Posts

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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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...

Knitting

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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...

More Micrography

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    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...

Blackwork Coif

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Instead of trying to source and work with metallic threads, I used spangles since I have a giant bag of them.  They've ended up all over my house.  Truly, they're pre-modern glitter. Obviously the leaves are not very consistent, but I figure there are enough of them and the glitter of the spangles really catch one's eye in the light that no one will notice. Currently on the third row so this picture's a little while ago.  I normally don't time my projects because that's just depressing, but I average one repeat in an afternoon. 

Back on my bullshit

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 It has been a minute!  Been distracted with looking for work, eventing season, the world descending into madness... So have a fun scroll I did a for a friend awhile back.  She has an Italian persona so I went a little overboard with what's essentially a step above a thank you card.  Note the entire map of Italy in the capital complete with an orca!       In progress capital that was ~1.25 inches square   The border is based on a prayer book from Milan ca. 1430 ( MS M.944 fol. 19v ).  The capital is also based on a 15th C. example, but I can't remember the exact source.  

Quick & Dirty Binding

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I've had my eye on some leather folders, but I'm currently between jobs and hate seeing plastic binders during court. So I did some quick and dirty limp binding with some scrap linen for my baronial ceremonial.  100% handsewn linen with matching green poly thread. If I'd had the confidence and time to do a test scrap, I would have tried to stiffen it with gum Arabic.  Knowing myself, I need to be able to wash it at least once in a blue moon so didn't want to glue to cardboard. It was a touch too small, so I had to trim the edges and laughed at the hack job, reminding myself this is why I'm not a bookbinder.

Fun with Mending

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