After two iterations of peer-review and lots and lots of prodding, re-writing, tweaking and polishing, I have received the good news: My article about the spinning experiment has been accepted by AAS. I have thus just transferred the copyright, in a version of an author contract that is quite... grabby. Another instance of academic publishing being different from "normal" publishing - but I'm happy to have gotten it off my desk, and out into the world. I will let you know once it's out!

For those of you who read German, there's a nice "protocol of a natural desaster" from the Middle Ages on tribur.de. Actually, it's not nice, it is quite tragic.

Also? There's a blog called The Archaeology of Tomb Raider.

I am busy writing and taking pictures and thinking and getting stuff reorganised in my brain. There are also things lying around on tables and floors, waiting to get sorted and put away, but they will survive (as I will) if I only get around to it tomorrow.

Just in case you are interested in what makes me so busy - three writing projects have come to a state of progress that makes me quite, quite happy (and means I have to apply my time and brains to them for a bit, too). There are another three, or four, or five depending on how you count in the wings, waiting - they shall have to bide a bit more time.

Some of the picture-taking planned for today is not for papers or other publications, though - it's for the online shop. I have a few new things to add, and if all goes reasonably well, I will be able to reveal them to you tomorrow. They are nice and exciting things, I think - and I hope you will think so, too!

One of the topics in the Forum this year was embroidery - a lovely topic. It was also a wonderful and really fascinating piece in the focus of the paper. The only unfortunate bit? The piece (an embroidered late antique tunic from the RGZM Mainz) had been conserved and placed onto a stand in the main exhibition so that the back of the embroidery is not accessible - and there are no photos of the back.

Now, if you are an embroiderer, you will know that the frontside shows the picture and the backside tells the story. Which stitches were used? In what direction were they worked? How were starts and stops (or larger gaps between similarly coloured batches) handled? Was the worker sloppy or neat? Which parts were worked first? All this... discernable only from the backside.

So I will repeat the There-should-be-a-Law thing that I posted already ages ago - I mentioned it at the Forum, and there was general agreement, by the way.

There should be a law that makes anyone writing about an embroidered piece to post at least three good quality photographs, showing a) the complete piece with measurements given in the text; b) a close-up (or several) of a detail, showing all the stitch techniques and materials used on the piece, together with a ruler or other size indicator on the photo; and c) a close-up of the back side of exactly these said details, also with a size indicator on the photograph.
Because it's the backside that tells the story, and the detailed view that makes it possible to listen to that story.

Now we only need to make it a real law. Any helpful suggestions on that?

Writing a book can take you into unexpected directions - such as researching English medieval furniture. After hunting for it for quite a while, I can tell you that there seems to be even less material about it than about German medieval furniture (and that's not much).

So I spent the day yesterday partly in the library, hunting down books and checking them and checking out some more of them, resulting in a very heavy bag of books to carry home. So heavy, in fact, that I had the sudden urge of sweetening the load by buying some sock wool... sock wool does not count, right?

Today's agenda, thus, has more books on it - books that I need to at least skim to see if there is something useful in there. If anyone here has a hint on where to find a good, current book or article about English medieval furniture in the timespan of about 1000 to 1350, it would also be much appreciated!

There are things that are fast and easy to do, there are things that aren't, and then there are things that will just gobble up all the available time and then some. Just like most of yesterday was gobbled up by finalising that reviewed (and thoroughly re-worked) paper.

The most interesting thing about it? The three proofreaders (thanks again! you did great work) sometimes totally agreed on which phrasing was totally crappy, and sometimes totally did not agree. I got to pick and choose, somehow.

So today I'll spend a half hour more on the last bit of the thing, finalising it for submission, and then I will get rid of it. Finally. Whew.

It makes me wonder, however. How much time is writing a paper supposed to take? I suspect there will be a huge range of timespans eaten by paper-writing, and probably time spent is not correlating directly to paper length. Or even paper importance.

When we started out with the idea of making the very first Textile Forum, we had just a limited number of goals - we wanted to make the Spinning Experiment possible, and we wanted to try if it's possible to get people from different backgrounds together to exchange knowledge, and practical knowledge.

After the absolute success of that first Forum in 2009, we decided to try making it a regular fixture. This was just four years ago, so it's not a real long-standing full-fledged tradition yet. Quite on the contrary, we are still finding how to make the Forum even better, to get better connection between the academic and the practical side, and how to establish it as a true long-term thing.

What I did not expect back then, or dared to dream of back then, is that we would have our own publication one day. But largely thanks to one person taking the stick and running with it (and gently hitting the contributors, including me, when appropriate, with said stick to keep them working) and doing all the editing work, we will have one. And now, since the proofs are in my inbox and our editor is waiting for the feedback, it suddenly feels much, much more real than before.

I will keep you updated once we have a firm publication date - and I am so looking forward to this!

There is that article that I am writing (or, rather, re-writing according to the suggestions made by the reviewers). It's about, who would have thought it, the never-ending spinning experiment. And it is driving me nuts.

Why? Well, for one thing, I am trying really hard to get some proper plots out of the thing. Which, according to my instructions and due to the help of a lovely person who knows R should be no problem... but my modules keep crashing, not reacting, or not giving me the results I need.

And then there's the citations. I have read in gazillions of publications that "thick yarn is made with heavy spindles"... and of course I did not take that as a note. And now I need to add a few more references to this, and it seems I cannot find them anymore. This is probably due to the fact that many of these books or articles were quite basic, or not typical scientific reference literature - but it makes it not easier to re-find them. So I will be shamelessly blegging:
Do you know a book (preferably something like a beginner's guide) or an (archaeological) article about hand-spindles and hand-spinning where heavy spindles are linked to thick(er) yarns? Please tell me in the comments. That would be really helpful.