The Big Reveal - Kingdom A&S Girdle Purse (with pictures)

This past weekend was Kingdom A&S so I can now post the pictures of my project - which I've been talking about for some time.

Quick summary for those who may have missed it. I decided that since this year is five years since I first entered Kingdom A&S, and that the event was back in our Barony the same as it was that year, that I would recreate my original project. I thought it would show the progress I've made in the past five years and might help people who may not be so confident with their first attempts (because looking back on my first entry all I can think is "What was I thinking?". :)

That year I made a new type of purse I'd never tried before, a basic kidney purse. The first 5-6 posts in the Kingdom A&S tag will give you the story on that original purse.

But of course, I couldn't just do the same pouch. I upgraded the complexity of the pouch, add better finishing and decorative techniques and used historically accurate materials (with a couple of exceptions I'll talk about later).

So, without any further ado, here's a picture side by side of the two finished pouches:

As you can see from this top view, there's a few major differences that you can see. For one, the stitches along the top forming the flab and connecting the various layers of leather is significantly cleaner. The white trim I think really makes a huge difference and makes it pop nicely (the trim was a suggestion from one of my judges for the original pouch). In Purses in Pieces, Goubitz also shows that many of the purses had buckles and straps, which I like since it will help keep things from falling out.

What you can't necessarily see as well from this angle is that there's actually a double pouch on the new purses.Underneath the black pouch you can see, there's a second pouch with two small pouchlets on it. This is a totally documentable design and added a lot of complexity (and storage space) to the purse. Here's a picture of the second level of pouch .You can also see the draw-strings on the pouchlet on the right, I hadn't yet done the one on the left.

Materials-wise, there's a big difference as well. The original pouch was commercially bought chrome-tan leather in a black-ish colour (turns out I was pretty close to what was produce-able in period, so that's kind of nice). The new pouch is dyed black using my vinegar black recipe from the Plictho, same as I used for previous projects.All of the stitching was done using waxed linen thread on the new pouch, as compared to artificial sinew on the original.

For the white leather, I had to make a substitution for cost/availability reasons. Goubitz indicates that pouchlets on these purses would usually have been made using either chamois leather or fabric.Given that I can't find chamois that isn't the super-stretchy auto detailing stuff, I made a substitution to use alum tawed leather, which is period appropriate. But (and there's always a but), it would have cost me $400 to ship a skin of alum tawed leather from the one place I've found it in the US - thanks to the crappy Canadian dollar right now. So I used some chrome-tanned white pigskin that I had on hand, which is almost identical to the colour, texture and thickness of the alum tawed leather.

Here are some in-progress pics (pics with red leather are the prototype that I made of the design, which Avelyn will be using).

Next post will be more about the day at the event.

Quiet day at Practicum

Oops, noticed I wrote this but never posted it. Guess its been busy. :)

It was a fairly quiet day for me at Practicum. I didn't have time to pull together any classes to teach this year because of my surgery recovery. Since there weren't really any classes that interested me (it was a Norse theme this year and I tend to do later period stuff) I decided to setup an all day leatherworking workshop.

Of course, this meant basically packing up all of my books, tools and gear and moving it from my basement to the site, which filled several bins. I needed a dolly to haul it all in.

I essentially spent the day working on my Kingdom A&S project and people could pop by, try out tools, flip through my leatherwork library and ask any questions they might have.

I was able to introduce a newcomer to leather tooling and stamping (and they got to take a scrap of leather they stamped back home with them) but other than a few good chats with a few people who had some specific questions it was mostly me doing my thing and people popping by to visit between their classes.

I was able to line up a few judges for the Baronial Championship at Break the Back (thanks all who've volunteered so far) and talked to some people about their entries.

I would say I'm about half done the work on my Kingdom A&S project.  I have to sew on all of the trim pieces and then do the final assembly. It's going to be tight since I also have to do up the documentation for whichever project I end up entering. (Note since this was written I've almost finished, just a few last pieces to do and then the documentation).

There were two highlights for me, both at court.

First, I was able to witness His Excellency Giovanni being elevated as Ealdormere's first member of the new Order of Defence peerage. Giovanni and Lucia were Baron and Baroness when I started fencing (or maybe Xristina was Vicaress at the time but they were certainly my first Baron and Baroness). One of my first really positive memories of fencing at events was my first Pennsic (and I think their first as Baron and Baroness) when they asked me to represent them as Baronial Rapier Champion until they could hold a tourney ( I wound up being their champion for more than a year). I was severely outclassed at the Champion's tourney from a skill perspective, but I think I held my own in the Q&A and swimsuit portions of the competition. ;) I didn't win one bout in any of the three tournaments I entered but I wore the Hare proudly. Of course, the next year was the famous "I want that bunny dead" incident during the town battle. You can ask Lucia about it, she tells it better than anyone else (and the myth keeps growing with every telling, as all good stories do).

The second highlight, and with all respect to our new Master of Defence, perhaps the biggest highlight, was seeing my Lady Avelyn totally gobsmacked as she was called into court and inducted into the Order of the Wain. She was only there because she'd written the text for an award scroll (of course) and wanted to see it presented (she was aiming for a record puns per inch of text). But I guess the surprise was on our new Ladyship. :) It's so well deserved, even if she has trimmed down the number of officer positions she currently holds from the previous high of 7 simultaneous positions.

Update on Kingdom A&S

I'm making some good progress on my Kingdom A&S project and with still over a month to go I'm feeling more optimistic about getting it done. I have a back-up plan in place just in case, since I want to make sure I enter something, but fingers are crossed I can get my project done.

My goal is to decided in the next two weeks whether I'm going to get the pouch project done in time, so I can start on pulling together the documentation. In both cases I've done all the research and written in down in various places, I just need to drop it into my usual format with pictures etc.

So here's the update on progress. For those that missed it, I posted about the concept here.

For the past few weeks I've been working on the mock-up. It's now done. In general, the main pieces all worked out the way I was expecting. I need to adjust the size/shape of the pouchlet pieces to give more slack to them so they will cinch better. Otherwise the main things I've learned have to do with the order of assembling the pieces. Some of the steps became super time consuming and challenging because I'd already assembled some of the pieces.

I made the mock-up using good quality leather that's almost exactly the same weight and flexibility as the stuff I'm using for the final, so everything should translate well. I'm giving the mock-up to Avelyn, it's a nice red and white so will work well for things where we want to show Kingdom/Baronial colours.

The final piece will be made from the same veg tan I used for the stick purse, dyed using one of my period dyes The trim and pouchlets will be done using some lightweight white pigskin I have. It's modern chrome tan but the feel and colour is almost identical to alum tawed leather (and doesn't cost $400 a skin, which is a plus).

I have progress pictures oft the mockup and will take pics as I work on the final project, but you'll have to stay tuned until the big reveal after the event (I know, I'm such a tease). :)

New throwing axe cover for Baroness Christiana (with pictures)

So this one has been a long time posting but I couldn't share it publicly until the big reveal for Her Excellency Christiana. She was elevated to the Order of the Pelican over a year ago now at 12th Night in January of last year. At the time I promised to make her a fancy throwing axe cover. Unfortunately, last year was not a fun year for us at home so I've fallen way behind on my backlog of promised projects. I finally got this one done in the fall but because I haven't been to many events in the southern part of Ealdormere this year, we haven't really crossed paths. Fortunately, Lady Augusta came up for a visit for Feast of the Hare in November, and I was able to send it via Talfryn courier. She delivered it to Christiana at Wassail.

I had the advantage in making the pattern in that Christiana and I use the same type of throwing axes. HE Percival also sent me a tracing of one of her axes, but in the end I just used one of mine as a 3D model.

It isn't necessarily a period design, but I think the technique of wrapping leather around an item and making a case/sheath is probably period appropriate. I did try to search out some period axe covers but I didn't really find much. Maybe a future research project?

In any case, the first picture below shows the pattern shape I settled on based on the shape of the axe. I tooled in the Pelican on one side and then did a series of small winged snails along the front flap (Christiana's primary charge in her heraldry). 

I had a hard time settling on a main colour because I wanted good contrast and was concerned if I used red the little blood drops from the pelican would be lost. In the end I used two different reds, a darker read as the main colour (which is a bit like a brick-red) and then a brighter red for the blood drops. It doesn't pop as much as if I used a contrasting colour but the white snails and pelican sure do, and it is Ealdormere after all so there has to be lots of red.

I then folded the cover around the axe and laced the bottom and the edge using artificial sinew (I thought about using waxed linen thread for authenticity but thought the artificial sinew would be more durable given that a sharp axe would be sliding in and out of the item). This is the pelican side of the cover on one of my axes.

Here's the back with the flap tied down using leather laces. Next time I'll have to rethink the closing laces as they get in the way a bit this way when you try to put the axe in or take it out. It's a bit of an awkward design, so there's room for improvement in the engineering. You'll also notice there are only four snails on the final piece while there were five in the picture above. I had to modify the size and shape of the flap once it was assembled, and one of the snails had to be sacrificed. That'll teach me not to do a mock-up of a new design.

Here's the final piece fully assembled, just before it went out the door. I'm hoping she likes it. :)

Plotting my next Kingdom A&S Project

Today is Queen's Prize Tourney, which over the past few years has become one of my favourite SCA events. Sadly this year, for the first time, I won't be there for variety of reasons. I'm hoping people are getting really good feedback and will be able to take those discussions and really up their skills as a result.

Since I'm not there, and since its going to be nicer out tomorrow for my outdoor chores, I thought I'd spend some time today plotting out my next Kingdom A&S project.

My very first Kingdom A&S was in November 2011, before A&S got bumped to the spring. It was hosted in Greyfells and Avelyn and I both went and entered for the first time since it was local. I'd only started doing leatherwork maybe a year prior and didn't really do much A&S wise. How times have changed. :)

Anyway, as has been my normal, the research into the project was pretty good but the execution was very much a beginner project. If you go to the very first few posts under my Kingdom A&S tag you'll see the progress reports on my original project. Here's the link to the photo post with the end result.

I think I've come up with a really neat idea, and when I've mentioned it to folks they seem to like it.

Here's the plan, would love to hear people's thoughts in the comments.

Since Skrael is hosting the event once again this spring, and it's basically going to be almost 5 years since my first Kingdom A&S, I've decided I'm going to redo my original project. But Dafydd, you say, that seems silly since you already made that pouch.

The difference here is that the pouch I made five years ago was super basic, with no ornamentation or detail at all. It was a true beginner project.

This time I'll still work off of examples in Purses in Pieces but otherwise only the general style of the pouch will be the same. I'm going to design a much more complex pattern, possibly with pouchlets, multiple leather colours (probably using my period dyes), better finishing details and some decoration. It'll basically be to show what I've learned in the past five years.

Surprise Rapier Sheath for Albrecht (with pictures)

Haven't posted for a while, largely because I didn't want to spill the beans on a surprise. But now that its been delivered I can unveil the rapier sheath that I did for Lady Emelote's fundraising event.

As announced previously, the winners of the draw were Their Excellencies Percival and Christiana. However, the trick was that neither of them are fencers, so a hand-tooled rapier sheath was probably not going to be particularly useful. :) As a result, they asked me to do a custom sheath for Albrecht for his elevation to the Order of the Laurel at Lady Mary this past weekend (now Master Albrecht).

In consultation with his lady the length is custom to his preferred rapier length (yes Albrecht, everyone was in on this plot). She also felt that his preference would be to go with more natural tones rather than the heraldic colours that I usually do. So I went with a bit of a different, more subtle approach. But because this is a very special occasion, I didn't want to just do a plain brown sheath, so I essentially did tooling covering the entire sheath.

Given that Albrecht was being recognized (at least in part) for the level of his research into historical fencing, I wanted to make this rapier sheath as historically accurate as possible (with a nod given to the fact that the rubber blunts on our rapiers mean we need a tube core for a sheath instead of the historically accurate flat wooden core). 

The tooling pattern is based on examples found in "Knives and Scabbards". The top  portion of the sheath has side by side heraldry where I've alternated between the laurel wreath (the symbol of the Order) and Albrecht's personal heraldry. Heraldry is very common on these types of objects, this one is similar to what can be seen in item 433 (p.140) or 436 (p.142). Down the remainder of the sheath is a pattern similar to what is called a foliate in "Knives and Scabbards", again a fairly common pattern - examples can be seen in item 444 (p.145) or item 490 (p.164). I've simplified it to be a double loop repeating pattern rather than one continues pattern and turned it into more of a geometric pattern rather than leaves and branches, I've also enlarged it to better fit the larger scale of a rapier sheath since the original was just a small dagger. To fill in the extra space in the pattern since the shape is now much larger, I used two different wolf stamps, since the wolf is a key symbol for Ealdormere and stamping of leather is an entirely period process. The effect is similar to what was done in plate 25 on p.167 with a lion passant stamp.

I also used fully period tooling techniques on this one. That basically means that I didn't cut the pattern into the leather using a swivle knife (which is a modern tool). It was just etched onto the leather and then I used my shaping tools to give it depth. It's hard to see the difference unless you look really closely at two items done with the different techniques, but it does affect the depth of the tooling marks a bit.

The brown dye is a modern antiquing dye to replicate the colours that would have been produced in period (mainly because I've yet to work out a period brown dye - but I'm working on it). I used the antiquing dye because it also helps highlight the tooling marks so that they stand out better since I wouldn't be using different colour to make them stand out.

Here are the pictures from start to finish. This is easily the most complex and detailed tooling project I've done so far:

 

Summer Siege That Was

This past weekend was Summer Siege, which is my Canton's main event each year. In the past it has been in early summer but this year they tried moving it to after Pennsic to see if we could get a better turn-out, as it always seemed to conflict with local non-SCA activities early in the season. Thought I'd post a quick update on what was a really busy day.

In general it was a great event. The new site worked well, and we had great weather and a pretty good turn-out I think.

Note: While there are some A&S tidbits in this post, I spent most of the day doing martial activities so while I try to focus on A&S things on the blog this post will be a bit different. I'll hit the A&S stuff first though so if the rest doesn't interest you, you can skip it. :) It will also be a bit of a long post and not much in the way of pictures to break up the text. Sorry, I'll try to do better next time.


A&S Stuff

So Summer Siege is traditionally a small local event, and this year gate was by donation so the cash flow was a bit simpler. That made it the perfect event to test the stick-purse to see how it would work in a real-life scenario for sorting different currencies and making change. I also brought my documentation and set it up at the A&S display table, so people could take a look if they wanted to.

Thankfully our Gatekeeper was thrilled to use it (thanks Lady Jane). It certainly seemed to work better that throwing all of the bills and coins into the same container. I think the concept was that people could just drop their donations into the container, but people kept wanting change and it got complicated. The stick-purse seemed to help with that.

Jane also told me the colour coding of the bags was really helpful as they could tell what bills were in which pouch. That was my original theory and why I did the colours despite the lack of evidence of colour on the draw strings of the original artifact. It just made sense, and this seems to prove the theory.

They couldn't really use the pouchlets since they don't cinch quite closed because of the thickness of the leather on this version, but I knew about that already.

There was also some discussion about whether it would have sat better on the desk in period because it would have been filled with heavy coins rather than light paper money. I suspect that would have made some difference.

In any case, it was fun to see the stick-purse being used for essentially what it would have been used for in period, and to confirm that the design for the most part worked. I'd call that an experimental archaeology success.

Sorry, I'd meant to get a picture of the stick-purse in use but it was such a busy day I never had a chance. Maybe next year we'll use it again. I had also meant to take pictures of the items at the A&S display table for the Pinterest page, I'm a Bad Baronial A&S Minister. :)


Martial Stuff

Rapier
The main reason I was so distracted at the event was that I was the Rapier Marshall in Charge, as usual for this event. I think I've run the fencing for the last four years now. Normally we don't get a huge turn-out, I think our high previously was five fencers and we've had years where I only get one or two other fencers. This year we got 11 (although two weren't in armour) and we did five authorizations (two primary authorizations, two rigid parry authorizations and one two-weapon authorization). I also had three Marshals in Training on site so they had a chance to do lots of inspections and observe the authorization process.

The authorizations took a lot longer than expected (I only knew about one of the parry device auths ahead of time) but I'm happy to do them since its so hard for locals who don't travel much to get to events they can authorize at. Since I haven't been to practices in more than six months and am from a different Canton I actually count as an unfamiliar marshal for folks in Caldrithig (Ottawa), which makes things easier.

Unfortunately, by the time we were done most of the auths we were right in the heat of the bright sunny day. We did one of the planned tournaments for a bit (a modified bear pit with retained wounds and random plague striking the winner after a certain random number of fights), and then people just sort of did pick-ups until they tired themselves out. I brought ice water, flavour squirts, and all kinds of snacks and had nothing left to bring home other than some pretzels, the fencers seemed to have a good time and no paperwork was required for anyone doing anything silly. I'd say that's a good day of fencing.

Archery and Thrown Weapons
Summer Siege is also host to the Baronial archery and thrown weapons champions tourneys (largely because its the only regular Baronial event that is during the warm months and has the outdoor space to do these activities). Whenever I can I always try to participate in Baronial Champions Tourneys, just as a way to support Their Excellencies and to help make sure they get a good turn out. Last time I did the thrown weapons but this year I did both, since I have my new arrows that His Excellency Master Percival made me last year.

I started with the archery tournament. Given I hadn't shot in probably five years, I wasn't expecting much. My goal was to hit the target at least once and I hit it a total of four times for 8 points. That's not going to win any tournament I've ever seen but at least I shot. :)

I had more confidence at doing at least respectably at the thrown weapons since I throw my axes a few times a year. The tournament had each person throwing six times from each station (axe, knife and spear) at two distances (10 yards and 20 yards). Bulls eye was worth five points, middle ring three and outer ring one.

Surprisingly I did really well with the spears, not usually something I do well. I must have found the right balance-point or something because they we're flying really well (including a couple of bulls-eyes). I hit a few axes too but it was the spears that really bumped my score. Maybe even more surprising, I hit a couple of times at 20 yards with both the spears and the axes, something that I've never been able to do. As usually my knife throwing stunk at both distances and I clanked all of them.

I was one of the last throwers but while I knew my score was really good for me (I probably beat my personal best by something like 20 points), I didn't really have a sense of how it compared to everyone else since I was running around so much and didn't have a chance to see the other throwers. That is, I didn't have a sense until I got called into court by Their Excellencies as the winner, then I had a pretty good idea. :)

So I'm now Their Excellencies of Skraeling Althing's Thrown Weapons Champion.