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 :)

Checking in

I've been trucking along with my embroidery since I last posted, but I realised something. I wasn't half way through when I said, because I miscounted the number of motifs in the final product. There's 35, not 30 *facepalm*. I have made it past the actual half way point now, but then I spent some time staring at it last night. I'd finished three of the corners, so I could see the size of it, and it looked to me like it was too skinny. The height was about two inches taller than an A4 piece of paper, but the width was only about an inch wider, and I didn't like the way it looked too long. So after a long time spent deliberating, I decided to make it wider by half a motif. I am glad I did, because it looks in proportion now. There's just more work for me to do :P.

In other news, I have ordered the cotton for the strap, but it still hasn't arrived. I'm expecting it sometime this week. Hopefully I'll get my loom strung up before uni starts in two weeks. I got an annoying email from fabric-store.com about the 5.3 ounce linen being on sale, with free shipping on orders over $50. I sent them an email asking why I was still being charged shipping, and of course the free deal was for US postal addresses only. The original email said absolutely nothing about that, so I replied and complained about false advertising and how if they had been a local store I would be entitled to claim the offer. They didn't reply. I placed my order anyway because even with shipping the linen is way cheaper than anywhere else, and I noticed that the reminder email about the sale had a little disclaimer added to the bottom about it being for US postal addresses only.

I've started watching Downton Abbey while I work on my embroidery, and I think I would like to be Maggie Smith when I grow up. Tomorrow I'm going to see the doctor at Curtin with a whole bunch of papers and I'm going to have some sort of Tuberculosis test. I'm a little confused about the list of immunisations I need except some of them aren't immunisations and some can't be taken with others but I might already have had some but then there may be boosters or something. I figure I'll bring all my papers and tell them to make sure my course requirements are filled. They do this sort of thing every year, they know what they're doing. Anyway, I have a feeling the rest of tomorrow might be a write-off, but hopefully not and I'll get through some more Downton Abbey and embroidery :). Also, I managed to get my silly girly elbow in the way of my bow string yesterday, and I think this is the worst silly girly elbow bruise I've ever had. It broke the skin in TWO places this time. I'm just hoping it'll get left alone tomorrow when the doctor is sticking me with needles and stuff.

I forgot to buy coffee beans today. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with this tomorrow morning when I need my morning coffee, but at the moment I'm in denial.

Better Things

I went to an archery event yesterday. I was called up in court and given something by the Kingdom A&S Minister:

It's the token for winning first prize in a Kingdom A&S competition. My belt won the competition, and my friends kept it secret for two weeks! I must say I was very surprised, I was not expecting it at all. Catalina also said there were two other entries and it was quite close between us, but she didn't know exactly what the entries were.

The rest of the day was really good too. I chatted to Mistress Rhianwen about weaving. She mostly does inkle weaving but the problems I've been having with tension are a universal weaving problem. She suggested I hold the warp as I beat it to stop pushing loose threads into bubbles. She said she'd bring something to the tourney next weekend and we'll sit down and have a good chat :)

In the afternoon I entered an IKAC and shot 122. I was quite pleased as I've been aiming to score 120. This score brings my average up to 125 for the season, so I'm quite happy with my shooting this year. I also did some more work on my red cote the other day and wore it to the event. You may remember the last thing I did to it was pull the top seams in by an inch on both sides. WELL of course this made the sleeve holes smaller, which I should've realised when I went to reattach the sleeves and had to gather them a little all the way around. Duh. So when I wore it at Championship I spent the day with it cutting into my armpits which was just great. Anyway, I took the sleeves off yet again, cut the sleeve holes bigger and then reattached the sleeves, and it is now a whole lot more comfortable. I tried to shoot in it, and while it was ok, I think it's just a little too restricting for archery. I think the mechanics of holding boobies up makes a dress unsuitable for shooting in, especially since it needs to work so hard to turn what little I have into cleavage. The dress is still not done though, my right sleeve is coming unstitched at the elbow, and at hem at my wrist as well.

Tonight I've been tackling my weaving again. It was really good to chat to Rhianwen and some other people about weaving and sewing and stuff yesterday, and I was feeling a bit more inspired again. I unwove what I'd already done, tightened my tension as much as I could, and started weaving again. I found that I needed two hands on the beater to beat tight enough, there's a significant difference between using one and two hands. But holding the weft with one hand and beating with the other seemed to work even when I then used two hands to tighten the one handed beating. The band started coming out a whole lot smoother. What I'm aiming for with the twist patterning is this:

Just really simple textured squares. This photo was posted in the historical tabletweaving facebook group. I'm not quite getting this level of awesome, but I'm getting the ridges where the turning direction changes and the band is relatively smooth. According to the facebook group, when you release the tension on the band there's more shadows that emphasise the squares more. So I'm hoping my band will look more like the picture once I take it off my loom. I also decided to change my threading yet again, so now I have five blocks of alternating threading instead of the three that I changed to from the original seven :P

It looks nowhere near as good as the picture of the white band, but it's definitely an improvement. Besides, the whole point of this band is to practice my brocading and try new techniques with that, so most of the ground weave will be covered anyway. I never expected that a simple twist patterned ground weave would prove to be so difficult. Anyway, I'm using some gold coloured embroidery floss as a brocade weft, and I'm turning it within the shed so you can't see it on the ede of the band. Basically the weft goes out the bottom of the band two card from the edge, then back up for the next pick. There ends up being a little running stitch along the back of the band, top and bottom. So far it's working. Here's my leaf:

It's looking a little wider than on my belt, I think that's because this band is a good 6-8mm narrower but there's still the same amount of length. Buuut at the moment this leaf is 3cm along the band, and it's under tension. My belt leaves range from 3cm-3.5cm, and that's not under tension, so this leaf will probably shrink a little once I take it off tension. I had lots of problems tying off the end of my gold thread on my belt, because I used the same method I use to start and finish bands, outlined here. It's really good for starting and finishing bands, but the poly gold stuff didn't agree with being threaded back through the band and it frayed and it was pretty awful. This was the main reason why I decided to continue weaving the brocade weft in with the normal shed between pattern bits, instead of stopping and starting like they actually did in period to save expensive thread. Besides, two layers of brocade weft thread plus structural weft bulked up the picks a lot. BUT then later after I'd finished the belt I mentioned this to Catherine and she told me you don't need to worry about threading the brocade weft back through, you just stick it out the bottom of the band and cut it off. Ugh. So I'm trying that this time.

And that's it from me tonight. Goodnight!

Dyeing Adventures #2 (Epic Fail)

There is only two weeks left of holidays. There is no way I'm going to get my list of THINGS done in the next two weeks. Work keeps wanting me to work. I've been working between 30 and 36 hours every week, which is awesome because I get to save up a whole bunch of monies for the proposed Pennsic 2013 trip, but not so awesome in that I have barely any free time and when I do I just feel like sitting and not doing anything.

ANYWAY I have done some things. Sort of. I made a set of arrows :) I wanted them for the Vallon d'Or IKAC since I only had 7 arrows left and you need 6, but my carefully planned plans were thrown off when I went to Achenfeld A&S to borrow the fletching jig and get working on them, but there was no taper tool except an old pencil sharpener that was way too small for my sticks. No taper tool, no nocks, and nocks are kind of essential for using the fletching jig. I really should've been more organised and checked that everything I needed was with the jig instead of just assuming, but there you go. I ended up just going to Vallon d'Or with my seven arrows, and promptly broke one in the first end. Luckily no more broke, not that it would've made any difference at all to my absolutely woeful score of 81. I made my new set of arrows the day after the IKAC :P. I shot in my man-cote with the slightly too-small sleeves because I didn't find time to make new ones.

However, I did make some adjustments to my green surcote. I detached the sleeves, opened up both side seems down to the gores, added in an extra inch-wide panel on both sides, then attached the sleeves again. I didn't get time to finish any of the seams, but that's ok because when I wore it to the feast I realised I would need some more adjustments. It's still too tight around the hips below where the gores start, so I'm going to take out the seams of the gores as much as I can to give myself a bit more room. It's also still too tight at the top above the armpit, where the new panel ends. After consulting with Catherine she suggested that I just cut the neckline down by one button, and since I have room to do so I think I will try it. That also means I can replace one of my lost buttons :P

Today I am dyeing my wool. Last time my selvedge didn't shrink, while the rest of the fabric did, so this time I cut the selvedge off

I'm also going to hang it on the hill's hoist in the sun, because the lines are straight. Last time I didn't want to hang it in the sun because I've had bad experiences with natural fabrics shrinking, fading and turning all stiff because our sun is a bit violent. Instead, I hung it under the verandah on some ropes that have been strung up, which sagged and stretched the fabric in places so it didn't lie flat. Anyway, it's winter now so the sun isn't so harsh, and I'd rather have fabric that wasn't stretched funny. It makes it a bit difficult to cut out and make into things if it's all stretched :P

The next step was to experiment with colours. You may remember I was pondering adding green to my blue dye to get a teal colour? Well, I decided to boil a little saucepan of water on the stove and add a tiny bit of dye to test the colours.

First try kind of failed. I meant to test the blue, then add green and test that, but I forgot my intentions almost instanlty and just added both blue and green. A little bit too much blue and green. This is a piece of selvedge that came out blotchy because of the weird selvedge weave thing it has going on. So I tipped that lot down the sink and tried again

I cut some bits of actual fabric instead of using the selvedge. The blue came out quite a nice blue, but as soon as I added the teeniest bit of green, the whole thing turned aqua. I decided I liked the blue, so I went with just using two packets of blue, and stuck it all in the washing machine. This is what I ended up with:

The strip on top is the colour I wanted. Underneath is the colour I got. I got the same colour as some wool I already have. Guh! I've hung it out to dry, and I think I might buy another packet of blue and run it through again with that to make it darker. I wanted that teal blue, but the next best thing would be dark blue rather than light blue. So frustrating! It means I need to get some more dye, then find a time to come home to use mum's machine because I'm housesitting from Monday and don't want to use their machine in case it all goes horribly wrong. It's a front loader as well, which is a different technique to the top loader, and besides, mum's machine is an industrial one which is a lot more efficient than these dumb water saver machines :P

The other thing I've done is order some silk! I've bought a skein if green and a skein of purple from Treenway Silks, and they should be finished dyeing in three weeks, then posted to me. I've been slowly pottering through Ecclesistical Pomp, and I've been developing an idea in my mind for my belt. I'd like it to have a ground weave of purple and green stripes, then I think I'd like to get hold of some metallic thread to brocade some sort of heraldic bits along it. I've been looking at getting actual gold wrapped thread from here, but so far I can't figure out how to order, or how much I'll need. I figure since I'm using proper good expensive silk for the ground weave, I should really use something of equal quality for the brocade. That reel is $14 for five metres, but I'm not sure if I'll need more than that. Any weavers out there know how much weft they use for a belt about a metre and a half long?

Tonight I'm intending to work on my geen surcote. I'll at least do the neckline and move that button. I want to wear it to the tournament that's on tomorrow because it's my warmest garb and it's generally pretty cold down at Wandi :P

Holidays!

I'm on holidays! I've written a list of THINGS and hopefully most of them will get done or at least started in the next five weeks before uni goes back.

NUMBER ONE
I need to make new sleeves for my man-cote. I finished the rest of it in time for Pencampwr, but my essay got in the way of making new sleeves. I ended up getting to site on the second day of the event with the sleeves from my first attempt and a sleeveless and hemless cote. I parked myself in the BBT with the Baroness and some ladies and finished the hem and attached the sleeves. The next day I wore it! Here's a picture:

I was really tired in the afternoon so I had a nap with a dinosaur in front of the thrones. This is the only picture if me wearing my man-cote :(. It is so much more comfortable than the first one, even though the sleeves were still a bit tight. It's really good for shooting in, I didn't get all tangled up in my skirts traipsing up and down the range to fetch my arrows. The brais take a bit of getting used to though. Last time I wore them I established that my hose were tugging on my belt as I walked because I had the brais up too high at the back, but this time I wore them a bit lower and tried not to worry about the feeling that they were falling off, because they weren't. I also wore normal undies underneath, which poked out the top by a lot because I'm just not comfortable wearing only baggy white linen brais that sit really low on the hips. They didn't ever come close to slipping or falling down, so maybe with some more wear I'll start to trust them more :P My new belt works good! Anyway, I need new sleeves, and I want them by next weekend because I think I might wear this cote to shoot in the Vallon d'Or IKAC before their feast. Although I think I want to wear a dress to the feast, so this probably means bringing another outfit and changing for the feast.

NUMBER TWO
I posted last time about my plans for the green brocade surcote. I think this is the dress I'd like to wear to the Vallon d'Or feast, which means getting it fixed before then :P I need to see if I can match the buttons to replace the ones I lost, or look at buying a whole new set of buttons, which is annoying. There's 20 on that dress, which makes it a bit expensive.

NUMBER THREE
I still need to re-sew the buttonholes on my parti-coloured surcote. Stupid buttonholes.

NUMBER FOUR
I need to fix my red twelve-panel-cote. I figured out last time I wore it that it flares out too suddenly, so it's just a matter of pulling in the side seams a little bit to make the flare more gradual.

NUMBER FIVE
I made the red twelve-panel-cote as part of an outfit, even though it's also designed to be worn by itself as lighter day wear, I originally wanted it to wear underneath a blue wool surcote. I have wool. I have blue dye. Those things need to be combined to create blue wool. HOWEVER whilst the original idea was for blue wool, I LOVE LOVE this teal blue colour wool. So I have two packets of brilliant blue iDye, which dyes 2.3kg of fabric. I have no idea what my fabric weighs, but I've got six metres. I dyed four metres of the same wool with one packet of green, and the colour came out quite nicely. But I'm thinking that maybe I could throw in one packet of green with the two packets of blue to attempt a teal colour. I dunno, it could come out more of an aqua than a teal. I'm not sure whether to risk it or just go with blue and buy some of the teal stuff at a later date and make something else.

NUMBER SIX
I've sort of already started this one. I want to weave a new belt properly with silk and make a fancy buckle and document it to enter it into the November Crown A&S competition. I've finally started reading Ecclesiastical Pomp, my first chance since I bought it in March, and so far I think I would like the ground weave to be purple and green stripes along the belt. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to tackle some sort of twill weave, or just go for the much simpler alternate S and Z threaded option. I am pondering the idea of metallic thread for the brocading, and if I do that I really should do it properly and use the real stuff. I haven't come up with a design yet, I could make it heraldic, since I'm going for my heraldic colours as the ground weave, or I could recreate some extant design. We shall see what ideas Ecclesiastical Pomp gives me. I think I'll probably end up doing the actual weaving once semester starts, since I'm looking at buying the silk from Treenway Silks, and they take 3-4 weeks to dye it. But I should be able to at least design it and start my documentation over the holidays.

NUMBER SEVEN

This was supposed to be my big project for these holidays, but I forgot about it :( I still want to make it though! I have the fabric and everything! It's something that I definitely want to take my time over and get it right, so I don't have a specific occasion in mind for it. These holidays I want to start patterning the bodice. I have some ideas of how to make it look right, but there's going to be a lot of trial and error going on with calico before I start making it in the proper fabric.

OPTIONAL NUMBER EIGHT
And finally, I also have some white fabric-store.com linen sitting in it's postal box under my bed. I've had it since last year and haven't touched it, but I intend to eventually make a white cotehardie to wear under the green brocade dress. This should be a relatively simple project since I already have the pattern (the one for 8 panels, not 12 :P) and I just need to cut it out and sew it up. If I have the time and inspiration these holidays, I'll make a start on it.

This may seem like a lot of stuff, but a lot of it is just adjusting and fixing up garb that I already have. I think this list is definitely achievable for the next five weeks :)

This is going to be another post with no pictures because I've been slowly working on stuff but there's nothing yet to show for it :( This week's been pretty hectic, since it's the first week of uni so I've had to sort all that stuff out, but we also had a stocktake at work which was epic.

I shot an IKAC on Sunday and scored 101. My personal best is 105, so that's not too shabby for the first IKAC of the season. I managed to hit my elbow with my string though, which is bad, but this time the bruise actually showed up, which is good :P On Sunday afternoon Mister Nathan and I went to Hoddywell Archery Park to check it out as a potential site for Championship. I like it, it will mean roughing it a bit since there's no kitchen as such, but there are showers. Mordenvale manages to cook a pretty awesome spread at Festival with no kitchen, so why can't we do that too? The owners are semi-retired, and they're pondering whether they want us there or not, and how much to charge us.

On Monday I washed my wool. I have decided on the purple for my new cloak, so I treated it how I'm gonna treat it when it's a cloak (since Mistress Rowan told us to and she's awesome and knows Things) and I washed it on the regular cycle. I ended up with purple fluff EVERYWHERE. I almost chucked the purple and red in together, but didn't because it weighs a bit and the machine might not be able to cope, and I'm so glad I didn't. As it was I had to scrape purple fluff off the inside of the washing machine before I put the red in on gentle cycle. That seemed to work a bit better, there wasn't nearly so much red fluff as purple fluff. You should see our verandah, I tried to do most of the shaking out there and there is so much fluff everywhere. It was also really dusty when I bought it, so there was dust and fluff flying around everywhere. Now it is folded up and sitting on my desk chair, because I don't have anywhere else to put it :(

Tuesday and Wednesday was craft/party stocktake at work. We started at 7am each day, and we didn't finish so I was there until 7pm last night. So much tired in my faaaaaace. Anyway, I did some sewing on Tuesday night, but I was so exhausted last night that I came home, ate my dinner and then fell into bed at 8pm. Anyway, my cotehardie is in six pieces at the moment. I'm hoping to get it all finished and sewn together with the lining by tomorrow night.

Tomorrow is my very last Friday off work, since I've been moved to part time at work and the new roster starts next week, which includes Fridays. I am going to run errands! I shall go to uni and pick up some textbooks and hopefully find Dress Accessories in the library, then go past Stitcher's Corner for more floss for my embroidery on my way to the annual 50% off sale at Homecraft Textiles! It's moved to March, people! This means enough time to buy cheap fabric and make things for Festival! I'm intending to buy something green to line my cloak with. If I can't find any suitable wool, then I think I'll go for some flannel since it's only $1.99 per metre during the sale and it should be nice and soft and warm :D

Hopefully on Saturday I'll be able to post pictures of my cotehardie all in one piece! Next week I'll have to actually go to uni, but my schedule should start working itself out and we'll see how much time I actually have to do SCA stuff.

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 :)