes with Fiji McAlpine.

Well, technically this challenge started on January 10, so I'm a bit late to the party. I'm also not completely convinced that I will not need a day inbetween to take a break, as Fiji is incredibly fit and I find her classes rather challenging, to the point that I have in the past taken a look at a few of them, or did the first bit and then gave up, switching to something less taxing. I did the first day of the challenge as my morning bit of sports today, though, and I managed to get through it with just a few little extra breaks (because while I'm not at the very low end of a fitness scale, I am definitely way, way less fit than I could be).

So I'm feeling a little tired now, and quite happy with myself. Which is actually a very nice combination. Tomorrow? I'll try day two, and I'll see how it goes.

 
* Looks like that is a Thing at the moment, too - Wil Wheaton has started his reboot back in October last year. Alasdair Stuart of the Escape Artists (free podcasts for Fantasy, SF and Horror) is in week 3 of his new fitness plan of working out 5 times a week. And there's probably a lot more people that are doing something similar right now - after all, the start of a year is a good time to take stock and change things for the better.

You're getting a late blogpost today because I had slow internet today, and it even ate a half-written post... but you are getting one, and it is one with free stuff! (Very fitting for the season...)

First of all, as a reminder - free ebook in Aarhus Uni Press this month is Woven into the Earth. Go download it if you haven't done so yet, and tell your friends who are interested in archaeological textiles. This is a wonderful book, and it is definitely good to have.

You already downloaded it? You would like more books? Here you go.

On a completely different, and very much non-archaeological note - there is a free e-book about working with MS Word, "Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals" by Jack M. Lyon. A few years ago, the author's newsletter "Editorium" helped me a lot when prodding my thesis text into shape, as well as later when I had typesetting to do. If you're working with Word (as so many people in the social/historical/archaeological sciences do), you might want to give it a look.

And now on to the juicy bits.

I had the opportunity to visit Estonia for a few days, and I didn't only meet lovely fellow textile people and fellow archaeologists and got to see exciting finds in several museums and a good number of the Estonian textile finds, I also brought home some books (about, who would have guessed it, Estonian textile finds). Two of them are about the finds from Siksälä, which is a burial site used continuously from the 11th to the 15th century - the Estonian Iron Age and Middle Ages. Siksälä has yielded exceptionally rich finds, including textiles wonderfully decorated with bronze spirals. There's a publication in two parts, a text part and a catalogue part; both are in Estonian*, but anyone can look at the pictures and construction drawings. And if I say anyone, I do mean it - both the first volume and the second volume are available online, free of charge, thanks to the University of Tartu.

Another absolutely amazing Estonian find is the craft box from Lohavere (which should be written with a little ~ sitting on top of the o), which comes from the hillfort of the same name, dated to the 12th and early 13th century. If you know the Mästermyr find and have always dreamt of something similar, but related to textiles? Here it is. The craft box, made from birch bark, contained textile remains, prefabricated and half-finished products, bronze ornaments and tools, some of them neatly stored in smaller boxes or little pouches. It is an absolutely fascinating find and gives so much information about how the spiral decorations were worked... and it, too, is published in a little book, and that, too, is available online free of charge.

These finds absolutely deserve to be better-known - so feel free to spread the word, and of course enjoy the publications of these gorgeous finds!

*Estonian is a language belonging to the Finno-Ugric group, and more or less related to Finnish. A few fun facts: Estonian has fourteen cases. Yes, fourteen - because there are no words to signal direction (like "into" or "from"), and a case is used instead. More fun facts? Estonian has no genders, so there's no problem with being politically correct. Because there were a lot of Germans in Estonia in the Middle Ages (Hanseatic League was a reason for that, for instance) there are quite a few German words still around, which makes not understanding most of the rest even more peculiar. Final fun fact for today: as I'm easily amused, it diverted me no end that the greeting "Tere" sounds much like the southern German colloquial "Dere" (which is very short for "Habe die Ehre", I have the honour). If you're intrigued now, here are a few useful Estonian phrases, and here is a very interesting pdf with facts about Estonian.

Aarhus University Press has a long list of books in their catalogue, and they include Else Oestergaard's "Woven into the Earth", the wonderful book about the garment finds from Greenland. They also have a monthly campaign of one e-book that they post on their site, downloadable for free.

Guess what this month's ebook is? Right - Woven into the Earth. Go here to download it, and feel free to spread the word. The book is absolutely wonderful and a must-have if you are interested in medieval garments. (h/t to Christa, who found this first.)

Other delightful news - the open-air museum village in Düppel, where I went to give a presentation this summer, has won a cultural award given out by Berlin. Congratulations!

You know about that thing about shoes that women are supposed to have? As in buy a lot of them? Happily this is not the only thing that defines gender, or I'd be very, very male indeed. (My shoes have to fit, and they have to be practical. And preferably last a long time so I don't have to go shoe shopping again soon.)

There's one shoe-ish exception to my usual "meh" stance, though - and these are medieval shoes. For reenactment or living history, shoes are one of the tricky bits. Modern shoes don't cut the mustard at all, as they are constructed absolutely differently, and the materials aren't right either. Going barefoot is of course an alternative (though we don't know how common walking barefoot for grownups would have been, and I've also read interpretations of shoe finds that hint towards shoes having been very, very common) but not a very viable one for every modern person in every weather.

Which means shoes are one of the checklist items when trying to gauge the overall quality of a Living History performer or group.

Years ago, in the course of trying out lots of different techniques, I actually made a pair of medieval turn-shoes myself. It took a fair amount of time and I did have fun doing it. The resulting shoes were useable, but far from good quality in regards to the fit (and also in regards to the materials, which were sort-of-suitable leathers I had lying around at that time). It did make me appreciate proper shoe-making work, however, and wish for shoes that fit properly.

Fortunately I have a friend who makes medieval shoes for a living. I've worn a pair of nice, low-cut shoes that Stefan made for a few years now, and am still deliciously happy with how they look. However, they are not very warm, and they do not fit over warm socks, so now I have a pair to change into when it gets colder:







They fit over warm socks, and this type of shoe is one that runs for a rather long time. They also have that lovely smell of new leather shoes, and the neat stitches that I love so much in Stefan's work.

Now I'm looking forward to cooler evenings on events!

I blame a friend of mine.

Several years ago, for my birthday, he gave me as a present the DVD of Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog. That led to many, many interesting and amusing hours of DVD watching, not because we watched that half-hour thing so often (though I have listened to the soundtrack many, many times in the car), but because we branched out afterwards, wanting more from the actors. Neil Patrick Harris. Felicia Day. Nathan Fillion.

So we watched Firefly, and loved it*. We joined the mass of people who all say that it was canceled too soon (damn you, Fox!) and we'd have liked more, much more of it. But some things you don't get no matter how much you (and many others) would like it.

However. Sometimes, other stuff comes along that is also a good thing to have. And we are living in the blissful age of crowdfunding and internet communication and stuff (in short: something very much the future), so when John Scalzi posted a tweet yesterday about Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion trying to fund a tv-ish project on Indigogo, I did what you do in that case.

So @alan_tudyk and @NathanFillion crowdfunding a comedy series about science fiction cons? SEEMS RISKY TO ME https://t.co/BZk0MoeUjw
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) 11. März 2015

I went there. I looked, and I watched, and laughed, and then I waited a few long hours and showed it to the most patient husband of them all, who watched, and laughed, and logged in to indiegogo and threw some money at Nathan and Alan's project while I mumbled to myself "oh come on take our money already WE SO WANT THIS STUFF". You know. As you do.

They started their campaign on March 10. Yesterday night, when we went to bed, they had raised more than 750.000 USD, enough for five episodes. Right now, they are at a bit above a million USD, with more than 14.000 supporters. The campaign is running for a month more... they might have to invent some more stretch goals.

Oh? You want the link? Go here. Enjoy. Spread the word, if you like.


* We watched more than just Firefly, of course, but Firefly is the one relevant for the rest of the post. Just in case you are curious, though: Eureka. Castle. How I Met your Mother. The Guild. Buffy. Fun was being had, in varying degrees, though most of them were rather high.