Dear Volunteers... Thank You.

I got to meet a lot of old friends at the Texel Stockings conference, and I also got to know (or know better) a bunch more people. Among them some of the absolutely and utterly amazing volunteer knitters who knitted an entire stocking reconstruction.

An entire one. It's not a sock, mind you. It is a stocking - more than knee-high. We're talking about a piece knit from fine silk, with about 200 stitches to cast on, and about 83 stitches per 10 cm. It took the volunteers between 170 and 350 hours to knit one stocking... no wonder these things were precious. My full and utter respect, and admiration, to the group of volunteers that, up to yesterday, handed in twentyseven complete stockings for the project.

You are heroes for science. Truly. Thank you so, so much for giving such an enormous amount of your time, your skill, and your love to a science project that could not have been done without you. People like you make the world of textile archaeology a better place, and I know from my own personal experience that all of the academics involved in the project will carry you forever in their hearts - like I do my volunteers from the Spinning Experiment that I did ten years ago.

Words are not enough to express how important your work is. Your contribution. Archaeology, especially experimental archaeology and textile archaeology both, are low-budget disciplines. Researchers often work all on their own, trying hard to make projects happen, and there's a constant struggle to source the correct and fitting information, workspace, tools, and materials. If you are very lucky, you can get financial support from an organisation, but a lot of archaeology projects are just fund-your-own research ventures.

Sometimes, this means you are working all on your own for a long while. It feels lonely, and it can be hard. Not only because you feel like there is so much to do, so much to find out, and so little time - but sometimes, as you muddle along crunching data and looking for pictures and written evidence and try to find solutions, it happens that you wonder if your work is interesting or important to anyone else.

Your volunteer support is not only helping us do science. It is also showing us that we are not writing for a dusty stack of paper, to be forgotten in some corner of a neglected library somewhere. It tells us, not only with words but with your actions, that what we are doing is interesting. It is relevant. It helps us find out things about the past, about textiles, about human work and human crafts and human lives - and you, too, are interested in this, and in the connection we today still have. In how our lives are similar, or different. Maybe also in how we can make the world a better place tomorrow, learning from yesterday's techniques, from yesterday's successes, from yesterday's mistakes.

Thank you so, so much. You are wonderful, and I am honoured to have seen, touched, and even tried on some of your hard, meticulous work. I hope you are proud of your work for the project, and that it will continue to warm your heart as it has warmed mine, and that of so many of my colleagues involved in the project.