The Early Textiles Study Group conference this year is taking place in Cambridge, Britain - or you can join in virtually online. Registrations for both kinds of attendance is now open, and you can have a look at the preliminary programme on their website, too.
Edges are definitely a very interesting topic!
... it will be a weird week when somehow Monday feels like Friday already. So even though I technically know it's Tuesday today, it feels like Friday-which-should-already-have-been-yesterday. So it should be Saturday today, but since it was a false Friday yesterday, it only shifted one day.
I wonder how the rest of the week will be like if it starts like that? Time will tell. For now, though, everything might be better with a cat picture:
At least it will not be worse!
Unless, that is, the sleepiness is contagious via computer screens...
Sometimes, things take a lot longer than one thinks possible.
Case in point? Well... I've been looking for a blacksmith willing to make shears for me for ages. Probably best if I don't try and find out exactly how long! It's been more than a decade for sure though.
A lot of people were interested at first, but then it never worked out - most of the time, I was just ghosted. However, I have finally found somebody to make them for me, which means that they are now available in the shop.
They are small, like many of the originals were, with about 13.5 cm length - and they will cut fabrics very well. I've tried all of them on different kinds (linen, wool, and silk), and they did manage all of them fine.
And now we will see if other people are as over the moon about these as I am... I find it hard to believe still that they are now really here!
One of the main things on my desk at the moment is work on the Madder Baselines experiment - at least a bit of a preliminary write-up has to be done, and, well, I am more and more convinced the stuff is called madder because it makes me... the same.
Also, there's such a huge difference between looking at colours on the fabrics in real life and in daylight, and in looking at them on a photograph on the screen. Print will probably be different again, too, but for now, I'm frustrated enough by not getting nearly as much of a difference on the pictures than they show when yo look at the objects.
On that image, four should be very similar to each other, and the other two quite different from the group, with some difference between them as well. That's one of the better images actually, where it's relatively easy to distinguish at least on my screen. The others... ah well.
There's also quite a stack of results (dye-wise) that I'm not sure how to make sense of. Samples that should be exactly the same colour are sometimes (almost) the same, sometimes not. The samples from the pots running in parallel are quite well-matched to each other, the samples from a second run with the same ingredients don't match those of the first run.
As I said - quite surely, madder comes from crazy!
At least it's a pretty red. Or some of them. Mostly.
In case you're prone to procrastination, there's an article in Nature that might be interesting for you - it is about the influence of one's outlook (optimistic or not so optimistic) on whether procrastination is more of an issue or not.
Me, I'm not going to procrastinate right now by reading that article. The Little Cat needs to have her food supply stocked up, so that is on the list of errands to run today. Because we can't risk the furry thing going hungry, right?
(And that also means that should I need something tomorrow to do instead of some task I'm really not so keen on doing... I still have the paper. Muahahaha.)
If you'd like to have a peek of how the NESAT looked like, you can find a few photos up on the website. My own photos from the conference are still not all sorted and labeled, though there has been some progress. And here's one of my bad selfies, in front of the Marie Curie Statue:
I had to take a picture with her, of course - after all, there's an actions scheme with funding run in her name, and I've heard "Marie Curie" more than once in connections with textiles. Also, apart from that, she was an awesome researcher!
There are two hybrid lectures hosted by the CTR tomorrow:
Textile Research in the Pre-digital Age AND Vindolanda, Berenike, Qasr Ibrim: Securing Textile Records for the Future.
Lectures by Lise Bender Jørgensen, Emeritus Professor of Nordic Archaeology at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Dept. of Historical Studies and John-Peter and Felicity Wild.
Time: 12 June 2024, 14:00-14:45
Place: South Campus, room 11B-1-05 and on Zoom
Organizer: Centre for Textile Research (CTR)
Abstracts:
Textile Research in the Pre-digital Age
This talk will present Bender Jørgensen' work on archaeological textiles during the 1970s and 1980s, which included visiting museums in most of Northern Europe at the time of the Iron Curtain, followed by field work in Egypt during the 1990s.
Vindolanda, Berenike, Qasr Ibrim: Securing Textile Records for the Future
Detailed records of archaeological textiles, written, drawn and photographed in the field, are vulnerable, particularly when they are not digital and have no secure home. Total digitization is a partial solution. In this discussion we present and comment on the (incomplete) digital archives for three key Roman sites, copies of which are being deposited with CTR for long-term curation, and use.
You can join the Zoom Meeting with this link, or use the Meeting ID: 629 5654 6156 and Passcode: 468241.
And if you're interested in more events and lectures by the CTR, check out their website!
