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.

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

I might have underestimated the amount of time the documentation was going to take to write, but it’s done and perfectly respectable. I just need to get a couple of shots of M in the garment, and then it’ll be completely done.

It was announced yesterday that the Aethelmearc A&S champs will be chosen at Ae 10-Year (which is at Cooper’s in 2 weeks).  Some of you may remember that last year I got my knickers in a twist because I couldn’t make my braies project fit the requirements (namely that there had to be an escarbuncle involved somehow – which of course led to the witticism of “Oops, I shat heraldry!”).

This year, there are no such restrictions. Bring your best thing and M’Lord King and M’Lady Queen will choose Their champion. No muss, no fuss. Initially, I thought “I have nothing to bring.” But then it occurred to me that I do have something that I would consider worthy of entry in a kingdom competition – I have M’s riding tunic. Of course, having time to polish up the documentation to a state that I’m willing to put out there is another issue. There’s an artisans forum as well, and really I should probably plan on participating in that, so maybe I’ll take the hour or two that it’ll take to get the docs into respectable shape and go with it. Who knows, maybe I could be A&S champ of my second kingdom… Wouldn’t THAT be amusing.