There's been a sensational find done in Italy: A church burial place where an entire community of people was buried in a church crypt - and a lot of them mummyfied. Which means that they are still fully dressed in their burial garments - practical, no-nonsense clothes.

You can read and see pictures about this find from the Italian mountain church here. Go have a look - the pics are spectacular!

It has taken ages and the development of a severely bad conscience on my side, but it's finally done and (almost) finished: The new webpages of www.pallia.net are up and running.

Ah. Finally.

Of course there were a few glitches, and the very last pages are not yet online, but the bulk of the work is done, including burying my arms up to the elbows in the innards of .css-files (something I have never wanted to do), brushing up my html-skills to get things to behave properly, and learning how to install webshop software on a server.

Well, the very last thing is still a work in progress, so it will take a while longer before you will be able to browse a shining new online market stall, and I'm sorry for the further delay - but those things are never as easily done as said. Meanwhile, why don't you hop over to the shining new website (now also available in English) and tell me how you like it?

It is almost the end of May, which means that the deadline for German taxes is approaching - and that, in turn, means I am doing what all good Germans are doing now... which would be re-checking the bookkeeping, making final calculations, and filling out tax forms with all the maths that is involved with that.

And while I am here and happy that there are programmes to help me doing all the maths and calculations and listing and whatnot that needs to be done, in case you want something else to look at, here's a list of stuff that I wanted to pass on to you, accumulated during the last few days when things were busy here:



Textile History, Journal of the Pasold Research Fund Ltd' has digitized all back issues. You can find the contents of each issue at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/tex. There's also a free issue to look through (one from 2009) as well as a cumulative index. (h/t to MEDTC-list)

There's a conference "Developments in Dress History" planned for December 8-10 2011 in the University of Brighton, UK; the Call for Papers is open until August 1. You find more info about the conference and the full CfP here.

The Euregio Maas-Rhine has a project about the historical wool fabrication up and running - it's called the Wollroute (wool route). They have made videos to show the historic production places and tell some background info - in German, Dutch or French. If you don't understand any of these three, you will at least have nice pictures of wool and looms, so do check out their website www.wollroute.net.


Yale has made their digital collection available online, and it's free! They announced an Open Access policy this May, and now you can browse what they have via Discover Yale Digital Commons. (They have spindle whorls. And lots more.)


And finally... Crowd Funding has found its entrance into archaeology. A group of German students wants to try and make a T-shaped stone pillar, as it was used at Göbekli Tepe more than 11000 years ago. The pillar will be about 5 m high, 35 t heavy, and will be worked with only the materials and tools available back then. They have already done their preliminary experiments, and now they are looking to raise money for the real project this summer. The fundraising is done via mySherpa, a German-language site (and the project description is all German) - if you are interested in the project (or better still wish to support it), you can find their mySherpa site here. (In contrast to kickstarter.com, mySherpa requires you to pay upfront as soon as you declare your sponsorship; in case of underfunding of the project, they wire your money back.)


Go have fun with these links!

The moment has come - textile folks rejoice! Cathy stumbled across a new downloadable .pdf-publication on the Archaeology of York webpage, and this time, it's Textile Production at 16-22 Coppergate by Penelope Walton Rogers. That book has been out of print for a good while, and I dimly remember checking its price once, years back, and deciding it was way too pricey for my student's budget.

Now it's available for free download! You will find the download page behind this link. Enjoy!

And now I'm returning you to your regularly scheduled reminder post...
It's May already, and the deadline for the Textile Forum is drawing closer.

So please do not forget to register if you would like to attend this year's European Textile Forum in Asparn an der Zaya, Austria. We are going to focus on linen and other vegetable fibres, and it does promise to be very, very interesting!

I spent most of the workday yesterday getting back on track with the website relaunch that I had prepared for oh, ages ago - new design, new texts, full German and English version. And then it had taken a backseat (think extralong passenger train backseat here) to all the other things going on.

The good news is: I had some nice progress yesterday. And the bad news... there's still a good heap of work to be done on it.

And now to the randomness part, because if I don't write all those random things here and now, I'll have forgotten about them on Monday.
My IMC Leeds programme arrived - and I was really wondering what I would be getting from the UK in book format. Goodness, it's huge! I already knew the conference was gigantic, but a full book just to list the sessions and papers? That really is a little overwhelming. And since I'm a fan of whelm and sometimes even overwhelm, I'm so looking forward to this thing!

It's really getting summery outside, and there's a few patches in the garden that need some urgent de-weeding. But the rest all does fine - we'll have a lot more of the good mint this year than last year, the first tulips (two real and a lot of small wild ones) are already in bloom, and my little tomato seedlings are also coming along very nicely.

The Spinning Experiment Results article is almost finished and sent off to colleagues to give it a read-through - so I'm happily waiting for their feedback now.

And some of you probably remember my post about the medieval underwear from Lengberg a good while ago - there's now been a little TV snippet about it. It will stay online for a few more days on the ORF page. The snippet you want is titled "Tiroler Tanga". The plugin doesn't work for me, unfortunately, so go enjoy it for me!

Update: There's a little arrow on the top right of the video frame - click on that to view it with an external player (windows media player or the like). That will work even if the plugin doesn't.

While I am finishing up stuff here and packing together all the stuff I am going to need during the weekend, I will just toss you a link to the V&A page about embroidery - just in case you don't know it yet.

It is here, complete with a little database of the embroidered objects they have. And I  stumbled across another thing on the V&A site: They have a youtube channel where you can watch videos about restauration and conservation work - or other informative videos. Like the stunning work for the Champlevé enamel. Do go spend some time there (so that I did not get stuck there alone)!

A few days ago, Merriam Webster had "togs" as word of the day, and I got sent the link. Word of the Day is quite fun to read, and if you are looking to improve your English vocabulary, it might not be a bad thing to just take a look at it now and then (or daily, even).

If you would like to read the "togs"-WotD, go here. But be warned: There's word games and stuff on that site, it can act as a time sink...