Kingdom Award Badges - Round 2 (With Pictures)

This weekend I kept chugging along with my work on developing cutwork patterns for our Kingdom award badges. I'm now moving on to a few of the slightly more complicated badges which require a bit of a different technique.

First up, the Thorbjorn's Hammer badge.

The pattern for this badge is actually fairly simple, but it has a couple of aspects that add an element of complication to the mix. Both are elements I'll need to master as there's lots of evidence these techniques were used for the cutwork book covers, so I may as well get working at it.

So the main difference between this and the previous two badges is that the main charge on the badge, the hammer itself, is actually a floating element. So, unlike the other badges where it was just a matter of cutting out a pattern, for this one I actually had to cut out the hammer as a stand alone element and then paste it separately.

The other slightly different element is that the hammer needs a bit of tooling on it so that the handle has the right 3-D feel to it. So I had to do small tooling on a cut-out pattern before it got stuck to the badge.

Here's a picture of the pieces cut out:

And then of course after they are painted (with fabric underneath to get the right contrast):

Next up is the Orion badge. It has similar elements, with the ring on the outside and a floating main charge in the middle. The main issue with this one is the harp because I have to cut out the harp strings, which will give me a bit of practice on really small cutwork shapes.

Here are the pieces cut out and painted.

I have two different purple fabric colours so I tested it with both. I ended up going with the darker colour on the left because it's more herladic, although I think I need to find some different fabric that's something in between the two for future badges.

Aaaaaaand, here are the two finished badges trimmed and mounted on a belt loop.

I actually think the Hammer badge is my favourite so far. Really happy with how it turned out. I think folks will really like wearing something like this (particularly if I can shrink it down so its a bit less cumbersome).

I think the Orion still needs some work. I'd like to get the strings straighter, and next time I think I'll use purple to do the outer ring instead of black, it makes the overall badge too dark right now. Plus, I think I'd try to find some lighter fabric for the purple.

Kingdom Award Badges - New and Improved with Cutwork/Filigree (with pictures)

As you'll have seen from my most recent post, I'm starting the process of working on developing some new leatherwork skills with the end goal of recreating 15th century (ish) Islamic filigree book covers. There's lots to do, but I thought I'd get started by working on my cutwork/filigree skills.

When I'm working on this kind of skill development, I prefer to do it by doing something useful, rather than just wasting leather doing samples. So I thought about my project from several years ago, where I developed tooling patterns for the various award badges. So I'm upgrading my award badges to version 2.0 - now with cutwork.

Much like with the tooling versions, I started out with the easiest one first - the Maiden's Heart. It's a fairly straightforward pattern with large areas of colour. I then moved on to the Order of the Wain, again because it has a fairly straightforward colour pattern that lends itself well to cutwork.

I started out by marking the line pattern onto a wet round of leather, the same as I would for tooling. However, instead of using the swivle knife next, I actually cut out pieces of leather to create blank areas in the pattern. In the case of the Maiden's Heart, I cut out anywhere that should be blue on the pattern, while in the case of the Order of the Wain badge, I cut out the white areas.

Here's an example, using the Maiden's Heart:

The original book covers have a layer of paper or silk under the cutwork leather to have the colour that shows through. I didn't want to use paper since these could get wet, and I didn't have the right colour of silk so I went with cotton for the purposes of the badge.

Here it is over the blue cotton fabric (although looks a bit closer to purple in the light of my work desk in the basement):

Then of course I have to paint the alternating colour on the leather. That's also a period practice, lots of examples of painted leather on tooled artefacts. Many of the books have either dyed leather or colour accents applied to the surface of the leather (often goldwork). 

Here's the Wain badge at the painted stage:

I cut the fabric in a round to match the shape of the leather and paste it down onto a round blank piece of leather the same shape and size as the top. I then paste the cutwork piece on top so that the fabric is sandwiched between. I also cut out a strip of leather about an inch wide and the length of the circle to form the belt loop at the back. I then punch the holes around the edge of the circle and sew it all together using some light leather as trim (since otherwise the edges of the circle would be pretty messy.

Here's a picture of the two completed badges (with a ruler as per Her Excellency Lucia's request to see the scale of the item).

So a pretty good start. They are much quicker to make this way than with the leather tooling so that's a big advantage. They do use a bit more leather though, so there's a bit of a cost trade-off for time.

I plan to experiment some more with the other badges since they'll require a bit more thought about how to do the patterns with the cutwork. I'm also thinking of scaling down the pattern so I can do the badges smaller. That wasn't feasible using the tooling techniques because my skills just weren't there (at least with the more complicated badges), but at least for these two I could probably drop the size by half and still be doable using the cutwork. It might make the badges more wearable for people, as right now they are a bit big (for my preference at least).

Update heading into Practicum

I guess its been a while since I've done an update. Lots of little tidbits to update on:

• While we were in the UK, Maggie asked if I could do a leather badge for her like the ones I made for her parents. Except with a rainbow. So Maggie's getting a rainbow badge (shhhhh, don't tell her). I started the sketches to figure it out, I think I'll throw a trillium on there too so its clear she ours, even with her cute little British accent. :)

• I've made some progress on my final stick-purse. I'd been stalled for a while so its good to get it going again. The leather I'm using is still to thick, so its really hard to do some of the hand-sewing, but its thin enough that it folds the way I need it to, so it will work. It's just a bad combination of design and materials that's making it a pain in the butt to finish.
  
  This past week, I managed to finish the first pouch, just need to dye the draw strings and weave them in. Just three more to go, plus the handle.
  
  I'm still contemplating whether to go to Kingdom A&S so I want to keep pushing to get it finished in time, just in case I do go. 

• Practicum is this weekend in Ottawa. This is a really big arts and sciences learning event with classes all over the spectrum (including a few fencing classes this year).  I'll be teaching my new class on my period leather dyes, so I've been working on finalizing my hand-out lately. Eventually I'll publish it online as a resource too.
  
  I'll be spending the rest of the day taking a bookbinding class from Mistress Tarian. I'm really looking forward to since Tarian really knows this stuff and does fantastic work! I've been wanting to learn this from her for a while now. Since my next project might actually be a book with a filigree cover like the ones I saw in Dublin, it's perfect timing too. That's assuming I'm any good at it of course. :) Plus, I'll get to use some of the goat skin I bought for my stick-purse that didn't work (it was to thick but will be perfect for a book cover).

I'll try to do a post Practicum update next week on how my class went and nay changes I want to make, plus maybe some pictures of my bookbinding project.

Gift for Robert the Blue and Lerthan (With Picture)

I haven't posted much to the blog lately for a couple of reasons. One is that we were in the UK for a few weeks on a vacation/research trip, so you can expect another post shortly about that. The other reason is that I was working on some things that I didn't want certain people to know about. :) This is one of those things.

As part of the trip, we were staying for a few days with some friends who moved to England a couple of years ago. When they left I had just finished working on my Ealdormere award badge patterns, and RJ had talked about wanting some belt badges for his awards (he has a Maiden's Heart and a Scarlet Banner).

I figured since we'd be seeing them I should probably do up the badges finally, and that I needed to do the same for Lerthan as well. I haven't yet figured out the engineering I want for the belt loops but I figured if I brought the raw badges they could applique them or use them for something else as well.

Here's the picture of the sets of badges that I did up.

The best part is that little Maggie (who's not so little any more) apparently really liked that badges and wanted to know why she didn't get one. So, I've now been commissioned to do a badge for Maggie with a rainbow on it. :)

A Gift for Kersteken (with Pictures)

I haven't posted in the last few weeks because I've been working on a secret project, and didn't want to even hint at it because I didn't want a certain someone to guess I was working on something for them.

Now that we're all clear, here's what I've been working on.

This past weekend at Feast of the Bear in Toronto, a good friend was inducted into the Order of the Pelican for her service to the realm. Not only is Kersteken super deserving of the honour, but she's also a local fencer. In fact, she's one of the first fencers to get authorized that I had helped to teach. As far as I can tell, the only time you won't find her on the rapier list at an event is when she's in the kitchen, doing entourage or otherwise working (it seems like she's always working, but also always on the rapier list - maybe she has a clone. That would explain how she gets so much done).

Anyway, I decided that I needed to do something special for the occasion. That of course meant making her a rapier sheath.

I had to do a bit of plotting though, so I tricked Kersteken into letting me know how long her rapiers are. It went something like this:

Me: Woe is me, one of my swords is going to need to be replaced soon. Maybe I should look at getting a longer rapier. Kersteken, you use a longer sword don't you?

Kersteken: Go longer for sure! I can bring my extra one next week to practice so you can try.

Me: Cool. How long are they? I think my current one is 35 inch.

Kersteken: 41 & 42

Snort! Done and done.

Then I contacted Master Brand, who was able to track down the artwork for her personal heraldry (I don't think I'd ever even seen her personal heraldry before so this was neat).

I wanted the sheath to have the pelican badge on it. Of course, if you followed my badge carving project a few years ago, you'll know I didn't do that one because its insanely detailed. And this one was going to be really small, only a couple of inches high, so the cuts are all really small and finicky. That meant the first step in making the sheath was to figure out the badge.

Here's a pic of my practice attempt, which I think isn't bad:

I then carved the pelican on a band of leather (I didn't want to carve it directly on the long piece for the body of the sheath since I only had the one piece long enough to make it - no second chances there). Here's the finished piece painted and ready to be attached. BTW - Good call by Avelyn to use the mustard to mark the little beaks on the chicks so it's more obvious what they are!:

Once that was done, it was on to carving her heraldry onto the sheath, which was comparably easy. :) Biggest challenge was figuring out which parts to raise and which to push back into the background. Here's the tooling pre-painting:

And here are some shots of the main body piece before I started sewing it up:

Finally, here are some pictures of the finished piece once I glued and stitched up the join and did all of the touch-ups on the edges and holes. The band at the top is proportionately thicker than I usually do because I was concerned about making the pelican any smaller. But since Kersteken uses a much longer blade than I usually work with (this is designed to fit a 42 inch rapier), it is relatively proportional.

Overall I'm quit happy with how it turned out. There are some things that I would do differently next time, but I'll keep them to myself (although I've talked with Mistress AElfwyn about what I'd change). The most important thing is that Kersteken (I guess that should now be Mistress Kersteken) really, really liked it.

Now back to your regularly scheduled stick-purse updates. :)

Catching up and Planning Ahead

I haven't posted here in a while, largely because I haven't really done much leatherworking lately.

I did manage to finish my pair of leather turnshoes and entered them in the A&S competition at Summer Siege in June, but never did take a picture of the completed set. :) Guess I was too busy taking pictures of the other entries.

Beyond that, I did a little of bit of tooling work on an award badge I'd started a while back, so its ready for dying/painting now.

I did have a bit of a idea on how I can engineer a way to mount my award badges on belt loops without needing to use glue or anything modern, and without punching holes through the actual designs. I need to use thicker leather to do it though so I can't test the idea with my current batch of badges.

For my secret project, I've done some design work and tested the tooling patterns a bit. It's going to test my ability but should be doable. I'm now in a bit of a holding pattern.

Not having done much leatherworking, you know I've been doing something with my time though, right?

Actually, I've been testing a bunch of period recipes for future use. We've always said we wanted to get a good collection of recipes that we've actually made so that we can pull off a feast with less planning needed (see the miracle Kersteken and Sven pulled off at Coronation as reference). I've made a good dent in that for sure, including a couple of recipes I don't think I've ever seen at a feast (probably because they would be hard to pull off in a normal feast kitchen - one needs a rotisserie and the other needs to be steamed, which would be hard to do for a feast of 40-50 people).

I need to start thinking about the QPT, which is coming up again this fall. My original plan was that my secret project might make a good entry but I'm not sure if it will be ready by that point at the rate we're going. I could do another pair of shoes, maybe with a bit more complexity to the design? Or, I could present where I am right now with the stick-purse (with non period-appropriate materials) and get feedback on that? The documentation is in good shape, I've just be stalled while I search out the right leather to use.

Workplan - General A&S projects

My other two workplans were more timelines for specific steps of each project. On this one I'm not going to get into as much detail but I'm going to at least try to set myself a timeline for some of the projects that are on my to do list. I'm hoping setting myself deadlines will work better than what I've been doing, which is just making a list and getting to items when I get to them.

Priority will be on getting the leather dye and stick-purse projects done, but I hope to be able to fit some of these in during gaps in those workplans.


Herald's binder for Harrowgate
Deadline - Break the Back of Winter (done and presented to Canton at Christmas party)

I've bought what I need and I have the carving pattern, so now I just have to get it done. I think Break the Back is a reasonable timeline to do it. (surprised them by having it ready three months early). :)

Leatherworking class for Practicum
Deadline - Practicum (February 22)

I'm mostly ready to go. The class itself is ready, I just have to prep some more kits and maybe prep a few more examples to show during the class.

Badges for Largess Contest at Break the Back
Deadline - Break the Back of Winter (March 15)

I started at Fall A&S by cutting out the leather squares. Just have to carve and paint 12 of the badges.


And here's a list of some of the other ongoing projects I have on mys list, just to keep them on the radar:

1. Replace Avelyn's favour (likely make a second more sturdy one for wearing in armour as well)
2. Develop carving pattern for my heraldry and badge
3. Finish Avelyn's lamellar
4. Start work on designing new leather leg pieces for Avelyn's new knee armour
5. Do "commissioned" children's archery glove for Eluned
6. Do "commissioned" belt favour (with award badges) for Robert the Blue
7. Figure out shoe pattern

Wrap-up from Kingdom A&S and the QPT

Warning, this will probably be a long post. :)

Wow. Something tells me this won't be the last Queen's Prize Tournament.

There's plenty of discussion and comments out there about the day, so I'm going to focus on my small slice of it but I will say that was one of the best, most enjoyable days I've spent at an SCA event - ever.

I'm a behind the scenes kind of guy. I'm also surrounded by a hoard of uber-talented people who tend to get a lot of attention (well deserved), so I sometimes feel like I'm in a bit of a shadow.

I don't enter A&S competitions that often, and the last couple of years I've had mixed feelings from my Kingdom A&S experiences. As a result, I wasn't really planning to enter anything this year. My stick-purse wasn't ready and I didn't really have anything that was completed that would be worth entering. Then the Queen's Prize Tournament was announced. It was just for comment - no judging sheets, just live discussion about the item. And they encouraged us to enter unfinished projects.

For those who've been reading this blog, you know that this pushed me to enter my period leather dye research. It's not nearly done but I figured it would be a good chance to get some input and suggestions on my dyes, plus get out of the shadows a little bit. Following QPT, my plan now is to enter two projects in the Spring A&S competition - the stick-purse, and the leather dyes (which I really only got into in the first place because I wanted to go 100% accurate on my stick-purse recreation).

Interestingly, for the QPT I was grouped with the dyes and pigments, rather than with the other leather items. This actually made for a really interesting discussion with my judges. I had Master Dafydd, who knows a lot about leather and leather tanning, but I also had THL Lassarfhina, who's more into scribal uses of inks and pigments, and Mistress Gaerwen, who is hard-core about fabric dying.

Through the conversation, they really liked my documentation (despite it's tome-like length). I also got some really interesting ideas on how to get some of the dyes to work better:

• Try grinding the indigo powder even finer so it can more easily penetrate the leather
• Try soaking the leather in the indigo bath for a much longer time (instead of just painting it on)
• Use distilled water rather than filtered as the chlorine can react 
• For the red dye, try applying the olive oil at the 10-ish hour mark when the red is still bright, rather than waiting until it dries out completely and fades.
• Look at the recipes using Roman vitriol (copper sulphate), might make a nice blue

Since I'm not interested in doing any of the recipes using bodily fluids, I gave Gaerwen a piece of leather for the next time she's doing an indigo dye, so she can see how it works. :)

Outside of the roundtable discussion with my judges, I also chatted with a number of other people about my leather dyes and the stick purse. I know Mistress Ælfwyn referred one of the other leatherwork entrants to me as he had done the iron-based black dye and was interested in information about colours. I had a number of people ask if I could share my documentation with them, which I think is really cool.

I also had a nice conversation with THL Wilfrid & THL Jhone about the dyes and the stick-purse that was found on the Mary Rose. Wilfrid suggested looking at other liquids, like alcohol or oil instead of water, as they might help the leather absorb the pigment. We also cut a corner of the green and red off to see how deeply it penetrated (it tinted the leather all the way through, which is a good sign). 

He also mentioned that the green colour I got was bang on what he would have expected from buckthorn and was apparently called goose poop green in period. So, yay for goose poop green! And, he mentioned my project had given him the itch to go home and try some of the dyes himself, which I think is a really big compliment!

Looking at the way the red dye faded, Jhone suggested that the fading may have been because of the alum wash rather than the dye itself. She noticed that the edges of the leather had more red. This could be because it was more exposed to the dye on the edge, but also because the alum may have collected more on the edge. She suggested I try painting the leather with the alum water rather than dipping it (so it distributes more evenly). The other idea we had was to soak the leather more thoroughly in the alum-water to see if that affects how the dye sticks to the leather.

When I wasn't geeking out I had setup a table to do some leather tooling but I admit I didn't get much done. I did talk about it with some people who came by to see what I was doing, so that's always good. Maybe some of them will give it a try.

At the end of the day I got a really great prize for my participation. Master Dafydd gave me one of the first arrowheads he ever made, which is just really cool. I'll have to figure out something really good to do with it! I'm told he was rather insistent in picking my name. :) 

All in all, having so many really talented people interested in my work, especially since it just started out as one of those side projects I had to do get the stick-purse done, was really cool. Not sure I can say I'm in the shadows anymore. :)

Side note: I've mentioned to my Canton that I might make this research into a class that I could teach. It probably won't be as hand's-on as my leather pouch class, but I'll wait and see where I land after Spring A&S.

New leather carving pattern - Harrowgate's tower

So while at Baron's Howe this past weekend, I spent my day Saturday working on some leatherworking. Namely, I was developing the carving pattern for Harrowgate Heath's tower. Since the Canton's badge still hasn't been passed (I believe there were some conflicts that needed to be resolved), I'm using the tower for now to represent the Canton.

I didn't bring all of my dyes and such, but was able to finish the carving portion. The consensus seemed to be that I got it right with my first try. It had the right amount of depth without being too busy (which could have been a problem given the level of detail in the original drawing I was working from).

I used my new angled swivel knife, which made a big difference for a lot of the finer detail work, which gives me hope I can improve some of my other carving patterns for the various awards badges.

I'll try to post a few pictures once I get a chance to unpack my gear and finish with the dyes.

Some project updates

I haven't really had much time to work on leather projects lately so I don't have enough to update on any individual project to justify a post. Instead, I thought I'd just do a quick post summarizing some updates and thoughts on some of the things I have on the go:

Stick-Purse

I finally heard back from the museum in the Netherlands about their stick-purse. As I thought might have been the case, my original e-mail must have gotten lost in the shuffle as they were moving to their new location. I re-sent the note last week and heard back within a couple of days. They've passed my questions on to the curator, so at least that's progress.

I was also talking with Avelyn about the project the other night. I'm hoping to have the purse completed in enough time before Kingdom A&S next year that I can actually try to convince the gatekeeper at a small local event (event still TBD) to try it instead of a cash-box to see how it works. I think that's really how the stick-purse would have been used in period, so I'd like to actually apply the concept in real life and get feedback that I can include in my A&S documentation.

Thinking about that, I need to figure out how to tell what coins are in what pouch. I don't think there's any evidence of how this would have been done in period. Perhaps the money-changer would know based on how they positioned the purse on the table. I'm also thinking the use of different colours on the pouches or the draw strings might have been an indicator. Maybe when I hear back from the curator I'll see if we can tell how the colouring on the pouch was applied (were they all the same colour, or were some different).

For my purposes I may just use different colour lacing to do the draw strings on each pouch, unless I get more info from the museum that indicates a different method.

Kingdom A&S

My Kingdom A&S submission is done for this year and I've given it to Eluned for her to take with her to the event. I've also sent in my forms in advance (even though that isn't necessary for beginner level projects) and followed up with a confirmation e-mail to the A&S Minister since I know they were having problems with the online form at one point.

My documentation ended up being a total of 22 pages, but a lot of that was the annexes which include photocopies of my references and resources. My actual written information was about 6 pages.

Hopefully it will go over well and there will be some folks there to judge it. There aren't a lot of people that specialize in leather tooling in Ealdormere (lots of people do it to some extent for armour and such but not necessarily as an A&S activity), but there are some very accomplished leather workers. Hopefully some of them will be there.

I'm a little concerned how they will judge it. While leather tooling is entirely period, and we have evidence that heraldry was tooled onto leather items, my projects are very much modern-SCA in orientation. I'm hoping they'll be OK with using period practices to produce items for use in the modern SCA.

Other Bits and Pieces

My heraldry that I submitted at Pennsic is working its way through the system and is now showing up in the OSCAR system as being out for the commentary period. Hopefully if all goes well I will have both my Arms and Badge passed early in the new year. Then I'll have to figure out the carving pattern for both. :) The badge should be fairly easy, just a blue calamari (aka krakan or squid) fieldless. The arms are a bit more complicated because there are two caravels (basically a large sailing ship) in chief that are fairly complicated to draw.

We've been doing a bit of A&S at home the past few nights, unrelated to leather. We bought some fabric paint markers and are experimenting with them vs using standard acrylic paints with fabric medium. If we can get the markers to work well it will make banner projects sooooooo much easier. We bought a few different brands and are experimenting with them to see which work best, and which have the best colour pallets.

I quickly touched base with Nathaniel at Feast of the Hare about the leather Herald's folder for the canton that he was looking for help with, but we didn't really have time to chat. I'll have to send him a note so we can scope out the project a bit more.

Planning for Kingdom A&S

Once again, Kingdom A&S is just around the corner. This year, the event is being held in Brampton (http://www.vestyorvik.org/event.html), so I don't expect that we will be going.

That being said, in some years they will accept entries in absentia, and Eluned has already said she could bring my project down if I want to send it with her. As last year's Pentathalon champion, she pretty much has to go. :)

The thing is, I have enough on my plate that I don't really want to start a brand new project and try to get it done in the next month, so I think I have a plan.

If they will accept entries for people who are not on-site (still need to confirm that), I'm going to put together all of my leather carving badges as a beginner-level leather carving project. The whole point of doing them was to work on  my leather craving skills, so they are definitly beginner level, but that project was a significant amount of work over the past 6 months so I think it would be a good entry.

It also shows practical, modern-SCA applications for skills and tools that were used in period. It would have been entirely period to carve, emboss and stamp heraldry and other patterns on leather. All I was doing is using Ealdoremere's approved award badges as my patterns instead of replicating existant examples of other people's heraldry.

In my resources from the Pennsic class I took, there are examples of heraldry carved in leather. I also have my Knives and Scabbard's book, which has a section on the tools they would have used (which are basically the same as the ones we use now).

I'll have to look at the badges and see if there are any I would like to redo (I'm thinking the Scarlet Banner and the Crucible maybe). Beyond that, I'd just need to pull together beginner-level documentation - I can probably use the forms from last year since I haven't seen anything go out from the A&S Minister yet about this year's competition.

Of course, since I won't be there to talk to my judges, hopefully my score sheets will actually be sent to me this year, instead of Dafydd ap Sion, so it won't take me six months to get their comments.

Badge Photo - Order of the Crucible

Well, this weekend I finished the last of my planned badge patterns. As expected, the Order of the Crucible badge was the toughest of them all, and I'm not really happy with how it turned out. The star in the middle is OK but I really don't like the way the concentric rings around the outside turned out. The red rings are supposed to be much narrower and the yellow raised rings should be much more prominent. 

The problem is my tools won't really let me make the rings much narrower, so I may have to rethink how I do them. Maybe if I use cuts instead of embossing the rings? It might help with the evenness of the rings as well.

Because the lines on the star and the rings are so narrow, it also made it really hard to paint it cleanly, even using my smallest brush. 

That being said, I got the weave of the star lines right and it looks not too bad so it isn't a total write-off. 

I think this will go in the "needs-work" category before I do it for anyone for real though.

Leather Carving - Thorbjorn's Hammer Badge

I'm really happy with how this one turned out. I thought it was going to be more complicated than it actually was. I can probably clean up the handle of the hammer a little bit and I'd like to get rid of the little ridge that formed at the top of the circle from the tooling, but overall I think it turned out pretty well.

This is the second last badge to work on. All I have left is the Order of the Crucible. That one's going to be a pain, I can tell. I may also try to redo the Scarlet Banner badge, see if I can work on the wolves a bit.

Photo - Scarlet Banner Badge

I'm now starting to get into some of the harder badges to carve. This is the badge of the Scarlet Banner. The two black shapes are supposed to be wolves. I think the one on the left doesn't look too bad, but the one on the right looks more like a panther or something.

I think I'll have to work on this one some more, but it's not a bad start I suppose.

Pictures - Orion Badge Pattern

I managed to finish the carving pattern for the Orion award badge this weekend. The carving itself turned out pretty well, I'm happy with it. I painted the background around the badge a dark brown and I'm not so sure I like it, but I thought it would be a good idea to try something other than black.

The Orion badge pattern was fairly simple to do. The hardest part was figuring out how I wanted to the the harp strings since they are supposed to be yellow surrounded by the purple background. They are too narrow to carve properly so I just did decorative cuts that I then filled wit the yellow dye. Turned out not too bad I think.

Here's the badge fieldless:

Here it is with the background painted brown:

Pictures - Latest Badge Carving

After my first failed attempt at doing the badge for the Order of the Wain, I did some more work on the pattern last night. I ended up reversing the pattern so that the light coloured section is pushed to the background, the dark is embossed. I think it turned out well.

Here's a picture of the badge "field-less", before I coloured around it.

Fieldless - Order of the Wain badge

 And here is the finished badge with a black background.

Order of the Wain badge on black background

Next up is the badge for the Orion. I've got most of the carving done, so I just have to paint it.

General Updates on Various Projects

Not really enough news to do an update on individual projects, but its been a while since I've posted so I thought I would do a general update note on a bunch of things.

Stick-Purse
I've written to the Fries Museum in the Netherlands about their stick-purse. This is the museum that Mistress Elizabeth spoke to about how the pouches are attached to the handle. I'm hoping they'll be able to provide me with information about the specific dimensions of their purse, as well as some details about the construction of the pouches themselves.

The picture in Purses in Pieces doesn't show any seams on the pouches so its hard to tell what pattern to use for the pouches (are there seams on the back and bottom, or is it a single piece of leather gathered at the mouth of the pouch). Pictures of the other extant example show that the pouches are standard rectangualar pouches like I've made in the past, so I can always go that route as well. Obviously there are different ways of making the pouches so either option would be appropriate, but I'm still curious about the construction. I'm hoping the museum will either have additional pictures from other angles, or can tell me about the pouch construction.

It's been about a week or two since I e-mailed them but the web site for the museum says they are opening a new location in September so they may be delayed in responding to enquiries. Hopefully my note won't get lost in the shuffle. All I can do is wait I guess.

Badge Project

Last weekend I did some work on developing my next badge pattern, this time it was the badge for the Order of the Wain. Unfortunately, I'm not at all happy with how it turned out. While the pattern itself was OK, the four stars didn't turn out right and ended up just looking like white blobs. I'll have to try either carving them differently or possibly reversing the pattern so that I can use my star stamp. I'll have to figure something out because the same stars are used in the badge of the Orion (although I think based on the colour pattern the stamp will work for that one).

On the bright side, I've already had a couple of people ask me about making them badges, so that's kind of cool.

Leather dye project

I'm in a bit of a holding pattern on this project while I wait for a book to come in via inter-library loan. If it doesn't come in soon, I may have to go to the University of Ottawa Library, as they have a copy of the book I'm looking for. I'll just need to get a new library card that lets me access all of the local libraries, including the colleges, universities and federal collections.

This is the book I referenced in my previous leather dye posts that apparently contains recipes. Hopefully, I can pull enough details out of it to work with Lyda on figuring out how they would work using illumination pigments.

Other Projects
At Pennsic, Eluned asked me if I would be able to make a small archer's glove for one of her girls, since she wasn't able to find one at any of the merchants that would fit a child's hand. I did some research online and found some instructions, which included what measurements to take. I may modify the pattern a bit but the measurement information was certainly helpful. I sent the instructions to Eluned so she can take the measurements. Once I get them I'll start playing with the design and see what I can come up with.

Carving Project - Maiden's Heart Badge

As you may recall, after finishing my pattern for the Ealdormere populace badge I decided I wanted to work out carving patterns for the various award badges both for Kingdom and Baronial awards. Since I'm still learning, I decided to start with the easiest ones first, so this weekend I worked out a pattern for the Maiden's Heart badge.

I'm happy enough with the carving portion. I think I need to improve the depth of some of the tooling to get a better 3D effect but otherwise it turned out the way I was expecting. I think I still need to work on the dying though. The blue is too dark and the yellow needs some additional layers I think to make it the solid colour I was hoping for. The dying is a bit rough around the edges too but I was just testing the design so I wasn't being as careful as I would if it was going on an actual project.

I experimented with doing a white coating under the yellow and it seems to have worked to make it brighter. Not sure if that's what I should do with the blue, or if I should just mix up a lighter blue. I may need to experiment and see what works better.

Anyway, here's the picture of the badge.

New project - Baronial and Kingdom badges

For those who have been reading my blog regularly, I have an confession. I keep adding new projects to my list. It's true, I guess I just keep getting these "bright" ideas and want to work on them. At least I don't have to worry about running out of things to do. :)

When I was taking my leather carving class, I developed a carving pattern of the Ealdormere populace badge (pictures are posted on an earlier blog post). This got me to thinking, if I want to keep working on my leather carving skills, I should really keep practicing. If I'm going to practice, wouldn't it make sense to practice with designs that I might actually use in an SCA context, rather than the typical flower designs and such in the pattern books?

So with that in mind, I'm going to start trying to figure out carving patterns for the various awards in Ealdormere and Skraeling Althing. Ultimately, I'll be able to use them to decorate various projects in the future if I'm making things as a gift. Some, like the Maiden's Heart, will be fairly easy. Some of the others are more complicated (I'm not really looking forward to figuring out how to carve the wolves on the Scarlet Banner).

Pictures of the badges at the Kingdom level are found here: http://www.ealdormere.ca//index.php/awards

At the Baronial level I've sent a note to our Baronial Persuivant to see if there are images available. I know it was being worked on a few years ago but not sure if it ever got finished.

I suspect this will be one of those ongoing projects that just pops up occasionally. I'll post pictures as I work on it and will tag the posts with "badges" so people can look for updates.