… when I step away from a project for a while.

I got the mauve gown out to work on it during textile guild Tuesday night.  I’m in the process of attaching the side gores… so I merrily seamed the one that was pinned to the body panel and then moved on to sewing the two gores together, except… something wasn’t quite right.  I pulled out all the pieces and tried to figure out what goes where and it just didn’t make sense.  I kept coming out with an odd number of gores.  I was just about to decide to stick the extra gore in the back when I realized… two of the gores I had lying around were right triangles, not isosceles triangles!  Right triangle = half-gore.  Closer inspection revealed that the two gores that I had already attached to the body were also half gores.  AHA!  So… for my own record-keeping.  ;)  Each side seam gets one “full” gore and two “half” gores.  Now I will remember.

There is still one error – right now those two half-gores that are attached are attached bias-to-bias.  I’m just going to leave them and let it hang for an extra-long time to get the stretch out.  I’ll make sure to do the other set straight-to-bias, though.

I’m planning to display the dress in its current state at C3R this weekend, so come take a look!

I gave up.  I CAN sew with the threads gleaned from the fabric, but I was getting too frustrated with them breaking, and I could only sew at about 1/3 my normal speed.  Since I’m kind of on a deadline for this gown (yeah, I know, the deadline is six months away, but I have other things going on in my life, too) and realistically I only sew one evening a week (that whole teaching + dissertation problem that I have), I needed to be able to do it faster.

As in the past 2 years, we are having a cavalcade of houseguests making their way from Points East to Pennsic.  This year is the Most Houseguests Ever – we will have 3 folks here tomorrow night, 2 more Saturday night, 3 a week from Friday, and… I think 4 on Saturday the 9th.  Oh, and did I mention that I will be making a quick trip to OK to drop of Shoshanna at Camp Grammy during that time, too?  The life of transplanted easterners who live 10 minutes off the NYS Thruway and 3 hours from Currie Road. And are suckers.

I’ve got most most of the body panels for the mauve gown basted together (lining & fashion layers).  Still have to work out what I’m going to do with the gores – I definitely need to cut more of them, and I won’t have enough damask to line ANY of the gores in it.  I had been planning to use an IL019 linen for the remaining lining, but now I’m thinking I’m going to use a white fustian I have lying around because it’s closer in weight to the damask.  But I’ll jump off that bridge… sometime next week, I guess, since I want to at least have all the pieces cut out before we go to war, if not basted.  (Basted would be the ideal but … I have a three-and-a-half-year-old to entertain and packing to do for us and her as well as houseguests and a dissertation that I’m theoretically working on.)

If you’re looking for me at Pennsic, I’ll be there War Week; we’re camping with the Barony of Bergental, and I’ll be at the A&S exhibition pretty much all day… I’ll probably leave to go watch rapier champs.  Can’t miss that.

I’m seeing “Pennsic Panic” posts & e-mails all over the intarwebz these days… only two weeks to land grab, after all!

There is no panic here.  I have learned my lesson – I make huge lists of things that I have to get done before War and they get whittled and whittled and whittled and I end up doing maybe two of the things that started out on the list.  And what fun is that?  Pennsic is already the vacation you need a vacation after.  Why make the weeks leading up stressful, too?  In our case, we have plenty of clothes, and they are in good repair.  Eventually I want to have enough undergarments that we can go skin-out for a week of war without doing lots of laundry but beyond that… I just can’t get too worked up about needing to DO DO DO! in the weeks leading up to our vacation.

That said, I do have a few things I would like to get done before we leave.

1. I want to get the remaining pieces of the mauve gown basted so that I can take that with me for handwork while at Pennsic.
2. I want to finish hemming the veil that I’ve been hemming since LAST Pennsic.  (I don’t like hemming.  And Pennsic is the only time I need more than one veil, anyway.  So it’s still not done.)
3. I might write up some quickie docs for the embroidery that I’m thinking about showing in the A&S.  Or I might just do the form that they will have there; I can’t document medallions anyway so really it’s just about the split-stitch embroidery.  A little throwaway thing, but I have it and it’s pretty, so what the heck.

Of these, the basting is the most time-consuming.  I need to cut out some more gores, too – I didn’t make the first set wide enough so I’m going to double up.

And obviously we need to pack – I updated and printed the list this afternoon and am laying things out in the dining room little by little as I come across them.  I will be doing most of the packing, probably, and M will be loading while I’m taking the kiddo to Camp Grammy – he’ll pick me up at the airport fully loaded and we’ll head straight down to Cooper’s.

I displayed what exists of the mauve gown at Baronial Champs on Saturday. By that point it actually had six buttons on the sleeve and one almost-finished buttonhole.  I’m pretty pleased with how the buttons are coming out… may need to re-wrap some of the shank because it gets moved around as I work them into the buttonholes.  We shall see…

You double check that you are correctly remembering the orientation of buttonholes relative to the garment edge.

(A: perpendicular, just like I thought.)

So many of us say that one reason we play in the SCA is for those magic moments, the ones when you’re transported to another time, another place.  Whether you call this “The Dream” or something else, it’s a wonderful reminder of why we do what we do.  I remember my first “magic moment”; it was at my very first camping event, Schützenfest.  It was May of 1999 (I know because Matatias and I had gotten engaged just a couple of weeks before).  Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I had to get up to go to the loo.  There were still some folks up singing and drumming, and I had to walk across a field shrouded in fog to get to the privy.

I had another magic moment this afternoon, sitting in a nylon camp chair on my back porch.  Nope, I don’t even have to be at an event to be transported.  I was whiling away Shoshanna’s rest time working on my mauve gown in the warm out of doors and I held the sleeve i was working on in my hand, studying some stitches I had just put in, and for a split second it was like I was sitting there holding an historical artifact in my hand.  I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a medieval garment that looked just like what I’ve done, but there was a quality about it that said “I am Not Modern” that was just wonderful.