I arrived back home from Eindhoven yesterday evening, after a week of all things good and fibrey (or stringy). More than a hundred of spindles were spun upon, masses of tablets turned, waffles and chocolate eaten, large quantities of coffee and tea consumed, and laughter and fun abounded.
The Textilforum was everything I had hoped and wished for: A meeting place for craftspeople and scientists, a place to chat and exchange knowledge and personal experiences with different historical techniques, to network and have fun together, a place to do some shopping for textile-crafts-related things and tools that cannot be found just everywhere, and an opportunity to have some nice, juicy bits of science that requires more than just one or two skilled craftspersons. So overall, a complete success, and I am sure that every visitor to the Forum also went home with something new and delightful learned.
For the experiment, I had the joy and privilege of working together with fifteen wonderful spinners to generate a really large dataset that will help a lot for researching spinning and spindle whorls in the future. This dataset and lots of number-crunching from it will probably keep me on my toes for the next few days and weeks, but the data already looks very, very promising. The first results were already presented to the spinners and lecture audience on Saturday evening, and more results are the topic of my talk at the liveARCH conference in Hungary in October. A good reason to set to work on all the cops of yarn and questionnaires!
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
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3 comments:
You still are evil. I can't stop trying to spin thinner and thinner, even though my neck and shoulders still hurt from the spindle from hell. The week was wondelfull, but to short. The people were very nice and the atmosphere was very special. Thank you once again.
Harma
I truly enjoyed the week, and am so glad I was able to attend. Thank you so much for all that you did to make it happen, and for making certain that it was sufficiently advertized that I heard about it.
However, while spinning has long been on my "I should learn to do that someday" list, I'm not certain that listening to the spinners complain about the spindle from hell has inspired me to make "someday" come any sooner. :-)
I'm all very happy with the week, too (though I think that a week is the perfect amount of time! or I'd die of no-sleep-due-to-brain-overload) and I'm more than glad everyone else had just as much fun!
Harma, spinning very very thin should lead to you not having any problems with the spindle from hell anymore - on the contrary, it's quite well suited for that... and Life Long Scholar, even that spindle from hell found two friends out of the fifteen spinners who actually liked it well! (And maybe you can learn spinning next Forum, that still means you are safe from any experiment just then...) : )
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