I have one more scroll finished. This one was a maunche for my apprentice sister. The image sitting in the capital letter is finishing the painting even as it is being given out. My apprentice sister is very good at calligraphy, and jsut getting started with illumination. I thought this would make an especially fitting image for her scroll. This scroll is number 26 for the A&S 50 challenge.

There are a couple of things which I have not recorded since I have not written in a while. First the Elizabethan smock I am making is based on one pictured in Janet Arnold's Pattern's of Fashion 4. There are 2 smocks, one with bobbinlace inserts and one with reticella inserts. I liked the pattern of the second smock, but prefer to make bobbinlace. Therefore, I combined the 2 and am making a smock with bobbinlace. To make a representation of the piece in the book I will have to make 19 separated pieces of lace. So far I have finished 2 and am partway through a third. The 2 finished ones are the same pattern, and I posted a picture of one on Sept 2. The latest piece is the first time I have tried lace with points. I still have 2 inches left to finish, then I will clip the threads. I am pleased with the way this piece is coming out.

From the other extreme end of the time frame of the SCA, I just finished a embroidered celtic dog. I have been working on this piece for years. It is not that it is difficult. It is more that I just found that this style is not my favorite, and I kept putting it down for years. This is going to be incorporated into an emboidered band on the bottom edge of a tunic gown. I will surround it with a geometric pattern which will work up quicker than this part did.

I got a copy of the scroll that I made at Pennsic last year. It was number 24. This one was based on one of the Catherine of Cleves illuminations.

Medallions are done

I went up to Carolingia today to finish the medallions for the coronets. I put another 2 layers of color on most of them. There were a couple of leaves which I thought looked dark enough without any more green on them so I put clear on those instead. I am very happy with the way they came out. For the first time I had tried enameling I think they look pretty good. I might have moved the leaves around a bit if I had it to do over, but they are going to have to do.

We also spent some time playing with some plating solutions to see if we could coat brass with either silver or gold-tone. The coronet I had envisioned had a gold cutout pattern over a blackened background. You can see in the picture that the sample piece of brass we had definitely turned silver on the left side where we treated it with the silver plating liquid. It is a bit harder to see that the band in the middle is really black. The light is reflecting off it oddly. Over on the right side we dipped it into the gold-tone plating liquid. since the brass is already a gold color it is hard to see the difference. however after the first dip it looked much shinier on that end. After a second dip the gold tone got darker. It might have started to look a little coppery. It was hard to tell on the limited sample.

Greenland Gown

I have had the opportunity to look at the book "Buried Norsemen at Herjolfsnes" written by Poul Norlund in 1924. I also have "Woven into the Earth" by Else Ostergard checked out of the library at the same time. Both of these books are essentially about the same archeological digs on Greenland. There was a settlement of Norsemen on the island sometime during the 11th through 14th centuries. The exact reason the settlement was abandoned is unknown. However, since it was abandoned the remains were not disturbed much until the 19th century. One of the earliest explorations of the area was done in 1921 and then written about by Poul Norlund. The second book WITE is then written about pieces from the original dig and subsequent textile finds. It is fascinating to see the difference between the two. Dr. Norlund saw the large pieces as they were removed from the graves. Unfortunately many of the pieces were considered too damaged to be conserved.

I have decided to try to make a replica of one of the pieces that I am fascinated by. It was not in the best of shape, and only about 1/3 of the dress was saved. The following picture is a sketch from Dr. Norlund's book. He found this dress used as a shroud on a small woman. unlike many of the other shrouds the corpses arms were put into the sleeves and crossed across her chest. A picture Dr. Norlund took of the gown as they pulled it out of the ground is published in WITE. That picture is still under copywrite so I cannot publish it here. The gown had a deep V neck and vertical pleats running down past the waist. The pleats start at the bottom of the V neck, and cover the entire front and sides of the gown. Since he mentions the arm holes are cut deep in the front, but are almost straight down in the back. Most of the other clothes isolated at this site had side gore which form the lower edge of the arm hole and extend to the bottom edge. while he does not say there were underarm gores on this gown he does say "the number of seams in the bottom part fit well with the other garments". From that statement I am going to assume the gown had gores which made up the lower edge of the sleeve hole. His comment that the pleats extended on the sides leads me to believe that the front and gores under the arms were all pleated. It will be entirely conjecture on what the bottom half of the gown looks like since their was no report on it. There is a Swedish gown from the 16th century which is pictured repeatedly. Margareta Leijonhufvud wears a pleated gown in her portrait. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Margareta_Leijonhufvud.jpg

While there is no real reason to think that the style of the 16th C gown could be in any way an evolutionary result of the earlier piece from the other side of the Atlantic, I need to base the lower half of the gown on something. At least both of these pieces are used by Scandinavians. It is possible that pleats were a reoccuring theme throughout the scandinavian's history. I will have to look into this a lot more before I can make any generalizations.

The first thinkg I need to do is find some fairly light weight wool in brown or black. T original piece was black warp and brown weft. I don't think I will be lucky enough to find that color combination. I am going to use the pattern of the Herjolfsnes piece #39. The lower pattern is #39. It is essentially 2 gores on the side and single gores in the front and back. I will have to make a sample to see how much the pleats will increase the width of the fabric that will be needed.

Another project to start. I need to get a couple other things off the table before I get started on this one, but I can start looking for the fabric now.

Pelican Scroll

I finished another scroll for the A&S 50 challenge. This one is a Pelican . It is number #25. That puts me half was through the scribal part of my challenge.

I finished another day of working on the medallions for the coronets. Today I started putting the color on. Black for the whales and green for the leaves. The first picture is of the medallion with a coat of glass particles on it. there is white covering everything except the whale. In the second picture you can see the same medallion after it has been fired. If you look really closely you can see some spots of white that have bubbled up from underneath in the whale. that should get covered by subsequent layers of glass.

In the next two pictures you can see the green going into the leaves. At this point you are seeing the medallion after we had spent a fair amount of time with a tiny paint brush getting all the green out of the white. To get the glass onto the medallion I put a couple drops of water on the surface of the piece and then floated clumps of damp glass particles into the water. It spreads our quite nicely, but sometimes it slops over the walls of the wires. then the small amount of glass particles have to be removed. I have to go back and put one more layer of colored glass. Then we will grind the surface and put a couple layers of clear glass on top of the while thing. So far I am pleased with the way things are going.