Heraldry! Heraldry! Heraldry! And a little bit of calligraphy.

I sat in on two sessions taught by Mathghamian (Argh! Spelling? Damned Gaelic!!) on commenting in Oscar. Which I've been really neglecting. Every time I try to go through it, enough people have already commented "docs check out, no conflicts found", which is all I am confident in doing. But I'm going to try doing it more. I do still find it worthwhile sitting in on first level classes because there's always at least one new thing I learn every time.

A friend of mine asked about getting a device done up. Slaine asked if she could help with it to learn. So I drew up the device, checked with my friend to make sure she's good with the design, conflict checked it, and then broke it down so I can show Slaine how I went about it so she can see how I do it. Made arrangements to get together with her this past Thursday evening to do that. I think she understood my process of how I do it, but I'm not a terribly good teacher.

I also helped a friend come up with a device for his lady, and emailed that off to him.

Thirdly I'm trying to help another friend design a badge for his household, what they've been using is not registerable. I think I've come up with a possible alternative they might find acceptable. He also asked about a device for himself, but I'm having more trouble with coming up with something acceptable for that.

A post was made in FB Heraldry chat about Birka, so I plan on sitting in on at least one 2-hour shift at Heralds point. I also offered to do some voice heralding in court. She said she'd post a sign up sheet, but I haven't seen that yet. I've never been to Birka, but I'm assuming it will be much like  KWHSS was that I went to this past year. Also this works well with my previous thought of I want to do more to volunteer during big events and get to know more people, rather than hanging out solely with my best friends. I mean, I will still hang out with them. But there's plenty of time to flit here and there and back and forth like I an wont to do.

Fiona and I have a backlog scroll to do! It's a silver wheel and neither of us know the recipient. But we have friends who do know him, and I was able to stalk enough to find out more info about him and why he got the award. I came up with some words (with some assistance by my scriby friends) and started practicing the calligraphy. I haven't done any since early November for the St. Andrews baronial scrolls. Yes, I definitely need to get back into practice. But I'm very excited to be doing a kingdom scroll, and I hope the recipient likes it. I was also asked to do the calligraphy for the upcoming baronial bardic and a&s champion scrolls. Yay!!

When we last left our heroine...

Updates from last posting:

For the barony:

I'm still trying to get things done for changing the herald title from Seastar to Drake. The current herald has starting using Drake anyway, because what's the worst that happens? She's told it doesn't pass and we figure out another duck-related title.

Also no news on getting the ballista made, but it's cold out I don't expect any progress until spring.

For my household:

I finished the tablecloth and it came out really well! I found out on the first of three skulls that holding the fusible webbing-backed cloth in place with pins, then ironing them down makes black marks where the pins were. Oops. But other than that it looks great and I got a lot of compliments on it at the event I brought it to! At some point I'll make 2 more.

                          

For the Kingdom:
I harassed Ozurr enough that he made a decision on what name he wants submitted. Then after printing out the paperwork for him I found out that he doesn't have checks and was too busy to get a money order, so I said I was going to do it for him. So the paperwork and a check went out in the mail yesterday. Hopefully it'll pass on the LOAR before he finishes his reign.

I can now add onto my EK Wiki entry that I get heraldry done for "people in charge" before their time is up twice! First my baron, now my prince! Ha!

Barony, Kingdom, Household

I've been working on stuff!

For the Barony:
I am still working on getting the herald title changed from Seastar to drake. Tiny nibbles getting closer to being done.

For the Kingdom:
Touching base with Mathghamhain on a regular basis so the two of us can prod Ozurr into getting a name and device registered. Ozurr said he'd think about his options and let me know by this weekend. I'll poke him again tomorrow, I think he's at an event today.

For my household:
I bought 4 tablecloths and plan on cutting them up and reassembling them into our household badge. It should work well as long as I can get the skulls bonded on correctly. I have been having trouble with the fusible webbing on the past 2 projects, but I got it to work on one. So, fingers crossed! But it should look nice, like a table runner. If I do it right I should be able to get 3 tablecloths out of the batch.

Oh! I almost forgot. Also for the barony:

I finally managed to coordinate getting leaf springs from Titus to Torfi, so now he can start working on making a ballista. Once that's done in the spring, I would imagine, I can kidnap bribe discuss with a siege weapon marshal to come out to Long Island to authorize whoever wants.

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.

Getting to know you!

Did you know that the SCA is full of awesome people? It really is, and I feel like I only know a small portion of them, and only in passing at that.

When I went to Wilhelm and Vienna's coronation I spent most of the time with the friends I drove in with. I do love them, they're my closest friends. I spent a small amount of time also with other friends that I see less often, but I still  know them fairly well.

It occurred to me a week or so later that I want to meet more people. And I want to get to know them. Because if I meet somebody once, it's likely that I won't remember them, my memory for people is so horrible. But if I have actual conversations with them then I'll remember them and be happy to see them at future events.

I decided the best way to do this is volunteer. I can read scrolls in court, but that doesn't get me to actually know people. And I don't get to many events outside my own barony. The frustrations of living on Long Island! So when I do go to other events I'm going to find something to volunteer at. Kitchen. Troll. Maybe even retaining. Who knows? I want to find something and meet people and see what new friends I can make. And hey, if that gets me seen by more people in doing more things, than that's just bonus.

It's all about meme

A lot of my life and communicating with friends is over Facebook, so all of the information is relative to that social media.

In 2015 I was asked to do event promotion for a friend's event, Bear's Tavern. Neither of the autocrats were very active on Facebook, and both are definitely not techno-savvy. I had seen Sir Gui making lots of SCA related memes and they were received quite well, judging by the number of "likes" they got. So I made up a few related to the event theme, created a facebook event, and started posting. I would space them out once a week, or every other week. Memes, photos of working on garb, information updates about the event like food menu or prereg dates and information. Silly jokes. Anything spaced out enough to keep people's interest and keep the event in their current mind.

I'm told it worked quite well, the attendee numbers were steady if not improved. 

The following year something horrible happened. Lord John the Bear, who the event is named after, had a bad stroke. Long story short, he was in the hospital for quite a while, but we were determined to keep the event going on. I upped my meme game, and promoted the heck out of the event. Since the theme was "Robin Hood" My sister and I came up with the idea to do pool-noodle archery contest. We had fake fruit that one person would hold and a child's toy bow and pool noodle arrows. It worked amazingly well for what it was, and people seemed to have a good time playing. Afterwards I was told again that my promoting and planning was a big help.

That year I was also asked to do event promotion for Goat's Tavern run by Oliver de Bainbridge and Arrows Axes and Ales run by Monkey Makgee. I didn't go as all-out on the memes for those, but I did do a similar style and run-up for those events. Oliver is a really good brewer and gifted me some delicious mead and cyser as thanks.

In 2017, I was once again requested to do promotion for Bear's Tavern. The theme this time was pirates. More memes and info over FB, but this time Jenna and I emphasized the silly games. And we did come up with a number of them! 

That year the autocrat of Barleycorn realized they hadn't done any event promotion, so two weeks before the event I was asked to help. I made 2 memes, and again put them out and information about the event over facebook over the period of time until the event.

This year, 2018, the popularity of memes seems to be dieing down. So once again asked to promote Bear's Tavern, I didn't do as many memes, but still put out lots of information at a steady pace. The bad snowstorm in the days preceding the event I think had an impact on the attendance, but it was still well enough attended.

Last week I was asked by the autocrat and feastocrat of this upcoming St. Andrews to once again do event promotion, so I started that facebook event. This is a much more "serious" event, so I won't do so many memes. But there's going to be a lot of activities going on and plenty of information I'll need to get out there, so I'm not worried about not having anything fresh to keep this in people's minds and make them look forward to the event.

Art as service

This post is long, and it mostly has to do with art. But I'll get to the service part at the end, I promise.

I first learned how to do calligraphy in high school and thought it was interesting. I guess I was good enough at it that my mom asked me to write out "If wishes were trees I'd have a forest", and she framed it and hung it up in our home. I hadn't done calligraphy since then.

A few times in the past year plus I'd mentioned to Vettorio that I would be interested in learning how to do it SCA style. He made pleased noises but didn't think I was serious about it.
This past June I took a road trip to KWHSS with him, Lada, and Onora. On the way I asked them a bunch of questions about starting off in calligraphy. They still didn't think I was serious. They said write out lyrics to my favorite song. I don't really have a favorite song, so Onora suggested writing out the names of everybody that played The Doctor (big Doctor Who nerd here). A week or so before I went on family vacation in July I asked Vettorio which hand (I made the error of calling it a font) I sound try. I wrote out "this is what my handwriting looks like" on a post-it and he suggested 2 hands. One of them looked fairly modern, the other was gothic. I already had a felt tip calligraphy marker, and got lose leaf paper and I wrote out the names.

Then I wrote out the lyrics to the Firefly theme song. At this point I asked Vettorio if there were capital letters to go with the alphabets he sent me. Then I found a list of pangrams and wrote those out. Those are sentences that use all the letters of the alphabet. Like "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is one.

At this point I was on vacation and there was a Michael's nearby so I went and found the brand pen and ink that was suggested to me. It was too difficult to use the ink pen at the house we were staying in, there was no flat surface I could use to write on. so I kept practicing with the marker, which would work fine on the padded table cloth of the dining room table.

Once back home, I kept practicing, now with the ink pen.  I wrote out lyrics to a few other songs. Beatles' "I will", and Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pidgeons in the park". Before Pennsic Lada asked me to write what I would describe as not-a-scroll. A silly fun scroll-like thing for a pirate at Pennsic. I found that I even had computer paper that was made to look like a pirate map parchment. I passed that off to the people who requested it, and Lada said they were very happy with the result.

I've been setting small goals for myself. Learn how to write the letters. Get good enough to use the fountain pen. Get confident enough to use bristol paper. Get good enough to do baronial scrolls.

This past week I dug out a portable desk I've had since high school. It worked amazingly well.

I taped a piece of bristol paper down, drew lines on it, and found suggested wording for champion scrolls. Since the next event is the archery and thrown weapon challenges I made up scrolls for those. I even left enough room if I can get anybody to do some simple illumination on top, maybe down the sides as well.

I wrote the archery champion scroll and realized halfway through the barony name realized I made a typo and messed up the spelling. Argh, I hate Gaelic! Lada said "Leave it. Typos are period". So I finished the scroll and showed it to my sister. It took her 3 times looking at the scroll before she even realized it was misspelled, so I laughed and didn't worry about it too much.

I moved onto the thrown weapon scroll and that went much better. I still wanted to do more, so I started the archery one over. This time I wrote it all out in pencil first. Only one line at the very bottom didn't space out right in pencil vs. ink, but it looked so much better. I showed it to my sister and she said she could see improvement with every scroll I did.

So now I'll offer them up to my baron/ess if they haven't already arranged for scrolls. If they want them, great. Onora said she'd pretty them up with some illumination. If not, I'll call it practice and put them to the side and keep making scrolls until my scribe friends tell me I'm ready to do simple scrolls for the kingdom.

I think I'll wait until these are either declined or awarded to show them off here.

It is art, but I'm certain I will enjoy having helped in scrolls to give out to the populace. Also helping out illuminating friends if they want to pass them off to somebody else to do the calligraphy. That's how this ties into service.


Edited to add:
My scrolls will not be used, but I was asked if I wanted to do the Heavy Weapons and Rapier champion scrolls. So I will find an illuminator friend (most likely Fiona) to coordinate with and make some scrolls for the barony.

Chain chain chain... chain of campion.

The medallion of the An Dub A&S champion is a big pewter medallion on a (in my opinion) unwieldy chain. I noticed the chain was big and clunky, and if memory serves right, made of galvanized wire. It didn't look comfortable in the least to wear. So I decided to do something about that. I think it was in 2014. My husband has been doing chainmaille for well over 14 or more years. He's brilliant at it. He has taught me some weaves and I've picked up a lot of tips just by being around him as he does it and listening to him and his other chainmaille friends, and now as he's streaming on Twitch.

Byzantine is an easy chain to make. I asked Steve what size/gauge rings to use. I asked Eanraig, who was the A&S champion at the time, what the length of the chain was. I made a thinner and more comfortable chain in that length. At the next baronial meeting I handed it off to the Baroness and Eanraig and told them what it was for. I had brought pliers and switched the medallion over and honestly I can't remember what happened to the old chain.

This is a poorly written entry, I apologize for that, but it's a thing I did that I consider helping out the barony, so I wanted to include it in my blog.

Keep up OP.

When I became herald pursuivant, my Baroness emailed me a spreadsheet of the baronial Order of Precedence. It was just a spreadsheet with name, mundane name, and what award they have. It also had a separate tab that chronologically listed who got what baronial level award. And it hadn't been updated in 2 years or so.

I tend to over-organize when given the opportunity. But this also makes things like the OP easier to update in the future. Hooray for planning for laziness! So now it is a multi-tabbed spreadsheet hosted on my google cloud. There's separate tabs for:
Society awards
Orders of high merit
Armigerous awards
Order of honors
Other EK awards

There's also a tab that is the "condensed version" that like the original list I got had only the person's name and abbreviations for all the awards they have listed after.

I don't have enough knowledge to see if there's a place I could upload the spreadsheet that would keep it easily updateable and also restrict editing to only specific designated people like the herald and coronet. So it stays on my google cloud and I wield my power over it! Muahahaha!! *ahem* 

I compared names from our OP to the kingdom OP, and email/facebook blasted a few times asking populace to check it over and tell me if there's anything missing. I was appreciative of the Vox Regises (Regisi?) when they would publish unofficial royal court reports, so I would skim them and add anybody to my OP that I knew was from my barony.

I also enjoyed reading the unofficial court reports, so I started doing them for my barony as well. But I think that's another post...

The Trouble With Tabards

Much before I was ever interested in heraldry, somebody else had made a tabard for our barony. I was told it was cotton, but it was textured and felt like polyester. It retained heat like polyester. It was scratchy like bad polyester. And it had little duck footprints all over it, big old crossed horns of herald on the chest, and shoulder caps that were as big as dining room curtains.

I hated wearing it, and Suzanne didn't blame me. She didn't make me wear it if I didn't feel like it. The previous herald had a bad habit of constantly forgetting it at home, so she said she wanted to keep it in her Baroness Box with all the other things that were brought out for court. Somewhere along the way the tabard was lost. I swear, it wasn't me. I don't have it, I handed it back to her at the end of every event.

During midnight madness of Pennsic 2016 I bought some blue linen intending to make a new tabard. But since I had no idea what I was doing, I also got some blue cotton fabric at Joanns to make a trial run tabard that I wouldn't be afraid of screwing up.

I then went to the internet! I asked in the court heralds facebook group if people would show me what their baronial tabard looked like. I also got some comments/advice saying the baronial device should be on the front, not the herald symbol. If I wanted those, it wasn't necessary, but I could put them on the sleeve caps.

So I measured myself and made the tabard base a little bigger so it would fit the average person, but not fall off me. Great. Then I borrowed Slaine's light box and traced the duck and wreath onto the white and yellow fabric. Fantastic! I got out my iron and used fusible webbing to iron on the device. (#$&@^^#$&*%($))!!!! Gah! That stuff doesn't like me. Oh well, I did my best. It held on well enough.

I finished it in time for Pennsic. Luckily the webbing held on long enough to last through that. I got some feedback that the wreath should be more circular and it and the duck should be bigger. So after Pennsic I figured out how to undo it. Basically iron it again and peel it up while it's hot. I made a new duck and wreath and battled the fusible webbing again. Not perfect, but it did look much better.

The leaves were peeling off and the webbing was winning the battle. But I had learned basic embroidery and applique, so I blanket stitched the whole thing down.

I think at this point I would be able to make the linen tabard, but of course I put the fabric in a safe spot and I have no idea where that is! So I've handed this tabard off to the next baronial herald and she says it fits her perfectly, so I guess that's the official one for now.

Fish hat fish hat, roly poly fish hat!

This post is a request by my sister.

During the winter Sir Tanaka was posting photos of the many hats he has, some of them extremely silly, while he was doing his pell drills. I remember seeing a dead fish hat on knitty.com, so I decided he needed one. I mwahahaha'ed at him and started knitting it. I saw him at K&Q Bardic/A&S. I had just started knitting the first 10 or so rows, so I snagged him as he walked past, just to make sure it was going to fit on his head. His kid was in tow, and when I showed them the photos from the pattern, ze turned to their father and said "I'm so going to steal that from you.". I said "... I can knit another one for you as well." I finished them by Mudthaw and SCA expressed them (I didn't go to the event this year). Tanaka posted a photo of him wearing it on facebook and I commented that after knitting those two, my son also asked for one, so I had knitted one for him as well. "I can do it in my sleep now!" Ryan commented something along the lines of "Oh, reallllllly?" 

Master Ernst commented with a photo of him wearing a red and yellow version with "live" eyes, instead of the "dead" eyes. dots vs. Xs is the only difference. He called it a carp of maintenance. I decided that I had to make a proper Pelican one for Ryan, I knew he would appreciate the humor of it. I had red yarn already, and I found in A.C. Moore they had a white yarn that had flecks of dark and light brown and orange/red in it. So I used that as the lips and fins and pulled the orange/red and lighter brown bits out and it looked perfectly like ermine. Once I finished it I found I had Ryan's mailing address already so I secretly mailed it off to him. When it was delivered Ryan fb messaged me a bunch of purple hearts. I must admit I squealed a little bit that he liked it. I think it was just before coronation that he got it. He posted the photo of it to facebook and I think he said he did wear it in court when the Order of the Pelican was called up. There's also a EK Photo booth photo of him wearing it.

I also realized this is the second hat I've made for Ryan. A handful of years ago I made him a Jayne hat in East Kingdom Purples. So I guess I need to continue knitting hats for him!

Dead fish hat pattern: http://knitty.com/ISSUEwinter08/PATTfishy.php