Her Majesty’s Pooh Tunic: > 3/4 assembled (one side complete, the other not).
His Majesty’s Pooh Tunic: 1/2 to assembled.
TRM came by on Monday to check necklines (I’m soooo paranoid about necklines) and a good thing, too, because I need to put bigger gussets in His Majesty’s sleeves.
If I am a good little worker bee I should be able to have them done by the middle of next week.
This pile of “Pooh” colored linen (Shoshanna’s color-description, not mine) is destined to be tunics for TRM, to be worn either solo or under their Viking overlayers. To be done by Pennsic (eep!). Good thing I’m machine-sewing them! :)
Interrupted? Anyway… Pax was our only chance to camp this summer, since we’re not going to Pennsic. Somehow we had never managed to get to Pax over the last three years despite it being only an hour away.
So we headed out Friday afternoon, got all set up and did some visiting on Friday night before we had to wrestle Shoshanna into bed. Saturday we got up, did more visiting, and M went off to fence. S and I wandered about and played with the various friends she had made and then she crashed for a nap by 11:30 am. After she woke up M was done fencing and we headed up to the field to watch the fighting and hang out with friends up there. While we were doing all that Catlin, aka Tall Child and the poor sad post-surgical Kip made it to the event so they joined in the hanging-out. I think Kip made friends with every person on site.
I also started teaching Shoshanna stem stitch embroidery, which she is really enjoying. I’ll have to scan her first “project” when she finishes it.
Several months ago I agreed to put front & back gores in an otherwise-finished tunic for HRM Maynard. It’s something I’ve done lots of times but I had never been totally satisfied with how it came out. I can DO it, I just don’t LIKE it.
Then Tasha posted her instructions for setting a gore in a slit. Tasha, it must be said, is a lifesaver, because while this is not anything that I hadn’t seen before, she put it in a way that I could make sense of. (And I think having the instructions to refer back to really helped, too. Previously I’ve only been SHOWN how to do it.) And the gores, they came out beautifully. Sadly, I didn’t manage to get any good pictures of them but HRM wore the tunic for court at Pax and it looked great, at least from afar.
I counted this for my A&S 50 because, while I didn’t do the whole garment, the re-learning how to do center gores was a pretty big thing for me and definitely will have an impact on how I go about constructing 13th century clothing.
What does this say about the Chivalry?
A discussion started the other day in a friend’s LiveJournal about the … lack of transparency involved in elevation to the Peerages, particularly to the Order of the Laurel (in large part because the friend who started the discussion is herself a Laurel). I’m still attempting to work through my thoughts on the matter… it’s been a REALLY interesting discussion. My slightly more coherent thoughts are behind the jump. Continue Reading »
I entered Caleb’s armor into Baronial A&S Championships last weekend. It’s done except for the hosen.
Read more here.
Alianor de Ravenglas. Device. Argent, a bend azure between two ravens, a chief sable.
and
Matatias filius Lie Blunde. Device. Argent, a Hebrew letter “resh” and a chief sable.
This is clear of the device of Arthur of the Fen, Argent, a fleam sable and in dexter three gouttes de sang one and two, reblazoned elsewhere in this letter. There is a CD for the addition of the chief and a CD for the removal of the three gouttes, which are large enough in this case to be considered secondaries.
There were some commenters who called for this submission to be returned because the character is not drawn as an actual resh symbol, since the ascender is not perfectly vertical. Some research turns up a 13th century Ashkenazic Haggadah (at http://www.library.yale.edu/judaica/exhibits/haggadah/image16.html), which has non-horizontal ascenders for all the characters, other medieval Haggadah which have curved ascenders, and an immediately post-period “Venice” Haggadah (http://www.library.yale.edu/judaica/images/Venice/HVeniceTPage.jpg) has the resh characters very nearly matching this submission. They are definitely not lameds, which also appear in the text. Since the character is an abstract symbol, which we do not grant difference between, and it is close enough to period depictions of the character, it is registerable.
Please inform the submitter that they may wish to draw a more vertical ascender on the character in future depictions.
M is sure to grump about the commentary on his, but hey – they both passed, hooray!
13th century shoe! In Germany! (link) Too bad it’s not a patten…
Did I get your attention?
Here are Caleb’s braies. I did them in the “quick and dirty” style – a wide center panel with legs attached, as pictured here.
This is how I did braies when I first started making them – they give the right impression, ESPECIALLY when worn with hosen, but are pretty fast to make and don’t require draping them on the wearer. I leave a small portion of the front seams open for access to the drawstring; it’s left open on both sides so that we can attach points directly to the drawstring and leave them there for the duration.
I haven’t seen them on him yet, but he tells me that the fit very well. If Alicia can make it to textile guild next week, we’re going to drape his hosen pattern.
