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