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 :)

Warp

I does have a warping board! My dad is pretty awesome, making me all these weaving things, and making them NICE. I've seen a lot of functional wooden bits and pieces that people have made for weaving, and they're not always nice, just functional. It's fine to have functional things, but it's nice of my dad to put in a little more effort to finish things off nicely. Anyway, here it is!

Tada! Complete with warp. It's 40cm x 50cm, which is a nice small size for storing places, and has heaps of pegs. I can measure out 8 metres of warp on this thing, which is probably more than I'll ever need. SO, how to use a warping board? I finally realised what it was and how to use it from this tutorial. I wanna make that hood by the way. The only thing that wasn't clear to me was the stuff about threading the cards. I get that you need to cross the threads on every pass, like this:

Because crossing them keeps them in the order you warped them, so when you transfer the warp to the loom it's all nice and flat and not all tangled. What I ended up doing was using some things as spacers.

A spare tablet and a pen. These are essential tablet weaving accessories that everyone should invest in, the proper tools for keeping your threads neat. When you awkwardly remove the warp from the board, trying to hold these spacers in place, and put them flat on the couch, you can pull each thread off in the order it went on, and it's all very neat and the string behaves and stuff. It's AMAZING. I had an epic argument with my skein of green silk, so what I ended up doing was warping up the correct number of black threads and laying them out with the spacers between the crossy over bit. Then I used the warping board to measure off two or three lengths of the green silk. I kept having to pull the end of the skein back through knots that had spontaneously occurred, so I wasn't able to just keep wrapping the thread around the board. Anyway, I'd have however many green threads I needed for the next tablet, and I'd pull off the correct amount of black ones from my nice neat row. It worked in the end. That whole process was a little tedious, but when I had finished warping the threaded-in part of the pattern, I had 18 tablets of alternate S and Z threaded to warp. This bit was super easy and quick. I measured off the correct amount of black threads, laid them down with the spacers, and just sat there threading the cards one by one.

I threw a few tantrums during the process, but that's not my fault, my skeins threw their tantrums first. I had epic knots in the green one, then right near the end the black skein decided that it had been behaving waaaay too well, and it spontaneously tangled up. So the process happened over a few days. I was able to literally just get up and walk away from it, because the cat is a very strange cat, and he hasn't yet been interesting in stationary string. He was dead to the world asleep on my bed when I quietly pulled my basket of silk down off the shelf to start warping. I turned around to find him alert and awake and watching me very closely. If I'm making the string move, he wants to play with it, but if it's just sitting there it doesn't interest him at all. What does interest him is little bits of round wood. I've caught him chewing on the pegs of my warping board, and he's almost totally destroyed a pencil I used to hold the end of my warp on my little loom, it's all splintered and covered in little teeth marks. Anyway, I finished warping last night, tensioned my loom and started weaving.

Remember it's supposed to be a black belt edged with leaves? Guess who got her Z and S threading backwards? Yeah. *hangs head*. I bloody hate stupid S and Z threading, it makes no sense to me. I spent ages figuring out which way to thread the cards and I got it backwards. So the first bit is all munted. Then I started troubleshooting, and flipped the cards over. Then the left side started looking closer to leaves, but the right side was different. Different? How can this be? So I compared the two sets and somehow I'd managed to thread two tablets wrong. Luckily they both just needed a half turn, so I did that and kept going. The last two blobby bits it what I got after all that. I dunno. Something is still wrong. The cards are all threaded the correct way, I double checked how Guntram labels his holes and I got it right, and the pattern is not on the bottom. The cards now face the right instead of the left, so maybe the home position needs to change. I'll try that next. Right now I have some study to do before I can go play at Nathan and Catherine's house. I'll bring my loom and work on it there.

Study Week (Again)

I'm not sure what happened to the time, but last time I posted it was study week and I hadn't done any study. Now it's study week again and I haven't done any study. Actually, this second study week is a cruisy week, since I handed in all my mid-semester assignments last week and nothing else is due for another four weeks. This is the calm before the storm, the storm being my first proper COMPASS assessed clinical practice that begins in two weeks. I'm being sent into a school to spend nine weeks with small children. Lucky me.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the last month, and not just hectic uni stuff. First of all my Gran passed away just after I got back from Pennsic, which was all very sad and stressful times. BUT then we had to go clean out her house, which was full of treasure! Actually, it was mostly junk since she was a bid of a hoarder, but my reward for spending a day sorting through the junk was a basket of treasure!

I got all sorts of useful things like threads, needles and pins. There's also a whole bunch of things like elastic and hooks and eyes which I'm not sure I'll use. I also got a box full of DMC stranded cotton, AND

SILK! Packets and packets of silk! The only downside is that except for the dark blue, there's only one packet of each colour, and a lot of them have been opened so the ends are trailing out. But it's still a whole stash of silk that I'm sure I'll find a use for. I also inherited Gran's sewing machine. It's almost as old as me, but it's been barely used. Gran used to make us dresses when we were little, but most of them were made before Pop died and with the sewing machine she had before this one. Since she moved to Perth 22 years ago she's very rarely used the machine. Every time she got it out she had to call mum for instructions on how to thread the bobbin case because it had been so long since she last got it out. Anyway, now I have my own sewing machine! It's been serviced and cleaned, it's pretty simple and cheap but I'll only need it occasionally and never for anything fancy.

In other news, I finally figured out how to use a warping board! I've asked my dad to make me one, and as soon as he does I'll use it to warp my leaf belt. Although I may need to put some pressure on him. I might go out to his shed tonight when he's pottering around out there, and I'll try to make it myself. If things go to plan then he'll get annoyed by my pitiful attempts at woodworking and he'll take over. Then I shall warp my loom!

Also, I've still been plodding along with my embroidery.

Now I has three corners! I'm really very close. I guess I'll have to start thinking about what I'm going to line it with and what I'm going to use to bind the edges. I want to tablet weave the edges, and I have this idea in my head of a spiral pattern in two colours, but every time I start planning it in my head I get stuck on colours. I don't want to use any of the colours of the embroidery, except white. I think I want white. I just don't know what other colour will complement the colours that are already there. Ideally I'd also like to use threads that I already have, seeing as I'll only need a small amount. I'll have to go digging through my stash.

That's about it from me. I went down south for Championship weekend, and it was COLD, and now I have a cold :(. I really need to fix my green brocade surcote. I wore it anyway because I needed more clothes than just my woolen cote, but I was really quite uncomfortable. The sleeves dig into my arms above my elbows now, which was so uncomfortable. I also started mentally planning a super amazing brocade surcote that may or may not be parti-coloured and will be my fancy one. I need a fancy outfit. Also it seems my wardrobe is green. I need to start making stuff in different colours.

Study week

It's study week. Guess how much study I've gotten done.

THIS MUCH! Nearly half way through my embroidery now. Clearly I've been procrastinating and have done minimal study, which is a bit sad. I've also watched season 2 of Smash and I'm half way through season 1 of Star Trek TNG. But back to my embroidery, I came across something a bit puzzling. I've been following the pattern on Mitchell Wymarc's page

The pattern has two different motifs. The blue strip and the dark brown strip have one, and the light brown strip has another one. So I alternated my motifs too, my purple strip has the different one (which is actually really annoying to stitch). A while ago I noticed that the stitching example only has one type of motif. THEN when I went to add a fourth strip up the top because I needed my needle case to be a bit taller, I realised that the pattern has dark brown, light brown, blue... LIGHT BROWN. That would mean my fourth strip should be purple, and every second strip should be purple. The stitching example has the three colours alternating, which I like better, so I decided to alternate the colours, but also alternate the motifs. So that's why the top blue strip has the annoying motif instead of the same one as the first blue strip.

Also I had an idea for some fittings I bought at Pennsic

I had an idea before I left for a belt using my leftover black spun silk and green reeled silk. I'll use the 14 tablet threaded in pattern of leaves that I used for my garters on either side of a black stripe. When I move back home I'll have a look at the fittings and decide how wide the belt bit needs to be, which will help me decide whether to do some twist patterning in the black middle section. I think the leaf pattern will look good with the flower leafy brass fittings, even if it completely not period :)

And that has been my very exciting study week as a crazy cat lady, looking after Miss Wendy's cats and spending most of my time in my onesie doing embroidery.

ALL the colours

Since Monday my embroidery suddenly got more fun. This may have something to do with all the study I need to do, but it doesn't matter because I've done heaps now. I only realised how much I'd done when I looked at the photo I posted on Monday.

Tada! Now it has ALL the colours. Yay! It's only about 3 inches tall at the moment, this is probably only about a sixth of the work, if that. But I like it a lot more now and if I keep going the way I am then it shouldn't be too long until I'm finished :)

Embroidery

I haven't been working on any particular SCA project lately, but I thought I'd post a picture of the embroidery I started on the plane.

It's really tiny and I'm not finding it as fun as the other German Brick Stitch I've done. The linen is 40 count, and I'm finding that it's sometimes really hard to push the needle through the tiny holes, especially when I'm filling in areas that have been outlined already. Sometimes it's really difficult to see where the holes are too, they all get squished together by the stitches I've already done. But I do like how it looks, and it's only small so it's something to pick up when I feel like doing something. I did most of the work on it on the plane, but I have picked it up a couple of times since I got back. I've been busy with uni and family stuff so I probably won't be starting another project any time soon. Although I think when I start working on that other pattern I want to do, I'll use something between 28 and 40 count.