Eva's journal

Finished the braies yesterday. Now I am thinking about making some gifts from the baron and me to foreign royalty. I am also trying to get som Real Work done, such as working on my paper/presentation for the Dressing the Early Modern conference in Bologna in a few weeks. I must confess that I go there mainly for the people, and for going to Italy in September. But I still need to make a good presentation.

Today is laundry day, which is made more interesting by the fact that they are replacing our lift and the laundry room is five floors down (in the dungeons ;) ) Thankfully laundry is a project that Rickard and I do together, so he will have to carry everything. Also lucky is that the last month of Pokémon Go has made my legs much stronger. That and climbing the stairs for a couple of weeks now; we live on the 3rd floor.
There's a lot of noise from the lift shaft today, but that means that they are working on installing the new lift, so I will not complain.

Apart from the stronger legs my body isn't too happy with me right now. I can walk (obviously), but I have this constant pain which makes it hard to concentrate and actually think, which unfortunately is what I'm paid to do. I might have to tak emore tramadol to get work done.

I started working again this week afte the holiday, and it was okay. I would have preferred to hav holiday of course, but there are quite a few thigns that I need to do before the semester starts on the 1st of September. Also, there was only me and one other person there most of the time, so it was really easy to concentrate. And I wasn't tempted by sewing, knitting or any other thing that I could do when I'm at home. So I commented on a student's essay, went throgh hundreds of e-mails, wrote a four page abstract for an anthology that I'm hopefully going to be in and started on the research for a paper that I'm, presenting in Bologna in September. I'm still on sick leave (and will probably be for the rest of my life), which means that I only work 15 hours/week, so I think this was actually rather good.
After work I have been out hunting pokémons, which is probably very good for my health, knittign, sewing, making scrolls etc. I have also started to have sewing/craft meetigs for my local SCA barony once a week. They're on Thursdays, when Rickard is away playing X-wing. Not that he minds having people here, but sometimes there's quite a lot of us and he does like his peace and quiet. This week I made a new "chin strap" and veil for my early 14th century wardrobe, painted a scroll and did some mundane knitting.



Next Thursday there won't be a meetig at my place though, because I am flying over to Visby on Wednesday, and will stay until Friday (Saturday is my mother's seventieth birthday). I will miss court by one and a half hour, which is both sad and good. Sad because I like courts and good because I won't need to pack my crown :)

The main purpose of the trip is to hang out it with helwig and liadethornegge, and to sign my apprenticeshop contract with the former. And to spend time with Renika, where I'm also staying.

I will also get the chance to wear my new red wool Manesse gown, and my new green wool surcoat with lots of metal flowers sewn on to it. A gown which I have NO good photos of. Mainly beacuse I haven't worn it.



I will also bring my old murrey gown to have something that I won't care so much if it gets dirty.

Gotland is suffering from severe drought and we are adviced to save water as much as possible, so I will take a bath at home before I leave and when when I get back to Gothenburg. So I will bring at least two shifts so I can change. Actually, that's how I usually do it a Medieval Week: one shower in the middle of the week and three or four shifts to change between. People shower too much anyway.

Hopefully by the time that I leave I have gotten somewhere on one of my new lectures for this autumn, on historical cotton trade.

When hanging with one of my closest friends, who also has a chronic illness (or rather: several, and worse than me), recently she asked if I really had the strength and energy to be baroness of Gotvik. And I answered that I am giving myself this.

And that's how it is: all these years, while teaching and having no official time for research I have done research, gone to conferences and written articles. Both because it's fun and because if I want a job that's what I have to do.

But since a year I have a steady job on 50% (and I can't ever work more than that). And yes, I am working on articles, but the two I'm working on now will be the last for a while, maybe a couple of years. Instead I will focus on making my teaching better, the thing I'm actually paid to do.

And on my free time i will go to more events and get more involved in the SCA. I will continue writing blog posts about historical dress and even write something for an SCA newsletter, not just for scholarly journals.

I am giving myself this and I am very happy.

When I got to work today my roommate asked me if I had spent much time reviewing the book we are going to discuss on a meeting on Wednesday. As in coming up with good ideas for improvement and rewriting for the new edition. I had sort of forgotten that.
So now I'm reading, reading, reading. And maing notes in the margins. in this case I am allowed to, it's a work copy. Unfortunately I have a flare in my arhtirtis and after first aqua aerobics aand then a few hours at work I feel cold and achey and not at all up to it. I hope lots of tea and some chocolate wafers will help.

i do have som important changes to suggest though, to make it less eurocentric.

Since I have trouble contacting photobucket (where I store my images) today I will do something that I rarely do: direct you to my other blog if you want to see my photos from the Medeival market in Hamar. It's here.

My current projct is the hand sewn bodice and sleeves of a ca 1500-1510 Cranach dress for my daughter Valeria. She is going to make the skirt and I'll attach it. It's a good division of work, since she hasn't hand sewn before and need ot learn it on something that doesn't need to be strong enough to take it being pulled tight around the body. Hopefully I'll sew the sleeves today, though if I don't because I finish my funding application that is good too.

I have two exciting news to tell, about new projects that I will do/ be involved in. The first is that I will be on one of the most popular national radio shows here in Sweden, every Wednesday this summer, talking about fashion from a historical perspective. Next week I will talk about hats.

The other news is that I, together with the Textile Museum in Borås , am going to write a book about 20th century fashion in Sweden; a book taht focuses on what people actually wore, rather than on a few exclusive designers. And with a focus on society of course, after all I'm a historian.

Generally not much. Healthwise I am still having a rather bad flare in my arthritis, bad enough that I have to take tramadol every day. The cold I got between yule and new year's is slowly, very slowly giving way (I think). My stress induced depression makes it hard to think at times, but it is better than before I started with sertralin.
After treating my Graves' disease with chemo and compensating with levothyroxine for almost one and a half year I have now stopped both (with a month between) and we are waitign to see fi my thryoid gland has beenable to heal - there is a chance. So now we take blood tests and keep our figners crossed.

At work I have way too much to do now, for someone with my health problems. Especially too many totally new things, but I hope I will manage and survive.

And in my free time I knit, it is definitely an obsession, but I don't mind, it keeps my hands busy and I learn new things.

Yesterday at 8.08 my collague Aufur called me and asked where I was, since I was goign to have a lecture at 8.15. I had totally forgotten about this, but of course she was right. So I jumped out of sweatpants and t-shirt and into a skirt, tights and a top and then jumped on my crutches as fast as I could to the university. Meanwhile she talked a little about the coming examinations. I got uinto my room and dug out my old notes, though I didn't have the time to find the OH-transparencies that are in another room and at 8.28 I was there, ready to teach. I did have to draw a map of Africa, due ot the lack of transparencies, but other than that it went pretty well.
At the break I got the transparencies for the next hour, which dealt with the early history of China.

Considering how it started I think that I did a good job.

Then I went home and made the final revisions for my article for Fashionable Encounters: Perspectives and trends in textile and dress in the Early Modern Nordic World, which will be published by Oxbow Books next spring. Our web mail wouldn't let me attach more than one file per message, but eventually it all got there in time.

Today I have a meeting about our fashion history course and then I teach Fashion 1900-1950 - an overview.

But I am really, really busy with preparing lectures for this semester. Ideally most should be finished this week so I can go back to doing the research I'm supposed to present at the Pasold conference by the end of September.

The stress of everything brings out the introvert that's always lived inside me, just very well trained and hidden, so I also need a lot of time when nobody asks anything of me or even talks to me.

Over here I have posted lots of photos from a Swedish sewing factory in 1946.