New Hood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow Progress

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

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

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

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

Saxony Gown Musings

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

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

ALSO THIS:

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

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

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

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

Embroidery

Hi there. Has it really only been four weeks since I last posted? It feels like YEARS AND YEARS since Rowany Festival. In the last four weeks I had two weeks without any internet because something broke and our provider had to find the problem and then they discovered it was actually Telstra's problem so they had to ask Telstra to fix it. Then they fixed it and I left the day after to go to the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference in Melbourne which was TOTALLY AWESOME :D I got to watch lots of gross videos of cancer larynxes and people who couldn't swallow properly trying to swallow noodles and rice and totally failing. And TONGUE ULTRASOUND. But that's a whole other story and not related to medieval stuff at all.

May Crown happened somewhere in the last few weeks as well. I day tripped and had a really fun day catching up with lots of interstate visitors and getting waaay too excited about each and every bout in the tournament. There were way to many re-fights and a whole bunch of my favourite people were trying to eliminate each other which was all a little too much for me emotionally. Also Mistress Catherine was admitted to the Order of the Laurel! Yay! Elevations to the Order of the Laurel only happen once every ten years over on this side of the kingdom, so it was all very exciting.

At Festival Mistress Acacia inspired me to try double stitching my German Brick Stitch projects, so I've decided that I'm going to make a pouch all proper with the double stitch, and then get it graded for the Worshipful Company of Broiderers. This is how much I've done:

But wait, that looks an awful lot like the last embroidery project I started. That's because I abandoned the other one and I've started again with the double stitch technique, and with silk instead of cotton. I'm having a little trouble with it because I'm using the 40 count linen which really needs three strands for good coverage, but because I'm double stitching I only get a choice of two or four strands. I've picked four which looks fine, but when I'm filling in the centre of the motif it gets really difficult to push the needle through the holes with all the silk bulking them up already. I've found that sometimes when I push the needle through, the stitches that are already there get pushed forward as well and it looks a bit messy in places. I think I might need a different needle but I don't know anything at all about them. I just went to the shop to buy everything for my first project and picked out a random packet of Anchor cross stitch needles. The packet says they're size 24, but I have no idea what that means. If anyone has any tips I'd be very happy to hear them :)

That's about all that's happening in my SCA world at the moment. There's a few events coming up but I won't be going to them because of assignments and exams. I'll also just be sticking to my one embroidery project for the foreseeable future for the same reason. I'll just plod along with the embroidery during my down time, which is a little rare at the moment.

Rowany Festival

I have returned! Festival was lots of fun, the new site is nice except that it's so COLD. FREEZING COLD. COLD. SOOOO COOOOOLD. I didn't cope very well with the cold. Did I mention it was COLD?

I managed to get all the assignments that needed doing done, and most of my projects. I finished my garters, they're all twisty so when I tried to take a picture of them I could only get this:

And blogger turned the picture on its side. Well done blogger. Anyway, my garters are all twisty! The general consensus at the Laurel Prize was that the wire is holding the twist, since it's quite stiff. When I first pulled it off my loom, the second garter was 8cm longer than the first. I figured that since parts of the first garter had been off the loom for three weeks, it had had time to compress. Now the second garter is only 3cm longer than the first, so it seems I was at least partly correct. I wore them on one day at festival, and found that the wire makes them quite stiff, and the stiffness combined with the twistyness makes the tails stick out all funny. Oh well.

I entered the Laurel Prize! I had my awesome bag, needle book, my garters and my purple and green silk belt on display. I had a good afternoon parked next to Ceara, and I spoke to lots of people. Here's my loot!

I wasn't actually introduced to a lot of the laurels I spoke to, so I have no idea who most of the tokens came from. The piece of braid is from Amalie, it was nice to finally meet her, the coin is from Mistress Joan, the pottery spindle bit is from Alex the Potter, the green pins are from Mistress Rowan (yay she liked my embroidery!), and the bone lacing needle is from Mistress Acacia. I didn't actually get to see Acacia at the Laurel Prize, but she walked past where I was sitting in front of the tourney field a couple of days later. Ursula von Memmingen took a lovely photo:

But wait... what's that hanging from her belt? Let's take a closer look.

It's a little blurry, but it looks an awful lot like....

Awesome bag! Mistress Acacia has her own little mini awesome pouch! I got very excited and bounced up to her and she got all excited and gave me the lacing needle :)

I also managed to make new sleeves for my wooly man-cote and finish my maroon woolen surcote. I'm really pleased with how the maroon cote turned out, even if the hems are a little long and got all dirty on the first night.

I've been tagged in heaps of big group shots of various courts and parades, and here's the best view of the dress. I pretty much wore my new hood for the entirety of the event. It was warmer during the day, but there was only one day that I wore just my linen layer. I tried on a couple of the other days but ended up being too cold and throwing on a woolen layer. So I was really really glad I had two wooly dresses to alternate.

It was SO FREAKING COLD at night, and I was almost warm enough with my awesome new epic sleeping bag. I ended up sleeping in as many layers as I had with me, which was three layers of pants, my fleecy tunic, hoody and a beanie. If I make it to festival next year I will be making a new epic woolyfleecy tunic of warms, and I will be investing in some thermal underwear. I'm also pondering making up some sort of furry wooly partlet to wear under my hood, and some sort of mittens to keep my hands and forearms warm. Did I mention it was COLD at festival? It didn't rain though, which was awesome. I might have traded some light nighttime drizzle for extra warms though, it was as cold as it was partly because of the clear days and nights.

At the Laurel Prize I spotted a lady with a really nice gown made of the most beautiful fabric. It was green with big gold spots, and I did fall in love with it. I asked her where she got it, and the answer was www.puresilks.us. There's 1772 silk brocades listed on the site, and most of them are US$19 per yard. They're quite light fabrics, but Ursula had the great idea of lining her whole gown with that cheap cotten/linen blend from spotlight. I trawled through all 1772 fabrics trying to find the spotty one, and failed :( But I did find this one!

I figured out pretty early that anything labelled as a "vestment" design looks fairly gothic. I'm also pretty proud of myself for ignoring all the green ones, since I don't need anymore green dresses.

(Except this one, it's green AND purple though, and they're my colours so it doesn't count as green fabric)

Anyway, I think I'm going to buy the purple one. The really great thing about this website is that shipping is calculated per item, and it's only $12 per item! $12 shipping! I also want to look into buying an orange fabric suitable for the Saxon gown I wanna make, but I gotta figure out what sort of pattern they used.

Anyway, that's it from me. I'm going to crawl back into my hole and bury myself in more assignments. May Crown is literally only two weeks away, which is way too close.

PANIC

ONLY FIVE AND A HALF SLEEPS UNTIL FESTIVAL.

Uni Freak-out:
I have a ridiculous amount to do! Last night I got to 2500 words on my epic assignment, and freaked out because NONE of those words count towards my 3500 word count, which means I've still got 3500 words to write! THEN AFTER THAT I HAVE A WHOLE OTHER ASSIGNMENT TO GET DONE BEFORE FESTIVAL. Tomorrow I'm getting my hearing tested, and testing my mum's hearing. My plan of getting this mini-assignment over and done with early backfired because now that just makes assignment number three to get handed in before Festival. I COULD HAVE DONE THIS IN MAY.

Actual Festival Prep:
Yesterday someone posted the long range forecast for Mittagong on the Aneala facebook group. Holy crap I have never seen the words "torrential rain" before on a forecast. At this point it looks like the first couple of days will be sunny and cold, then after that it's going to rain. It's going to rain a stupid amount of rain. I think I might pack some sort of rope and attempt to rig up a clothesline in my tent to hang my garb over so it doesn't just end up being a wet puddle on the floor.

Last weekend I suddenly decided that it was going to be cold and one wooly surcote isn't enough. I Cut Out my maroon wool and I almost have another one! All that's left is to make sleeves. Then I need to look at taking up the hems of all my dresses because no matter how much this new site has been advertised as not being a muddy horse paddock, with that much rain it may as well be a muddy horse paddock.

Today I'm going to buy new gumboots, because my old ones just aren't the same after they went to German Sparkle Party. I've given up on the idea of wearing hose. I might bring a few of my linen pairs just in case, but I think I'll be wearing wooly socks the whole week. My epic sleeping bag arrived! I'm so excited to use it, it feels amazing and soft and warm and heavy. I had to store it somewhere so I put it in my suitcase along with my new airbed and pump. I've officially started packing! The cat was grumpy with me because I had to evacuate my self inflating mattress and tent poles and shove them under my bed too, so now his little Tory-sized spot behind my suitcase is no longer there. He tried to shove himself in anyway which really wasn't working for him.

I finished taking in my wooly man-cote a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't put it on until yesterday. Now, this man-cote was mark two. I made a whole different one that was entirely too small, including a pair of very tight sleeves. I remember needing to use the old tight sleeves on my new one temporarily, but I was under the impression that I made a new pair. WELL the sleeves I put on yesterday were stupid tight. I could barely get them on over the sleeves of my supportive man-shirt, and it took some effort to get them off again. As I was wearing it they warmed up and became a little more comfortable, but at the end of the day I need new sleeves. CRAP. That's just another thing to do, and I HATE making sleeves. These ones have buttonholes too. Mister Nathan suggested I sew them on the plane. I had intended to sleep most of the way to Sydney since we leave at 5:30am, hence the half sleep on my countdown, but I guess if I don't have time beforehand, then a five hour plane ride is prolly enough time to hand sew a pair of sleeves together.

I want to enter the Laurel's prize. I want to have my awesome bag, needle case & documentation, and my new garters. I have one more motif to weave until I've finished the first garter. Then there's another 18 motifs until I've finished the second garter. Each motif takes roughly an hour to complete. Hmmmm. I don't think I'm going to be able to finish it in time.