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.

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.