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kareinaWhat have I been up to for the past 8 days? Some highlights:
Sewing. Working on a new tunic for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
archinonlive--he does the machine sewing, we work together on everything else. He is fun to work on projects with, and he has the patience to match the stitch length to the weave of the fabric. The result is that he can do a flat-felled seam the same orientation as I do by hand: First pass of stitching so that the seam is on the outside, with one seam allowance twice as long as the other. Fold the longer over the shorter, then press them flat against the garment and stitch down the folded edge. He uses a zig zag stitch for that, and while it is visible if one looks closely, it is no where near as obvious as most seams done by machine. It actually surprised me when he did this, because I have had more than one machine sewer tell me that they do their flat felled seams the opposite way, so that the seam allowance is on the inside of the garment, so that only one line of stitching will be visible on the outside. However, both he and I agree that the seam feels nicer with the seam on the outside. (Another advantage is that if one is doing something fitted the fit won't change when the seam is finished, as it would if the seam were on the inside.)
In addition the 12th Century underdress I have been working on for over a year (hand-sewing, of course), has been coming along. I am pretty much only working on it at the Sunday afternoon folk music sessions (two hours each week), but I now have all of the gores set into the skirt, the sleeves finished, and have started attaching them. I have only to finish up the shoulder seams and sew the sides shut, so there should be no problems getting it done before double wars. I noticed yesterday that I somehow managed to make one sleeve about 1 cm longer than the other. However, since this is the sort of sleeve which is way longer than my arm, and is gathered up over the forearm no one will ever notice, so I might not bother changing it.
I have actually been contemplating havingarchinonlive help me with the black/brown herringbone wool bliaut that I cut out not long before moving here. I have been hemming each piece, and will then sew the hemmed pieces together (I experimented with flat felled seams, but for this fabric this is a *much* nicer finish. I am wondering if he were to machine hem the pieces (save for the points of the gores, which I would rather do by hand) using a zig zag stitch if the diagonal weave of the fabric would cause the stitches to vanish enough for me to cope? While I have a strong preference for only hand-sewn costumes (read: I do not own any machine sewn costumes at all, though some of my armour was machine sewn by my knight back in the 1990's) I also acknowledge that I simply do not have the time for hand-sewing that I did during the decade I spent as an undergrad and had all of those lectures during which I could be sewing.
Met my exercise goal for the week. I have been feeling like my daily evening yoga and morning abs plus dancing weekly and walking to classes a couple of times a week was just not enough exercise. Just that was averaging between 1.4 and 1.6 hours a day of movement, which, while high compared to many people on earth, is low compared to other times in my life. Therefore I decided that I would start exploring the area on my trike, with a goal of pedaling at least an average of 10 km a day, five days a week. (archinonlive doesn't have a bike just now, so no way am I going to make time to cycle on the weekends when he his home from work). As a result of adding in the trike riding (and meeting my distance goals) my average hours of movement a day for this month is now 1.9, which feels much better! It is, of course, still too soon to see any changes in my body, but I feel better, and that is enough.
Getting into armour. I first built my armour in 1991 or 1992, when I was living in An Tir. While I was still in Glyn Dwfn I fought regularly, and learned the basics, had much fun, and the others told me that I had potential as a fighter to get good. Then I moved to Fairbanks, where we had very few fighters--while we did armour up occasionally, we didn't quite have critical mass to make a regular thing of it, and I did not improve.
From there I moved to Anchorage, where the group is larger--it fact it was just slightly too large to inspire me to fight much--the fighters there were able to kill me at will, but I wasn't offered the training I needed to learn to block their blows, and there were enough fighters at the time they didn't really care if I armoured up or not, so I didn't bother as much as I might have. From their I moved to Kotzebue, where there were three of us who owned armour. Again, the small number of fighters translated into only rarely bothering to armour up. That was followed by a brief stay in Anchorage again, where I was even less inclined to armour up, as I was more out of practice, and so easier to kill.
Then I moved to California, where our local fighter practice had so many people attending each week that if a couple of dukes failed to show up no one noticed, unless they had a message to pass to them. There was no need for me to armour up from anyone else's point of view; the rare occasion I did I reinforced my own opinion that everyone else is better than I; I can't hit them, but they can hit me at will. And I had a champion who was pretty good at fighting and fun to fuss over, so rather that doing it myself I enjoyed the other half of the game, and worked on his armour, talked fighting with him, encouraged him to practice, and did everything in my power to help him to be the best fighter he could be. He has told me that he would likely not have become a knight without my help, support, and encouragement, and that felt pretty darn good.
In Tasmania the local group was much smaller, and sometimes I received encouragement from the other fighters to armour up, because there were few enough of us that one more body mattered. However, some months there were just too few of us so that no one bothered armouring up and "practice" was really more of a social gathering, and then I started really focusing on the PhD and not having time to go to practice at all, right about the time we achieved critical mass in number of fighters such that practice was actually happening every week. Showing up once in a while convince me that they could hit me at will and I couldn't hit them, and I accepted the fact that without training as well as practice that situation wasn't going to change for me, so I sold my armour and focused on my studies. Just before I left the lady who had bought my armour sold it back to me, pretty much unused, as she had injured her back and hasn't been able to armour up.
In Italy there was one other person in Milan who had armour, but his home was an hour away by bus, metro, or trike (a bit longer if I took my rollerblades) and we were both very, very busy, so we only armoured up two or three times in the 1.5 years I was there.
Frostheim, on the other hand, appears to be the perfect size group to inspire me into armour. We generally have 4 to 6 of us in armour any given week, and we do Training. Sunday's practice we put on our gear and then we took turns being in the middle while the rest of us came in, threw one blow (at a slowish speed), and came out again. This cycled through with each of us throwing our one blow a number of times before the next person went to the middle. Then we repeated the sequence, but this time with throwing one feint followed by a single shot. The third set we upped the speed of the blows and were permitted two feints before the single shot, and this time the person in the middle was permitted a single return shot if the attacker left a really inviting opening. Finally, after all that warm up (and it really did warm me up!) we played a game they play most weeks--we are each given a number of lives based upon our experience level at fighting--the local knight gets one life, I, at the bottom end of the ability list get seven. The first person takes the center of the field and one at a time the rest of us go in for single combat. The winner keeps the field, the loser departs. Wounds are retained. We keep cycling through until everyone has used up all of their lives.
At this point I am only managing to hit the others rarely, but I feel like with the actual training I am receiving, combined with the encouragement to armour up each week, that I will actually improve this time, and get to actually claim to be a real fighter, rather than someone who owns a suit of armour but doesn't use it. This makes me happy. I must add some arm strengthening exercises during the week--that shield and sword feel heavier than they should feel...
Swedish LessonsWe are up to chapter 13 in the text book, and I really need to put some more serious effort into studying--I need to take the exam early, on the 25th of this month, due to the below mentioned adventures. I confess that outside of class I have been neglecting the text book, but instead am making good progress in reading the Swedish version of Anne of Green Gables, which book I have read in English so many times over the decades that I know what every paragraph should mean, which means that I can read it in Swedish, even though most of the words aren't yet part of my vocabulary. I am really, really looking forward to re-reading it, because it is with repetition that words become part of one's active vocabulary. When I first started this book I could manage to read a page or three at a sitting. Now I can read more than a chapter at a time, and it feels good. I am laughing where I should laugh, and fully expect that it will make me cry when we get to the part that always does.
I am getting a bit better at catching words I know when I hear people speaking in Swedish. If they are talking about information I already know I can follow much of a conversation. However, conversation tends to move on to other topics, and then I get lost again, but it is encouraging to see some improvement. Now if only we would speak Swedish more at home. But we tend not to do so for more than five minutes in a day (if that) as it is just so much easier to speak in English...
Planning summer holidaysWe have booked our ferry tickets to the Medieval Week on Gotland in August, finalized plans for the shire trip down to Double Wars, leaving here in two rental mini busses in two weeks, departing on Friday the 27th, and returning on Sunday the 5th of June. I think that I will not be bringing my computer on that trip, which will make it the longest I have been without internet access since I don't remember when. We have booked for the local Medieval Days on 13 to 16 July, which is a gathering open to the public that the SCA participates in (and the group is paid to do so). This year it will also be the site of the Nordmark Coronet Tournament, too. Alas, I don't yet meet the residency requirement to enter Coronet.archinonlive has to work that week, but I will be on site during the days, and he will join me in the evenings and we will be camping the full week. As soon as that week is over his vacation starts. (His company divides the summer into two halves, and half of the employees can take vacation during the first half and the rest during the second, the following year they switch to the other half of summer; this ensures that there are people on duty at any given time who have enough knowledge base to see that everything that must happen happens. However, it does mean that sometimes he has to miss out on something because it falls just outside of his possible vacation time).
We have three weeks of his vacation time to enjoy before we head south for the above mentioned Medieval Week in Gotland. I am hoping for some sightseeing adventures in the mountains of Sweden and Norway, but details have not yet been determined. Should anyone wish to visit and do some mountain adventures with us, the period between 18 July and 5 August is the time available on this end.
Sewing. Working on a new tunic for
archinonlive--he does the machine sewing, we work together on everything else. He is fun to work on projects with, and he has the patience to match the stitch length to the weave of the fabric. The result is that he can do a flat-felled seam the same orientation as I do by hand: First pass of stitching so that the seam is on the outside, with one seam allowance twice as long as the other. Fold the longer over the shorter, then press them flat against the garment and stitch down the folded edge. He uses a zig zag stitch for that, and while it is visible if one looks closely, it is no where near as obvious as most seams done by machine. It actually surprised me when he did this, because I have had more than one machine sewer tell me that they do their flat felled seams the opposite way, so that the seam allowance is on the inside of the garment, so that only one line of stitching will be visible on the outside. However, both he and I agree that the seam feels nicer with the seam on the outside. (Another advantage is that if one is doing something fitted the fit won't change when the seam is finished, as it would if the seam were on the inside.)In addition the 12th Century underdress I have been working on for over a year (hand-sewing, of course), has been coming along. I am pretty much only working on it at the Sunday afternoon folk music sessions (two hours each week), but I now have all of the gores set into the skirt, the sleeves finished, and have started attaching them. I have only to finish up the shoulder seams and sew the sides shut, so there should be no problems getting it done before double wars. I noticed yesterday that I somehow managed to make one sleeve about 1 cm longer than the other. However, since this is the sort of sleeve which is way longer than my arm, and is gathered up over the forearm no one will ever notice, so I might not bother changing it.
I have actually been contemplating having
archinonlive help me with the black/brown herringbone wool bliaut that I cut out not long before moving here. I have been hemming each piece, and will then sew the hemmed pieces together (I experimented with flat felled seams, but for this fabric this is a *much* nicer finish. I am wondering if he were to machine hem the pieces (save for the points of the gores, which I would rather do by hand) using a zig zag stitch if the diagonal weave of the fabric would cause the stitches to vanish enough for me to cope? While I have a strong preference for only hand-sewn costumes (read: I do not own any machine sewn costumes at all, though some of my armour was machine sewn by my knight back in the 1990's) I also acknowledge that I simply do not have the time for hand-sewing that I did during the decade I spent as an undergrad and had all of those lectures during which I could be sewing. Met my exercise goal for the week. I have been feeling like my daily evening yoga and morning abs plus dancing weekly and walking to classes a couple of times a week was just not enough exercise. Just that was averaging between 1.4 and 1.6 hours a day of movement, which, while high compared to many people on earth, is low compared to other times in my life. Therefore I decided that I would start exploring the area on my trike, with a goal of pedaling at least an average of 10 km a day, five days a week. (
archinonlive doesn't have a bike just now, so no way am I going to make time to cycle on the weekends when he his home from work). As a result of adding in the trike riding (and meeting my distance goals) my average hours of movement a day for this month is now 1.9, which feels much better! It is, of course, still too soon to see any changes in my body, but I feel better, and that is enough. Getting into armour. I first built my armour in 1991 or 1992, when I was living in An Tir. While I was still in Glyn Dwfn I fought regularly, and learned the basics, had much fun, and the others told me that I had potential as a fighter to get good. Then I moved to Fairbanks, where we had very few fighters--while we did armour up occasionally, we didn't quite have critical mass to make a regular thing of it, and I did not improve.
From there I moved to Anchorage, where the group is larger--it fact it was just slightly too large to inspire me to fight much--the fighters there were able to kill me at will, but I wasn't offered the training I needed to learn to block their blows, and there were enough fighters at the time they didn't really care if I armoured up or not, so I didn't bother as much as I might have. From their I moved to Kotzebue, where there were three of us who owned armour. Again, the small number of fighters translated into only rarely bothering to armour up. That was followed by a brief stay in Anchorage again, where I was even less inclined to armour up, as I was more out of practice, and so easier to kill.
Then I moved to California, where our local fighter practice had so many people attending each week that if a couple of dukes failed to show up no one noticed, unless they had a message to pass to them. There was no need for me to armour up from anyone else's point of view; the rare occasion I did I reinforced my own opinion that everyone else is better than I; I can't hit them, but they can hit me at will. And I had a champion who was pretty good at fighting and fun to fuss over, so rather that doing it myself I enjoyed the other half of the game, and worked on his armour, talked fighting with him, encouraged him to practice, and did everything in my power to help him to be the best fighter he could be. He has told me that he would likely not have become a knight without my help, support, and encouragement, and that felt pretty darn good.
In Tasmania the local group was much smaller, and sometimes I received encouragement from the other fighters to armour up, because there were few enough of us that one more body mattered. However, some months there were just too few of us so that no one bothered armouring up and "practice" was really more of a social gathering, and then I started really focusing on the PhD and not having time to go to practice at all, right about the time we achieved critical mass in number of fighters such that practice was actually happening every week. Showing up once in a while convince me that they could hit me at will and I couldn't hit them, and I accepted the fact that without training as well as practice that situation wasn't going to change for me, so I sold my armour and focused on my studies. Just before I left the lady who had bought my armour sold it back to me, pretty much unused, as she had injured her back and hasn't been able to armour up.
In Italy there was one other person in Milan who had armour, but his home was an hour away by bus, metro, or trike (a bit longer if I took my rollerblades) and we were both very, very busy, so we only armoured up two or three times in the 1.5 years I was there.
Frostheim, on the other hand, appears to be the perfect size group to inspire me into armour. We generally have 4 to 6 of us in armour any given week, and we do Training. Sunday's practice we put on our gear and then we took turns being in the middle while the rest of us came in, threw one blow (at a slowish speed), and came out again. This cycled through with each of us throwing our one blow a number of times before the next person went to the middle. Then we repeated the sequence, but this time with throwing one feint followed by a single shot. The third set we upped the speed of the blows and were permitted two feints before the single shot, and this time the person in the middle was permitted a single return shot if the attacker left a really inviting opening. Finally, after all that warm up (and it really did warm me up!) we played a game they play most weeks--we are each given a number of lives based upon our experience level at fighting--the local knight gets one life, I, at the bottom end of the ability list get seven. The first person takes the center of the field and one at a time the rest of us go in for single combat. The winner keeps the field, the loser departs. Wounds are retained. We keep cycling through until everyone has used up all of their lives.
At this point I am only managing to hit the others rarely, but I feel like with the actual training I am receiving, combined with the encouragement to armour up each week, that I will actually improve this time, and get to actually claim to be a real fighter, rather than someone who owns a suit of armour but doesn't use it. This makes me happy. I must add some arm strengthening exercises during the week--that shield and sword feel heavier than they should feel...
Swedish LessonsWe are up to chapter 13 in the text book, and I really need to put some more serious effort into studying--I need to take the exam early, on the 25th of this month, due to the below mentioned adventures. I confess that outside of class I have been neglecting the text book, but instead am making good progress in reading the Swedish version of Anne of Green Gables, which book I have read in English so many times over the decades that I know what every paragraph should mean, which means that I can read it in Swedish, even though most of the words aren't yet part of my vocabulary. I am really, really looking forward to re-reading it, because it is with repetition that words become part of one's active vocabulary. When I first started this book I could manage to read a page or three at a sitting. Now I can read more than a chapter at a time, and it feels good. I am laughing where I should laugh, and fully expect that it will make me cry when we get to the part that always does.
I am getting a bit better at catching words I know when I hear people speaking in Swedish. If they are talking about information I already know I can follow much of a conversation. However, conversation tends to move on to other topics, and then I get lost again, but it is encouraging to see some improvement. Now if only we would speak Swedish more at home. But we tend not to do so for more than five minutes in a day (if that) as it is just so much easier to speak in English...
Planning summer holidaysWe have booked our ferry tickets to the Medieval Week on Gotland in August, finalized plans for the shire trip down to Double Wars, leaving here in two rental mini busses in two weeks, departing on Friday the 27th, and returning on Sunday the 5th of June. I think that I will not be bringing my computer on that trip, which will make it the longest I have been without internet access since I don't remember when. We have booked for the local Medieval Days on 13 to 16 July, which is a gathering open to the public that the SCA participates in (and the group is paid to do so). This year it will also be the site of the Nordmark Coronet Tournament, too. Alas, I don't yet meet the residency requirement to enter Coronet.
archinonlive has to work that week, but I will be on site during the days, and he will join me in the evenings and we will be camping the full week. As soon as that week is over his vacation starts. (His company divides the summer into two halves, and half of the employees can take vacation during the first half and the rest during the second, the following year they switch to the other half of summer; this ensures that there are people on duty at any given time who have enough knowledge base to see that everything that must happen happens. However, it does mean that sometimes he has to miss out on something because it falls just outside of his possible vacation time). We have three weeks of his vacation time to enjoy before we head south for the above mentioned Medieval Week in Gotland. I am hoping for some sightseeing adventures in the mountains of Sweden and Norway, but details have not yet been determined. Should anyone wish to visit and do some mountain adventures with us, the period between 18 July and 5 August is the time available on this end.
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Date: 2011-05-11 04:47 pm (UTC)