Tuesday 21 January 2020

New Kingdom A&S Project

It's that time of year again. Kingdom A&S in Ealdormere is approaching in March, and as the host Baron and a member of the Order of the Crucible, I'm feeling like I need to pull out something from my bag of tricks.

As you may know from reading this blog in the past, I don't like doing the same old same old when it comes to A&S projects. I like things that are out of the ordinary, or that I haven't seen done before in the SCA context. That's how I got to the stick purse and the leather dyes, and I think I've come up with a good one this time.

I'm not going to get into too much detail here because I want the project to be a bit of a surprise, but I'll give some hints:

1) The item that inspired it was something I saw from one of our museum stops in Europe.

2) The type of item was not done in Europe in period, but would have been encountered by European travelers. The culture that produced it had extensive interactions with Europe, and the items go back to at least the 12th C in that culture. It didn't arrive in Europe until the early 17th C.

3) It is a leather item.....sort of. :)

4) As usual, I'm having to lean some new skills to make it.

5) As usual, I could be biting off more than I can chew, so we'll see if I can pull it off. Possible I'll enter something that's not completed or I might have to scale it down from the full period examples (which are large, incredibly ornate and complicated). To give you a sense, modern makers with extensive expertise at using traditional techniques usually take up to 5 months to make the thing I'm looking at.

On the bright side, my research is more or less complete, other than re-reading a few peer reviewed papers to make sure I've got everything for my documentation.