Mammen Masks

I had so much fun making the elevation coat/caftan that I decided to make one for me.  This time I am using motifs from the Mammen embroidery to decorate the neck and cuffs.  The small masks will go on the neck edges down to where the brooch will sit, I could (and probably should) go all the way down the front but (a) I find that rather heavy looking on the lighter colored wool and (b) I am lazy.  I'll be using the acanthus vine motif on the cuffs, changing the color scheme just a little bit to correspond with the silks I have available.

The threads are a combination of filament silk and spun silk.  The filament looks much nicer and seems to wear better, you really can barely tell the difference between the spun and regular DMC cotton, which is deeply annoying to me but this is all left overs from other projects so it's not so bad.  I'm really happy with how this is looking so far.  The stitching is also going fairly quickly which is a nice change from some of my recent projects.

Sadly I don't have a picture of the totally done elevation coat, but you can get a general idea of what I did from the pictures.  I'm very pleased with the design I came up with for the cuffs.  My original plan for the neck was more elaborate and I think would have been more effective but the lady who received the coat was thrilled with it as is, so it all worked out.  Trying to sew a garment without measurements is bad enough, but when it's for something like a Laurel elevation, when it's going to be seen by literally EVERYONE and you really do want the person to be happy with it, it's a little scary.  I'm very glad she was so happy and that it fit so well.

Stitching away

I should never ever bemoan not having enough to do!  I'm now back to hiding from the calendar.  In addition to a fiber show at the end of September (how is that only 2 days away?!) and co-teaching a class on tailoring and fitting for an SCA university on the 7th I'm also working on a Laurel elevation coat which needs to be done by the 14th.  I will post pictures after the elevation, as it's a surprise, but wow time is not my friend this week.  I'm really hoping that my doctors can figure out what is causing me to need a nap after a couple of hours of not very strenuous work because this is getting ridiculous.

The coat itself is a lot of fun and pretty straight forward.  The sewing isn't a big deal, it's getting the embroidery done that's a bit of a challenge.  I'm trying to keep it simple, just doing outlines for the design and a little bit of fill all in pretty filament silk on the nice wool I was given to use on the sleeve cuffs and at the neck.  So far it's looking really nice and I'm quite pleased.  As long as I don't get crazy with putting more elements on the coat, I should be fine.

I love working with the silk, the filament is so very much nicer than the spun stuff I had been working with.  It's a little trickier to work with but the end result is much nicer and actually looks different than regular DMC cotton, so it's the worth the little extra effort (mostly in making sure my nails and cuticles are snag-free).  Having to mail order sucks, but I did finally find a good color card for Soie de Paris on-line (it's part of the Soie D'Alger card, the number in bold are the Soie de paris) which makes mail-ordering a lot less stressful.

Some good resources

Here are a couple of great links that some of you may be interested in -

For the late-period enthusiast, Drea Leed has made her out of print book on 16th century Flemish working-class costume the Well Dress'd Peasant available in PDF format at http://www.elizabethancostume.net/welldressdpeasant.pdf.

If you are interested in Vikings, the best research summation I have seen thus far on apron dresses and under-gowns can be found here - http://urd.priv.no/viking/  She's got a lot of other great links and resources as well, all grounded in good archaeology.

Pennsic Project ADD

Second attempt at a sprang bag

I got back from Pennsic with so many project ideas and plans and thoughts that I almost don't know what to pick up first.  I learned to do sprang, bake bread over a fire pit, do underside couching, and got inspiration for a bunch of new sewing, embroidery and weaving projects.  I also picked up what I needed to do a blackwork coif I've been wanting to make for awhile and while I was at it decided I might as well weave the ties on my loom because I can and hey, why not make the needle lace for the trim as well?  Not that I know how to make needle lace but I can learn, right?  So I built a stool for my husband (not that he goes to many SCA events, but whatever), am trying to decided how I want to built a sprang frame, want to sprang all the yarn, am picking a place to dig a fire pit in the yard, and am darting back and forth between all of the other projects so often I need a nap.

My ghetto light-box - a desk lap under
my glass top desk.  Ugly, but fictional!

In a way this is wonderful, I've been in a bit of a creative slump for quite awhile now and I think I managed to push through it at Pennsic some how.  Having two whole weeks to do nothing but take classes and explore my crafts was a wonderful release that I desperately needed.  I need to make time for that kind of unfettered creativity; no worries about the dogs, feeding the DH, or helping other people with their projects. Of course, I also need to focus all that energy onto a manageable list of things instead of running around like an insane squirrel so that I can get something done, but for now I will enjoy this phase of creative madness for what it is, take lots of notes on all the ideas, and worry about the rest later.

Naked Underwater Linen Weaving

In one of my books, which I can't seem to put my hands on at the moment, there is a very silly picture of a guy sitting at loom in his drawers and nothing else weaving linen in a pool of water.  I now understand exactly why he is doing this.  I finally sat down this morning to work on the long-languishing Perugia towel and holy cow does weaving that blasted linen ever work better if it's damp!  Hurray for naked under water linen weaving!

It's also helping that I took a friends recommendation to use paperclips and small weights to keep the floating warp in place.  It was tending to get lost in the first few warp threads, making my selvages messy and ugly.  With the clips on I am getting a much neater edge.   I've decided to abandon the idea of doing a proper Perugia towel with the pick-up brocaded sections though, that's just not working well on this particular loom and I have other things I want to weave sometime in the next year, so I'm doing a faux-rugia instead.  I'll just be weaving in some stripes of the indigo dyed cotton at either end.  Given that my edges are still kind of funky looking, I am happy with this compromise.  Just getting this linen woven off will be a huge accomplishment.  It's still slow going but now that I have my handy spray bottle (and some flax seed sizing, that's a big help too) it's a whole lot easier to make progress.

Edited to add that I found the picture of the naked underwater linen weaver!  It's in the Textile Production at Coppergate book, plate 821, which you used to be able download here but seems to be currently unavailable.

Off the deep end?

In what might be a sign that I've gone off the period-underpants deep end, I found myself thinking as I was working on my last pair of braies: "Oh these will my sexy pants!  The linen is so sheer!"

Giant baggy linen boxer shorts, no matter how sheer, are not sexy.  I must write that out somewhere.

Spanish Fashion Victim

Because I leave for Pennsic in less than 5 days, I've decided I need a new dress.  Obviously.  :)  To be specific, I need an obnoxious parti-colored bias cut plaid dress, such as were popular for about 20 minutes in late 14th century Spain.  Leave it to the Spanish to come up with the craziest of fashion trends.

Anyway, I have the gown out and about half way put together, I'm doing this by machine partly because I have only a few days but mostly because the fabric is mainly cotton.  It was either that or heavy wool coating and I'm not about to wear heavy plaid wool in the middle of July in Pennsylvania.  The plaid is cotton and the solid kermit green is a cotton linen blend, since that is what they had at the fabric store in a decent selection of colors.  The colors remind me of Kermit and Miss. Piggy for some reason, I'm quite pleased with them even if the whole thing leans a bit towards the obnoxious (isn't that the point though?)

What I am trying to decide at the moment is how to close the front.  Based on the picture, it sort of looks like the gown is probably laced up either in front or down the sides and there does not seem to be a visible undergown.  It's a little hard to tell and I have not been able to find a higher res version of this image to see if there is any more detail.  Because the fabric is not so very sturdy I will be wearing a supportive layer underneath, I'm wondering how I ought to close this thing up.  I'm leaning towards buttons even though I really can't find any suggestion that this is how this sort of gown would have been closed that way.  It would certainly be easier for my purposes.  A laced overgown over a laced undergown sounds like a big PITA.

Totally finished book cushion of doom!

All together, this blasted thing took 175 hours and 5 minutes to embroider and another 8 hours 45 minutes for finishing (that includes carding wool for the stuffing, sewing the interior pillow, constructing the whole thing and doing the braided edging).  I cannot being to express how glad I am that this project is done.  At some point today I actually had the rather distressing thought that making another cushion for my chair might be a good plan.  God help me.

I'm not sure what the next big project will be.  Probably the Mary of Hungary smocking, now that I've got past the planning stage and got this done actually tackling the stitching sounds a lot more appealing.  I've got a couple of other smocking projects I want to work on as well as some weaving things that have been set aside while I've been trying to get this done, plus I need to get back on track with my A&S 50 stuff.  Lots of possibilities!  And yay for getting a big thing done and off my plate!

OMG it's done! Now what?

Just over 175 hours later and I've finally finished the embroidery for this blasted book cushion!  Yay!  I'm sort of in shock, truth be told.  I've been working on this stupid thing for so long it feels sort of strange to actually be done with it.  Well, done in the done with the embroidery part sense of done.  I need to actually make it into a cushion but that should be fairly straightforward.  I'm not going to do anything overly complicated.  I'm planning to back the embroidery with linen, make the back of the cushion from blue silk, and stuff the thing with wool then finish the edge with a nice bit the same embroidered braided edging I've used on the bags.  A red edge should bring the whole thing together and brighten it up just a little bit.

Book Cushion - getting there

150 hours 35 minutes into this project and the end is in sight.  Sort of.  I'm more than halfway done with the fill-in and making good progress.  My goal it to get this done so I can put it on display at Pennsic, which means I need to be done by the time I leave on the 23rd.  I think I can do it, I just need to stay focused and work for a few hours each day.  At least I can see my progress as I'm working.  It helps to play games with myself and set a goal for the day (fill in one diamond, two diamonds, whatever).

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it's looking.  I've found some mistakes that are annoying me towards where I started the piece, but there's not much I can do about that now.  You really can't see them unless you look super hard so it's not a big deal.  Certainly nothing that detracts from success of the piece.  The only issue I really have is that the color values seem somehow off.  It was all good until I started in on the green, then the gold got sort of washed out.  I'm not really sure if if the green needed to be lighter or a brighter shade, or if I should have gone with a different color or perhaps a lighter blue or tone the whole thing down, but it does look good with the book that it's meant to go with.

Maybe I'm just nit-picking.  I do tend to do that.

All is well

I've been madly busy with getting ready for my first trip to Pennsic (hooray!!) in a couple of weeks, finishing up some long-delayed commissioned work, keeping up with orders from my little knitting bag business, and trying to work through some less-than-fun health issues which has left little time or energy for keep up to date on my blog.

In the midst of all this, the DH lost his job.  He found a new one quickly, and ended up being out of work for  just under a month, but it derailed a number of things, not least of which was a much-longed for move back to California.  At some level I had never really believed it would happen, but I've wanted to go back home so badly for so long it was still a blow to have even the chance of it happening finally taken away.  I hate living in Virginia for to many reasons to list, now I really have no choice but to learn to live with the bugs and bigots and miserable weather and the crap shopping.

At least I get to go to Pennsic.  I am really looking forward to that.  With a little bit of luck I will have the book cushion finished and ready to put into the A&S display fully finished too!  It's coming along quite nicely, I've got all of the pattern stitching done and am just past halfway done filling in the background.  Once I get that done, the finishing should go fairly quickly.  I'm not planning anything too elaborate, just a simple braided edge.  I am really looking forward to getting this thing done, partly because I'm sick of looking at it and want to move on to something else, but partly because it actually looking pretty cool and I want to put it to use.

More book cushion progress!

Slowly but surely I am making progress on the brick stitch book cushion.  I finally have all of the major pattern element in place.  Hurray!  What you see has taken 100 hours 20 minutes to complete.  The blue medallions ended up being far more time consuming than I had thought they would be, taking between an hour and a half to two hours each.  The red flowers and filling in should go much faster, there is far less counting to do now so I expect to get this bugger done soon.  Then I just have to decided how to do the finishing.  It definitely needs some big tassels at the corners.

Pattern Darning for Mary of Hungary Smock

Finally I am starting to make some progress on the long-stalled Mary of Hungary smock!  A big part of my problem has been sourcing materials, namely the silk.  Part of the issue was, I think, that I was not 100% happy with the quality of the linen I had for the smock.  It was a good handkerchief weight, but very slubby and poor quality (as has been most of what I have gotten from fabric-store.com recently, fine for a smock but not good at all for fine needlework or anything I want to last).  A friend placed a large order with Gray Line Linens, and I got some of their handkerchief linen to replace it and Oh My Gawd it is lovely.  Perferct for this project and all of my Brigitta coifs where I have been struggling with the uneven quality of threads on the other stuff.  I am never going back.  Beautiful stuff.

Anyway, having got that out of the way I suddenly found myself motivated to do the sampling with the slik threads I have already got last night and *gasp* threw them in the wash this morning.  Putting filament silk in the washer and dryer is about the scariest thing I have ever in my life done, but wouldn't you know it, they came out beautifully!  I'm not saying this smock is going to get heavy laundering every single time I wear it, but it's good to know when it get's dirty, and it will, I can clean it!  In looking at the sample I much prefer the look of the more delicate Soie de Paris, which is the darker gold color on the top.  I think it will fill in the pattern better than the more tightly twisted Soie Gobelin bellow it, even though that was easier to work with and strikes me as more durable.  Both retained their sheen beautifully, even though I went on autopilot and put Biz in the wash (not a good idea with silk or wool in the mix) and machine dried it (admittedly on low).  Neither color bled in the least.  The grey lines you see are my smocking dot marks, I used non-washable marking pen on the sample fabric.

Now all I need to do is cut out the smock and get the pieces finished so I can start the embroidery.  I should be able to do that while I wait for the silk to get here.  The front, back and sleeves are constructed and finished separately and embroidered before being joined together at the shoulders and underarm seams, which makes a great deal of sense.  There is a huge amount of fabric to pleat, so that alone will take some time.  I went ahead and got iron-on smocking dots, which I know is a no-period cheat but the smock take just over 6 yards of fabric and I may be insane but marking dots on that much fabric by hand is beyond what even I am willing to do in the name of an authentic experience!

Like a hole in the head

I went to a beginning scribal schola in Maryland a couple of weeks ago with a couple of people in my local SCA group, and oh good grief did I need that like another hole my head.  One of ladies I went with is our current baroness, and she and I had been talking about our lack of local scribes and need to do something about this, so we thought it might be a good idea to at least learn some calligraphy so we could make up some simple award scrolls.  Hah.  When I started playing with the books I promised myself (and my dining room table) that I would not, under any circumstances, start messing around with the calligraphy and illumination.

So much for that.

This is fun!  My first attempt you can see here, is not that great, but it's not that bad either.  I freely admit that the calligraphy style and the illumination style do not, chronologically speaking, match, but it seems I like the round calligraphy hands and the bar and ivy boarders are pretty easy to make look nice and the two just aren't found together in nature.  It seems like you get horrible boarders or horrible calligraphy, though I think I may have found some nice, not painful Carolingian boarders like this one at the British Library to go with my not-so-horrible calligraphy so that's something.  I've got a lot of room for improvement but for a first-ever try, I am not totally ashamed.

Now to put away the paint and get the hems on the pile of gowns I'm working on done.  I've got a fitted gown for the aforementioned baroness to finish off, a gown based on one of the styles seen in the Morgan Bible for next week to finish for me, the under gown for the Morgan dress to assemble and finish, and hemming to do on attempt one at a bliaut or at least something close to one.  And then Monday I'm off to an all-day napkin hemming party.  If I never hem again...

Filament silk questions

I ordered a small sampling of silks from Hedgehog Handworks (very nice folks with a great selection of metal threads and the full Au Ver a Soi line).  Playing around with the Soie de Paris, I am now in love with filament silk.  What was I thinking with stupid old spun silk?  Really?  I might as well have been using cotton. Oh, that's right, I can get it easily without all this on-line color card nonsense!

Anyway, for those of you have have greater filament silk wisdom than I (not hard I freely confess), I have questions!  First of all, I am looking for something suitable for doing the pattern daring on the Mary of Hungary smock.  I think silk would work best, and there really is no point in using silk unless I use filament, but it's also a smock and white and will thus need to be washed.  Let's face it, sauce will end up on the front of it at some point.  What is going to happen to the filament when I wash it?  Will it be a tragic loss?  Or will it be ok?  I'm ok with handwashing, just not so much drycleaning.

Second, has anyone used the kanagawa embroidery silks?  These are Japanese silks, and come on 20m cards, which is more length than you get with the Soie de Paris (5m spools), I'm just not sure if it's plied the same way, or how it compares.  I would assume it a good quality thread since that's what they use for the amazing silk embroidery they do in Japan, which is more complex than the opus anglicanum I want to do.

And lastly, when doing medieval style silk shading, how many shades of silk do you really need?  The technical references I have assume you have an insane palette of threads I am guessing would not be available to the medieval embroiderer, and most of the extant pieces I've been able to find decent pictures of don't seen that detailed or sophisticated in the shading but it's hard to tell when looking at pictures on computer screens.

Translation, anyone?

A friend who knows about my dog-barding project shared this with me and it cracked me up.  Seriously, barding on a cow?!  Wow.  Sadly I do not read German at all so I have no idea why on earth this manuscript is showing such a thing, but it's pretty entertaining.  If anyone out there can translate the inscription I would really appreciate it!

At least I now know putting barding on my chihuahua is not that ridiculous an idea after all!

New project ideas!

I gave a presentation last night on the Morgan Bible, sometimes better known as the Maciejowski Bible, for my local SCA group.  The Morgan is the theme for our next big event, which is also out kingdom's spring coronation, so I'm hoping that at least one or two people were able to get inspired to make something based on the manuscript.  I certainty did, but sadly as I am running the competition I can't enter.  Boo!  At least it takes the pressure off needing to get a project finished by a deadline, though that can be a really good thing sometimes (witness, the never ending book cushion).

Anyway, I've been wanting to do an almoners bag or something similar in opus anglicanum for awhile.  It's not the easiest technique ever but I enjoy it and getting to work with metal threads for the background will be fun.  I found a miniature in Morgan of David of Bathsheba getting married that I really like, I think if I take out most of the background/side people, including the crazy uncle giving Bathsheba bunny ears, and just use the central couple, who have lots of nice graceful folds in their cloths perfect for silk shading, it would make a nice piece.

Since just a pair of people standing there would make a boring piece, I want to incorporate a frame made out of some of the funny gumdrop/Lorax looking trees that show up all over the place in the manuscript.  I'm not sure how best to stitch them but I will figure it out.  They have a lot of fine detail in the bud sections, maybe some form of couching?

The fun part is planning out what to stitch.  The less fun part is the silks.  There is a wonderful post over at opusanglicanum on just this very subject, suggesting (quite brilliantly) silk tram as an affordably embroidery thread.  Sadly I can't find anywhere in the States yet to get this from, and mail ordering from the UK makes it about as expensive as getting the soi de algiers.  Unless of course I order a truck load of the stuff.  I'm also not in love the soi de algiers color cards, or lack thereof, so picking out colors is tricky.  Locally all I can get is spun silk which lacks luster and except for being silk might as well be cotton.  It has a nicer hand when finished but lacks any real difference in visual impact making the huge difference in cost totally pointless.

What I would not give for a good, local needle working store!  I don't mind paying tax, but paying shipping over and over again just because I didn't get a color right or need one more spool or something is really irritating.

More books

This book things is totally addictive.  I finished the rounded spine journal, and posted start-to-finish photos on facebook, which you can see here.  I'm very happy with how the whole thing came out and it was a lot of fun to do.  While I was waiting for the glue to dry I did some poking around on the web to see what I could find out about proper medieval bindings and I'm looking forward to trying some of those out.  They appear to be a bit more complicated, and the boards are made from actual wood, but this all makes sense given that the books inside were so precious.  The limp bindings are also really interesting and though they seem simple there is a lot of interesting and rather beautiful stitching going on on many of them.

I think the biggest problem is going to be figuring out what to do with all of these journals.

More coptic stitch books

Again with the modern covers, but as these are just for practice that's ok!  I'm having a lot of fun with the sewing and the gluing.  The cherry blossom paper is left over from my wedding favors and the sheep are from my scrapbooking paper fabric.  And hello, sheep!  I do love the sheep (but not in a creepy or gross way).  I think these came out very well, I like the hard covers.  I'm even more pleased with the end papers on these books, which of course I didn't take pictures of.  Hopefully I will get around to it with the next batch of books.  The sheep have a stripped black paper and I used a green textured Japanese bamboo leaf paper for the cherry blossoms.  Both turned out quite nice and have a wonderful tactile quality that I wasn't really trying to accomplish but am very happy with.  I do need to find some better paper for the signatures  I used resume paper for these two books since I had that in the house and it's ok to write on, but I really need to figure out something nicer that I can hopefully find locally.

Next up is the round spine journal, which I understand is a proper, period technique, even if the kit I have is not using period materials, and the limp binding kit I got at KASF which is actually totally period.  One of them will end up being my new comment book for A&S competitions and displays, depending on how they turn out.  Right now I am leaning towards the round spine journal, it's less period but smaller and will take up less space on the table which can be a serious issue in some cases.

Something completely different

The DH and I went to LA this weekend, partly to visit with my family and partly to work on Top Secret Project Number 1 (more on that later).  It was a nice trip, even if I did bring the cold weather with me and of course no coat.  Who bring a coat to Southern California?  Seriously?

Anyway, my cousin's girlfriend was teaching a class on Coptic bookbinding at this amazing little place called The Makery (if you are in the LA/Orange County area, check it out!  very cool space) on Saturday and since I was there I signed up.  Yay for bookbinding!  How did I not get to do this sooner?  Sewing AND glue?  Seriously?  It's my two most favorite things ever, all in one place!  I'm now super bummer I never took any book arts classes as an undergrad, there was apparently amazing book arts programs at my undergrad college.  Oh well.

Anyway, here is my first ever attempt at book binding.  It's not a period book, obviously  but the techniques used to make it are all period.   I'm pretty pleased with myself.  I've already got two more (modern) books started with hard, paper-covered covers.  I also picked up a long-arm kit from Mistress Aneira at KASF that is totally period so I will get started on that in the next day or two.  I also ordered another kit for a rounded back journal from Hollanders that should be fun.  I don't know what I am going to do with all of these hand-bound journals, I'm sure I'll think of something.  Making them is sort of addictive.