Weavers block?

Is there such a thing as weavers block?  The perugia towel project is hopelessly behind.  At this rate, there is very little hope that I will have a pentathlon entry together for WOW, which is maybe ok but sort of disgraceful since I have several projects that would be great for an entry, if only I had any hope of getting them done.

Part of the problem was the massive regalia project I sort of got stuck with.  It was decided at some point that the barony needed new regalia for all the fighters.  Getting this done as a group project was a disaster, so I recruited a couple of reliable people and we did it as a committee.  Except that one of the people turned out to be not so reliable, or at least not so good at allowing for equipment malfunction, so I ended up making 13 tabards and 8 half capes all by myself.  There are still favors to do for the war, which I need to get started on figuring that someone will flake on me again and I'll have to make 40 of the bloody things two days before we are supposed to leave for the event.

I hate regalia.

Needless to say, this project has turned me off from SCA projects in general.  Plus I have commission work (yay!) that's taking up most of my sewing time, leaving little in the way of energy or motivation to confront annoying projects like the perugia towel.

Weaving with linen is tricky, it's not no give so you have to dress the loom very carefully, and since I am working with a jack loom which does not maintain even tension on the warps, getting a clean shed is impossible, making the weaving slow and tedious at best.  I have managed to get the first section of white done though.  The selvedges look like crap, but should clean up a bit in the wash.  My first start on the blue brocading did not go terribly well so I picked it out and applied some flax seed sizing, which should make attempt 2 a little easier.  Once I figure out how the banded section is supposed to be treadeled anyway.

My Mary of Hungary dress is languishing.  I did re-do the embroidery graph so the embroidery on the smock will be the right width, but I am dreading making the dots on that much fabric.  The whole thing is something like 220 inches around before you pleat it.  Luckily my pattern had the same ration of pleat draw-in as the original, so I am confident that this is not an insane amount of fabric, but it is an insane number of dots to draw by hand.  I need to order some iron on smocking dots, otherwise I will go bananas before I've stitched so much as a pleat.

I did manage to get it together to teach a class on smocking at University this last weekend, which was a lot of fun.  Everyone in the class was able to do at least a couple of stitches by the end, which I count as a success.  I very much enjoy the teaching aspects of my SCA life, sharing what I know with interested and eager people is fun and energizing.