Imperfectly Period

Recently I've gotten into designing charters.  Not going to get into why, but it's a whole soapbox thing. A Silver Wing (helping newcomers) based on a very worm-eaten Icelandic exemplar.  I got to paint one recently and forgot to take pictures. 😅 A Hafoc (martial) based on the same exemplar.  I fell in love with the derpy elephant on the left.  Then I realized how goofy the faces of the soldiers were and how the castle turrets look like they're screaming.

Have you ever tried to find sources for an 11th century Icelandic style award that isn't yet another runestone?  Nothing against runestone styles, but if your kingdom is so full of Norse culture that a newcomer has asked you if they're required to have a Norse persona, you might feel a need to branch out of the tried and true.  (True story, and was the impetus for me to finally break out of my Hiberno-Norse into full Irish kit). Enter derpy birds and elephants!  I present to you the Physiologus og fleira , 1190-1210 Iceland.  It's severely damaged and in two pieces .     It's hard to see from all the worm holes(?), but along the left there are birds among foilage.   Yes, that's supposed to be an elephant.  I wouldn't have known if it wasn't for the following.  The chamfron is covering the poor pachyderm's eyes!  Horses weren't unknown in Iceland and they had chamfrons, too, that didn't cover their eyes, but maybe the artist found it easi...

A couple of charters I painted this year.

Due to time blindness, I forgot until the week before August Investiture that I'd planned to make a cloak to replace a friend's that was lost.  And I wanted to appliqué a Pelican , a type of needlework I've never done before. A mutual friend donated some white wool as the only white in my stash is handkerchief linen for undergarments.  I printed the design off heraldicart.org , which was adapted by another mutual, and used that as a stencil to cut out the main pieces. I turned under the edges of the brown wool since unlike the grey and the white, it would ravel, and couched brown wool with matching DMC cotton embroidery thread around it. As mentioned above, I don't work with a lot of white, but had some darning wool that worked well for blanket stitching the pelican onto the grey and couching grey gobelin wool details atop the white. The beaks are leaf (or is it stem?  I can never remember which is which) stitch in yellow embroidery wool.  All of the details wer...

I've been frantically knitting in prep for the Fall Fair demo, which means I finally finished the Monmouth cap I started test knitting the pattern for ~14 years ago.  The pattern writer is now a Laurel.  But it's finished! And promptly will go into largesse because it's not my best work.  I won't wear it and I don't think my spouse will either. The Gunnister glove I just finished, however, will go to spouse because it fits them like a glove.  (Yes, we are both WOAWs, in fact, they're the Bishop of the Vancouver Island WOAWs). Currently there's only 1 because it's for my display table.  I'm a little sad the details were lost a bit in the fulling process. While at the local yarn store picking up more yarn, they asked the usual "what are you making?"  And they're of course modern experts so they were fascinated about pre-modern pieces. One asked me if I wrote a book.  I laughed it off at first because I'm not an...

    As usual, I forgot to get a picture of the championship warrants after they were finished.  The name of the equestrian champion (left) was filled in over the tail and haunches of the horse.  I cleaned up the weird ink bleeds and sketched in ridges like carved wood or twine wrapped around the spear. The name of the thrown weapons champion (right) was filled in along the penciled line here and the seal was glued to the three legs on the right, forming the target.  The champion did end up winning with an axe! I also convinced another scribe, who prefers to paint due to a disability that affects her hands, to try micrography since it hides mistakes quite well!  I sent her an image from the Bayeux tapestry and gave her some tips on how to modify it depending on the level of complexity she felt like attempting.   The name of the archery champion was filled in on the inside of the bow, meeting up with the lines that end in midair here.  Unfortunately...