Edith and I trundled off today to Autumn Collegium in Beau Fleuve, at a site that is about as far as you can get from home and still be in the Barony (travel time: approximately an hour).  For me, at least, it was a very relaxing day.  I taught my socks class, which now has the official title, “Banish the Tube Socks”, to a captive audience of five.  Honnoria had cornered me sometime before the class and asked if I needed a victim model; I said yes and now there’s a mostly-finished hosen pattern for her in a box in my kitchen to be finished up at a later date.  So we talked the theory of socks and then I demonstrated how to drape a pattern for them.  As we were talking, I realized that there’s really no way to explain men’s hosen without explaining braies.  So now I’m thinking about a two-hour class entitled “13th century men from the waist down”.  Mistress Alicia asked me if I could do it at Three Ravens.

In addition to teaching my class, I went to Mistress Alicia’s class on documentation which just served to remind me that, as I put it to her, I have an attitude problem about A&S competitions.  And I’m not scared of documentation (which we knew).  And in my continuing class to spend as much time as possible in places where goldwork embroidery is happening (as if that will magically imbue me with the ability to do it), I audited  Mistress Yvianne’s Or Nué class.  No, it’s not opus anglicanum, but the technique for the application of the metal threads is very similar so I absorbed more today.  I think that after the first of the year I will be brave enough to order some gold and stranded silk and have a go at it for real.

The dayboard was spectacular, there was good company, and it was all in all a relaxing day and I was home cooking dinner for a very affectionate five year old girl by 5 pm.

I keep going back and forth between being glad I’m taking a year off from Pennsic this year (we’re going to help out with our new niece instead) and sad that I’m going to miss it.

Have fun, kill many!

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.

For the second year in a row, the Canton of Beau Fleuve has hosted spring Coronation – this year, though, the new Royals are from our own Barony!  So we went, of course, because I love Coronations – almost as much as I love Crown Tournaments.

It was a very fun day.  I entered the Kingdom Arts and Sciences Championship – the theme was largesse and entries were to be donated to the Crown for distribution during the reign.  I entered the two award medallions that I had finished recently and the pelican cushion – rather than it languishing in the closet like it has been for the last six years.  At one point during the day it really dawned on me that I would not be taking it home with me.  I really am fine with it, but it was such a labor of love that I would be lying if I said it was easy to part with it.  In addition to the Crown’s choice (which was John Michael Thorpe, who does beautiful meatalwork), they recognized the Laurels’ choice, populace choice, and outgoing champion’s choice.

As it turns out, the middle weekend of April is a pretty good weekend for me to go to an event.  Six years ago, I was apprenticed to Eilis and got my Maunche at Balfar’s Challenge (which was today, too).  Today, I was the outgoing champion’s choice of the folks entered in the A&S championships (prize: a lovely buff-colored kidney pouch).  I received a token as a seamstress to the Crown, and I received my Sycamore.  (For the non-Ae folks, that’s the A0A level A&S award.)  I had suspected that something was up because I’d been getting a lot of weird questions from various folks.  Obviously I didn’t know WHAT they were up to or when anything might be happening, but I was not completely shocked.  What I didn’t expect was that Matatias had written the scroll text!  I love that – each of my Kingdom A&S awards comes from him, since he made my Maunche medallion as well.  Sadly, he had to be at work this afternoon so he couldn’t be there for court, but Irene says that she got good pictures.

Jokes were made that Caleb did a really good job taming the ice dragon this year… though it didn’t last long, as it snowed this morning.

But that’s beside the point.  I really don’t get why this even wipes me out so much, but it does.  We all had a lot of fun; Mistress Mahin came up – it was the first time we’d seen her since she moved to Aethelmearc; some friends came to check out the SCA too, and had a great time.

Both Shoshanna and I entered the A&S competition – she had made an “alphabet board” patterned after ones used to teach the aleph bet to young kids in the Angevin Jewish community.  She wrote and painted all the letters herself (in English rather than Hebrew) – all we did was coach her and I drew the initial lines for her to paint over.  I entered the in-progress mauve gown as well as the award medallions in both needlework and heraldic display.  Shoshanna’s comments were awesome, and she got a number of tokens from various people.  I got really great comments on the heraldic display entries and really supportive comments on the embroidery.  It’s hard to say much about the in-progress dress (or the comments on it) because it is so very in progress.

All in all, a good time was had by all, I think.

Saturday morning we piled six of us into Irene’s truck to go to the College of Three Ravens in Thescorre. I was on the reserve list to teach my hosen class, fully expecting to be asked to step in for a cancelled class. As it turned out, I wasn’t. I went to two classes – one on making list-legal rapier armor (I was curious about how another person would approach it) and one on tabletwoven edgings – correcting mis-representations in some of the line drawings in Textiles and Clothing.  It was really interesting, and now I really REALLY want a copy of Woven Into the Earth.

I displayed a handful of things in the A&S display – the mauve gown as it currently exists, the award medallions, and Liadain’s gowns.  Well, HRH displayed the gowns – I just stuck the docs on a table with a note to go look at the Princess if people wanted to see the actual garments.  They looked STUNNING, and were selected as Baron & Baroness’ choice.

I also caught up with someone I met at Pennsic to geek about 13th century iconographic sources – she’s forwarded me a citation for a book with a number of pictures of 13th c. tomb effigies, which is awesome.

Shoshanna had a really good day, too.

I’m on the “reserve list” to teach my hosen class at C3R on the 28th… if you’re interested, even if I don’t end up stepping into a slot, find me and I’ll be happy to let you have a handout!

That was the name of our event today… we had quite a good time.  Matatias fenced, I taught my hosen class (which I had forgotten that I very cleverly titled “Socks Don’t Have to Be Knit” – way more fun than “Cut Hosen for Men and Women”), we all went to a beginning dance class which Shoshanna LOVED.  She was a bit too tired to really fully participate but she danced the Horse’s Bransle along with all the rest of us (she and I acted as one dancer).  And THEN Shoshanna got recruited to be one of the fairy folks for Gabrielle’s elevation procession, complete with wings and a be-ribboned baton.  She loved it.

And, as always, she passed out in the car on the way home.

We trotted off to Summer’s End this morning and had an enjoyable day.  I picked up my blades for the first time in close to a year, and while my legs and lungs are in the best shape they’ve ever been, my bladework is … pathetic at best.  But hey, I didn’t lose out in the round-robin portion of the tourney, and I had fun.  And my back (which decided, in a fit of spite, to spasm this morning) cooperated and let me fight the tourney as well as some pickups before and after.

There ended up being no A&S competition so the fact that I got up at 6:30 in the morning to put together some slap-dash documentation for my embroidered award medallions was wasted.*

In a fit of “some things never change”, Matatias and I have volunteered to be the adults-of-record for a young lady named Rose, who is a first-year college student here in Buffalo (but not yet 18) and whose dad we have known slightly for years back in the East.  It’s been YEARS since we dragged a minor (other than our own kid) to an event with us!

There was a HUGE contingent of under-five kids at the event today, which meant that they were all pretty well entertained.  There was Shoshanna, of course, her friend L (who is three months younger), then P (9 months younger), R (about the same age as P), K (just recently 2), and T (P’s little sister).  Phew.  There were squabbles over toys, but in general they played together pretty well with minimal adult intervention.  AND the one really organized children’s activity was a pinata (the theme of the event was the Spanish Inquisition – and yes, the jokes were made.  A lot.) which these kids all LOVED.  Phil had the kids line up according to size to take turns swinging at it, which meant that Shoshanna went fourth.  It wasn’t until they got to the 10-12 set that the thing got busted open.  Phil controlled the danger of the mad scramble by letting the little kids get their candy first before he yelled “charge” at the bigger kids.

Other than the fencing, there was a lot of hanging out and schmoozing and generally relaxing, which is just what one wants out of a small local event.

*I really was up at about 6:30 this morning writing documentation, but I did not get up at 6:30 specifically to write the documentation.  I just wrote instead of paying any attention to BunnyTown or The Wiggles Show.

We went, we warred, we got sunburned and ate lots of cobbler and ice cream and drank more than our share of Raven (and came home with another bottle).  I didn’t fence at all, but M did, and quite well (he took second in the EK Tourney and also fought in the field battle, woods battle, Battle of Tortuga… and maybe other stuff that I’ve forgotten).  Five days really doesn’t feel like long enough to be at Pennsic, but it was what we could manage this year what with getting the kiddo to Camp Grammy and all.

I went to a couple of classes.  Eleazar ha Levi’s class on Jewish women was interesting; I finally managed to get to Mistress Bricia’s opus anglicanum class and have determined that I have all the skills I need to do that style of embroidery (well, except DRAWING – I’ll have to co-opt an artist if I decide to do anything with people or animals in it); I just need to get up the courage to buy some gold thread and actually DO it.  I also helped Hugh with one of the A&S 50 info meetings, which was fun.  I missed Maestra Isabel’s class on handsewing techniques from extant 13th century garments because I was planning to go to the Friday afternoon session and then as I was getting ready to leave for the class M charged into camp and informed me that our friend Fergus was getting his White Scarf before the rapier woods battle (which was scheduled to start at the same time as Isabel’s class) and so I went off to the woods to see that instead, and it was brilliant.  Catlin went, though, and brought me back examples of the seam techniques, and I will e-mail Isabel for handouts.

The A&S display was amazing, as always.  I got a lot of good feedback on my display, which I ended up calling “Alianor’s 13th century Miscellanea”.  I had out my brown linen hosen, the bits and pieces of the mauve gown, and two pieces of embroidery that are destined to be award medallions (one Keystone and one Millrind).  The embroidery got the most attention, actually, which amuses me since that’s really just my busywork.  But it’s kinda shiny and I feel like more people understand that I had a good conversation with Mistress Rhiannon and she convinced me that I should enter Ice Dragon this year – I MAY be able to put together a pent (thoughts on that in another post) but even if I don’t I’ll enter the new stuff I have (the mauve gown will be done by then, plus the embroidered medallions, the brown hosen…).

We saw lots of people, too many to name, which is the REAL reason for going to Pennsic.  To see people and to get away from the real world for while – on Friday night the conversation over cobbler turned to the Presidential election and I realized that I hadn’t thought about world affairs for almost a whole week and that I’d been really really HAPPY in my ignorance.