Happiness in a thread

Soooooo…did you have a good Christmas? (Providing, of course, you celebrate Christmas in the first place!). I’ve had a nice, relaxing time off, as the museum closes over the holiday season. I’ve spent the time re-visiting some arts and crafts that I’ve not had a chance to practice for about a year now. I used to knit a lot when I was younger, and I decided I needed to make some more knitted santas – a lot more. Mostly I took the time to churn out a bunch of card woven ribbon and I managed to at least cut out all the pieces for a Viking Age style woman’s caftan in wool. The ribbon is to go on it eventually, and now I am looking to get going on a card woven hair band. Card weaving, or tablet weaving as it is also called, is one of those things that I got into as a form of experimental archaeology. I figured I’d understand it better if I could figure out how to make it myself. Said and done, I set off on this journey of discovery that has lead me down some very interesting paths. You see, you can’t just…well, you can, let me rephrase that…I can’t just stick to store bought stuff, of course, so learning how to weave entails learning how to make the cards, the carding wool/preparing flax for linen or nettle for thread and so on, the dyeing with natural materials and spinning and so on. During this journey I have learned ever more difficult patterns and techniques. At the moment I am working on figuring out different ways to set up the weave (there are a variety of looms and such one can use, or just a belt and a doorknob) and fiddling around with materials I’ve not used before, and it was during this journey that I have found happiness in a thread. Silk thread, to be precise. Anyhow, that’s all personal things that I’ve done over the Christmas holiday… Now for something more work related:


Yet another year’s gone by. All things being relative, this is the slower time of the year for me here at work. By that I mean that I’ve got a couple of days at this time of year to catch up on things that have had to be left for a while, “tasks to be completed later”, and begin more detailed planning of the things we’ve decided to plan for the upcoming year. The event schedule is set no later than December, but now comes all the nitty-gritty planning, such as timelines of the day of an event, figuring out how many volunteers we will need, how many tents and who will cater it all and so on. As the collections manager, I also have time to do much needed research for exhibits, educational kits and objects in the collection, and as of late, I have tried to cram in as much of that as possible. The research is always put on file in report form, of course, but it is from these files that I can extract information for exhibit notes and such. This is the part of my job that I relish. I love to write, I love historical stuff, not to mention pre-historic stuff, and I love to disseminate knowledge about the things that I love. Some things about collections management is not so fun, like dealing with mind numbing data entry and/or uncooperative computers/software, but it’s all in a day’s work. With some luck, we can find volunteers to help out with some of those things, too. As with most non-profit organizations, we would be dead in the water without our volunteers. I cannot reiterate this fact enough: We have the best volunteers ever and we would not be as good at what we do were it not for them, so Yay for our volunteers!