St Basil O-Day and More Cotehardie

Yesterday morning my alarm went of at 6:30am, about half an hour earlier than I needed to get up to make it to uni early enough to get free parking. To my surprise, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep like I expected, hence the reason for setting such an early alarm, I actually woke up and got out of bed. Big mistake. I was now in the frame of mind that I had plenty of time, and I ambled around getting all showered and packed and ready to leave. I ended up leaving about 20 minutes later than I wanted to, and missed out on free parking :( Instead, I parked at The House, and hiked over to uni. The House is only a couple of streets away, but it was far enough that I didn't want to have to make two trips. So I managed to load myself up with all my gear and do it all in one :D I had managed to pack the most awkward things. I ended up bringing my quiver, my loom, my basket full of things, and a foam head. I'd only remembered that I had a foam head when I dug through my accessories bag trying to find my hose, and saw my hood. I had a wistful moment in which I wished it was cool enough to wear it, because I love my hood and I like to show it off. That's when I remembered the foam head, and I evicted my flapper wig in order to pack it to display my hood. Anyway, I didn't have very much stuff, but it was awkward kind of stuff to try and carry all at once, but somehow I managed it with my awesome skillz

O-Day was pretty good. We ended up with about 60 sign-ups, which I think is about average. The test is how many of those sign-ups are show-ups next week when we get to Thursday training. We have a $5 sign-up fee, and it's a good thing we do, because I reckon another 60 people just wandered in and asked to sign up without even knowing what we were, and when we mentioned the $5 they very quickly sat up and realised we were wearing funny clothes, and generally made a swift exit. I'm glad I had strung my loom, I ended up spending most of the day sitting on the floor working on it, and it attracted a lot of people who thought it was very fancy and I had awesome skillz. One girl made a comment about how cool it was, then followed the comment with a surprised exclamation that I was actually using it, and knew what I was doing rather than just pretending. One guy was sort of mesmerised by it and ended up sitting down with us and chatting for ages just as he watched me weave. All in all, we had a very productive O-Day, as successful as any other, but more commendable since for the first time we didn't have any grownups to help out. We set up our list field as usual, but there was no fighting because we didn't have enough authorised fighters with armour present. It's a bit of a shame since the fighting really draws the crowd in, but on the other hand we still had a lot of people come through, and we managed quite well.

It took us ages to pack up because we're lazy and couldn't get motivated. We had a lot of chatty rest breaks :P The table people came past multiple times to collect our tables, but were scared off by the amount of crap still piled on them. It wasn't really much, but I suppose it looked like a lot of unfamiliar bits and pieces that may or may not take a lot of time to shift, rather than a whole bunch of the most unbreakable, invaluable, fanciest looking stuff we have that could all be shoved off the tables very quickly :P We were all exhausted by this time anyway, it's amazing how a day of sitting around and talking to people can really drain all your energy! It wasn't even very hot, not like past 40 degree days. It only got up to about 26 degrees, and I even wore shoes and hose all day, without even being tempted to swap to the sandals I brought with me just in case. We also had a lovely breeze wafting through the pav all day, it was quite lovely :)

I ended up not getting home until about 6:30pm, and I just crashed. I piked on singing practice, which I feel really guilty about, but I would've been absolutely useless. As it was I just parked myself on the couch with my sewing and worked really hard at staying awake until a decent bedtime, instead of going to sleep as soon as I got home and waking up at 2am and not being able to get back to sleep. I was rather unproductive with my sewing, I only attached one more panel to my lining in an hour and a half. I ended up giving up and I was in bed passed out by 9pm.

This morning I woke up feeling drunk. I seriously had that weird dizzy feeling, and I couldn't walk straight. I was also weirdly sore in random places. I feel like I've done something to the back of my left knee/calf muscle, but it doesn't feel muscular. I also have a stupidly sore right shoulder and the right side of my neck. I remember feeling that recently, I think it may be related to floor weaving. Anyway, I downed some gatorade and went to my ballet class, and back to pointe for the first time in over a year, so now I just hurt everywhere and I can't remember which bits hurt before class :P I have a feeling I'm not going to be able to walk properly tomorrow :P

I spent the afternoon with Mister Nathan looking through a book of WA camping grounds, trying to find a suitable place to hold Championship since Ern Halliday is booked out on our weekend :( We found a couple of place to check out in the next few weeks, and I think we're going to visit Hoddywell Archery Park tomorrow after training. I spent the evening watching Journey to the Centre of the Earth on tv and making my cote lining into one piece. All done! I must say while the movie is all fluff and very predictable (especially since I've read the book), it was a pretty good sewing movie. You don't need to pay *that* much attention while still being able to follow the plot. And Brendan Frasier is pretty :P Now my lining is completely finished, all it needs is attaching to the actual dress, which I can do after I turn those twelve pieces into one :P

That's where I'm at. Tomorrow there's an IKAC at training, so we shall see if all the tips Mister Nathan has been giving me are actually improving my shooting :)

Things!

UPDATES ON THINGS:

1. I looked at work for a D ring for my belt. I had a choice of hot pink, blue or green, all made of plastic. Great. Next to those ones was a big empty space where the metal ones go. There were lots of empty spaces on the shelf because it was a shelf of BIRCH things. Birch is evil. If anyone ever mentions to a manager that they need something but the shelf is empty, the first thing they ask is "is it Birch?" even though they know it MUST be Birch, because they immediately follow the question with mutterings that you can't quite hear but there are most definitely obscenities involved. If there's more than one manager there, then they also exchange Knowing Looks. From what I can understand, Birch is bad. Anyway, no D ring for me. After a chat with Mister Nathan in which he gave me far too many options and lots of inconveniently located shops, I have decided I am too undecided to make a commitment about the stupid belt buckle. Also, I am cranky at it. This has become way too difficult so I'm going to ignore it and think about it later.

2. I started sewing up my cotehardie! Now I have twelve pieces of dress, but only eight pieces of lining! Yay! Soon I will have only one piece of lining, then I can start working on making my twelve big pieces pieces into one big piece :D

3. I didn't do any sewing today. Instead, I strung up the loom again. I have decided that there needs to be a piece of tablet weaving in progress for the St Basil O-Day tomorrow. So I found a nice simple threaded in pattern that I wanted to do (the Anglo Saxon one), and strung up my loom. I think I'll donate the finished product to the Baroness' Fighter Auction table. After watching me intently as I measured out string, Tory decided he'd like to help

Look at him sitting there looking all innocent, like he wasn't just pouncetackling my string. I growled at him, and he went and lurked just behind the door. He obviously thought I couldn't see him, but I was totally onto him :P So when I ran out of yarn and decided to go out and get some more, I locked him out!  Mwahaha, he was so not happy.

4. I went to Joondalup Spotlight, cos duh, I couldn't go to Innaloo during my morning off, then go back again for my shift. So I went to Joondalup. I found some more yarn, then I accidently walked past the clearance table, and accidently rummaged through it, and accidently found WOOL FOR $5 A METRE!!! :D :D So I got just over four metres of red, and just under four metres of purple, because that's all that was left on the rolls. There's still a roll of charcoal, because I didn't want that colour :P. It's the Melton wool which is only 60% wool, but nice and heavy and good for cloaks. Maybe I willl have a new cloak for Rowany Festival after all. I think I wanna line it though, I need more warms than just one layer, but I haven't decided what I wanna line it in. Maybe I'll get myself some nice soft wool suiting, or just some cheap fleecy stuff. I was pondering what to do with the red stuff, when I had a brilliant ambitious plan to make it into a man-cote complete with man-hood with wanky dagging and giant liripipe, but that also involves brais and man-hose so I dunno. I'm only ever really tempted to wear short tunics and stuff at festival, where it gets very wet and skirts get very annoying, but that means adding a quite ambitious project to the pile of things to do in the next six weeks. And I don't think I have enough stag buttons left. An awesome man-cote needs stag buttons :P

5. Anyway, I went home and finished stringing up the loom. Then I started weaving. Then I realised that something was wrong. First of all, the pattern was totally not even recognisable as a pattern. I looked at my threading diagram and eventually realised I'd threaded the whole thing backwards. This one was alternating S and Z threaded, and I thought I'd started with an S threaded card, but clearly I mixed myself up and accidently Z threaded it. Why is the S and Z thing so difficult? Anyway, this problem was easily fixed, I just needed to flip every card over. Yay! The next problem was that one of my edge cards wasn't being woven in with the rest of the band. It was just hanging out there all my itself, slowly twisting up with no weft going through it. After studying my turning sequence, I realised that even though the threading diagram was for 25 cards, the turning sequence was for 26. I have two packs, so I needed to have one edge card in one pack, and the other one in the other pack. I pondered threading up another card, then realised the pattern would become UNSYMMETRICAL and we can't have that, no no no no, so I just shifted the rogue card to the other pack, and the problem seems to have fixed itself. Huzzah! here's a picture:

Ah epic fail. You can see where I fail at beginning braids, then the weird backwards threaded pattern, then a big lump where I flipped the cards and turned them all back to the top, then finally the real pattern starts! Why am I so bad at these things? I thought maybe this time would be different, that finally I'd be able to just start weaving like everyone else seems to be able to do, but clearly I was wrong :P At least I fixed it, and it was relatively easy to fix, because it would've been a whole lot of wasted time and yarn. Although I guess it also goes to show that one teeny weeny little mistake can just turn the whole project to shit.

6. I've almost got my dad enthused for making me my own tablet loom. I'll work on him a bit more on Saturday, then hopefully I can transfer this project onto my very own brand new loom made just for me, and give Tex's back to her so she can lend it to Rachel :P

And that's about it from me today. Tomorrow I'm going to hang with the college kids, hopefully it's not too hot, like every other O-Day that has come before. I've decided to wear my German, since it's flashy and comes with a nice giant pizza-hat for keeping the sun off :P The freshers won't have any idea that it's all cheated sleeves and made out of the wrong fabric with crappy plastic beads.

Cutting Out

Today was my day off, and I was mostly productive! I slept in, then after coffee I sat down with these instructions to finish my belt. They popped up on the SCA tablet weaving email list a couple of weeks ago in a discussion about starting and ending weaving. Now I don't know if I'm incredibly stupid, but everyone else seemed to love the idea, but it took me ages to figure out exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I suppose the main thing is that the extra loops of thread don't stay in the band, they're used as hooks to pull the weft back through the previous pick. Once I figured that out then I was fine, it's a great way to finish! It only took me 20 minutes of swearing at it, but I got there in the end :P

Once I'd done that I decided to start on my documentation. I typed a bit about what I did and why and what I used and stuff, before it got to the point where I need to find myself some books to get some actual facts and stuff. I nearly impulse-bought Textiles and Clothing and Dress Accessories the other day because they're on saaaaaale and I NEED them, but I'm really poor and couldn't bring myself to do it :( early birthday pressie anyone? I also really really want some Nancy Spies too, while we're at it :P *hinthint*

MOVING ON. This took me all of the rest of the morning, so I decided to go out and get some ingredients for lunch sammiches and make a stop at Bunnings on the way to buy a D-ring for my belt. I really wanna nice buckle and point, but I'm on a budget and I can't be bothered anymore. Besides, I wanna buckle without a pin, and that seems a little bit difficult. Anyway, I have always known what a D-ring is, and I took for granted that it was one of those things of many uses and everyone would know what it is. I also assumed it was some sort of hardware thing and I'd be able to find it in Bunnings. Apparently not. I ended up asking about four staff members in various aisles who just gave me funny looks, obviously had no idea what I was talking about and sent me to look at D-clamps. Eventually I was passed to a manager person of some sort, who implied quite rudely that I was making things up and wasting her time. It was very frustrating, so I left. I also went to look in the Collie Shop, and although the man there was much nicer, he also had no idea what I was talking about. I pouted all the way home and asked my mum to reassure me that D-rings do indeed exist. She has a packet of them that are too small, but at least they exist. She also said they're used for curtains, so I should in theory be able to pick one up at work tomorrow. Although I talked to dad later, and he says they're used for parachutes so I'll have to go to a parachute shop :P

After that ordeal I had some lunch and decided that I needed a nap. Partly because I was full in mah belleh, partly because I was cranky about the whole D-ring thing, and partly because the next thing on my list of things is Cutting Out, and I had already spent my morning procrastinating and I'd run out of ideas for more procrastinatory activites.

Eventually, I got onto Cutting Out. Over the weekend I pulled apart the pattern, ironed it all flat and evened up both sides, so today I needed to start with tracing it out onto calico so I have a pattern to use next time.

Here is all my bits! I use the same panels reversed for left and right, so I only need one half of the pattern, which is only six panels. Yay less cutting out :P

Two nice neat piles of fabric :D The calico bits go into a labelled zip-lock baggie in a big bag with the rest of my patterns, and the red linen gets sewn back together, but finished this time and attached as the lining of the finished dress. I also cut out the outside bits, which are a bit longer since they have to go all the way to the ground. I didn't take ny pictures because they would just look like a whole mess of red fabric everywhere :P. I flared each panel out so that it measures ten inches wide along the bottom hem. This gives me a skirt which is 120 inches around, which is plenty. Twelve relatively skinny panels are very fabric thrifty, I have a lot more practical pieces left over from this pattern than my eight panel pattern. I also flare the panels so that one side is straight and the other side does all the flaring. The straight side I sew in so it is closest to the front, and the flare flares towards the back. This does two things, Each straight edge is sewn to a flared edge, which stops any hem dropping that you get when you sew two biased edges together for a gore. It also means the body of the skirt moves towards the back , giving a nice sillouette. The front middle seam is two straight edges joined together, and the middle back seam is two flared edges.

The fabric I am using is crimson 5.3 ounce linen from fabric-store.com. I found this weight is good for cotehardies, since there's a lot of strain on the fabric in such a tightly fitted dress. I made an earlier one from the 3.5 ounce linen, and while it was really nice soft linen, it just couldn't take the strain. Unfortinately, I won't be making any more orders to this site. The linen is good quality and cheap in a great range of colours, but  had a bit of an ordeal trying to contact them when my last order took five times as long as it usually does to arrive. They ignored three emails and only contacted me when I wrote a scathing complaint through their feedback form, and that one attempt at contact was indecipherable, they clearly don't speak English. In a nutshell, the customer service was unnacceptable, so I am chucking a tantrum at them and refuse to give them any of my hard earned monies.

I can't start sewing the cote together yet because I don't have any red thread. I will pick that up tomorrow at work along with (hopefully) a D-ring, then I will finish off my belt and start sewing! Yay for getting past Cutting Out. I'm just going to ignore the fact that I haven't done anything about sleeves, which means more Cutting Out later :(

12 Panel Cotehardie

I decided some time back that I NEED a twelve panel cotehardie. The first cotehardie I ever made that wasn't from a commercial pattern was four panels, and while it was fine, the next one I made with eight panels was significantly nicer looking. The two side gores on each side made for more boobie support and a nicer shape. So four side panels on each side should be EVEN BETTER. Yes? In theory. In practice, this is actually a Very Ambitious Project for me. Why? Extra sewing of long side seams? Nah, I can totally deal with that challenge, even though I prefer to hand sew my cotehardies. The problem is, there isn't very much of me to fit twelve panels around. But I won't let this stop me! I NEED a twelve panel cotehardie! My last cote is 28 inches around the smallest part, so I figure I've got to divide twelve panels into 28 inches, yes? So the eight side panels will be one inch wide each, at the smallest part. That's eight inches. That leaves five inches each for the front and back panels. Somehow it didn't exactly work that way. I have no idea how, but this stupid pattern has been giving me a headache for a while now. I cut it out in the first week of January, worked on it with gusto for a couple of weeks, then threw a little tantrum at it and tucked it away at the bottom of my projects basket. I didn't have much trouble getting it tight enough and getting the right shape, the panels just ended up all wonky. I managed to pull the back seam in so far that my arm hole came half way along my back, but the side panels were so tiny I couldn't pull them in anymore!

Anyway, I want this cote for Rowany Festival in April, and I had intended to do a whole lot more work on SCA stuff before my holidays ended, but they kind of disappeared somewhere and now uni goes back in a week! So I pulled it out again on Wednesday, with the idea that I would Get It Done so I could cut it out yesterday. Well I did get it out and I pulled it apart again and sewed in back up AGAIN to move the side gores up in order to give me some seam allowance in the arm hole. I also took my time carefully measuring each bit and trying to get both sides even. I suck at keeping things even on both sides, which is why I only use one half of the pattern, and cut both sides the same. I know we're all supposed to be naturally crooked, but I'm not crooked enough for it to make a difference if both sides of my cotes are cut out exactly the same shape and size.

So I pulled it apart and sewed it back up again, and somehow it ended up bigger. Whyyyyyy? That's when I gave up working on it for the day. But I made myself get it out again yesterday, and fiddled with it a bit, and ended up with this:

 

It's slightly crooked in the front, you can see the zip walking around to the right, but that will be fixed when I pull it apart and even up the panels. I'm wearing my little tennis dress chemise that I made as a first prototype to experiment with chemises under cotehardies. It used to be a tunic thing that the Baroness gave me because I'm small enough to fit into it, so I didn't have much fabric to work with, hence the shortness :P I like the short sleeves though, they work very well under the fitted hinge sleeves. I must mention that the zip isn't staying, it will be replaced by lacing holes later. The zip is just a usefull tool to see what the pattern looks like, because the damn thing is way too tight to pin shut. I even struggle to zip it up :P I will trace this pattern onto calico as a template to use next time, and this fabric will be my lining :)

 Notice that you can see my floor? Half an hour earlier you couldn't. The next step of this process is Cutting Out, and I loathe Cutting Out, so I decided I needed to clean my room. I even cleared out my sock drawer and threw out a bag full of old holey socks. Funnily enough, the remaining socks took up two drawers. I have no idea how they fit into one in the first place.

Anyway, here's the side view:

There's a lot of extra seam allowance now, but you can clearly see three of the side panels, the fourth ended up only half an inch wide, because I needed to bring in an inch, and the back panel needed to move across under my arm a little more to bring the arm hole closer to my actual arm :P I'm happy with the shape down the front, yay boobies! A lot of the time when I try to move my boobies up, they end up being flattened :( I need to clean my mirror. I don't think it's ever been cleaned.

Well, that's as far as I got yesterday. I did bring my fabric out to start Cutting Out, but I had to mark where the stitching was on my pattern so when I pulled it apart I'll be able to see where everything goes, but then my fabric marker started running out so I couldn't. I needed to have a nap instead :P Maybe I'll start Cutting Out on Saturday. I wish a little fairy could do it for me, I really hate Cutting Out :(

Welcome!

Welcome to my brand spanking new SCA blog! I've been pondering the idea of a blog for a while now, but I've only recently begun to really plan my projects with research and making them all period and stuff. The blogs I've come across on my travels through the interwebs have been useful, but mainly seem to be written by super awesome people that can just look at a piece of fabric and turn it into some amazing gown that looks EXACTLY like a period picture with no apparent effort at all. I was getting a little disheartened, because I spend a lot of time staring at my fabric all laid out, turning my head this way and that trying to visualise how to tetris all the shapes. I eventually succeed, only to find that the shapes were wrong in the first place, or the shapes were all perfect, but magically the fitted cotehardie ended up too big and spent the weekend sliding off my shoulders, meaning I had to pull the lining out and take the back seam in two inches. Moving on. I am going to walk you step by step through my processes so we can all see exactly where I go wrong, and learn from these experiences together, and by the end we will all be one of those awesome people that just does stuff all awesome and stuff :D

I have a couple of projects on the go at the moment. Firstly, I was given an awesome wooden cantilever sewing box for Christmas, the only one we could find in a local store because they've stopped stocking them, and although there were some awesome ones online they all cost about $100 plus $100 shipping from the UK, with no guarantee that they would arrive in one piece. So we went with the local one for $65. The only problem is that it is HIDEOUS.

Yay pink and white. Anyway, I may paint it a brown colour of some sort, or I may just leave it white if that's too difficult, but I am definitely going to take that pink fabric off. I recently made THIS...

... for the 12th Night embroidery A&S. It's a reconstruction of a 14th century pouch, done in German Brick Stitch in silk. More about this style and patterns and stuff can be found at A Stitch Out of Time. Anyway, the point is it was my first A&S comp and I won! I also got to talk to Mistress Acacia who is an awesome embroidery laurel from over east. She talked to me about this double stitch thing. My pouch is basically just done in satin stitch, but apparently in period they used to use half the number of plies and go over every stitch again, which made the stitches stronger and more betterer. SO to go back to my hideous sewing box, I had so much fun making my little pouch that I wanted to do more embroidery and try out this double stitch thing, so I'm embroidering a couple of panels to replace the pink fabric.

Tada! It's another pattern from A Stitch Out of Time, but this time I chose my own colours. Another thing that Mistress Acacia talked about was that the white thread was almost always linen thread, and that gave the piece texture. Silk was used for the colours because silk holds colours really well. These days, no one likes linen thread because it's difficult and expensive and why use linen when we have cotton? The only linen embroidery floss I could find is a few colours that DMC makes, but they don't make white. The nearest they have is ecru, and oh man how I hate ecru. It's even an ugly word, who came up with ecru? Anyway, I decided to use white cotton DMC thread, and silk for the colours. The green and gold silk is Anchor silk which I found on sale at the one and only embroidery shop in Perth, and now I know why it's on sale. It's annoying. It's lovely and shiny, but it's SO ANNOYING to stitch with. The plies all come loose from each other so you have to almost pull each one through individually. Madeira silk is so much better. This panel is obviously not finished, and I think it might be a while before it is, a) because I've run out of purple and I need to go all the way to Vic Park to get some more, and b) I have a way more exciting project that I just started on Friday!

Wasn't that an excellent segue to introduce the whole point of this post, my tablet woven brocaded belt! I bought a cute little loom from Rowany Festival last year. The lady that sold it to me was really lovely, she'd marked the price as $50, but as I couldn't really take it on the plane home with me and needed it to be posted, she asked me to pay $55. Turns out the postage cost about $20, so I got a bit of a bargain. I feel a bit bad, but yay loom! Anyway, I made an easy 8 card practice piece, then some 14 card garters, then I moved up to a 24 card pattern. That's when I decided I needed a new loom. The last pattern was trim for a tunic, and I made something stupid like 4 metres of it. The loom is only 60cm long, so every time I'd completed 10cm of weaving, I had to untwist it and tension it all over again. I also had a lot of trouble tensioning it because both ends of the loom are clamps, and the clamp was made of MDF which isn't very strong. With 24 cards worth of string, the clamps just didn't hold it, so I kept getting random bumps in my pattern from loose strings. It was Very Frustrating. So that loom is for small projects.

I recently decided that I NEED a tablet woven belt, and I'd like to try this brocade thing, so I looked around online for some different ideas of loom construction. Here in Aneala, the most popular loom seems to be one that has a clamp at the working end, and teeth at the other end for tying the strings around. I decided that I would borrow one and see how it goes, then flutter my eyelashes at my daddy and hopefully he'll make me a nice new loom :P Anyway, I like the teeth thing, it works very well, and keeps the cards in lots of about three or four, so it's not a whole bunch of threads all tangling together. Having never done brocading before, I asked google how. I came across this page, which was very helpful with videos and stuff as well as explaining the process. I also found some graph paper that someone has made with rectangles instead of squares, which is perfect for drafting the pattern as it tends to stretch along the warp.

I decided I would make a belt in the theme of St Basil the Great, which is technically my college, even if I don't go to training sessions anymore because I have to work. There's a newcomers feast in March with a Basil themed A&S competition which I am intending to enter. My belt is black and white with black towers brocaded along it. I bought myself some #5 perle cotton when I was at work on Thursday night, then (luckily) started warping the loom at 11pm because I just couldn't wait. That's when I discovered that I hadn't bought enough cotton. No matter, I was going to work again on Friday, so I picked up some more after my shift, then spent my Friday night sitting on the floor in front of the tv finishing the warp. What a thrilling social life I have :P I threaded my cards alternating between S and Z, because that's what all the cool brocaders do, and turn them all forwards every pick to tangle them up really quickly. Here's a picture of the loom all strung up ready to go

With that done, I started my weaving! I did a bit of white space before starting the tower to get my tension and stuff. I was a little disappointed with the first tower, because I'd imagined this Amazingly Amazing Tower of Awesome and it wasn't quite as awesome as I'd envisioned.

To me it looks a bit gappy. I used the same size thread for the warp and both wefts, and I think that using a bigger thread for the brocade weft will allow it to cover more sideways. Next time! It's actually grown on me as I've continued weaving, so I'm quite happy with it now, although I will probably experiment with different size threads in future. So I'd woven my first little castle, then I kept going with the white space, then I ran out of room because my threads got twisted. I'm so glad I borrowed this loom that's twice the length of my loom, because I wouldn't have gotten very far at all with mine before I needed to untwist. Now I have a lesson for everyone:

This, my friends, is what happens when you untwist your threads and retension without tying your cards together! Bubbly bits where the cards have done something bizarre, I don't know exactly what. Also, it seems I pulled too hard on one end, because my first little tower is all twisted now. After this, I made sure to tie all my cards together every time I needed to untwist, and I also made sure to look at the pattern to make sure it was still straight. When I pulled this part of the weaving through to make room for more weaving, you could see that the weaving has bent around to the left instead of making a straight strip. Luckily, I allowed for mistakes at the beginning when I measured out my warp, and I should be able to cut this bit off and still have a decent length belt :P

I forgot to take pictures of my pattern draft at the beginning, so here's a picture of it now next to where I'm up to now. I've nearly finished, I'm at the point where I can't pull the weaving along anymore without pulling the warp all the way through the teeth of the loom, so I'm just untwisting and tensioning until I can't go any further.

I forgot to mention earlier that I wanted to make little faulty towers at intervals as well as the normal towers. It's a little college joke, and we tried to register faulty towers on our device, but the heralds wouldn't let us *grumble* I thought it would be cute to put them on the belt. The first tower drawn on the graph paper is the pattern I've been using, the second one was my first attempt at a faulty tower. It came out looking munted like I'd made a mistake, it didn't look intentional, so I tried the third tower, where I've just chopped his leg off. You can see the faulty one woven into the band at the far left. I've woven two of them, and I think that's enough for me.

Once the weaving is finished, I need to figure out what I'm doing for buckles. I like the idea of a buckle that doesn't have a pin, because I don't think I wanna stick a pin through all my hard work. My garters have buckles with pins, and they're a bit munted where the pin goes, but that's ok since you don't really see them, and I'd rather have a reliable way of fastening them since they kinda have to be tight to hold my hose up. The belt is more decorative, so I think I need to ponder my options a bit. I have about five weeks until Newcomers to decide, and get my documentation done.

Congratulations for making it through my very first epicly long blog post! I am in fact procrastinating at the moment, which probably explains the length of this post :P. Somewhere underneath the loom and the graph paper in the last picture is my desk. I need to clean it. I don't wanna. Part of the process of cleaning it involves doing my quarterly constable's report, so I can put a pile of indemnities away. I don't wanna. I also promised myself that today is the day that I pick up my twelve panel cotehardie pattern again, after putting it down in the second week of January because it was just too hard. Stay tuned for a whiny post all about my twelve panel cotehardie, which may or may not involve me actually working on it :P