Writing documentation for an entry into a “heraldic display” category is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BEAST than writing documentation for clothing & embroidery categories.

It’s not FINISHED finished, but it is all assembled.  And suffering from “looks better on a person than the dress form” disease, but you will get the idea.

For this gown, I tried something new in terms of the neckline – I made bias tape and finished the neckline with it.  Since it’s a keyhole neckline, I had to miter the corners, and I even did it correctly on the first try!  (Hooray, I get to pass ninth grade geometry!)

In general, I like this as a finishing method.  I like an applied facing rather than just turning a small hem for a neckline.  I made one mistake, which was only cutting the strip about 3/4″ wide – this meant that I had to make the seam allowance smaller than the allowance of the center seam, which in turn meant that getting things to line up on the inside was a little… finicky.  It looks a little strange on the inside, but it lies just fine.

Yeah, I’m doing it again.  Musing on entering the Ice Dragon pent.  Yes, I’ve lost my mind, why do you ask?  Blame Mistress Rhiannon, she talked me into it.  I’ll definitely be entering some things, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a pent together.  As of right now (based on last year’s categories), my best-case entry would look like this:

1. Clothing (pre-1400): mauve gown
2. Needlework: embroidered medallions
3. Heraldic display: embroidered medallions.
4. Fiber arts: fingerloop or TW edging for the medallions
5. Literary arts: braies research paper

Of those I am going to really push to get the gown done and it shouldn’t be a big deal to finish off a medallion or two between now and the end of March.  As with the Pennsic A&S display, I think it’s hilarious that the medallions get me 3 categories and the gown only gets me one.  I’m not going to kill myself to get the research paper done, though.

Gah.  I can’t believe I’m seriously considering a pent AGAIN.  Didn’t I do all this insanity five years ago and swear I was done forever and ever amen?

If you look off to the right, you will see a new page entitled “Resources” – I’m slowly dumping the Internet resources I use on a semi-regular basis there, and I’ve taken the non-blog links off of the blogroll.

As I’ve been posting here over the past couple of weeks, I have been reminded of why all previous iterations of my SCA web presence have spluttered.  I just can’t decide how I want to organize things.  Because the “completed projects” and “current projects” schema doesn’t work – some things are too small to be worth a whole webpage of their own, etc.

So look for a reorganization around here sometime in the relatively near future.

Well, probably not.  But after Ice Dragon I got it into my head that I needed to finally get myself in gear to put all of my SCA stuff on the web.  I spent a couple of evenings developing content, mucking about with HTML and NVu before it occurred to me (in a fit of brilliance, albeit delayed) that I could just host do the whole thing at WordPress.  Dropped the content in here, and viola!

I’ll update with more content as I excavate it from my hard drive and as I write it.