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.