Still don't have a dress, but I am making progress on my A&S 50 challenge

I took a day off to work on a quick little belt pouch gift/prize to give to the cook who made the best bacon treat at Solstice Court. I wasn't able to stay to see what happened, but I hope whomever won it likes it. I decided to arbitrarily add it to my list of favors and tokens I'm making for my SCA A&S 50 Challenge. I have until the year 2015 to make 50 of them. I'm also doing a few other challenges; 50 skills Praksedys would have developed and teaching 50 classes head the list.

I haven't been particularly scrupulous about making my favors and tokens entirely historically accurate, instead working with what the intended recipient would like and appreciate and the budget and circumstance as in the case of the 100 wool rat site tokens I made for our Mystery Event in March 2010. This time around, rather than doing wet felting, I needlefelted the pouch since I'm still working on improving my felting detail work without tidying the lines with some dry felting. Here's the little pouch before I sewed it together (I forgot to get pictures once it was complete-- its a problem with most of my projects.) When complete, it was lined in a gold colored broad cloth and stitched together with a blanket stitch in yellow cotton. There was enough overlap with the flap that I didn't do a fastening and chose to not put belt loops or anything on it since I wasn't sure how the recipient wanted to wear it.

The gryphon is loosely based on the crest of the Crosby Garret Helmet, a Roman Silistra-type cavalry helmet dated between 100-300 AD and found and sold in 2010

Mine is far too cute and not nearly striking enough to be more than inspired by the original. Too many years of felting children's toys, I suppose. It also suffers from lack of texture. I'd like to try sculpting something like the crest in the future, its such a beautiful image.

It is a restored piece, however. A more recent find at Vindolanda in Jan 2011 has a similar gryphon (stated to possibly be by the same craftsman) that has not been restored.

Living in the "Gryphon Lands" of Artemisia, more images of gryphons are always nice to have and I'm sure I'll come up with a reason to play with it again in the future.