I am slowly but surely surrounding myself with boxes filled with stuff - books, textile implements, more books, resources and materials, more books, tools, cloth, and even more books*. It is a weird-looking mix of order and chaos: a jumble of things on heaps to be sorted out, books still in shelves (almost none left in the study, though), things that are pre-packed in boxes anyways, and the big newly-filled boxes stacked on top of each other, slowly filling up freshly cleared space where shelves were.**

Yes, that sounds like an upcoming move - we will move into a bigger flat, since my stuff seems to have exploded (or maybe "popcorned") during the last months. This is largely connected to my acquiring some exhibition stuff (which includes two dress mannequins) and to the growth of the market stall and its assortment of goods, but also to such slightly mad ventures as the spinning experiment (which resulted in my having about 105 spindles now instead of five, and two more rather large boxes to stash). All this has led to the apartment being too small, and offering too little storage space.

So we will move, but stay in this very nice and quiet part of Erlangen. I will have a nice, large study/work room with no roof slope taking away space for shelf storage or moving around in the room, and enough space to actually do tailoring work in there without feeling cramped. And it is a ground floor flat - hooray for not having to lug so much stuff down from second storey when going to a medieval event!


* Yes, I'm a book junkie. And that is especially true for books on archaeological stuff, textiles foremost, of course. Book buying binges when in museum or exhibition bookstores is a very common quirk of archaeologists, and I'm no exception to that rule. Which means that not only do I have lots of books, I have lots of really seriously heavy books, because most catalogues are printed on thick, glossy, heavy high-quality paper...
** Compared to stacking books on the floor until stack height is still just stable, shelves are a much more compact way of storing (we found this out when emptying a shelf to re-build it with an additional bit a while ago), but even shelf storage cannot beat boxes filled with books and stacked up high. Much less convenient for actual reading, though!

Quite a little stack of links to interesting places and things has accumulated in my "slow blogging day" stash, but they are much too good to languish away. So here's a link drop - I hope there's something for you in there, too!

- Two blogs that recently came to my attention: Fait Attention and Publishing Archaeology.

- For those of you working with MS Word, there's a webpage with tons of good advice, instructions, makros and stuff at the Editorium. This site has helped me a lot when finishing off and layouting my thesis. I still wouldn't recommend to use pictures in large Word files, though. (My pics were layouted half-automatically, using the Word-generated picture list, a homemade makro and LaTex. Not the best layout ever, but very little work.)

- A new project is researching medieval soldiers "to challenge assumptions about the emergence of professional soldiery between 1369 and 1453", and they have put a database online where you can search almost 90 000 muster records for soldiers from 1369 to 1453. So don't forget The Soldier in Later Medieval Times when you are looking for muster information!

- I'm very happy that I usually don't have to cope with Latin (and I would look for help if I had to), but for those who are, there's Du Cange's medieval latin glossary available online: beware the rather large .pdf.

- And for those who read French, there's a bimonthly magazine called "Histoire et images Medievales", with some articles available for download. And of course with nice pictures!

Once in a while, you stumble over something smashing on the Internet. That happened to me yesterday (leading to some work time reduction and late bed-going due to having to watch funny videos on Youtube). Did you know that CBBC has a series of utterly funny sketches and songs titled "Horrible Histories", making history lessons the most amusing thing ever?

Now I will finally remember what happened to Henry VIII's wives, because of watching this:



And the perfect follow-up for that video is the Terrible Tudors song:



For those lucky enough to be in the right area (unfortunately I'm not), there's also the official webpage of the show, where you can watch snippets, videos and the episodes shown during the last seven days (now I'm jealous!) and even play a game called "Terrible Treasures".

Making medieval garments is something nice and fun - but seeing them worn or seeing them in an exhibition is something else again. And two sets of garments are going on display very soon now:
In November (on November 13/14, to be exact), a new exhibition will be opened in Burg Hartenstein (Wikipedia in German, with picture of the castle) in Franconia - featuring two knights fully dressed, with garments that I made. One of them is the 14th century knight and lord of Hartenstein, the second man is a Teutonic Knight from around 1200.

Since the exhibition is not opened yet, I will post no pictures today - but it won't be long now... Meanwhile, if you read German, you can also pay a visit to the official website of castle and of the group organising and running the exhibition, the Freundeskreis Burg Hartenstein.

With the hype for all things medieval, there have also been quite a few boardgames with medievally themed topics or artwork. And with the huge games fair in Essen just past, there is a new one in the range - the game "after" Ken Follett's sequel to Pillars of the Earth (which usually means loosely connected to the book topic). That book is, in German, called "Tore der Welt" (doors of the world), quite a different title from "World without End", and the game title matches the book title.

Well, I don't read medieval-themed historical novels anymore (the last I read actually was Pillars, when I had just started studying medieval archaeology), but I'm game to play medieval-themed games. Maybe that is because it is harder to put huge, garish mistakes into game descriptions, and maybe it's just because I like good board games. Especially those that are typical German-style board games (and isn't it amazing they name a whole genre for us Germans, and such a nice one as well?). I didn't manage to play the Pillars game when it came out (I think last year), but this year's Follett I did play, and all four of us playing had a good time. It is a nice game, with good artwork and good, functioning game mechanism, including some fun details: You have to pay taxes, feed your family and show that you are a good christian after each of the four "chapters". The chapters contain different events and give each player six chances on action. Those are selected using your twelve action cards - but you have to discard one of the remaining cards when playing the one you selected. This, for us, sometimes led to more thinking about "what shall I discard" than "what am I going to do now" - quite unusual, and quite dastardly in a very nice and amusing way. For once, you can't blame luck if you don't have the action you would need anymore! Every player also has an "event card" to play each turn, giving him or her some much-needed income and sometimes a second income, but every other player gets something as well. What everyone gets is depending on how the card is placed on the board - another simple, but nice and well-fitting mechanism.

Altogether, I did like the game quite a lot. It is already available, but only in the German version for now, so tough luck for all of you who would like to play it but don't read German. (One competent translator, though, should be enough - you only need to read the rules and the event cards, there is no need to read for choices.) But since the Pillars game (which has also gotten good critiques from those around me who played it) has been translated and is offered in the US, there should be good chances that it will cross the great salty puddle, too.

Some time ago, Sabine and I decided to go on another mad venture and include nice, really thin, naturally dyed silk threads for embroidery in our assortment of goods. So Sabine had a lot of good opportunity for cursing when she dyed them, and I had a lot of good opportunity for cursing when I reeled the threads off on little spools. But it turned out that these threads are absolutely fabulous for couching gold threads - and even if they resist getting dyed and spooled with all their might (which is impressive), I feel that it's well worth the struggle when the final result looks like this:

The colours are red (madder), blue (indigo) and golden yellow and olive green (birch leaf); you can only see a tiny bit of the gold-coloured thread right on the top of the picture, about in the middle.

These threads are wonderful for couched work, used like in this photo - though the picture doesn't do the colours justice, and I find goldwork enormously hard to photograph...

Because I tend to forget passwords, I use a nifty little programme called "KeePass" (here is its official website). The programme can store your passwords for everything and anything, so it is finally possible to have different passwords for all the important and security-relevant things, and only keep the one master password in mind. (Better not forget that, though!) The little programme will even generate long and very secure passwords for you.

The only thing that really throws me off track with Keepass sometimes is when I've generated one of the nice and safe passwords, copied it to its new home, saved everything, bumbled on... and then I find that the password hasn't been stored correctly in its new home because there is only space for 12 digits, and they cut off my password without warning! And there I stand then, trying like mad to get into the site, application or whatever. I KNOW that new password, darn it! I just changed it! I KNOW it's the correct one, it's stored in Keepass!
... and after a while, it dawns on me...

So should you need a little programme to keep track of your passwords (and I think it even can be add-on-ed into Firefox), KeePass is a good choice. It's free, secure, helpful with password generation, it's even portable so you can take it with you on your USB stick or whatever else you carry around for data transport. Just make sure you don't fall into my trap and check the maximum allowed number of password digits first!