ERMAGERD

Lookit what arrived in the post today!

THREE SKEINS OF SILK! I spent ages fiddling with my camera and lights and stuff, but I couldn't get the colours to come out right. The blue and the green are just as bright as the red, they look awesome! I ordered these weeks ago from ebay because they were $10 each plus $10 shipping each, but then because I ordered three the shipping was combined. I ended up paying $45 for three skeins of silk! It was advertised as reeled silk and each skein is about 470 yards. The skeins are smaller than I expected, probably because the yarn is a little finer than 20/2. It doesn't say what thickness it actually is, but I'd say it's about 30/2 or 40/2. It looks quite manageable, not silly like 60/2 :P. More to the point, it was cheap. It's not as tightly spun as the fine cord from Treenway Silks, and it doesn't look as good quality, but it's shiny and super soft. It's a bit fluffy, so I guess I'll see if it does the piling thing that spun silk does. Actually, for that price, if it behaves like the Treenway spun silk but is shiny like the reeled, I'll be ecstatic.

I have no idea what to make with it, but I wanna do some weaving now! I actually have no weaving projects in mind at the moment. I'm going to be booking for Rowany festival today, since tomorrow is the last day before the price rise, and this has been making me think about all the the things I want to have done by then. Mostly it's garb. Firstly, I WILL get around to fixing that green brocade surcote. I wore it at Championship and it was so uncomfortable! I had to squish myself into it because it didn't fit over my new cotehardies properly, and the sleeves were digging into my armpits and my elbows. It's going to be cold at Festival next year because it's late in April and the site is closer to Canberra, so I want to have more than one surcote for warms. I get sick of wearing my wool one all the time. I've also been pondering the fact that most of my garb is green. I am now putting a ban on making anything green. The two cotehardies that fit the best and are most comfortable are my green one and my sphinx one, which is almost green. My wool surcote is green. The brocade one is also green, but there's not much I can do about that and I'm going to be putting black all over it to make it fit better, so it should look quite striking. I think I need to start wearing my ginger cote again. Also, I think I'll remake my gold cote, and start wearing my green and purple linen surcote again. The gold cote I have looks awesome, but it's so uncomfortable. So I'm going to buy some more of the gold fabric and make it again using my new pattern. I think I need to look through my wool collection and make another surcote that isn't green. I think I have some maroon wool that should do nicely.

There's also a high chance that it'll be raining at Festival too, so I think I'll get on with making that linen man-cote and supportive shirt that I wanted to do before Pennsic. The fabric is all pre-washed and ready to go. Then I'll fix my red wool man-cote and hood, so I have a linen and wool option for rainy days when I don't want skirts dragging in the mud. I also need some more wool hose, since the pink one shrank in the wash. Only two more weeks until freedom!

I'm Still Alive!

Yes, I know it's been ages since I last posted anything, but I've been busy with things and have done hardly anything SCA to post about. I last posted just before clinical placement began, and I'd just warped up my loom using my new warping board. The threaded in pattern wasn't working properly and I was troubleshooting. WELL. I checked the threading direction, I swapped the cards so they all faced the other way, I checked the threading again, swapped everything back, changed the start position to every possible position, checked the turning sequence, checked the threading AGAIN and nothing worked. It was sending me absolutely bonkers since I'd already woven the pattern with no trouble at all, and I was using the same printed patterns that I used the first time, so I knew that it MUST work somehow. By this time I was at Nathan and Catherine's house, and I was keeping Catherine updated on my progress, since she's an awesome weaver person with mad skillz. She made a few suggestions, and eventually the stupid thing bothered her enough to fix it by trial and error and what it looked like on the surface of the band. No way do I have the skills to just fix a threaded in pattern by sight like that. Anyway she fixed it! It was something to do with the holes of the cards needing to be labelled differently depending on whether they faced to the right or to the left. I've never come across that before with any of Guntram's patterns. He labels his cards backwards to mine and it hasn't seemed to matter whether they faced right or left. Not this time! Anyway I'm very grateful to Catherine for fixing it for me :)

I took it to the Riverside Ramble demo the next day, since it was an easy turning sequence and weaving always looks quite tricky and striking and attracts people. I had a few old ladies get all excited and want to know exactly how it all worked. It was a good day, our first really warm spring day, and it was fun even if I did get sunburned sitting in the shade of a pavilion all day. Also I entered a $2 raffle for a horse bow and I did win it! :D Now I just need a pony. I shot the bow a couple of weeks later at Sunday training and it was really fun. It's so different to my modern recurve, it's lighter and less stable, so a little more concentration and skill is needed to shoot it well. I need heaps more practice with it before I'll be any good, but unfortunately I haven't had a chance to shoot it again. Most of my Sundays have been spent in the library at uni completing assignments.

The next five or so weeks passed in a blur of assignments and clinical practice. Teaching weeks at uni have finished now, and today was my first exam. I have my last exam on Monday so this weekend will be spent holed up in my room trying to cram all of the stuttering content into my head. Unfortunately all of my study break was spent doing clinical placement stuff, which I'm quite annoyed about. I now understand exactly why people in the second year of my course all go stark raving mad. I thought we were already mad but I got laughed at when I said that to some people that know this year's second years. There's this thing called uni that has semesters and a full time work load of assignments and stuff during the semesters, then exams at the end. There's also this thing called Final Clinical Year which is 40 weeks worth of essentially working full time, but at the same time you need to prove you're working ethically and evidence based-edly by essentially completing the equivalent of two university assignments every week. The catch is that WE GET TO DO UNI AND FINAL CLINICAL YEAR AT THE SAME TIME. Lucky us. And this is why we get to wear a mortar board with a gold tassel, if we survive to the end. Anyway, the point is I'm busy. Somewhere in the last five weeks there was a ball, and I went but I left early because I was tired and grumpy and had too much work to do.

THEN last weekend there was a royal visit! I had booked for the whole weekend but that was before I realised that I was silly to think that study week was for study. So I compromised and went to the event on Saturday, stayed for the feast and then missed out on Sunday because study. I'm so glad I went because I had a great time just hanging out with SCA people, and I left all inspired to do more SCA stuff as soon as I have time. I've been so busy that the thought of making anything or putting any effort in just exhausts me, so I've just been coasting along. There were a huge amount of awards given out, and I think it is incredibly rude to begrudge any of those people their award, because you could see the absolute delight in their eyes at being called up in court and recognised by their Majesties. That moment was the best moment of their lives, and I personally loved watching each and every one of them. As for the rest of us not recognised officially with a dangly for around our necks, the populace make up for that by complimenting each other on our work. I was very pleased to receive compliments from all sorts of people on my garb, my weaving and my embroidery, and I think I managed to give out my share of compliments too. I certainly saw some lovely garb. People spontaneously appreciating my work is just as good as getting an award.

Also, remember that weaving I was doing? I finished about half of it at the demo weeks and weeks ago, then spent a couple of evenings working on it, then stopped. It sat in the lounge room for weeks with only about 20cm to go. Then I decided I HAD to wear it to the Royal Visit event, so I finished it the night before. I'd meant to go out on the Friday to the lighting store down the road to get a chain for the leaf dangly, but I forgot. The ONE THING I had to do that day (other than uni stuff) and I forgot. So I raced over to Bunnings and found one of those chains that you hang up plants with, and used that instead. It did the job and it can stay until I feel like fixing it :P Unfortunately I had another invisible event and no photos of me at all have surfaced on Facebook, which means there are no photos of me wearing the belt. I'm not sure how or why I'm so good at avoiding cameras at events, because it's not like I don't like to have my photo taken :P Anyway, I took a photo of the belt sitting on my bed to give you an idea of the finished product.

One day I'll take a course in how to use photoshop or something, because I'm really bad at taking photos and I have no idea how to fix them. But you get the idea. Have another one:

Here's the detail. You can see the twist of the green silk so clearly. The two types of silk worked together much better than I expected, which I'm pleased about. I seemed to have all my issues at once at the start of weaving this band, which was good because the band itself came together with no issues whatsoever.

Speaking of photoshop, my embroidery has been featured on the cover photo of my Barony's Facebook page! Sir Nathan is our web minister, and he's been using his mad photoshop skillz to make awesome cover photos. I was there when he was working on this one, and it took a lot of work! He was doing things to the pictures that I didn't even know they needed. He's going to do a series of pictures and rotate through them, but I don't mind if he takes a while to make up the next one :)

My embroidery has come to a grinding halt, much like my weaving did. I finish it eventually. There's only three weeks left of clinical placement, including my four day adult placement which gets tacked onto the end of my paediatric placement somehow, then a week later my last assignment is due (the day after semester two results are released, so I'm not sure how that works), then it's Christmas and I have holidays and it will be SO GOOD. Maybe I'll get some SCA stuff done then :)