Entry for A&S Competition

This year the theme for the St Florian A&S Championship is Calligraphy and Illumination and related Arts. So I'm making this piece partly for my exemplar for the college of scribes and also for my entry to the competition. I can't win it again this year, but hopefully it will inspire more participants to enter.

                                       This is what I'm starting with

And this is how far I've come tonight

By my next post I'm sure I would've done some more on it. And by the way, gold leaf is crap to work with!

Grete

Buzz's Mongol Coat Part 2

This is what I did on Sunday.

It doesn't look like much more than the previous picture, but the 'behind the scenes' sewing took a while.

The final result was done right before festival, and it had the desired outcome. Buzz wore it on 3 of the 5 days of festival. He said it was very comfortable and easy to put on and take off. He said it was just like a dressing gown. That wasn't really what I wanted to hear, but I'm glad that he likes it and wears it. Here is the picture:

Buzz's Mongol Coat

A couple of months ago I decided to make Buzz a Mongol Coat to go with his Yurt. The coat looks good and are pretty easy to make...I don't know why it took me till 2 weeks before festival to get motivated to make it for him. I did some research on it a couple of months ago and decided to make one like these extant examples.

The pattern was the hardest part of the process. I hate patterning, but once you have it right, the rest of the outfit doesn't take very long. I did all of this tonight:

These are the two front pieces. They overlap to cover the front.

This is the back piece, it is just a square, but I've put some gores on it as you'll see later.

All the pieces together.

This is the sleeve.

That was the patterning done, I then cut out all the pieces and overlocked them. Then I sewed them all together to get this:

Beautiful isn't it!

Tomorrow I have to go to spotlight to get some brown silk for the neckline and the hem, and also some more brown thread cause I ran out. I will take another picture of the finished product when I remember.

Greek Garb

4 Weeks ago, Giles tells us that there is a Greek event on in February in Willoughby Vale (Red & White), and that we should all make Greek outfits. He said it would be easy... take 2 sheets of 150cm wide linen, fold them and pin them together and voila, a Greek outfit. Obviously this was the oversimplified version, and I wanted mine to look a bit better than a bedsheet. And so began the story of the pretty pretty priestess Greek outfit.

I must admit, it was probably the easiest and quickest medieval outfit I've ever made. Giles taught us the latin names for the different parts of the outfit, which we quickly renamed to represent the random pieces of fabric more accurately.

I will start with underwear (spelling will be wrong, but this is how it sounds...). Firstly, we have a Strophium (affectionately known as the scrotum, why? Because it sounds the same and it makes sense). The strophium is a long piece of white fabric about as wide as your breasts and long enough to go around your body (breast area) 3 times. This is to support your breasts because they didn't have bras back then. The next item is the chiton (aka nappy) which is giant granny underwear so that you don't expose yourself in public. I havent made either of the underwear pieces yet, mosly because I haven't had time and they're not really needed for the impact of the outfit.

The main part of the outfit is called a subligaculum (suble-gak-cleum is how we said it...emphasis on the gak). This is the two pieces of fabric about 150cm wide that is pinned together and tied with some cord around the waist. This was the only part of the outfit that took any sort of 'patterning' to make sure that it all hangs correctly. I used 150cm wide white linen for my subligaculum and trimmed it with some green fabric from my himation (explained in the next paragraph).

The last part of the outfit is the most irritating and is called the himation (or as it became known after 4 minutes of wearing it, the 'high maintenance' because it needs so much adjusting). It is basically a 5-6 meter piece of pretty cloth, mostly decorated silk or cotton that is wrapped around the body multiple times for modesty. The 'high maintenance' is annoying because it keeps trying to trip you by gently working its way down from your butt area to your feet. The problem is probably that when I went to buy a silk sari from the local indian place, the lady there sold me a 'silk' sari and when I got home and opened the packet...it had a tag on it saying 100% polyester. I was going to take it back and give her what for, but I didn't think I would be able to find something else i liked before the event, so I just went with the plastic for now. That is probably why it wouldn't stay in place and irritated me so much. My 'high maintenance' is green with a gold border, and most people that saw it thought it was silk, so I'm ok with that.

Then there is the hair. There are multiple ways of wearing your hair in the greek style. I chose to make a sakkos (aka head nappy) which made me look like I had cancer from the front, but was easy and quick to put on. It is a piece of cloth that effectively holds your hair up at the back. It was a good choice of headwear, because I didn't have to spend hours curling my hair.

Now for the accessories. I love that greek/roman style things are back in fashion these days, because I found all of my jewelry, brooches, earrings, necklace, bangles and my shoes in Carindale or at the indian place. And it wasn't even very expensive. I will post pictures of all of my Greek outfit here once I have taken some.

And that is the story of my pretty pretty priestess Greek outfit. (I'm the one in the white & green)

Welcome to my blog

So, I have a blog...

This is mostly to keep you guys in the loop and to track my progress with my SCA projects.

So lets get this party started!