Gummy Penguins

Yay! I found the gummy penguins! These are very cool. I was gifted with a bag a few years back and they were very tasty.

My Stuff

Hey look, I found a picture of my actual weaving and spinning. Thanks to my friend with the seemingly unlimited Yahoo! space. So, from left to right, the yellow and black circles was the first double turn double faced band I ever did. The white and blue one to the right of it was the first thing I ever wove. The purple turtles with gray background and pink edging is being sewn onto my blue Viking apron dress and is a more recent piece. The white crabs on a blue background was from when I lived in Lochmere. The purple and yellow windmills is what I was working on when I asked Megan to take me on as an apprentice. The really narrow blue and white and the red and yellow were from a class I took at Kingdom Crusades from Countess Bera. The "Celtic Cock Brewers Guild" was one of my first adventures in weaving letters. The white acorn on green is a test piece from a much longer band in Megan's shop (the one on the far left). The white wolf and estoil on blue is the test piece from the apprentice belt I wove. The purple and white is a minister of minors favor that I made myself when I held that office in Lochmere. And there's various skeins of wool that I spun. Not terribly exciting, well to me it isn't, but it's my stuff.

Back to the Grindstone

Spinning again. If I had a digital camera I would post pictures. Playing with the brown wool I picked up at the '03 Sheep and Wool festival. I was looking for something to use my new toys on and it was cheap. So I'm about 1/2 way through the 1/2 lb of washed but unprocessed mystery wool. So I've been combing it with the Viking Combs from Indigo Hound, they're the best, and spinning on my favorite drop spindle. Once I get an ounce of stuff processed and spun I'm going to ply and finally send it in for the Apprentice level entry in the guild.

The "put up or shut up" project is on hold until I get more stuff spun. Don't have enough of the madder dyed wool spun and I could probably use some more of the bleached.

The stout was bottled today. I'll see how it is in a week. Nothing much going on.

Weaving a Message

I've been playing with Linda Hendrickson's book Please Weave a Message and am working on weaving a banner for this blog. So far I have "Penguin dreams and strang" woven in purple and grey. I'm using the second set of letters, the 14th century hand, and the "s" is funky so I've already used the wrong version but I am NOT going to unweave back to the end of "dreamS" to fix it. Ok, I might do that because that's just how I am but at this point, it is highly unlikely. I'll probably just keep on weaving new bands with different colors and effects so that I have a whole bunch of "Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things" pieces. Perhaps if I get a bigger reader base I'll start giving them out. See, that's a penguin dream. I'm doing this on an inkle loom from White Wolf and the Phoenix using card that I cut and drilled at their house. I will never have to buy cards again!

Picked up a copy of Brimstone by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child at Barnes and Noble today. I enjoyed their last novel, Still Life with Crows and The Cabinet of Curiousities before that. I generally don't like the horror genre but DBF turned me on to these guys. I guess I like their novels because they actually have a plot. It isn't just people getting killed mysteriously, there's a good sense of suspense as well as intellectual plot twists. This isn't to say that some twists aren't blatantly obvious, show be a book that is completely suprising. Ok, the end of Life of Pi was unexpected but I only read that because of the newspaper clipping in front of my advisor's office about if a tiger in a lifeboat was the same as a lion in a lifeboat, the basis for another novel.

Pennsic

Yes, I went to Pennsic.

No, I wasn't there for war week.

I took a class, hung out with friends, got sick on Wednesday, spent WAY too much money and helped host a party on Saturday.

Hopefully we'll be able to stay longer next year.

I don't really have anything to say. The current A&S project is playing with my new drop spindle from Ursula's Alcove and the silk from some other merchant that I can't remember the name of. I adore Ursula. She's one of the three merchants I almost always buy stuff from. I've run out of things to purchase from White Wolf and the Phoenix and I'm waiting for the Spanish Peacock to finish prototyping kumihimo supplies before I buy anything new...but that's not to say that I won't be highly tempted by their drop spindles.

Miguel makes the BEST drop spindles that I have ever used. I cried the day that I snapped the shaft of my first drop spindle from them. But, I took the pieces back and he was able to remake it. *Mental Note* Stop trying to trap a run away drop sindle with your foot.

So, I'm going to stop rambling for now.

A&S

So I'm an artisan or something like that. I'm an apprentice and I've been REALLY lazy lately about the weaving.

Yeah, I made a nifty turtle piece and some inkle stuff for my new dress but I haven't done anything challenging in a long time. The crab belt was challenging and ambitious for my fourth piece. The apprentice belt was challenging because of the sheer length of the thing, 3 yards, and the time table I was trying to keep. I haven't woven any of the patterns that I've drafted yet but that's the next step. I haven't done anything else with twill since I tried the basic 3/1 with what was left on the loom. I won't get better unless I practice. I won't practice unless I warp that sucker up. I guess that's what I'm doing tomorrow.

Then there's the rapier thing. Spent $550 on new toys but I haven't been to practice yet. Need to get washers to put in the bird blunts so I can get the dagger and schlagger set up. So much to do and so little initiative. Was I always this lazy?

Society for Creative Anachronism%2C Inc.

Society for Creative Anachronism%2C Inc.

So this is how you find the homepage for how I spend most of my free time. Real medievalists have mixed feelings about us because some members tend to play loose and fast with history. I say, "I don't have enough money or time to be a reenactor and be perfectly period."