Prep work for Feast of the Bear Part II - With Pictures

This is part two of my post on prep work we did for Feast of the Bear. Part one covered the making of AElfwyn's vigil book with Master Giovanni.

AElfwyn's vigil and elevation ceremony was based on Anglo-Saxon ceremonies. So we knew we needed to look the part. Now, I don't normally do early period beyond the occasional Norse, and I certainly didn't have any garb that suited a formal Anglo-Saxon event.  I also hadn't had any luck in the past making a pair of shoes that actually fit and looked right.

Sooo, new garb and new shoes were in the cards.

Shoes:

I'd previously made a pair of shoes but the ended up being way too wide and about two sizes too big because I did a poor job of tracing the sole. But they also weren't particularly early period, so I needed to adjust the pattern for the uppers as well.

I based my shoes on the Anglo-Scandanavian Shoe pattern by Marc Carlson.

I used my milled veg tan leather (which was the leather from the Stick-Purse) and dyed it using walnut dye extract that I bought on our trip to Montreal. It produced the same nice brown as the black walnuts without the mess of handling them. Just add water. :)

The shoes are stitched using waxed linen thread.

Here is the one shoe before I turned it and then after fighting with it to turn it right-side out.

And here are the two shoes turned and on my feat to test the fit (still a little bit wide and long but certainly wearable).

The original artifacts often have holes along the top edge, which may suggest edge trim was applied to clean it up. I also find it stiffens up the shoe a bit so it holds its shape a bit better, so I did that too. I left the leather natural colours as I thought it would give good contrast with the darker brown shoes.

Carlson also has an interesting latch system for keeping the shoes closed, which don't actually use any stitches to anchor the latches. I'd never tried that before but gave it a shot, and it seems to work OK. You cut small holes and wedge thicker straps through the holes and it locks into place.

So here's the finished shoe. You'll see them on my feet in the garb pictures below as well.

Garb:

While I was working on the book cover and the shoes, Avelyn was busily working on making me look good. :)

We got all the fabric we needed in Montreal, and commissioned Baroness Mahault to do up some nice boar-themed embroidery for the collars and cuffs.

Avelyn spent weeks leading up to the event sewing the tunics, and spent her day at the event hand stitching a cap for me.

I'll leave the details to her to tell since it wasn't my project but needless to say I'm super appreciative. She did an awesome job. Thanks also to Emelote and Bethoc for last minute help getting the finishing touches done on the night before we left. :)

The undertunic, cap and shoes

Here I am on the left in the overtunic.

Making stuff for Feast of the Bear - Part 1 (With Pictures)

Feast of the Bear was a super important event this year, but that's not all that unusual. For some reason, stuff seems to happen at Feast of the Bear. That's the event I received my Award of Arms in 2008, at the very same church where it was held this year.

At Trillium war in July, to a great deal of rejoicing, Mistress AElfwyn was put on vigil for the Order of Chivalry. Their Majesties wanted to do the elevation before the end of Their reign, so AElfwyn selected Feast of the Bear as her elevation event.

As AElfwyn's apprentice, I had a small part in the ceremony, so we've spent the past few weeks making things so that I would look the proper Anglo-Saxon(ish) part. That's why we did the fabric shopping trip to Montreal, so we could find fabric that had the right colour tones and fibre content. I also made a pair of new shoes, since a pair of modern running shoes would have ruined the look. :)

On top of all that, Master Giovanni asked me to work with him again on the vigil book by doing the leatherwork for the cover.

So, its been a busy few weeks. Here is part one of my Feast of the Bear work, the vigil book. Other stuff will be covered in the next post.

The book:

I knew I wanted to do something more than just dye the leather, which certainly added some complexity for both me and Giovanni. I had to be precise in the measurements to make sure any tooling etc. was placed correctly for when he made the book. I pushed the envelope a lot on this one, doing a number of new techniques I'd never tried under a tight timeline. Some of it worked, others didn't. In the end, I figured that AElfwyn would appreciate me trying to push the envelope so I went with it. :)

My initial idea was to base the cover on the St Cuthbert Gospel, which is an 8th century Anglo-Saxon book. However, the cover on the Gospel is super complex, with raised sections, tooled sections and is both dyed red and painted with gold highlighting (or more likely gold leaf). Given the timeline for the project I thought it best to take inspiration from the design, but not to try to replicate it entirely. I also wanted to customize it a bit for AElfwyn by replacing the core design with a boar.

First I had to sand the leather to get the pressed layer off (I had to do the same thing for the last book we did, it was AElfwyn's suggestion at the time). Once it was sanded I did the tooling. Here's the tooled wet leather:

Once I did the tooling I realized I screwed up my placement, and essentially tooled the back cover. So I had to modify the plan and do matched tooling on the front and back, like so:

Once the leather was tooled I had to dye it. This is where I made another mistake. Rather than using my existing period red dye recipe, I tried to modify the process based on what Mistress Lucrece did for her recent book project. My hope was that it would give me a truer red. But these are natural dyes and any little variation can throw things off, so it ended up not working out quite the way I intended. The colour was more a brownish purple than red, and it didn't bind well to the leather. More experimentation needed, but I ran out of time and had to go with it since a dye batch takes a couple of days to make.

The dying process took a few days between pre-treating the leather with alum water and then doing multiple coats of dye with drying time between. Just in case the tooled section messed up I dyed the whole skin so Giovanni would have enough space to make a plain leather cover as a back-up plan.

Once it was dried, I used my black water-based leather dye from Zeli's to make the boars black. Unfortunately I found because the red dye wasn't adhering well to the leather, painting on top of it also presented challenges. Each black coat had to dry much longer before I went back for another coat, or it would come right off. I was also worried it would rub off when my top coat was applied.

Once I got the black to where I was happy with it, I took some metallic gold craft paint and a micro brush and painted all of the tooling lines on the boars. I bought five different types of paint and tested them to see which was the least likely to rub off. The best of the bunch was from Martha Stewart that I bought at Michael's.

Here are pictures of the boars painted.

I then had to decide what to do with the border. The original Gospel had a raised line that delineated the border, but the logistics of knowing how much space to leave Giovanni to do that were daunting, so I decided to skip that. In the end I decided to paint the knotwork with the gold paint, but leave the outer lines plain.

After that I let it all dry and applied the a modern top coat to hopefully stop anything from rubbing off as the book was handled. This led me to doing a bit of touching up on the boars as some of the black flaked off, and it did wear away some of the colour, but not too bad. I also had a problem with the top coat making a chalky layer on the leather, which has never happened before. That really pissed me off but no amount of buffing was helping get rid of the coating.

In the end I think it turned out pretty well, although there's a number of things I would do differently. Giovanni did a great job making the book itself. I'm sure it was a nightmare trying to make sure the covers lined up properly because of the tooled border. 

Avelyn described it as looking like an actual artifact that was pulled form the ground (which I think is something that would please AElfwyn) because of the way the dyes rubbed off in some places. It looks weathered.

Here's a picture of the final book that Giovanni took once it was finished.

Summer Siege Wrap Up - With Pictures

Running a bit behind with blog posts, its been a crazy few weeks getting stuff ready for multiple events.

Summer Siege, as always, was a busy event for me. It was also a Royal progress stop this year as we had a Laurel ceremony happening, so the attendance was significantly higher than usual.

Rapier:

Normally I'm running the rapier list since I'm the Canton's Rapier Marshal, but this year we tried a new format for the A&S activities and as Baronial A&S Minister I ran that instead. Gavin was kind enough to volunteer to run Rapier, and while we didn't have the record number of fencers we had last year, it looked like a pretty good turn-out and folks seemed to have fun.

Normally in the past for the event I have borrowed the Caldrithig armoured combat list poles from His Excellency Shahid, but they are rather large and heavy, and really overkill for rapier. So this year, Avelyn and I worked to make a new set of list poles, based on the ones Jocelyn loaned me last year for the Althing. We even got a bit of power tool help from Avelyn's dad, since our little hand drill was rather under-powered for the job.

The best part of them is that instead of taking up half the back of our truck, I can disassemble them and they fit into a duffel bag. They're super light weight.

Here are a couple of pictures of them in action. We'll call them the prototype, since there are some things I may want to adjust, but they seemed to work OK for their maiden event.

A&S

A lot of the work for the A&S activity was before the event, coordinating judges and entries etc. What I was hoping for was a chance for local artisans to get some feedback on projects. I had a good host of people volunteer to judge, which was really great. Unfortunately a number of people who had planned to enter items weren't in the end able to make the event. We did have one lovely embroidery entry and she seemed to get some good feedback so that's good. Hopefully it will continue to grow in the next few years.

Thrown Weapons

Their Excellencies have been using Summer Siege to run both their thrown weapon's and archery champions tourneys in recent years, as its one of the few venues that lends itself to those activities in the Barony. Last year I managed to win the Thrown Weapons tourney with what was easily my best ever day on the range. The chances of me doing as well again this year were slim, but I entered again this year to defend my title, or at least make sure that I gave the winner a run for their money. :)

During the tourney I knew I didn't throw as well as the previous year, but I hit a good number of throws from 10 ft, but not much from 20 ft, so I knew it would be tight.

In court I was called up to step down as champion, where I surprised Their Excellencies with a new axe and heraldic axe cover for the champion (I did the same when I stepped down as Rapier Champion, so now it's twice, so its a tradition!). Eluned picked up the axe for me at Pennsic and I made the cover based on my existing axes.

Here's a picture of me returning the tabbard and presenting the axe.

and here are some close ups of the axe and cover:

So I bow my way out of court, go back to the audience and resume taking pictures. They call up the Marshal, who starts calling out the top three, and low and behold, they call me up as the winner and Their Excellencies get to give me back all the regalia once again. I think They enjoyed the joke of handing me back the axe after I just presented it. :)

Other things of note:

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Laurel elevation in more detail. THL Alais (now Mistress Alais) focuses a lot of her research on shepherdesses and peasant practices. Her elevation was really unique as they modeled it after a Flemish village wedding ceremony, including using dances as part of the ceremony. It was really neat, and totally suited the event. I'm glad the weather was nice (if hot) and that everything seemed to go well.

I had been asked to be their "official" photographer for the elevation so I tried to make sure I got lots of pictures while I was hopping between activities. I was also able to do a family photo for her after the ceremony, which is always a nice keepsake.

A leather guy's notes for doing fabric shopping in Montreal

About a week ago, Avelyn, Emelote and I planned a quick day trip to Montreal to look for some good fabric for SCA garb. In particular we were looking for linen or wool fabric in appropriate colours (particularly blues and yellows) that looked at least close to what would be producible using period natural dyes. Avelyn and I consulted the weekend before with Mistress Siglinde Harfnerstochter, who was able to give us lots of good advice and show us some books and actual dyed wool and linen samples so we'd have an idea of what the right colours might be. I'd also asked around to get ideas of where people normally go for their wool fabric, so that was a bit of a starting point.

The beauty is that within the garment district in Montreal, there's a huge concentration of fabric stores in a very small stretch of Rue St. Hubert. I counted about a dozen stores within about four blocks, although some of them are more upholstery fabric than garment fabric. Within about four and a half hours we were able to hit about 8 stores and we did find what we were looking for.

We went on a Saturday, so most of the stores closed around 5-ish with a few earlier closures. There was lots of street parking, with pay machines so parking was about $1 per hour, with a max of three hours (but you can go back and get a new ticket from the machine no problem). We found it easiest to just park in one spot and walk back and forth since everything was so close.

One thing we found with many of the stores is that labeling the bolts was not even a thing. Very few of them even had prices labelled, never mind fibre content. I was glad we brought Emelote along because I certainly wouldn't have known the difference between fabrics. It pays to brush up on your haggle skills because some of the sellers seemed open to bargaining or offering a "deal", especially if larger amounts were being purchased.

Avelyn suggested I do this post so I can pass on some of the tips and tricks we learned while planning and doing our shopping trip. Hopefully this will be helpful to people interested in doing some SCA fabric shopping in Montreal in the future. About 98% of this post is unrelated to leather (I did stop at one store that had dye supplies, so if you're only interested in my leather dye project I'll put that store last on the list if you want to skip ahead).

So, below I will make some comments and observations about each of the stores we visited, in hopes it will help anyone looking to do some fabric shopping in the future.

The stores:

A C Textiles

7390 Rue St-Hubert

When I asked around to our local experts, Dame Helen of Greyfells suggested this store. I can see why, this was a favourite stop of the trip. The owners were super helpful without being pushy (and gave us some really good prices too). They had a really awesome selection of 100% wools - including Cashmere. When we were there (not sure if the inventory moves around within the store) the wools were on the left hand wall when you come through the door. The linens were  on the right hand wall just past the cash, and the silks (mostly prints) were behind the cash.

The one thing is they don't have a set inventory, so what’s there is what’s available, and next time it'll probably be all different. That being said, their prices were super reasonable compared to both the other stores we went to and ordering online (most of the wools we bought were in the $17- $25 per meter range for really high quality), so we ended buying a fair bit of stuff that wasn't the blue or yellow we were there to find. Their linen and silk selection in period appropriate colours and patterns weren't great but that could be the time of year, since we went in August the wools were probably more seasonal than the lighter fabrics. They had some nice twill-weave wool that we snapped up too.

We went back at the end of our tour and bought more from them because their stuff was what we liked the best, and the price was right.

C&M Textiles

7500 Rue St-Hubert

C&M has locations in Montreal and Ottawa (Merivale Road, in the Emerald Plaza), so Avelyn stopped in at the Ottawa location before we went to check it out. They had a good selection of wool and linen but the prices were way more than we were looking to pay and colours were OK but not exactly what we were looking for.

We did stop in at the Montreal location to check it out. I think the selection was pretty similar in the fabrics we were looking for, fair bit of suiting wool and some linen, but nothing super exciting from a colour perspective. The prices were much more reasonable though, so they must adjust their pricing because of the level of competition in the area (about $10/m less than the Ottawa store was charging for the same wool). So if you're looking at buying a fair bit from C&M, it may be worth going to Montreal at that price difference.

Note they primarily sell décor fabrics so you have to look around in the shop to get to the apparel fabrics.

Tissus Marina

7515 rue Saint-Hubert

They had a small linen section in the middle of the store, nothing to write home about. Mostly just your basic colours - natural, white, black and I think navy blue. The wool section was towards the back of the store and had some nice stuff but nothing in the colours I was looking for - mostly the same basic colours as the linen. They did have really big bolts though so for volume buying I bet it would be a good spot.

Pricing was in the mid-range, probably about the same as some of the online places I've seen (so in the $20-$40 price range for the wool.

Tissues St-Hubert

7399 rue Saint-Hubert

The review I saw about this store was that they were expensive, and I can see that because it's pretty high end stuff. They had a pretty good selection of wools, although most of them were the suiting wools, or weren't the right colours for our period use. I think if we hadn't found something that worked really well elsewhere we might have gone back here for some of it because they had some yellow that looked close, but in the end we didn't buy anything here.

According to the sales guy, a lot of their wool was still in the basement because they hadn't had a chance to clear shelf space for their fall materials yet, so it's possible if we'd come back in a week or two the wools would have been better.

The sales guy was very eager, to the point where he was kind of pushy. I do give him credit though, he's the only place that had a lighter and did a burn test on a piece of fabric to show us it was indeed 100% wool.

TrimCité

7381 Rue St-Hubert,

Fairly big trim store with all kinds of interesting stuff. Unfortunately they didn't have much in the way of woven trims, but they do carry a lot of the bands of trim with metallic stitch-work that you see a lot of people using for generic utility garb.

They also had trim with embedded "jewels" and jeweled applique pieces that might work for some later period stuff. I know Avelyn and Emelote thought it was neat, just not what we were looking for on this particular trip.

Avelyn’s note: If you’re sensitive to fragrances be wary of going in this shop.

Textile Couture Elle  

7361 Rue St-Hubert

They had lots of wool selection for sure in all kinds of colours and patterns, including some lightweight suiting that would have worked in a pinch (although still not quite right). It's a pretty small store but they sure do pack it tightly. The heavier wools seemed to be along the left hand wall as you come in the door, and the lightweight wool suiting was around the corner near the front window.

Avelyn bought some nice veil weight 50-linen/50-silk fabric here. They also had lovely fine, pure silks in various degrees of sheerness that she was coveting. $25-30/m.

Prices seemed reasonable, probably in the middle for the stores we saw. The staff seemed helpful, pulling things out and down of the shelves as needed so we could take a closer look.

Goodman Carlyle 

7282 Rue St-Hubert

The review said this place had a huge wool section, and boy do they ever. Massive amounts of wool, shelves and shelves of it. It was actually fairly overwhelming. It was a pretty big jumble, so you just had to walk through everything and look. They had a bit that could have worked but they didn't have enough left on the bolt. They had some interesting herringbone and twill patterns too, but not what we were looking for and nothing that we linked more than the stuff we saw at A.C. Textiles.

They only had a few linen bolts and nothing in colours that would have worked unfortunately.

It's too bad this store didn't work out because they had a 40% off sale so it would have been nice if they'd had something.

Sam Textiles

7195 Rue Saint-Hubert

Alright, so this is where we ended up buying the specific fabric we were looking for. If you go to the back of the store, on the right hand side they have a section of really lovely high end Italian 100% linen in a bunch of colours. Both the blue and the yellow looked pretty close to what Mistress Siglinde showed us. At the back of the store on the left they also had a few shelves of wools, and again they had the right blue and yellow in wool as well.

So, we bought a bunch of stuff here but it certainly wasn't because of the friendliness of the staff or the prices.

So some tips in this store: Don't, whatever you do, remove a bolt of fabric from the shelf. You are not allowed to touch the cloth because they worry about the way the shelves are organized. I got told off because I took a bolt down so I could hold it up to another bolt to see how the colours would look together, and then I got a lecture. (Avelyn says she did it though and didn’t get caught…)

Price wise, the linen was really high quality but it was also more than I had wanted to pay. But the colours were bang on and the weave is really fine, so its way nicer than the stuff we could have ordered at Fabrics-store.com. For day-to-day garb I'd probably just go with ordering from Fabrics-store, but if you wanted to splurge on some really nice fabric for court garb or a special occasion, and don't mind paying extra for the quality, this would be a good place to check.

Just don't touch anything without someone helping you. If I'd found anything close at any of the other stores I would have gone somewhere else without a second thought, but I guess them's-the-breaks when you're looking for something really specific.

Kama Pigments

7442 Rue Saint-Hubert

This place is not a fabric store at all but I wanted to stop in since its in the same part of the street and looked like they might carry some of my dye pigments.

Most of the store is focused on painters and other artists. But they have one long shelf with fabric dyes and chemicals/ingredients used by dyers, including some traditional dye stuffs like cochineal, madder etc. Not as much of a selection as my usual supplier in (Maiwa Supply in BC), but they did carry gum Arabic in powder form, which up until now I've only found in the US. They also sold black walnut extract, so I bought a small package of that to see if it will make a black walnut dye without the mess of having to handle the nuts themselves.

Definitely will be adding it to my list of suppliers, and the store has a neat feel to it too.

Summary

So overall I'd say the trip was successful and that we eventually found what we were looking for. I definitely think it was worth spending the day in Montreal, rather than ordering wool online - we found stuff that was in most cases much more accurate to natural dyes that would have been used in period, and the prices (when you factor in shipping costs plus the low Canadian $), means we probably saved some money too.

I think the best bet is to go not when you're looking for a specific project (although we did end up finding what we wanted), but just to see what they have and to gradually add to your stock for future projects. If you have a very specific colour or fabric style in mind, it's much harder since a lot of these stores have variable inventory. Because of that, if you find the perfect fabric make sure you snag it because there's no guarantee it will be there the next time you go.

Trillium War notes

*****Oops, wrote this last week but forgot to post it. Bad blogger. :) *****

It's been a busy week so I'm a bit behind in my updates. Trillies was pretty busy but here are some thoughts.

Thursday:

Didn't really get all that much done on Thursday since that's the day we arrived. We setup our presence with Fettered Fleur, who let us crash our day-visit setup with them, and got our banners all setup. There was a bit of a scramble because I left our portable hole in the garage at home when I was packing the car. Fortunately there were some available at a couple of blacksmith merchants on site so we now have several. After that and a quick dinner snack, I was off to the rapier list for inspection and the torch tourney.

Friday:

Friday morning was the start of my main class I was signed up for, Mistress Lucrece's leather bottle-making class. We spent most of the morning learning about the historical context of the bottles, design types and then trying our hand at making our own. I got to do my first wet forming of leather, and picked up a few neat tricks to improve my overall leatherworking techniques. It was an ambitious schedule, so I wasn't able to get done my bottle during the class, but I have everything I need to finish it up at home when I have time.

Right afterwards, I taught my first of two classes at Trillies. We had a full class of six people (Yay). We scheduled my Intro to Leatherwork class on Friday so that people would have some time to finish their pouches in camp if they didn't finish during the class, but I think almost everyone got pretty much done during the two hours, which is really great.

I like the format of this class because its kind of free-form. Over the course of the two hours I do a bit of an intro and then everyone spends about an hour and a half sewing their leather while I basically do a show and tell about leather tools and leather. Because I pre-cut and pre-punch the holes, we can chat and discuss all kinds of things while they work, so they end up hopefully picking up a lot more basics than they would otherwise.

I got some great comments during the class, and I'm told some of the students were really excited about it when they got back to their camps, which is cool to hear.

Saturday:

I had a couple of classes I was going to take on Saturday morning but I ended up not going for a couple of reasons. Aethelbert was doing a neat class on how he makes shoes, covering last making, stitching with boar bristles etc. It would have been neat but it was first thing in the morning and being off site, we just couldn't make it.

I was also originally signed up for a knife sheath class that Henry was teaching right afterwards, but I released my spot because there were a lot of newer people on the waiting list, and I figured they would get more out of it than I would. I was able to pop in and see his home-made bone leather stamps in action though, which was cool.

Right afterwards I taught my second class of the event, my discussion about period leather dyes. Its a bit more of a specialized class, so we only ended up with two people. Otherwise I think it went fairly well. I haven't taught it lately so I felt a bit disorganized in my thoughts, but I got all of the information out. The main goal is really to give people the basic tools to be able to select leather colours that look right, even if they don't want to experiment with making their own dyes. We also talked a fair bit about how the leather dyes compare to period fabric dyes, since at least one of the ladies had some experience with natural fabric dyes.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon at Mistress Lucrece's camp, where she was showing us how she finishes the bottles to make them water-tight using pitch and bees wax. This was her first time trying this on a camp stove setup, so there was some experimenting involved. There was much less swearing and crying than was advertised since it actually worked pretty well.


Other general stuff:

Since I was essentially in the A&S tents for most of the event, I didn't do any thrown weapons or rapier (other than the torch tourney on Thursday). I also didn't even break my camera out until court on Saturday.

During court, we got to hear the scroll text Avelyn and I wrote for Mistress Kersteken get read out when she was presented with her Hare Valiant, seemed to go over well.

I was kindly requested by Her Excellency Catherine to stick around to take pictures of the Skrael fighters at the Rose Tourney, which followed after court. I'm pretty sure this was a RUSE though (sneaky Baroness is sneaky), because the plotting had begun to make sure certain people were there to witness my Laurel, Mistress AElfwyn, being put on vigil for the Order of the Chivalry. Woot Woot!!!!!! There was a lot of cheering. :)

So I got lots of great pictures of this fine event and some pictures of the subsequent fighting before we had to go pack up our presence (we wanted ot get it packed before dark). We hung around the rest of the night visiting, going to the awesome bardic circle and otherwise doing the SCA camping thing, and then went back to our hotel for a good night sleep before driving home on Sunday.

The classes have really become a much bigger part of Trillies in recent years, which is great to see but also puts a lot more time demands on me since I spread myself pretty thin across different SCA activities. But we are an educational organization after all, so lets edumacate people when we can. ;)

Banner making for Trillium War (with pictures)

Yes, I know this is a leatherworking blog and silk banners have nothing to do with leather. But I'm still posting it here because we've been wanting to make some silk banners for a while now, and we finally got around to doing it heading into Trillium War this past weekend.

But don't worry, I have a Trillies update coming too and that'll be largely about leatherwork, and I have a huge slate of projects on the go so there will be a number of project updates coming over the next two months.

So, to the banners.

Avelyn and I had previously purchased all of the supplies to make silk banners, but we didn't have the frames. We'd bought some copper pipes to make the frames but didn't necessarily have pieces short enough for small banners, so the week before Trillies we went out and bought a some more pieces. So we're now fully stocked (we also ordered some more brushes and such that we picked up at Trillies from HE Percival, so we're now setup to be Talfryn's eastern banner making hub). :)

So the first attempt at a banner was one we did jointly, with both of our main heraldic charges (I'm the kraken, she's the comet). We did the banner quartered and then did a purple and white border around the edges. I used a pre-hemmed silk scarf from our supplies, which made it a bit easier to work with.

You'll notice in the pictures below its a bit faded, that's because of a flaw in the instructions we got with our dye supplies. They were great up until the end, where it said to fix the dye and gutta using an iron, and then wash it out. What it didn't say is to wait 3-4 days before you wash it, to let the dye set. We only found that out when we went to the manufacturer's web site and read their instructions afterwards. 

As a result, the colours are faded and the black gutta didn't leave black lines like we expected. Lesson learned - in consultation with others it seems like they don't even bother washing it afterwards so we know better now.

You'll also see the lovely banner stand topper that we got. It was an awesome birthday gift from Their Excellencies Eleanor and Menken. I'm super please, it works like a charm and the artwork is fabulous!!! 

After the first quasi success (I admit there was a lot of swearing after the black lines washed out, and many emails and Facebook messages to try to figure out what happened), I decided I wanted to do another one. I thought it would be nice to have a small kraken sign to put up outside my classrooms at Trillies since I'd be teaching two classes (more to come in my next post on that). So I used a narrow pre-hemmed scarf to make a small personal banner that could hang from some of the modern garden stands that we have. This one I think turned out really well! Need to improve my painting technique a bit to avoid the overlap areas on the big stretches (I'm told its because the dye was drying faster than I was painting)..

But of course it wouldn't be fair to just do one for myself, so after I got mine done, I started on one for Avelyn. Thankfully I booked the week off to prep for Trillies so I could do it during the day, given the time it took to do the gutta lines. Hers is rather complicated. Here's the picture of the black lines without dye.

And here it is with the dye. I think it looks super sexy, the purple and white lozengy really pops. I might go with a different colour border next time, not sure about the yellow and black, but we didn't want purple because we thought it would be too busy given the complexity of the lozengy. We also made the bars in the border longer than in mine by about double so it would be less busy.

And here they are side by side on our modern stand (its actually a target shooting stand, but it collapses and is just the right size for these. We put little wooden dowels in the bottom to help wight it down a bit in the breeze, not sure that was super successful, they kept falling out. May need to rethink that.

Next up, I'm hoping to do a full 5-6 ft long standard for each of us. Hopefully in time for Summer Siege if I can get the rest of my projects going. My gutta line drawing could still improve, fewer blotches and blobs would be nice, but overall I think I'm getting the knack for these things.

Planning for Trillium War

We're less than a month from Trillium War and things are starting to firm up. Looks like this year at war I'm going to be spending most of my time on A&S activities, rather than rapier or thrown weapons. I'll still be doing some rapier marshaling, and I'll make sure I throw in some of the tournaments since I'm the Baronial champion, but I can see me spending most of my time at the A&S tents.

I've confirmed I'll be teaching two classes this year, both of which I've taught a few times before. On Friday I'll be teaching my Intro to Leatherworking, which is basically making a small basic belt pouch as a way to learn some basics of leatherwork. I go over types of leather, stitches etc, and then we spend some time assembling a pouch.

The second class is my leather dye class, which I taught at Practicum, and at Trillies last year as well. It was specifically requested that I teach it again this year as some people missed it previously. It's more of a roundtable where we discuss what colours were achievable in period, the period leather dye sources, my experiments to get the recipes to work, and people can see the finished projects and test swatches of dyes. Aside from learning the dye process, the real goal is to show people what colours are appropriate in leather items so they can choose their leathers and modern dyes accordingly.

I'm mostly prepped for both classes, so that's good. I had some kits left over from last time I taught the intro to leatherwork class, and went to pick up some more leather at Zeli's on the weekend so I can make a few more. All the leather got cut out and pre-punched last night so all that's left is printing out the hand outs and throwing  them in the bags. There's nothing really extra needed for the leather dye class other than making sure I have copies of the hand outs.

There are also a handful of classes I'm going to want to take as well, so lots to do and see this year.

We also have some things we would like to do before Trillies. For one, we'd like to finally get some banners done up (either silk or some painted ones, just to have something to jazz up our site). We're staying in a hotel, so we won't have a full camp, but some heraldry to mark us out would be nice. Fortunately we have all the supplies for doing both silk and fabric banners in the basement, so last night we spent a bit of time plotting out what we want to do. I'm hopeful to have at least a small banner or standard done up by the end of the month.