Mervi Pasanen has finished her masterpiece in handcrafting - a reconstruction of a medieval dress, based on an archaeological fragment found in Turku, Finland. Since part of her project was sharing information, she has posted pictures of the dress and a description of its making, together with plenty of photos, in a blog.

If you are at all interested in medieval garments, you will want to click here and take a good look. There are also nice pictures of the original fragment on the blog, also worth checking out. (Textile porn, anyone?)
Don't be scared if you see a lot of Finnish text first - there is English text below, so keep calm and scroll on.

After yesterday's blogpost, I had some more of a look around the internet - and lo and behold, there is one of Dagmar Drinkler's presentations online.

You can download it, as a pdf file, here. It's in German, but even if you do not read the language, it might well be worth a look, since it contains a huge number of pictures of tight-fitting legwear, plus a number of pictures of sprang with diverse patterns.

And with that, I shall leave you to the weekend : ) which I am planning to enjoy thoroughly!

They have accumulated again, those pesky links. Or are they pesky? You might want to decide for yourself. Here they are:

Cathy posts a review of Marianne Vedeler's book "Silk for the Vikings".

Jonathan Jarrett has put together a resources page you'll definitely want to check out.

There's a German article about silk relics (tunic pieces) from the fourth century.

King Richard III has undergone multi-element isotope analysis, and seems to have liked his booze, judging from that.

That's it for today - now I'll go back to my presentation writing.

Yesterday I received an e-mail telling me about a free e-book from one of my lovely colleagues... and that did make my day.

A few days ago, I stumbled across a Past Horizon article about a new find of a Viking age figurine, showing a woman in full dress (or at least dressed). I took a look, marked it for looking at it again a little later, and planned on blogging about it, with maybe the inclusion of some thoughts about the dress and its possible interpretation.

Well, you know how some problems solve themselves with waiting? Cathy from Loose Threads has beaten me to it, and posts in detail about the figurine and the difficulties of interpretation of its dress. So I will just point you at her blog, for now. And say that I totally agree with what she writes: The figurine throws up more questions than it answers, and that is frustrating and fascinating at the same time.

Welcome again to the world of textile archaeology.

It's getting hot here - summer is in full swing. Not yet so hot you get the feeling that your bones melt, but warm enough to take a morning walk without a sweater or jacket, and warm enough to break a sweat when dashing to the post office.

Which I just did - after waiting for ages for my computer to finish its updates so I could get at the data I needed for the postal dance. And then I missed the postie getting the packages from the office by about five minutes... I blame Windows and their weird updating methods.

On a different and more interesting note than my computer woes and the fact my brain is trying to get into summer relaxation mode (hey! not yet! still work to be done!), here's the currently oldest trouser find yet - from China and about 3000 years old. The article includes a link to the proper article about the trousers; it's behind a paywall, though.

It's a little later than what I usually blog about, but it more than makes up for it in splendour: There is an exhibition, very recently started, on the textiles of August der Starke (the strong), 1670-1733. The textiles stem from the polish coronation ceremony in 1697 and a wedding 1719 in Dresden, and they are exhibited together with thread-by-thread reconstructions in Dresden. This means it's possible to see and compare how the textiles look now and how they most probably looked when they were brand new and used for representation. The information about the exhibition says something about gold and silver cloth, velvets, gold embroidery and bright beautiful deep colours - all the best that textile manufacture is able to give.

The exhibition has just started on the 13th of November and will run until February 24, 2014. You can learn more about it on this English info page about the exhibition...

I think I shall go see Dresden, soon-ish.