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.
I did a quick drive-by at practice tonight to let Caleb try on his fencing undergarment and to deliver his braies. The undertunic is put together pretty much the same way as Shoshanna’s coat – this was not my initial intention but I messed up the math on the gores so that they didn’t reach into the sleeves like I wanted them to. I’ll correct this on the overtunic for sure. The garment fits him perfectly – I just have to fix the neckline because M’s head is much smaller than Caleb’s.
I seem to have a huge pile of projects all in the works at once right now… not that I mind, it’s just a little crazy.
I’m sending an A&S display item to Crown even though we’re not going. That will be Matatias’ brown riding tunic – I had to do some mending on it last night because the topstitching on the neckline had broken in one place, but it’s repaired & washed. I need to check/update the docs for it, though.
I’m also working on Caleb’s rapier armor. It’s going to be my usual 2-layer undergarment with a fashion layer overgarment. He has chosen brown with black bands for the fashion layer and white for the undergarments. His hosen will be black as well. I cut a bunch of bias bands for the trim last night. When we get to the point that I’m going to drape his hosen pattern, I think I’m going to turn it into a workshop – Alicia wants to see how I do them and at that point we might as well just have a bunch of people over. It’s not like I don’t have the handouts for it!
Finally, I’m working on Catlin’s riding tunic. I’m repeating the seaming technique I used on the first riding tunic, only without whip-stitching the fashion and lining fabrics together first. So far I have done about 6″ of seam on one set of gores. I couldn’t find my wax last night so it wasn’t going as fast as I would have liked. My GOAL is to have that done by Pennsic so it can be displayed and then delivered to her there.
ETA: Heh, I forgot that I also have a tunic of His Majesty’s to do some work on. Thank goodness for my handy to-do list, eh?
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.
Writing documentation for an entry into a “heraldic display” category is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BEAST than writing documentation for clothing & embroidery categories.
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.
