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.

WAMA Fair and Other Things

I went to the Perth Medieval Fair on Sunday, and for once I wasn't invisible! Pictures of me have popped up all over the place, and I am very pleased :)

Here's a photo of me that Phil took, from his awesome photobucket album of awesome. As you can see, I wore my new gold cotehardie. This one isn't as booby as the green one. It's funny how they all come out a little bit different, but I use the same pattern and try to be consistent. But it fits and it's comfy. I had a good day at the fair. I spent the morning helping to set up, and then I had gate duty, but most of my afternoon was spent weaving as part of the SCA display. I only got about 2cm of actual weaving done, because I had an almost constant stream of interested people to chat to which was really nice. My weaving is actually working out wonderfully, which is unusual for string and the complete opposite to my last experience trying to work with the gold wire.

LOOKIT HOW MUCH IT WORKS! It's pattern 38 from Anna Neuper's Modelbuch, the version with 25 tablets across. The pattern repeat is 24 rows, and this picture is from the first day I started working on it. I got very excited because I could see the pattern and it was all working and stuff! Now I've done about 9 repeats of the pattern, which is just over half the length of one garter. Also, I'm hoping that once it's been off tension for a while it will compress together a bit more. I'm really happy with how it looks now, but it doesn't look anything close to the examples on the back of the book where there are no gaps between the bits of gold wire.

In other news, there's only three weeks left until Festival, and I managed to put my heel through the seam of one of my hose as I tried to put it on on Saturday. Dodgy machine stitching *shakes fist*. It should be repairable, but it highlights just how much maintenance my hose need. I don't know why I hate sewing hose so much, they're fairly quick and easy to make, I just LOATHE THEM. I'm almost ready to just wear explorer socks for the whole week. Festival has moved down near Canberra after all, where it gets stupid cold. The last time it was this late in April I was SO COLD that I crawled into bed with Mister Nathan in my desperation for warms, then I went and begged the combined colleges for extra blankets, not caring that they had already been rejected by collegians for reasons that are unknown and shall remain so. That Festival was up at Glenworth Valley, miles from the frozen reaches of Canberra.

In related news, I bought a new sleeping bag! I resorted to trawling the ebays for sub-zero sleeping bags that are only sold in the US because why would we need them in Australia? I have five pounds of non-allergenic Insul-Therma insulation wrapped in cosy flannel lining which is rated for 25F coming my way! It's gonna be massive and take up half my giant suitcase of bedding, but I'll be toasty warm at Festival!

Four Weeks!

Only four weeks and ten hours left until I leave for Rowany Festival, and I'm starting to feel slightly hysterical! Necessary projects are being downgraded to unnecessary, and unnecessary projects are moving off my list completely. I have four weeks to get two massive assignments completely finished and another one started, so SCA projects are starting to become those things I do to procrastinate. Also, I've almost completely given up napping during the week which makes me very sad.

So, what have I done in the two weeks since I last posted?

I made a cotehardie! It's not green! Yay! I haven't tried it on yet because I couldn't be bothered. I'll wear it on Saturday to the WAMA fair demo unless I put it on and something is horribly wrong with it. This is the third cotehardie I've made from my new awesome pattern, not counting my supportive man-shirt, so it should fit fine. I'm not sure what I'm going to use as a lacing cord because I forgot I needed one and didn't get any matching perle cotton from Spotlight while I was there for something else, and I'm not sure I can justify going all the way out there this week. I might just have to pick a random coloured lacing cord from one of my other cotes for this weekend :)

Today was one of those procrastinatey days, and my browser has decided all of a sudden that it doesn't like Facebook and kept freezing every time I logged in. What did I do instead? I warped my loom! I warped my loom for one of those unnecessary projects that has fallen off my Festival list, because I'm going to a demo on the weekend and tablet weaving is a cool thing for a demo. I'm turning one of Anna Neuper's brocade patterns into a pair of garters for my man outfit. I used some blue reeled silk that I bought off ebay before Christmas for really cheap. It's thinner than any silk I've used before, but is lovely and shiny. There are some flaws, some lumpy bits and the skein isn't one long piece, it's a bunch of fairly long pieces tied together. I only encountered one tie today, but could see some more in what was left. I got to use the yarn swift I got for Christmas!

Tory was very taken with the swift and felt the need to rub his face over every corner. He figured out fairly quickly that it turns and that seemed to delight him. Also, I think for the first time ever I'm going to have to guard my string, because apparently this yarn is tastier than any other yarn that has come before, even more tasty than the pegs of my warping board.

Here's the whole setup. The yarn swift is amazing! Best idea ever! That little wooden chair you can see in the top left of the photo is what I used to hang my skeins around, and it's very questionable as to whether some of them are still skeins or a tangled mess of string. Anyway, loom is warped! I intend to use the gold wire stuff I bought for the brocade weft of that belt that was going to be awesome, because hopefully it'll work better with a different warp and a more geometric pattern. I've got some top stitch thread and some upholstery thread to use as structural wefts, so hopefully I'll be able to find a way that it'll all work together nicely. Or there will be tantrums and I'll be going to Spotlight after all to find something else to use as brocade weft. Wish me luck!

Rowany Festival Project Update

I finished my hood! It only took two weeks to complete the tablet woven edging. Next time I think tablet woven edging is a good idea someone needs to remind me that it is seriously tedious. I am really happy with the finished result though.

Yay hood with silly hook! Here's a closeup of the top seam when it's turned back:

Yay for dodgy colours. The edging is dark purple, but the pink has managed to invade it in this photo. This is the first time I've woven with wool, and I found it really easy to work with. It's stretchy so every time I untied the warp for untwisting it was really easy to just re-tension again and I didn't end up with any lumpy bits. The braid just sorted itself out all nice and stuff. It'll be interesting to see what happens with a flat band with multiple colours. I'll have to give it a go one day.

In other news, I have Cut Out and stitched together the lining of a new cotehardie from the gold linen I bought. I haven't had time to Cut Out the outer layer yet, but I'm hoping to be able to do that sometime in the next few days. I've made pretty good progress on my list for Rowany Festival, but now there's only six weeks left and I went back to uni classes today, so time is becoming more and more expensive. AND it's now March, which means half price sale at Homecraft Textiles! I need to go out and buy another spool of gold sewing thread because I've completely run out, so I might just go there and see what sort of brocade selection they have.

Things I have left on my Rowany Festival list:
1. Man-cotes: I need to re-fit my red wool man-cote over my new supportive shirt. This involves taking in some seams. I also need to make a new one out of blue linen.
2. Finish the gold cotehardie: Involves Cutting Out and sewing together the outer layer, sewing it to my lining, then making and attaching sleeves. And a new lacing cord.
3. Audit hose: I need to have a look at the state of my current collection, possibly say goodbye to some, possible repairs on others, and most likely making some new ones. I definitely need a new wool one to replace the one that shrank.
4. Not-green woolen surcote: I have some maroon wool that would do nicely for a warm surcote that is not green. This project has been classes as non-essential, but would be really nice to have for Festival.
5. New garters to wear with man-outfit: Also non essential but I'd really like fancy new garters to show off :P
6. Embroidered pouch: Remember my embroidery? The embroidery that had a run-in with the cat and I completely lost all enthusiasm for because it needs fixing now? Yeah. It would be nice to have a new pouch for Festival for night time tavern shenanigans, but I do have a suitable pouch so this is also a non-essential project.

THE END. Except my beautiful Pennsic fob watch has stopped and I am sad. I can't see how to get into it to change the battery, but cobblers tend to know seekrity seekrits like that so I might go ask one of them to fix it for me.

Hood Update and Other Things

Thanks for helping me decide where to put what colours on my hood! I ended up going with green with pink lining. I stitched it all together on Thursday and Friday last week, and brought it along to the Dragon's Bay A&S workshop on Saturday. Nearly everyone there mentioned that the colours were completely different in real life than on their computers, which I thought was interesting. Of all the photos I have put up on this blog, that lot were the ones I did the least to because I thought the colours were pretty accurate, just a little washed out. Maybe I'll have to look at the colour settings on my computer.

Saturday's workshop was lots of fun! I taught some tablet weaving to a small group of enthusiastic students, and they seemed to enjoy it which is great. Most of them even warped up their looms and started their very own first piece of weaving. In the afternoon I threaded up some cards and began the edging for my hood. All up the length around the edges of the hood is nearly three metres, which sucks balls. After about an inch of weaving I'd already decided it was way too tedious, but I want the look to it must be finished! It might take me a while though. Nearly a week later I've only done half of the bottom edge. So far to go! Tomorrow is the St Basil O-day at UWA, so I'll bring it along to that and tie myself to a leg of the pavillion. What makes it super tedious is that it's quite simple and boring, which also makes it good for a demo, since I don't need to worry about counting anything or being interrupted. I can literally drop it and leave it at any point.

In other news, you may remember that my Gran passed away last year. I managed to inherit her sewing machine and a bunch of embroidery floss and odd and ends. By inherit I mean I went to her house and claimed a bunch of stuff. In actual fact, I received my actual inheritance the other day, in the form of $275 cash transferred straight to my bank account. It may not seem like much, but it's enough to by myself a present or two. First of all, I need a new pair of pointe shoes, since last night my current pair managed to munch their way through the adhesive gel pads I wear on my heels. One of them succeeded in sticking itself and my tights to the top layer of my skin. IT WAS NOT FUN. Anyway, since my Gran taught me ballet I thought it would be very fitting to spend some of my inheritance on pointe shoes. New ~fancy~ pointe shoes that require a fitting appointment at a dance physio. After that, I should have about $100 left FOR FABRIC :D.

Now I have choices. Lately there's been some enthusiasm for Cranach gowns around the place, which makes me wanna hurry up and make mine. I already have some dark green woolly velveteen stuff for the main part, and I did buy 3m of red shot gold silk dupion for the bands and the contrasting bits on the bodice. BUUUT I've only got 3m and maybe I think I sort of might want Fancy Orange Brocade.

This is called Brocade Ornaments, from Sartor. It's US$20 per metre, but only 75cm wide and made from a polyester rayon. Also there's big warnings about shrinkage.

Other brocades that have caught my eye from Sartor include:

GREEN AND GOLD 14TH CENTURY RABBITS!

Wine red and white pretty

Miscellaneous "Historical Brocade" in gold and blue.

So the green on has a few downsides. Number 1: It's green. I already have too much green things! Number 2: It's US$64.95 per metre. That's because it's 100% silk and it's slightly wider than the other brocades, a whole 110cm. IT'S SO PRETTY. I think I need a larger inheritance for that one though. Sadface. I actually quite like the gold and blue one, I think it'll make a great cotehardie. The only things that worry me are that it's polyester, it's only 75cm wide and there's warnings of high shrinkage. That means that actually at the width I normally buy fabric, these brocades are actually $40 per metre. Maybe I should keep shopping.

HALP!

I'm really bad at making decisions, and tonight I have a really tough one to make, so I'm asking for some help! I've cut out all the bits I need to make a new hood with a silly hook, but I can't decide how to put them together!

Should I make it green with pink lining?

OR pink with green lining?

OR Parti-coloured?

You'll have to visualize it without the pins, and with the little shoulder gussets actually facing the right way. Silly me pinned it together so the seams were facing out. I should also mention that the edges will be finished with tablet weaving in some dark purple wool. Also I'll be wearing it with my green cotehardies, if that makes any difference. So far I have one vote from my Dad, he thinks I should make it pink with green lining. Please help by commenting or sending me an email!