Violet the Axe Breaker, Tyger's Cub

Since I'm getting myself ready to jump into the Eastern Crown Herald role I hadn't planned on doing any scrolls until I finished that next April. But then I got an assignment emailed to me for Ostgardr Investiture two weeks before the event. For Violet the Axe Breaker. Her parents are close friends of mine, I emailed Signet back saying I've known Violet since before she was born and I happened to have one last scroll blank. So yes, I'd take this one.

The scroll blank was weirdly spaced out and not good for most other awards. And there's very little space for text. The page itself is not very big as well.

So I figured out a short amount of words that got all the information across and sounded decent, 57 count.

A mischievous grin and a welcoming smile. A playful dance and helpful hands. Cracking aim and her joyful laugh. These are qualities that befit a growing person in Our Society. And so do We, King Culann and Queen Honig III induct Violet the Axe Breaker into the Order of the Tyger's Cub at Ostgardr Investiture, AS 61.

I also printed out various sizes for the order badge to trace into the square. The description on the back of the illumination only says "14c" so yay, doing textura quadrata. The practice page I quickly realized by usual line spacing of 3, 5, 3mm was too big, and shrunk it down to 2, 4, 2mm.

On the actual scroll I messed up one word, but managed to save it enough that nobody will notice unless I point it out. (Since I had to break up the word Investiture, I accidentally spelled it investititure, but managed to realize it after the second ti and fixed the spelling then scraped away the wrong ink.) 

And then I got out my little kit of paints and carefully painted in the order badge. One spot of the yellow was giving me problems, but I think each time I do a badge I get a little bit better with the paint.

No, this does not mean I want to start doing illumination. *shudder* 

After it dried I erased all the pencil lines except for the two spots for the King and Queen to sign, and went over the lines of the badge with a micron pen.

I'm not too upset with how this turned out! I hope Violet likes it. I'm not too concerned with delving into period-inspired words, but I think I'm also getting a little more confident with that as well.

Duck Micrography

I entered my barony's A&S competition. Knowing the level of art people here do, I did not expect to win. But this is a technique I've wanted to learn for a bit, and this was a good way to start. And I had fun with it! So here's the finished product, and my documentation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MOjBa5SctTBw9WV72IFdww8_uOyrOGTmTkFKJ3eOsSo/edit?usp=sharing
Words start at the chin, go up around the head, then once back to the chin jump over to the wing, and then continue as the waves.

(And no, I did not win. Osana's game board was amazingly beautiful and had much better documentation.)

Let's get back to business.

Things have been quiet since November, but it is the down season so that's not unexpected. I've still been doing the monthly Mosaic and Mural emails, but even that has been fairly quiet. Although with events starting to take place in person again, hopefully those will start getting back to normal amounts of submissions.

Over the past month I've been learning a new hand for calligraphy, Insular Minscule. It's a fairly generic medieval font so I can use it for more varieties of illumination. In preparation for An Dubhaigeainn schola I got 2 beautiful illuminations from Oda. Using the competition themes I came up with words for both. I'm really pleased with the one for bardic especially, it uses tons of alliteration that make me happy. I feel like I'm decent at coming up with words for generic champion scrolls. But I have no intent to do research and make my words more period. I mean, I've been mostly doing baronial champion scrolls so , I feel it's not as important to have them be more period accurate. We're a pretty laid-back barony. And everybody that I've helped do scrolls for seem to love them as they are, so I'm ok with that.

Schola was virtual again this year. The theme of the event was "Silly Schola" and I immediately wanted to do a class on canting. I stunt heralded morning court, but that's easy. Just intro and outro Their Excellencies. I had 4 people attend my class, one of them being a newbie. My class lasted about 15 minutes, and I discussed with the attendees at the end. I was hoping to do more a "match the device with the name" type class participation, but I hadn't gotten to making up slides. I think if I set aside time to actually think it through and try it out, then I can do this for Pennsic. I received enthusiastic feedback from the attendees, so I probably will!

The baronial herald was there for afternoon court, so all I had to do was hold the scrolls up to the camera as they were read.

The next event I'm going to is coronation. I've signed up to do a retaining shift with their outgoing majesties and one with the incoming majesties. I also emailed the incoming Crown Herald and offered to help read any scrolls. If I'm successful in restraint I will not volunteer to do anything more and will be able to socialize and enjoy myself.

I was talking with my sister and firmed in my head that it might take me another 30 years to be Elevated because I'm not being seen as doing major work. But on the other hand I probably will not burn myself out and disappear right afterwards, as I see happens to a lot of Peers. I'm ok with it taking a long time. Slow and steady wins the race, and I don't wind up being bitter and burnt.

St. Andrews

St. Andrews is our barony's big event, and I always volunteer to do a lot. Plus TRM wanted to attend, and they are super awesome people. But that makes the event that much bigger.

Again I volunteered to do two more champion scrolls. Oda just happened to be painting a scroll blank so she finished that and gave it to me to use, and Fiona found a blank she'd done over the summer. So that was taken care of, and I got the scrolls finished 5 whole days in advance. And I remembered to print out the cut sheets as well!

For this event I volunteered to head up the health checkpoint. The site only has one entrance, so with my 3 volunteers we'd stop the car as it pulled into the driveway, ask for ID and vaccination card or negative test, then send them along to Saravit who was in charge of telling people where to park. I actually had fun, got to hang out with friends and chat between people arriving. Slaine, Eslebeth, and Sarah volunteered to help me do the checking, and I'm very appreciative that they all put some time in with helping me, and the coverage between the three of them meant they all got to go do other things they liked as well.

Prior to the event I got an email from the Kingdom Seneschal, she sent me the sign out sheet for the checkers. And said since the BoD directions of splitting people up to check different parts of the alphabet didn't go into effect until the 15th, and our event was the 13th, I could arrange it any way I wanted. And she'd appreciate any documentation of why our version works, or if the alphabet version works. Photos would be great. So I had my son take some photos and videos of how we checked in the cars to back up that our way was better. 

Since I had 2 people checking at any point (I was one of them, and rotated through the others) when I was asked to jump in as deputy herald to lead Their Excellencies into morning court because the regular herald had to run off site for a few minutes, things were still covered. By 1:00 it seemed no more people were arriving, so I informed Oswin at Gate that I was stopping and passed off the paperwork and wristbands to him. At that point I had some food and got to hang out with friends for a little bit. After about an hour a tornado alert was on, so everybody was breaking down anything they could put away. 

After helping with that and filling in names on the scrolls, I offered to the Crown Herald to help read scrolls for afternoon court, so he let me pick one to do. I jumped onto the end of the procession line and hung out behind the entourage with my friends that were retaining until it was time for me to read. Oh, except for one point when I was called forward by my barony and inducted into the Order of Perseverance! I was really excited about that, it's the local award for contributions in all 3 aspects of the society: service, martial, and arts. Soon after that I read the scroll for my household brother, then headed back into the audience to knit and chill for the remainder of court.

Once that was done I helped clean things up from court, brought out tables for feast that I was not staying for, said my goodbyes and headed home for a well-earned adult drink.

Seeing people! In person!

When we last left our superhero...

My barony has had two in person events now! We only have one event site in the area, and it's got a HUGE outdoor space, so the events can be safely held to the comfort of the more cautious people. Me. I'm cautious people. 

I offered to do the champion scrolls. And 2 weeks before the first event (Arrows Axes and Ales, so three champions) I realized I needed scrolls blanks. Lilly Morgaine said she had one, a black hours scroll she had done just to try it out. She's freaking amazing. So she lent me gold ink and I got that one done up. Vettorio said he found a scroll blank his apprentice Oda Lally had done, so I used that and got the second one done. I decided to shoot for the stars and found a simple cadel online. I traced that and made the third scroll by myself. Which has always been a goal of mine, so yay! I'm proud of myself for that. When I posted it to facebook after the event I got a message from a gentle who's well known for cadels and he gave me a tip or two on how to improve on that. But I got those scrolls done 2 days before the event, whew.

At the event I took a turn at serving dayboard. To keep things clean as people came up to the table I would say "Hello! Welcome to dayboard, please use the utensils!" Because I had discussed previously with the autocrat that people are oblivious and would just reach in for stuff with their hands, right next to the spoons and tongs. So this was a friendly yet firm reminder. We also had sanitizing wipes to use every so often on high-touch areas.

After that I hung out with my friends a bunch, and relaxed.

Until the competitions were finished. I suddenly realized I didn't print out cut sheets like I'd intended to before leaving the house. So I begged some paper and was frantically writing out the words for the herald. As I'm halfway through that I'm told the winners names and that court should start soon. So between the chill in the air and the adrenaline from rushing to write out words my hands were a bit shaky and I'm not proud of the way the names came out. Oh well, can't be helped.

Court was enjoyable, it was late October and still warm enough to hold it on the outside stage. After that was a quick cleanup and break down and then headed home.

Waiting for things to happen now.

Since my last post, I still haven't done too much. Things with Blue Tyger office slowed down until the role changed over from Muirenn to Alys. Mosaic herald office had been vacant, so I volunteered to take that over as well as Mural herald until they find somebody new for that. But even those have both been slow. So I've been helping friends here and there with heraldry submissions. Not too many though. 

I read another time or two for scrolls in ethereal court, but that has stopped now that events are back to in person. I skipped going to coronation because I wasn't ready to jump into the deep end of peopleing. But next month is the first event back in An Dubhaigeainn, and then TRM are coming to our event in November, so those should be good.

I haven't been asked to help with any kingdom scrolls, but I did help Ostgardr with one of their baronial scrolls. Soon I'll ask around and see if anybody has already planned out scrolls for our event in October. But there's time for that.

And that's about all I've been doing SCA-wise.

Busy little herald

I feel like I've picked up a bit in the "doing stuff" department. 

Earlier this month on one of the recording sessions my friend Caterina received her AoA. YAY! I then poked Vox Regis and requested doing the scroll reading for her. This past weekend I found out Fiona asked to do the scroll for her, and asked if I wanted to do the calligraphy for it. Yay! I miss doing calligraphy. But I told Fiona I'm still not going into buildings, so I would do it if she was willing to do the mailing it out part.

On Friday I taught a class at KWHSS midyear event! "Being a baronial herald". It was the first time I taught that, so I wasn't sure how it'd go. But it seemed to go well! I think half or more of the people there either were or are local heralds, but they all assured me they were still there to learn. I realized a few days later that I too have taken classes multiple times, or classes on things I already knew because there's always something new to learn. This may adjust how I teach this in the future.

Also prior to the class a SH from An Tir asked if I had handouts for the class, as she had a few shire heralds who would be interested but lacked stable internet connection. I explained I didn't and she asked if I'd be willing to do a zoom at a later date for them. Sure thing! So that will be coming up around March or so.

Saturday was Hugoline's elevation. When we all popped into the zoom and started recording I was waiting for a signal that it was time for me to do the boast, but they skipped right over that. Oops, oh well. This is the good part about "recorded in front of a live studio audience". So I read my part at the end and they'll slot it in where it should go. This is the third household member I've been asked to do a boast for. For a year or more now I've been trying to pay attention to other people's to improve on what I write for my friends. I think each one I'm getting a little better. Yay! I'm still not interested in being a word smith for scrolls, but this is different to me. 

And then the Isolation happened.

I'm trying to remember what I've done service-wise since the new year.

• I know I finished calligraphy on another backlog scroll.
• I helped herald in court at Twelfth Night.
• I've finished a thing for a friend's elevation, but as that hasn't happened yet, I'm not disclosing details on that.
• I've held my "Absolute beginner's guide to submitting heraldry" twice online. Once on facebook live, which isn't good for seeing if anybody has questions but more people were watching, and once on Google Meets which worked a lot better but had fewer people. The facebook live I had committed to doing before the webministry started pushing for people to use the Meets. So, experimentation in streaming ways happened. Facebook live is good for broadcasting with minimal interaction with viewers since there's such a delay between what you say and what viewers see. Zoom is good for having multiple people talk at the same time or roundtable discussions. Google Meets is good for a lecture class.
• I recorded a short video of my dancing in armor to the Electric Slide to amuse my fellow SCAdians. And I most recently recorded videos to contribute to group video projects of "Eye of the Tyger" and "Glow Up".
• Plus I've been continuing my monthly duties as Mosaic Herald, and helping out with proofreading things for Blue Tyger.

I think that's all for now! Because I suddenly remembered I have this blog to keep record of the things I do.

New Job, New Scrolls.

Just after Pennsic I was offered the job of Mosaic Herald. This is the person who sends out notifications after a submission has finished kingdom (first) level commentary. As opposed to Mural herald who sends it out after Laurel (final) level acceptance/return.

I jumped at this chance, as I've often heard grumblings from people that once they submitted something they never heard anything back. Sometimes OSCAR gets cranky and refuses to send out the emails. Sometimes they wind up in people's spam folders and don't get seen. So, since we have kingdom personal and office gmails set up now, why not use it to send them out? Ok, maybe it takes a bit longer to send them out one by one instead of in a batch, but if it helps the notifications get seen then I'll do it. Also the Oscar system seems a bit complicated. But I'm sure it worked for many years. Mostly.

Anyway! I officially started last month, with the submissions done right before Pennsic. That was 27 emails, 33 items to send out. Some emails were both name and device. I did the spreadsheet and sent the emails in one evening. This month's batch was the first round from Pennsic. 34 emails with 49 items. The spreadsheet alone took me one evening. Since I was cramming to do a scroll for an event I had to spread out the emails over 3 days. I had messaged Brigantia and thanked him for starting me in this job the month before having to do the Pennsic ones!

I went back to the instructions I was originally given, as the results sit in Oscar waiting to be processed and emailed. But since I'm not doing it that way I went back in there to delete them. It wasn't difficult to figure out, just tedious going through all the ones that are sitting on the server and finding each separate one and deleting it, then going back to the list and finding the next one. It looks like there's a bunch of old notifications sitting on there that nothing was done with them, but I don't know if it was Mosaic level stuff to do, or Mural. So I'll leave any one I'm not currently working on alone for now.

I posted a note of what happened to the Kingdom (unofficial) facebook page and sent an email to the EK Gazette with the same wording. Since I know not everybody is on facebook. Just the majority of us, heh.

I also went back through notes on facebook and updated my baronial OP. Fixed a few entries and added a bunch of people.

As for scrolls, I've still been working on the last 2 backlogs I signed up for. I have the illuminated pages from Fiona and the words from Aislinn, I just have to get the calligraphy done. The one I'm currently working on is being a problem child, as the spacing is either too cramped or too much extra space. But I think I finally got a good balance and got the pencilled words on there, now I just need to ink it. I also did the calligraphy for a friend's AoA, the baronial heavy weapons champion, and the baronial brewing champion. Beyond the scrolls I did way too much at St. Andrews, and did very little at Arrows Axes and Ales.

Next weekend is Crown Tournament. Which I volunteered to either herald the lists or be a list runner, wherever I was needed more. I will also offer to help read scrolls in court. I think I've got the projection down, but in order to be heard and try to remember to enunciate and slow down so my An Dub accent doesn't muddle the words I don't have a good flow when I read. I want to work on that. I'm sure it'll get better with practice.

Herald has leveled up!

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to up my herald game. So I sent an email to Blue Tyger and Brigantia with my qualifications and asked if they had any position openings in the next year.

I got an email back from Blue Tyger offering for me to join in on their slack sessions. So I've been doing that the past 2 weeks, and getting more confident on my contributions to the discussion. It's confidential submission stuff, so I can't document here what's going on, but my help seems to be warmly appreciated! They like me! They really really like me!

I signed up for some shifts for Pennsic at Heralds point, doing admin entry stuff if needed. I am committing myself to helping for those two shifts and am determined to pop in other times to help out where I can. While I'm not even 90% confident on my consulting sans the ability to say "Let me check and I'll get back to you" I know there's plenty of backup to look over my shoulder, so I'm jumping in with both feet and offering to help with submitters.

As I told my sister, I know it takes like 30 years to become a Pelican, so if I don't start now, then it's just that much further out that I can hope for it. Heralding is what I am most confident at and enjoy the most, so that is where I'm going to concentrate my efforts in growth. Also heralding is very enjoyable and heralds are such fun people! So: learn, grow, help, and have fun while doing it. Yes, thank you!



I'm still working on scroll backlogs. I started pencilling out the words for one while I was on vacation with the extended family last week. The other night I started inking the calligraphy, and after about 3 or 4 lines I noticed that some words were spread out and others were squished together. It was seriously not acceptable for me. And besides, it was just a practice/layout page, so I'm not upset, I'll just start over. But that will be the last time I try working on scrolls while at the beach house. Too many mundane people around, especially kids age 11 and under. I meant to do another pencil layout tonight, but got caught up in helping Blue Tyger office hours again. And my cat settled down and was purring in my lap, so I obviously couldn't move. It'll get done tomorrow.

Little service here, little service there.

Before the An Dub schola event, which is also our A&S and bardic champions event, I was asked to do the calligraphy on 2 scrolls. Fiona did the illumination on one, Lily on the other. They just did borders and let me choose which one was for which. Since I'm terrible at and honestly find no joy in word smithing I went to Slaine for those. I was quite happy with how they turned out. And I've been saving up empty copy paper boxes at work, so I cut out the tops/bottoms to make some quick and dirty (not nice and fabric finished) scroll sleeves. I even remembered to print out cut sheets.

I got to the event, which was held on a Suffolk County Community College campus. There's no site fee, no dayboard. In previous years a few people have brought food to share, so I made up a big batch of honey butter and bought a loaf of sliced crusty bread. Because no SCA event is complete if it doesn't have honey butter and bread! I asked permission to use and printed out 2 copies of a charge group lesson that Yehuda had made up years before while he was Elmut. Because I knew I had at least 2 (and probably only 2) people that were interested in learning more than my usual "absolute basic heraldry for the beginner". I also brought along my laptop in case anybody wanted help with their EK Wiki pages, but nobody asked about that.

The honeybutter turned out to be widely liked, I taught Slaine and Lily how to determine charge groups. I took a class on how to write award recommendations. Then the bardic performances happened, and the 2 A&S entries were discussed. I was told who each winner was so I could put their names on the scrolls, and I suddenly realized that Fiona won the A&S champion spot. And I had done the A&S wording on the scroll she illuminated. Everybody was so very amused at this.

Put away my things, helped straighten up, then home.

A little bit of everything.

For event promotion, I do pretty much all of it on facebook, since that's where the majority of people are. I used to also cross-post to G+, but I wasn't getting any impression that it helped. Plus G+ will be going away around August, so there's that. A week before St. Andrews something on facebook changed and I wasn't able to share specific posts from within the event page to other groups. That made it a little more difficult, but I tried in the last few days to post something to the East Kingdom, Ostgardr and An Dubhaigeainn pages.

A month or so ago I had asked Vetra if she wanted me to organize feast servers. She asked what I wanted. I said when doing that I don't actually get to eat the feast, and I really would like to. So we defaulted to the usual "one person from each table comes and gets a course".

However, then a few days before the event the Heavy List Champion went and made himself Prince, so Vicrene Lada was organizing retainers. She was having slight difficulty getting people to sign up and asked for ideas. My barony has 2 large households. My own (House Three Skulls) and another, Surtr's Brood. I know the spreadsheet had already been shared to my own household's facebook group, so I also shared it to the other one. A bunch of people immediately signed up and got at least one person, often two, covering the whole day. I had already signed up as well, thinking it was perfect. My first time retaining and it was for a friend. His first event getting retained for and it was all friends and people he knew. Lada had told me Ozurr's snack of choice was Cheeze-its, so I picked up a box of 12 snack bags, and made a quick pouch out of some scrap fabric I had that was the right size to hold one of the bags. So he could have his snack and not have it look obtrusively modern. He was delighted about that, I saw he hung the pouch on his belt for the remainder of the day. And he said he polished off the box before feast.

For the actual retaining, I signed up for 2 hours, while the martial competitions were going on. Caterine had the "retaining bag" and a bottle of gin, and I was given the "Drinking boot" (Go ahead and ask his Highness about it) to carry. We stopped at his car and he was getting some weapons and gauntlets for people to use if they wanted. He said he was given a bottle of elderberry mead and it was ok, but not to his taste. He offered me a taste and I said I loved it, so he said "It's yours". As he picked up the weapons and started carrying them to the fighting area I said "But I'm not supposed to let you carry things!" he called back "Try and stop me!!" Since my hands were already full I didn't fight too much. But later on when I had put down the bottle of mead, and Caterine put down Ozurr's extra alcohol, anytime he looked like he was about to carry something I snatched it out of his hands and said "Continue..." I've had practice already on that kind of thing from being a mom. While we were out watching the fighting I made sure he was drinking water, and he had already eaten so he was good on that. After the first hour Caterine switched with Raud, and with a half hour to go we went back inside. I had promised to participate in a quick activity at some point, but warned Raud I would have to step away for 5 minutes. As it happened, I was called to the activity while Raud was off getting a drink, so I apologized, and handed the bag and boot to Ozurr and ran outside. I saw Lada on my way and let her know, I think Raud had gotten back to Ozurr by that point and took the stuff from him.
I went back inside after and Ozurr was chatting with people before court. I was asked for help with one quick task that was right there where they were all standing, adding a decoration to court setup. Check back at Ozurr, he's still talking. I was asked to put the names of the winners on the scrolls since I had done the calligraphy. Run over to the table, do that. Check back on Ozurr between scrolls, he's fine. Finish second scroll, the kids are taking their turn at retaining, he's waiting for court to start.

I don't think I did a spectacular job at retaining, but maybe an acceptable level. I can try again at other events, and I can also practice retaining with my own Baron/ess at events in our own barony and out of area.

I also talked with Ozurr about the name he'd like to register for few minutes, I had brought my Old Norse name book along. I offered to let him take the book to look through in his own time, but he said he'd rather not take the chance of losing it. so I said I would continue to research the name and let him know what I could find.

I didn't get to stay to help clean after feast because my husband and son really wanted to get home. But I know there's always plenty of people who chip in and get everything done. My barony is awesome like that.