A little bit of ancient history

Okay, not really. But I've spent the past few days going back and organizing my photos from my phone so that it would be easier for me to post here, and going back through old blog posts to see what all I've talked about, and I discovered so many things that I never told you or showed you! Holy goldfish, it's been a lot.

I mean, in 2015, I taught myself how to weave. I'm still pretty terrible at it, but I enjoy it when I can motivate myself to dress the loom. Weaving is like sewing, or like cooking or painting a room: they call it "painting", but 90% of your time is spent preparing to paint, not actually painting. With weaving, most of your time is spent putting the string onto the loom and making sure you don't have any tangles in it, and that the pattern is set into the loom (I'm trying to avoid technical talk here), before you can actually sit down and do any real weaving. But yeah. I learned weaving, and there are no pics or posts or even a tag on this blog for it. For shame!

In 2016, I participated in a project called "Calf to Codex". If you're a knitter, you may have heard the phrase "Sheep to Sweater" or "Sheep to Shawl". It's where someone starts with the raw wool, cards it, spins it into yarn, dyes it, then knits it, start to finish, every step of the process. Calf to Codex was like that. People took donated animal skins (actually mostly deer, but "deer to codex" doesn't have the same ring to it) and turned them into parchment; the organizer collected poems and songs pertinent to the SCA Middle Kingdom's history and origins (because of course this was an SCA project, no one else is quite that insane); we used ink made from a period recipe and goose quills for pens, hand-ground pigments and binders for paint, genuine gold leaf for the gilding and period binders to stick it to the page. Then the pages were gathered and stitched together using linen thread that was spun from flax grown by SCA gardeners; the silk thread used for the decorative stitching at top and bottom was gathered from an SCA silkworm expert who grew the caterpillars herself; the cover was made from hand-planed oak boards covered with leather that was no only hand-tooled, the guy who did it, built his own leather-working tools from wood and brass.

The idea was to show that we have the skill sets and craft know-how within the SCA to set up an industry like this, or at least to recreate it, from start to finish. Between flax growers, chicken farmers (two of the paint binders were egg yolk and egg white which came from period breeds of chickens, because, again, we're insane that way), the silkworm lady, parchment makers, various poets and minstrels, calligraphers, illuminators, the bookbinding team, and the leather-worker, we totaled about 75 people on a project that took five years to complete. It's beautiful, though. A little smelly, because the parchment makers were still perfecting their craft--but the end result should last a few hundred years and is an excellent example of just what we're capable of when we put our minds to it.

My daughter assisted me with some of the illumination. I did calligraphy and illumination, and also took a course on medieval music notation, to write the first song of the book out as music rather than only lyrics. I also got to write a translation of a period book curse: basically, "Don't steal this book OR ELSE".

So that was 2016.

In 2017, I made scrolls, including several to meet our then-king's demand (request) to help get us caught up on a number of overdue awards that had been missed due to a glitch in our award recommendation database. I also got to see one of my close friends from years ago elevated to the highest honor we have for arts, the Order of the Laurel, and got to make her scroll for her. There are, of course, many pictures.

Throughout the past two or three years, I've been doing henna, but recently joined an online "club" for henna artists and discovered that, wow, my skills are not what I thought they were. My confidence in that area is a little shaky, but then, as one of the phenomenal artists said to me, it's not a race. We're not competing with one another. We're all making henna and adding beauty to the world. If I worked 40 hours a week on henna the way a lot of these ladies do, I'd definitely be more skilled than I am presently. As it is, I get about eight hours of practice in, once a month, for five months out of the year. And people still like my work! So instead of being ashamed, I should maybe consider just practicing and using up old henna.

But yeah. I've been busy, I just haven't had much motivation to show it here. There's a blogging app on my phone that works okay, but not great, and getting all those photos organized was definitely an obstacle to posting anything here. However, I hope to post a little at a time over the next few weeks and get caught up to present day, and maybe motivate myself to get something else started again; I'm looking at getting back to my mosaics here in the winter months, or starting a new weaving project. We'll see what happens.

Let me know what you're interested in seeing, and I'll try to post that first!