Drachenwald A&S Exchange - Received

I've now obtained permission, and have updated my previous post with the name of the recipient of my A&S gift. And having made my gift for the exchange, you may wonder what it is that I received.

My gift was made by Lady Ameline de Leeuwe; two beautiful hand dyed skeins of merino fibre for spinning. Yes, I've taken two pictures here, the one on the left with flash, but it's necessary to show off the wealth of colours in the fleece. The linen bag to hold the fleece and my spindle, is embroidered with yarn that was itself spun and hand dyed! The stitches are so soft and even it's almost impossible to stop stroking them.

Thanks to an outbreak of Real Life, it actually took me a week after I'd received my gift to take pictures to share on the Drachenwald A&S exchange group, but I actually started spinning with it right away. It's coming together so lovely and fine, I don't think I've been able to spin this evenly before. Just goes to show the quality of the product ;)

Drachenwald A&S Exchange

So, when I went to the leather working workshop, what was it I did on the Sunday? 

Well, last year I took part in the Drachenwald A&S exchange for the first time.The format is simple; you get a form to complete with details such as your society name and device (if any), period of interest, favourite colours, etc, all details to help your recipient decide what to craft for you. My recipient, Lady Mylla O'Reilly, a 16th century bourgeois Flemish woman, had an interest in sewing and a preference for an autumnal palate, so I decided to make up a sewing kit for her with items that could conceivably been made of a middle class woman's sewing box. I based my items on findings from the Thames River, reasoning that there would have been reasonably regular trade between England and the Netherlands, and it was likely they'd be using the same tools, without too much in the way of regional variations. 

 
To start I carved a simple apple wood awl, and made up some felt which would form the leaves for the planned pinbook, and as a place to keep all the hooks and eyes together.  


 
I've found that hooks and eyes abounded in the 16th century. From woodcuts which clearly show the presence of hook and eye closures, to the rusted findings from sunken ships, these seem to have been a common closure option. I made up these using 0.8mm brass wire, which were hammered to work hardened the wire. The hooks were hammered flat and folded into shape after. The pins I made were also made with brass wire, but this time using a slightly heavier gauge, 1mm thick. The coils I made separate to the pin shaft, and hammered them flat onto the pin when I was hardening the wire. The points were sharpened on a file, and the pin was sanded lightly with fine sandpaper. I had meant to try the period method of using ground pumice to sand the pins, but my tub of pumice chose just the right moment to go missing...

The pins were displayed in a pinbook with four leaves cut from felt, and an outer of leather which was painted with the recipients (newly approved) heraldry, and sealed with a beeswax-olive oil finish.

I made up a bakers dozen of embroidered buttons, using brown cotton embroidery thread over wooden beads, using a variation of a detached buttonhole stitch over eight spokes on the buttons.




 

But the pride of the work box was the leather components, as well as the pinbook, there was a simple (purchased) snips and snips case, and a pouch for a piece of beeswax, all stamped with the same simple pattern. And I also crafted a leather needle case. 

The case was formed by stitching wet leather around a piece of wood, with a rubber mallet being used to help flatten out the seams after sewing. The outer piece was sized and stamped before being sewn into place, which took up most of my Sunday at the workshop, and with the deadline fast approaching, had to be completed that day. When all the leather had finally dried out, for which I allowed about a week, it had shrunk and very much tightened around the wooden form that I'd used. It order to remove this, I screwed a screw into the wood, and using pliers and brute force, managed to pull the wood out. Now, annoyingly, this left the inner leather case a little loose, however when I put in the fingerloop woven cord for the case, this made the fit nice and snug again. The case and other leather components were then dyed with commercial dyes to give a uniform look and sealed with a likewise commercial dye so I could be sure the dye wouldn't bleed when the leathers were in use.

So with gift completed and put into a purchased woven basket with a piece of white linen to help keep everything secure, I posted it away and waited anxiously to see if it would be on the mark. And I'm very pleased to say it was, and my recipient was quite pleased with it.

Italian Quiver

Towards the end of last year, Dun in Mara hosted a leather working weekend, with Master Pol attending as the teacher. I attended with a specific project in mind, and I was quite pleased that I actually got further along with it than I’d hoped. 

I bought myself some leather earlier this year with the hope of turning it into an Italian style quiver. Thankfully, not only is there a perfect image where the painted archer is twisting himself into knots to make sure we get a full front image of his quiver (though granted, you do need to zoom in), wiser heads than mine have gone before me, so I even had a pattern to work with. 

I started by sizing up the pattern, and made up a cardboard mock-up to check the size against my arrows and to make sure it wouldn't just plain too long or awkward for me to wear. With this confirmed, I transferred the pattern to the leather and cut it out. 

Now, to be honest, this was as far as I expected to get this weekend. I'd planned to draw my heraldry on the quiver, but as I hadn't drawn it out before hand, and didn't initially trust myself to free hand it, but as time marched on, I felt there were worse things I could do than attempt to draw it out. Lo and behold, I had a heraldry! Now I could move onto the problem of being stuck with what to fill into the rest of the blank space. Several minutes browsing through Pinterest later, I fell across this image of a red velvet hood embroidered with gold thread (as per the description, I've never actually seen the colour image), but I've always adored the scroll work of this hood, so I decided to use it as inspiration for completing the design for the quiver. That was actually the easy part. 

With the design completed, I had to transfer it to the leather. I taped the leather quiver cut out to a convenient flat surface, then taped the paper pattern over it, matching the outer lines. I used a leather stitch marker to transfer the shape through the hide, which took forever, or what very much felt like it, but I was afraid to stop halfway through in case the paper shifted, or I lost track of where I was. A brief chocolate break later, shapes all transferred, I went over the lines with a swivel knife to finish the transfer of the design. 

I have plans to gilt parts of this design, and Lady Órlaith is currently doing some research into period leather dyes for me, but first, I wanted to do some stamping to bring out texture in the pattern. Typically, the two stamps I decided on, a simple beveller and a drop shaped texture stamp, were two of the smallest in my collection. But I really like the effect they gave.  

This is as far as I got before I had to call it for the weekend. I'd promised myself the quiver would be the Saturday job, and I'd work on something else on the Sunday of the workshop. *sigh* I shall be at this a while before it's done. 

And I'm back!

The start of this year saw a suspected power issue with the old laptop turn into a complete motherboard failure, so I've been without my files and pictures for almost six weeks now. Far too long *shudder*

But I have a shiny new piece of tech now, and a whole lot of updates from last year to catch up on! So I'm just going to get things in order again (and learn how to use this thing), and I'll have something to share with ye all again.

Tokens and gifts

I've been wondering a while what I could give out as tokens. I wanted something handmade, something that reflected something of myself, but something that was still easy enough to turn out. Inspired by tokens I'd seen through the year, I settled on hand made soap and wash cloths.
 

The pattern for the wash cloths I found as a free pattern on Ravelry, and made up six from a single ball of DK cotton yarn.Then I was delighted to have an excuse to get my soap making supplies out, given that it's been so long since I've made any. My first batch didn't turn out so well. I tried making a chamomile soap, but I used the wrong oil in my calculations and ended up with a lye heavy batch. I managed to save this by rebatching, but rebatched soap never turns out as pretty, so I'm hesitant to give this away as gifts.

 

For my second (and third) attempts, I picked up some silicon molds so I could make up pretty hand sized soaps. I made up two 500g batches this time, a rose scented goats milk soap in rose shaped molds, and then an almond milk soap with almond scent and ground almonds for added scrubbiness, made up in star shaped molds.
 

So that's twenty-four soaps and several wash cloths still to be made up. With a few given away already, that'll keep me going until I get indecisve about my tokens again. 

Get re-elected, go up a level

Recently my shire decided I was doing a good enough job as seneschal to re-elect me for a second term. And it’s only right that there be some kind of external representation of my levelling up – newly blinged-up garb!

This is the same black dress that I sewed up for Raglan, now with trim added. I had planned to add this for some time, but only recently got time to complete it. The trim is actually a ribbon yarn that was spotted in my stash by a friend, and it has worked out beautifully.

I based the trim placement on "Portrait of a Woman", a mid-sixteenth century Florantine portrait. The trim was pinned in place before being sewn down with whipstitch. I decided against putting trim on the bottom edge of the skirt for the moment, as I’m rather torn still about it. There are several portraits and woodcuts that clearly show Italian and even Venetian dresses with one or two lines of trim along the hem, these are in the minority of overall images, and I’ve seen more portraits (when you finally do manage to find a full length Italian portrait instead of one that finishes at the hips) where this trim is not evident. Even if it would give a nice bit of extra sparkle on this gown…

The Period Little Black Dress

Due to play related nerves, I didn't get a whole lot of crafting done at Raglan. What I wasn't expecting was the heat wave we got, so if I didn't get the newly re-cut linen dress sewn up, having only my linen linen wool gown to wear, something was going to give.

I'd had the fine black linen dress made up previously and had worn it for Medieval Dead last year, but I wasn't entirely happy with how it had turned out, so I put off the finishing of it. But then in June of this year I met the Honourable Lady Christine Bess Duvant, who introduced me to the pattern she had developed for making the magical gravity-defying shoulder style dress of the Italian reaissance. We completed the mock up at the Dun in Mara garb workshop weekend, and having gotten the new pattern cut just before the event, there was so much frantic sewing that some of my friends commented on the fact that they didn't really see any other pictures of me from Raglan.

But thanks to the generosity and permission of Lord Rashid al-Jallab, I have a few pictures which he took at the Friday evening court session that show off the dress well. So yes, the sleeves still need to be completed, and I need to add trim, which I'm hoping to get done before an upcoming demo (and most definitely has to be done before Coronet in November), but it's swiftly become my new favourite dress.

The original pattern, as Lady Christine focuses mainly on the late 15th and early 16th centuries, had quite a high waistline, so I dropped the waistline to my natural waist to reflect the style of the later half of the 16th century. The skirt is just a single layer of linen, gathered at the waist, with a strip of wool fabric in the hem to maintain the body. The bodice is interlined with wool and lined with purple linen. The bodice was side laced, and after this court I added a few more lacing holes in the side split of the skirt, as due to my hourglass figure, this was lying open more than I would have liked. But it looks sexy and it feels oh so comfortable (and sexy). I just don't enjoy the feel of mundane clothing half as much after wearing this dress. I can't really justify any more dresses in my wardrobe at the moment; most events just don't require that many costume changes, but damn I want more of these.

And one final picture in which I'm handed my Lindquistringes, because I just love it so.