Mistress Clare's Vigil Dress

Photo by Douglas Sutherland Photography, used by permission

Can't say I've seen a more beautiful smile in a very long time. I missed seeing this dress in the daylight, since I pulled in to camp at 1:40 AM, so Baron Douglas's spectacular picture thrilled me beyond words. Her Excellency Clare was gracious enough to continue her Laurel vigil and wait for me, and I got to be the very last person to talk to her that night. Not that I said anything useful, other than promising to finish the dress and add the rest of the embroidery done by others around the neckline.

Countess Clare's Laurel, Mistress Giliana Attewatyr, let Doom in on the fun of vigil planning and asked us to make Clare's vigil gown. Not to mention "temporarily liberating" one of Clare's favorite underdresses at another event so we could pattern this. A few minor flaws in patterning happened due to cutting the fabric in a tent during a windstorm, but I think they can be easily remedied.

Mistress Clare's device has a pheon (a broad arrow) and 5 lozenges as well as a stag. The dress doesn't have the stag, but the pheon is heavily featured. I appliqued a large version on the skirt and various of her friends embroidered smaller versions to be placed elsewhere (I'll get pictures of those once I get them placed on.) The first two, by Ladyships Fiametta and Maysun, are at the wrists. There will be several others placed on the neckline, as well as a gold laurel wreath (stitched by Bronwyn.) The concept is sort of similar to Bronwyn's Hood of Love. with multiple hands stitching pieces to honor out friend. The linen dress itself is entirely hand sewn with felled seams. Maysun did one underarm seam, the rest was done by me since that part just isn't that condusive to having multiple people work on simultaneously. There is blanket stitch around the hem, wrists, and neckline in gold pearl cotton that was then laced with blue cotton and the same blue was used to do a modified herringbone stitch over the top of the blanket stitching.

She seemed to love it, and we were all very honored to be involved in the creation of something that could play a part in her special day.

Shhhh. . . but here's a look at one more secret of the dress. Fiametta stitched in Doom on the underside of the cuff. We've branded Clare as ours. I know we'll have to share her with the rest of the kingdom, but she's epic enough to go around.

A&S 50 class challenge update

Gentleman of the Trivulzio Family

I just realized I hadn't updated my class list for the A&S 50/50 challenge.  Last update was back in January.  I've taught quite a few since then and have made some progress towards my personal challenge of finishing the requirements to achieve a Fellowship in the University of Artemisia.  I'm also scheduled to teach at Kingdom Collegium in November with 4 more classes.

Here's the run down.

1.An introduction to making felted hats
2&3. Beginning naalbinding
4.Quilting IS period: an introduction to trapunto
5. 16th century Italian accessories (roundtable class, part of panel)
6. Gryphons and Giants and Dragons: Introduction to Geomythology
7. Bookplates, Bookcurses and Decorative bookbindin
 8. Pretties for keeping the plagues away: Apotropaic jewelry  
9. Perfectly Period Applique
10. Research techniques for working with period portraiture
 11. Poetry and Pageantry: The Renaissance Imprese
  12. Guzzle, Guzzle, Guzzle: an introduction to Medieval soft drinks

Those are the ones that have  already been taught.  I have the class notes as Google documents linked to a few of them and plan to clean them up and expand them to be real stand alone classes and post them on the blog.  I've been talking to a friend about helping me do a bit of changing and adding around here so I can have a tab to post class notes and tutorials in a spot that is easily found.  Hoping to have that done before Christmas. (I'd say earlier, but we're both costumers so Halloween time is crazy busy.)

The 4 classes I'm scheduled for at Kingdom Collegium next month will bring me up to 16, so I'll at least be past the quarter mark on the 50.  I'm excited by that. They should also finish my Fellowship requirements, but I haven't gotten any confirmation on that yet.

                   13. 16th century sumptuary law: comparing England, Italy, and the Low Countries
                   14. 16th century Italian female poets
                   15. Pomander balls using a recipe from Nostradamus
                   16. 16th century Italian proto-feminist writings

As I am the retiring bard at Toys for Tots the following weekend in November, I'm hoping to teach a class on storytelling and start in on my requirements for The College of Performing Arts as well as creep a bit closer to the halfway mark. 

About half way through with applique

Doesn't look like much, but this was my free time today. I machine tacked the linen interlining to the upper fabric and stabilized the blue with a fine line of glue so it wouldn't continue fraying. Once complete, the edge will be bound with fur and then covered in ribbon so I'm not worried about it eventually, just while stitching. I also needed an edge to stretch since the border is so close to the edge of the fashion fabric, so I cut the linen extra large. I don't need a very tight fabric for applique so I went for speed and put it in one of my  Q-snap frames rather than stretching it on a better frame. I should finish the stitching tomorrow or Wednesday.

I'm using 1000 denier Kanagawa silk in turquoise and a glover's needle to quilt the leather. It is a heavy 3 ply filament silk with a great deal of shine. I'm just doing a basic running/stab stitch but I want there to be significant contrast between it and the leather and no question that "I meant to do that."

I'm considering changing the buttons and either doing them in the turquoise silk or possibly leather covered ones. I need to see how it really looks with the fur and ribbon in place. While I'd like it to coordinate with the eventual loose gown I want it to look good on its own.

In other news, I never showed off the pictures of the bag I made for Baroness Jennet. It is a version of the silver dragonfly and thistles of her heraldry. I talked about it here and it is one of my 50 favors and tokens for A and S 50. So here's the picture of it before I forget again.

Signed up for the IRCC II and updating A&S 50 projects

My event went really well yesterday. I think everyone that could attend had a good time, and we had wonderful turnout for classes. I learned a great deal in the moments I was able to carve out to attend classes. As a result, I now am excited to go read a 6th century Welsh epic and a couple of Norse sagas. Fighting went well, people had a good time playing our scavenger hunt and the bardic was so jam packed we ran out of feast (though not food) before we ran out of entertainment.

While everything else was going on, I also managed to snap a few pictures of some of the tokens I made for part of my challenge. The first is a bunny bag for my friend Lady Kristine Ragnaldsdottir,called the Killer Rabbit. It it both based on her heraldry and the Rabbit of Caerbannog from Monty Python. That in turn is based on an incident in one of the Medieval French tale of Reynard the Fox. There is an incident of a hunter bragging of his escape from a fearsome rabbit. He spits in its eye and escapes to the tale. The passage is embroidered around the edge. The terrifying teeth made from rice pearls make me giggle every time I see it. Kristine has had the bag for about 3 years now, but I keep not getting a picture so made it a point to take one yesterday.

The other goofy favor from yesterday is a set of folly bells I made to be a protege belt for Lord Michael McCraney. The base is a black linen embroidered with polka dots. I appliqued a white felt cow to yellow wool and it is stitched in place with a herringbone stitch. The cow and the herringbone stitch match Dame Kadrina Tanskalainen's gown I made the trim for when she received her Pelican (it is another one of my 50 favors.) There are 24 bells going down the side. Kadrina said she will probably give him a larger cow bell to act as a weight on the end "when he deserves it." I actually made 2 basically identical sets of bells so she can have one for another protege when she's ready to take a second. I love the cow rampant and the cow bells. I also like the challenge of making something silly still be beautiful, elegant, and meaningful to the people involved; even as we don't take ourselves too seriously.

In other news, I sent in my entry for the IRCC II this morning as soon as I saw the announcement. It had been 6 hours since Bella opened sign-ups, so I'm far from the first. There are already 2 on the entrant's page and who knows how many in Bella's inbox. Hope there's room for me to play. I've started planning what I want to do, but keep second guessing myself. I want to do the Venetian open front style and am seriously concerned about how it will work on my figure, but we'll see. It will certainly be a fun adventure.

I just spent a week on an embroidery project

And then, of course, forgot to get pictures before giving it to the recipient. Because I'm a little dopey like that. I think it turned out beautifully, if I do say so myself and its part of my A&S 50 challenge. It's not the first time I haven't gotten pictures of something for that. In fact I pretty much have completely forgotten to get pictures of any of them.

It's a padded silver brocade dragonfly with needlelace tracery in the wings. Tucked in to the wings are 2 thistles. I learned a new stitch, rya stitch, in order to make a fuzzy pile for the thistles. The bulb parts of the thistles are laid and couched. I had originally hoped to make a shaped bag like this 17th century
frog bag in the Museum of London.

I padded two cardboard shapes of the dragonfly from cardboard with 2 layers of wool felt and then covered it with the silver and then made a mostly triangularly shaped bag of green silk to sort of accordion fold in between the frames.

It didn't work at all. The shape of the dragonfly is just not condusive to this sort of thing. Then I added the thistles curled in between the wings and the body to make the entire shape a much more solid triangle. Better, but it wasn't really what I wanted. Also, to make the top of the bag able to take a drawstring and draw in, I needed to flip the dragonfly so its head was pointing down and thus the widest part, the wings, was at the bottom of the bag. I continued fussing with that for a few days and adding more and more detail to the embroidery to try to get it to be a recognizable insect. Finally, at the 11th hour, I finished one side and felt pretty okay with how it looked, but there was still the second side to do and I was running out of time. The entire shaped bag concept still wasn't working. I'm pretty certain I now know why the two shaped needlework bags we see from the late 16th-17th century are frogs. Its the shape. The roundish/ovalish center body with non integral appendages is pretty much required. The recipient's heraldic dragonfly just didn't work shapewise. So, late Friday night I cut the entire side lose, making it into a heavily padded slip.

The changeable green to red silk I had intended to use was no longer viable as it couldn't support the heavy applique. Instead, I opted for a maroon colored pig suede I had kicking around. Using period applique methods, I stabilized the edges of the slip with a little glue and placed it on top of the suede and couched two lines of gold thread around the edges. I braided a quick green wool drawstring, cut some slits in the top for threading and then stitched around the edges of the suede with a saddle stitch. I considered lining with the green silk, but really didn't want to make the eyelets that would have been needed for threading the drawstring if I had done so.

Hoping to get pictures at some point and I'll update when I do.

My 50 classes for the A&S 50/50

One of my goals for the SCA society wide A&S 50/50 challenge is to teach 50 classes. I've been working on it but haven't made as much progress as I'd like. I'm also trying to make them fit into the University of Artemisia requirements for become a Fellow of the University which adds some additional requirements. In order to fit the University requirements they have to be taught at an event (officially,) roll has to be taken, and the class can only be repeated every 4 years. So, they have to be official classes, and they have to be different classes. Also, to meet the requirements to become a Fellow of the University, the classes have to be wide ranging. In order to receive that accolade you need to teach 3 classes in 3 different areas. The University is divided into 9 different colleges. If I teach 3 classes in 6 different colleges I could become a Senior Fellow. Teaching 3 classes in all 9 colleges earns the Fellow's Emeritus of the University. That last one probably won't happen since I'm not into the combat arts (other than thrown weapons and a wish to learn heavy fighting.)

Thus far, I've been teaching mostly at the Collegiums and trying to spread the subjects of my classes out, but am nowhere near what I need to teach my goal. I have taught:

An introduction to making felted hats
Beginning naalbinding (taught twice but only once counts)
Quilting IS period: an introduction to trapunto
16th century Italian accessories ( co-taught/participated in a round table)
Introduction to Geomythology
Bookplates and Decorative bookbindings

Yeah, 6 of 50 doesn't seem too impressive. I'm planning to teach a class on apotropaic jewelry at the event I'm autocratting in March. I've already been poked about teaching at Southern Regional Collegium in April and I'm sure I'll teach at that. I'd rather take classes, to be honest, but its a good opportunity to teach multiple classes quickly. Just need to decide what. It needs to be non-textile to fit the Fellow guidelines, otherwise I was sort of thinking about doing one on how to drape and sew stockings. I might do a cooking class of some kind or a straight out history class on a particular event in Russian history. Still thinking on it.

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.