May Update

What have I been getting up to in May? I'm still unemployed so mostly I've been hanging out with Spoh and helping to refurbish our tent. I did a little bit of blacksmithing to make hooks to hang from the spokes of the tent. Spoh did most of the work and I acted as third hand and did some twisting of metal which was cool. We also added some extra bits of fabric to the socks that the spokes slot into. That was a bit tedious, sitting with a pile of canvas and pulling out each sock to cut it open and hand stitch extra fabric onto it. But it was worth it because the spokes now sit in the correct spot. The canvas has stretched a little in weird places so it's a little wibbly, but not really that noticeable. We also did some more painting on the valance, and now it looks FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONTY times better, and more like the pictures. Last weekend my Dad left us unsupervised in his shed and we used POWER TOOLS and stuff to clean up all the wooden poles and make some toggles for the door. We also oiled all the wood so it's all nice and won't go crazy if it gets wet. We can now put up the tent in about 15 minutes, but it does take both of us to get the centre pole up. We haven't waterproofed it yet because the weather has been sunny but cold with about 50% humidity and patches of cloud that sometimes rain, and the waterproofing stuff says it needs 12 hours to dry in warmer than 20 degrees with low humidity. We want to do this properly, so we decided not to just wing it and hope it turns out alright. Hopefully when Spoh gets back from skiing again the weather will be a bit better and we can waterproof it then. Spoh was also very industrious and sewed up bags for all the wooden bits and the tent itself, and made a bunch of curtains and chair covers and things. She also made a cushion and table runner that need some trim, so I think I'll make up some doubleface tablet weaving in one of Anna Neuper's patterns. I tried to buy some size 10 DMC balls from the Embroidery Den, but their website's broken and they haven't answered my email or fixed it yet.

BUT BUT I don't care anymore because yesterday was my birthday and Nathan and Catherine got me THIS:

OMG MY VERY OWN LOOM! Catherine's Dad MADE it when he was doing weavy type things and it's pretty awesome. It's been sitting in storage for some time now apparently, so now it's ALL MINE. It's got ten shafts. TEN. Count them. I'M SO EXCITED. I had to just stare at it for ages because I had no idea where to even start, or what to do with TEN SHAFTS. I think I might just ignore eight of the shafts and try dressing it for a plain tabby weave. I hunted all over the Googles for shops in Perth that sell cones or skeins of yarn for weaving, and eventually found one place that sells cones for knitting machines. For a while there I thought I'd have to order some yarn online and then WAIT UNTIL FOREVER for it to arrive so I could play with my loom.

I also had a brilliant idea. Back in January I left a bunch of old textbooks and stuff at the UWA secondhand bookstore, so I decided it was about time to see if any of them had sold. All the expensive ones sold and I got $103.50 to by ALL the yarn! Then I went adventuring out to the yarn shop, which is actually the bottom floor of a house and it looked like it wasn't a shop but then it was! The owner guy was fabulous and very helpful. I wanted to get some cotton or cottolin to start with, and they had this great mercerized cotton that was all shiny and looked like it'd be really easy to manage, but it only came in cream or baby pink. So I went looking and then there was some TEAL and it was 100% WOOL and then I'd bought it along with some brown AND I'M SO EXCITED IT WILL LOOK AMAZING but it's felting wool so will probably be an absolute pain in the butt and there will be tears and tantrums. It was fairly cheap too, only $33 for a 350g cone. They also had some polyester stuff that came in ALL THE COLOURS which would've been my second choice because there was also teal, but it was about the same price as the wool, so wool won.

Last Friday I went to the craft fair and bought some small 25g skeins of silk because they were shiny and I couldn't resist. But there was also a display from the Weavers and Spinners Guild of WA, so I got talking to the ladies there and I think I'll go along to their next weaving meeting in a couple of weeks, and see if I can do some workshops to learn some stuff instead of trying to muddle along completely on my own. I don't think my loom will be going with me though, there's no way it'll fit into my car.

Stay tuned for my next entry, which will undoubtedly be about how evil string is and whaaa whaaa whine whine warping is tedious :)

Half way!

It's been almost exactly a year since I started, and I'm now half way through my embroidery!

Hopefully it won't take another whole year to get it finished. It's fairly tedious and I'm not enjoying it as much as I enjoyed embroidering my awesome bag. I think I'll be avoiding working on 40 count linen for a while. I'd like to start learning different styles of embroidery, and I'm planing on using the WCoB competitions as inspiration, whether or not I end up entering each competition.

In other news, I made a jewellery!

I got the idea from Ceara's star and lily necklace. I like the idea of wearing my awards, and the star and lily pendant is so pretty, but having it on a long braid is just annoying. I bought a string of amethyst beads at Festival for this project, because for some reason I thought the pendant was black and the purple beads caught my eye on market day. When I got them home I put them against the pendant and they really didn't go together, so I ended up buying the blue Swarovski beads when I went to the bead shop to buy findings. I already had the pearls in my bits and pieces box, not sure where they came from though. Also, I've learned just how much is involved in this bead jewellery making business, and I don't think I want to open that can of worms. I used tigertail wire and crimping bead dealies, and kinda failed to pull the loop through on the jump ring end, so there's a loop of tigertail almost the size of the jump ring. I think I managed to put this necklace together with the bare minimum of materials and skill whilst making sure it wasn't likely to break catastrophically. Anyway, I wore it at the Autumn Gathering camping event last weekend. I think it might be a little bit long, but I'm not sure it bothers me enough to do anything about it.

Speaking of Autumn Gathering, it was a totally awesome event! I was in charge of my first ever meal at an event. Luckily it was an easy one, just the soup kitchen on Friday night. I was so scared I was gonna burn the stews, and that I wouldn't have enough, or that I would have waaaay too much, but it turned out pretty much perfect. Sophie and I also put up our big period tent for the weekend. We worked out it hasn't been put up for about two and a half years. I'd forgotten how awesome it is to camp in a giant tent with furniture and stuff. It's well worth the huge amount of stuff to be carried and set up and packed down. We've got plans for improving it, so we've set aside time during May before the ski season starts up again to work on it. It needs to be waterproofed, which is pretty important. Saturday is going to be spent blacksmithing some metal bits to hang from the spokes that we can then hang things from, like garb and lanterns. Curtains are going to happen to divide the tent into sleeping area and really cool party gathering area. We'd like to do things like host parties and A&S classes in the tent. We also need to adjust the socks that the spokes slide into so that they actually sit in the right spot, at the moment they're too high.

Anyway, I had a really cruisy weekend. The event was really relaxed which was nice. I shot two archery shoots which was fun, had a couple of naps in our awesome tent, and generally had fun hanging out with people. I'm looking forward to next year's event!

Rowany Festival AS49

This year I had my best Rowany Festival ever. I've always had a good time at Festival, but mostly I left having not really done much except hang out, and feeling a little bit like a nanna for struggling to stay awake at night and going to bed early. Not this year! I dormed instead of camping and ate at the Greesispoone which was completely different from previous years. This year was much warmer than last year (though still not actually warm), but a whole lot wetter. Going back to a warm, dry bed in a building made a wet festival a whole lot more comfortable. I slept awesomely which probably contributed to how productive I was during the day. 

I made it to SIX A&S classes, which is a record for me. Two of those were embroidery discussion classes with Ceara, one practical smocking class, one about cloth structures and weavy stuff, a really awesome medieval surgery class that I had to leave half way through to go to the WCoB meeting, which I had to leave halfway through to go to the most awesomest class ever, weave a napkin!

Photo by Lady Aleinya

I WEAVED A NAPKIN! :D Lady Aleinya Thrakesina warped up her two shaft looms and showed some random punters like me and Rosamond how to weave, and sat with us to fix up our mistakes and deal with the looms when they had tantrums. IT WAS SO AWESOME and now I want a loom so I can weave MOAR THINGS.

I also bought some things at the markets, it doesn't seem like much but I spent all my monies so it must've been a good haul. Ceara helped me find some gold thread that I can use for couching, because I think I wanna do some couching on my Saxony gown when I get around to making it. I've decided I can't afford to order the silk I need until I'm employed, so the whole project is probably going to be put aside for a while. I might still look into making the chemise, since I know how to smock now. I haven't decided if it's going to be smocked, but I mentioned I'd done a smocking class to my Mum and suddenly I have all of Gran's old smocking books and patterns and a pleating machine, so it's all very possible.

I watched a few tourneys and went to a lot of vigils. It seemed that every party was a vigil this year. I helped Katherne get dressed for her vigil and her Pelican ceremony, and I even did her HAIR. I'm so not a hair person, but her do worked out really well, and it helped that there was a hat to hide all the messy bits under :P She was so pretty!

My silly hood also acquired a bell. I did steal it from a Lindt bunny. I stitched it on for the last day, but it had to come off for my hood to go in the wash when I got home. It was kinda fun having it on there, so I might think about stitching it back on for special occasions.

Photo by Ceara

Before Festival, I managed to make all the warm things that I had planned. I made two flannel chemises, which only just squeeze under my cotehardies and are not very comfortable in the sleeves. Luckily I didn't end up having to wear them because it was so much warmer this year. I got by with just a linen chemise, a linen cotehardie, wool cotehardie, wool partlet, short wool circle cloak and my hood (and thermal leggings). The wool partlet made a huge difference, and mostly only got worn at night when it was really cold. I don't have any pictures of the partlet, probably because I always had my cloak and hood on over it, but here's me in my cloak.

Photo by Ceara, with Stanzi's camera

I bought that brooch holding it together at the markets. The cloak is wool lined in bright green linen, and it's really lightweight but warm. It comes to just below my elbows, so it doesn't get in the way like a full length cloak does. It also doesn't pull on my neck and shoulders like my heavy full length cloak does, so it's really comfy to wear. I didn't seem to have the problem I've had in the past of the hood not sitting on top of the cloak well, which was awesome. The hood itself doesn't really wanna cooperate, I think the wool I used for the tablet woven edges might be shrinking when I wash it or something because it doesn't wanna turn back at the front anymore.

I also bought some little ankle gumboots from ebay, which were totally awesome. I wore them for pretty much the whole of the event, and because it was so wet I was kirtling up my skirts in my belt so the boots ended up being on show. I got a few compliments on them, and they don't look overly obvious like proper size gumboots do.

Just as an extra note, the above photo was taken on the only day that I wore contacts instead of glasses. It was very wet that day so I was worried about having to constantly clean water of my glasses. Turns out I didn't need to worry, if I pull my hood far enough forward then my glasses don't get wet. Anyway, I ended up leaving my smocking class early because the contacts were feeling scratchy, and they don't quite correct my vision as well as my glasses. Mostly I wore my glasses during the day and ditched them at night because it's so dark and smokey with fires that it doesn't make any difference if my vision is corrected or not, I can't see much anyway. Anyway, I think I'm coming to terms with wearing modern glasses with my garb. I really dislike my contacts so I'll only put up with them when wearing glasses is weird and distracting, like at dancing.

I didn't end up finishing my embroidery. I'm almost half way now, when I get there I'll post a picture. I did bring it with me and cart it around for most of Festival though. I showed it to Mistress Acacia who said some really nice things about it, and Mistress Rowan who said I'm insane for doing something so small and tedious, but also said some nice things too. I'd like to start entering the WCoB competitions which will make me start tackling different styles of embroidery.

Also MOAR WEAVING is a thing that I want to do. Weaving is fun and awesome. Yay weaving.

New Hood

Happy New Year! I know I'm way late and I have no excuses for not updating this blog because I've been unemployed for the last 10 weeks. I got all excited about all the time I was going to have for SCA things after I finished uni, but then Christmas happened and I discovered I was seriously lacking motivation for SCA things. It's difficult to get back into the swing of projects and stuff when you've completely checked out for six months. So what have I been doing? Not much. I spent $70 on 1000 pearls from China and had some interesting conversations with the people from customs because apparently 'cultured pearl' is not enough of a description for them to know what was in my package. There were multiple emails and I ended up sending them the internet listing for what I had bought. But when I got the package they'd opened it anyway. Not that I mind, but what was the point of all the emails? Anyway, that was over a month ago and I haven't done anything with them since. They're for my Saxony Gown, in particular the goldhaube/hat dealie thing. I need to buy the silk for them to go on but then the US exchange rate turned to shit and I started procrastinating instead.

I made a hood! There was a open A&S competition at Midsummer feast a few weeks ago and I decided since I needed to make a hood anyway and I had all the materials I should enter it. I thought about it for two weeks and then freaked out and put the whole thing together in the two days before the feast. I scored 33/50 which isn't bad, but I think I could've made a better hood and written better documentation if I'd gotten my act into gear and given myself the time to actually do it properly.

I made it without the skirt that covers the shoulders because I had this idea that I'll wear it with a partlet and cloak at Rowany Festival. Whenever I wear a cloak and a skirted hood I have a lot of trouble keeping the hood from slipping off or twisting around. It's an absolute pain and I usually only resort to wearing both when I'm stupid cold so I'm already grumpy from being cold and it just makes me grumpier and more uncomfortable. Anyway, I made this hood from some blue wool that Lady Mery gave to me as a birthday present a few years ago, and some gold silk dupion I found in my stash. I tablet wove the edges like on my other hood. I had an idea that I'd wear this with my linen huva cap for extra warms and to grip the silk. As you can see from the pictures, the silk is really quite stiff. When I wore it to Midsummer it sort of wobbled around on my head and didn't change shape. I also had problems keeping my huva cap on my head because the string was too long, and I actually thing the cap itself is too big because the edge doesn't sit flat around my head, it's sort of wibbly. I might need to make a new one from my own pattern instead of just copying Mistress Catherine's pattern :P

I also did a big no-no and didn't pre-wash any of the fabric. Gasp! Horror! I know, I'm lazy. Anyway, I decided that I didn't like having such a stiff hood because it felt silly. I've heard that silk dupion gets softer the more you wash it, so I decided to give the hood a wash and if the colours ran or it shrank weirdly then I hadn't really lost anything because I was unlikely to wear the hood while it was all stiff anyway. I hand washed it in some lukewarm water with fabric softener, and nothing drastic happened. The colour didn't run at all which was awesome because I really wouldn't have been surprised if everything turned blue. I think the silk shrank slightly, but not enough for me to care. More importantly, I'm pretty sure it's less stiff than it was. Mistress Catherine suggested washing it in vinegar to soften it, so I might try that too. I do have an issue with wearing it with my huva cap though. It makes a lump at the back of my head because that's where my hair is, and it makes the back of the hood stick out. It's the right look for a veil and wimple, but looks a bit silly without. I might make a new huva cap that fits properly and experiment at Festival with wearing the hood with and without the huva cap to see which works better.

I've also been plodding away at my embroidery. I'd like to have it finished to take to the WCoB meeting at Festival to get graded, but I worked out that I need to finish half a motif every day, which is about five hours of embroidery. It's do-able but I'll be cramming it in around dance classes, job hunting, SCA training and all the other things I need to do for Project Warm for Festival. So far I've done nothing except the hood and I've bought some cotton flannel that I'm going to turn into long sleeved chemises to wear under my cotehardies. I need to rummage through my fabric stash because I want to make a wool half cloak lined with linen. It'll either be parti-coloured or I'll use some of the maroon wool that I have tonnes of. So far I've borrowed one pair of thermal leggings and a thermal shirt from my mum, I'll just sleep with the shirt under my fleecy tunic but I'm intending to wear leggings every day so I'll need at least another pair. I also need some more woolly socks.

I'm hoping this year will be better because Easter is a few weeks earlier than last year so it might not be quite as cold to start off with. I'm also coming so much more prepared with a thermal layer and more warm things, and I'm also sleeping in the dorms instead of a tent. So even if the evenings are still stupidly cold, I should at least be toasty warm at night. I'm bringing the same bedding I had in the tent, which had me almost warm enough, but the dorm rooms should be warmer since they have heaters and they're inside with beds raised off the floor.

Stay tuned for more updates on Project Warm for Festival :)

Freedom!

I LIIIIIIIIIIVE! It's been five months since my last post. Not a lot of SCA related things have happened in that time, but that will change because now I have TIME.

Here's a list of Things That Have Happened:
1. A new Baron and Baroness of Aneala, Damian and Leonie, were invested at the end of September. There was a tourney and a feast and I made it to both of these things :D. It was a beautiful warm summery day and I had a really good time catching up with people I hadn't seen in ages. The next day was a horrible wet wintry day but that didn't stop the heavies holding training with the King and Queen. I had another social day. TWO IN A ROW. What a great weekend.

2. The weekend after the new B&B were invested was the September long weekend, which means Championship! I'd just finished my paediatric placement so I was free for ANOTHER WHOLE WEEKEND. We went down south and I experienced camping in dorms for the first time. I must say it was a good experience, but the dorm was only a third full and no one snored. It worked really well for the drizzly weather. I had another great weekend.

3. I emerged from two months spent in the library at uni to attend a tourney run down in Abertridwr. Loki asked to fight for me since Kester was away in the US, and I musta done something right because he won!

And so begins my chaplet collection! There were two because there were two tourneys, and I got to keep both of them. Loki was having some fun with his tassels, thanks goes to Mister Nathan for the photo.

4. I also went to the annual Toys for Tots tourney last weekend. It was proper summer hot.

Thanks to Ragnarr for the photo. Also I wear glasses now. I've had them for two whole weeks, and I can see good now! I'm not sure about wearing them to events, they're very modern and don't really fit with the picture I have in my head of my persona and how my garb fits together. I'm either gonna need to reconcile having a new look, see if I can get some more period looking glasses for events, or talk to my optometrist about getting contacts. I have astigmatism in one eye which can make contacts problematic, so I guess we'll see.

5. My garb is all falling apart. Sadfaaaace. I only have about 3 hoes left and they're all linen, my chemises are all looking a bit ratty and not at all white since I just wash them with my other garb and they pick up coloured linen fluff that I can't get rid of without giving them a good bleach. All three of my cotehardies have frayed bits at the hem. My gold one has frayed at the neckline as well, and the lining has come apart from the sleeve of my teal one. They seriously need some love and attention. I think I'm gonna make new chemises and rethink the pattern I'm gonna use. Also I think I might make a whole new wardrobe. I like the idea of 15th century Burgundian.

6. I picked up my embroidery again and started chipping away at it. I've not made much progress but I'm permanently set up on the couch again so I can pick it up whenever I feel like it. I can't quite remember how many motifs I decided to do. I'd calculated it all and everything, but didn't write it down because I'm usually very good at remembering what I'm doing. I also haven't ever been so totally focused on other things that I don't even think about SCA projects for months at a time. I had heaps of ideas for projects floating around in my head, but I think they were assassinated by my uni research project. I can't even remember what I was planning for my epic Cranach gown of awesome. I wrote a bunch of stuff down in my dress diary but I'd also spent a lot of time pondering bits and pieces. I guess I'll just have to start pondering from the beginning again.

7. This is the most important point of all. Results have been released and.... I'M A SPEECH PATHOLOGIST! No longer a student, I'm a qualified unemployed person! The job market is veeeery competitive at the moment (as in there are no jobs to apply for), so I have some time on my hands to get back into the swing of SCA things. Also I need a holiday after the last five months of epic stressful craziness :)

Slow Progress

My holidays have come to an end. I feel like I haven't done much at all. I flailed about Saxony gowns a lot and started a dress diary, and I did some of my embroidery.

Actually, I've pretty much doubled the amount of embroidery I did during last semester. I went out and bought some smaller needles. I ended up just going to Spotlight because I had other errands to run in the same area, and I would've had to have made a separate trip all the way out to the Stitcher's Corner. I'll be going to uni on Monday so I'll stop there on my way back because Spotlight only had Birch needles so I got some size 28 tapestry needles.

They all died horrible horrible deaths. Three of them bent and two of them broke. It was definitely easier to use the thinner needles, but the thinness also made them not very strong. The whole packet only cost me $2, so hopefully I'll be able to get some better quality needles of the same size at the Stitcher's Corner on Monday.

I'm not sure how this semester is going to go. I'm working on keeping my evenings free for relaxing so hopefully I'll be able to keep on truckin' along with my embroidery and hopefully start working on bits and pieces for my Saxony gown.

Saxony Gown Musings

I had my last exam yesterday! It should be the very last exam I ever do EVER, because next semester is about research projects and clinical placement, but I'm pretty sure I failed it and you have to pass the exam to pass the unit so I'll probably get an email about a supplementary exam at some point in the next couple of weeks. Whatever, at the moment I'm not thinking about that. Instead I'm thinking about my Saxony project! The one that I've been thinking about for years and even have fabric for but I just haven't gotten around to actually working on it. WELL I was just casually looking through the Cranach Digital Archive because I started de-cluttering my room last night. I'm at the point where I've just made a bigger mess and now I'm procrastinating cleaning it up. It's like something exploded, there's so much crap everywhere. Anyway, I was thinking recently that maybe I don't want to have one of those ridiculously wide neckline Saxony gowns, maybe I want one that has a cool high collar dealie. So I was paying particular attention to them when I found THIS:

The only picture I could find when I did a quick Google image search was the teeny one from the Cranach archive, so here it is, watermark and all. BUT LOOK at the design along the edge of the red fabric and around the collar. It looks an awful lot like the kind of designs that you see in Anna Neuper's Modelbuch. They're both from around the same time so that makes sense. But is there any way of knowing whether it was beaded onto the fabric of the dress, or woven as a band that was sewn to the dress? The corner of the collar is really smooth that would suggest beading, but the Cranach paintings are all very stylised, so we can't really say that there was no folded braid seam. Likewise, the bands on the sleeves could be tablet woven bands stitched to the fabric. I don't know very much about these gowns at all really, so I'll have to investigate further. I'd love to weave some trim though, I really enjoyed weaving my last Anna Neuper pattern, and I'd like to experiment with the Japan wire that people keep talking about on the Historical Tablet Weaving Facebook group.

ALSO THIS:

I WANNA MAKE A STUPIDLY EMBROIDERED CAUL. This one definitely looks like beads but I could probably make one using tablet woven bands that match the ones on the dress, like a fillet. Fillets are totally documentable, right? This one looks like there's words of some sort on the front band.

OH OH I could weave some bands and then put BEADS on the BANDS! Then it'll be all sorts of super awesome blingyness! This project is gonna take forever to put together.

In other news, my last day of clinical placement is on Thursday, and then I have three weeks off! Three WHOLE weeks! Except for the three PD events I'm going to, helping a guy with aphasia put together his presentation for a conference, and the meetings at uni about my research project. TOTALLY FREE! I've been chipping away at my embroidery too:

I've done SO MUCH. A whole half motif and a little bit more. There's almost a whole corner! I still need to get some smaller needles, which I might go do on Friday. I just haven't had the time to go to any shop that sells embroidery needles. There's so much to catch up on in the next three weeks!