Double Wars was fun!

[kareina]

The plan for the trip home: depart site by 05:00 at the latest, in hopes of arriving home by midnight.

The reality of the trip home: departed site at 04:55, arrived home at 23:59; had everything unloaded at two different locations, the two rental cars filed with petrol or diesel (one of each) and returned by 01:20. There were seven us for the drive home, five of whom did the full trip, the others were dropped off in cities 6 and 3 hours south of here. The trip went so smoothly I would cheerfully travel with these folk on future road trips. Yes, it is a very long drive, but it was still a nice trip!

Double Wars was a nice, relaxing, event for me. But then, I usually just relax at SCA wars--they tend to happen when it is hot, so I spend my days in the shade waiting for sunset, and then enjoy evening socializing. However, hot days in southern Sweden, while still hot, are no where near as brutal as hot days in California or Australia, or Arizona. We only had a couple of days that got hot enough to really keep me hiding in the shade, and on both of them the heat broke around 17:00, giving us nice, comfortable evenings to enjoy for hours more. My, but the sun sets early that far south! It got nearly dark around midnight, but lightened back up again after 02:00...

The first couple of days it was cool and comfortable (read: was cold enough to wear two wool tunics, wool socks under my boots, nålbinded fingerless gloves, and a wool hat over my underdress) and it rained. I am totally ok with rain on the first couple of days on a long event, so long as I get to pack a dry pavilion at the end of it, and I did. However, the nice cool start to the day did make the hot days seem even hotter.

Projects accomplished or in progress at the event:

*under dress: white linen, 12th Century style with really long sleeves that runch up on the forearms. I completed it on the drive and wore it several days at the event. I really, really love the fact that it is totally self-supporting. The body rectangle is exactly the same size as my ribs just below my breasts, so that when I wear it they are supported and cannot fall down, as there is no where for them to go. So comfortable! I made this one long enough to puddle on the ground, but since the event started out damp I decided on a way to shorten it at need. I took a heavy thread and ran it in a quick basting stitch around the skirt at hip level, in three different lines, spaced about 7 mm apart. I then drew the threads in and tied them shut around my waist. This was very effective to shorten the skirts, but the strings are not as comfortable as I would like. The plan is to replace them with loops sewn onto the seams at that height, and then thread in a nice soft, woven band that can be used to cinch that part to my waist when I want to, or removed when I want the skirt at full length. No, I have no idea if this was ever done in period, but it is way easier than making two dresses, one of each length!

*take in old underdress: blue linen, made just before I left the West for Lochac back in 2003--at the time I made it loose for maximum air flow in hot weather, and I have lost weight since then. I so loved the way the above dress feels to wear I took off the sleeves and took them in to fit (a necessary step to getting the self supporting effect--the underarm square gusset needs to actually sit in the armpit, not down by the waist!) and got archinonlive's help pinning them into place on the body such that this one is also self supporting. It took an entire day to do this and sew the sleeves back on, but then I wore the dress several days because it was so comfortable this way.

*take in laurel tunic: black linen with embroidered knot-work laurel wreath, made shortly after I moved to Tasmania. This one was tighter in the body than the above mentioned blue underdress, but I had made the sleeves, which are short, very loose, and the underarm square gussets were larger than they needed to be. As a result the under arm gussets reached fully to the top of the waist gores! This made for a loose, brezzy tunic, but it wasn't that flattering. So I took off the sleeves, cut off a wide enough strip from each of them that I was able to cut one of them in half to make two new underarm gussets the correct size (and save the old ones for some future project like a belt pouch or something). Again, it took all day to do the modifications, but the result is comfortable and flattering. I did make it deliberately a little looser than the underdresses, so it is not self-supporting on its own (over a loose underdress), but I am still happy with the changes(I don't think it would have been a good idea to make an over tunic as fitted as the underdresses).

*progress on the bliaut in progress: blueish black/brown wool in a wavy twill weave. This is one I started before I left Italy, with fabric purchased in Austria. The fabric frays enough that I am hemming each piece and will then stitch them together once they are hemmed (so when it is finally assembled all of the seams, including the bottom hem, will already be finished). I worked on this in between the other projects. I am doing my usual trick of using lots of narrow triangles for the skirt gores, which means that I could fit two of them into my belt pouch to take with me, and stitch whenever the mood struck. I managed to hem a bunch of them, and even stitched one set of three gores together to see how they would look. But it will be ages before this project is done. However, that is a good thing, since my main motivation for stitching is that I want something to do with my hands at the moment!

*bells: good quality large bells, that had been purchased from a music store--they came mounted on a stick and have a really good sound. But we were looking for something we could put on my ankle so that I can play music while I keep stitching. Therefore we took the bells off of the stick. It turns out that they were attached by rivets to a black strip of plastic that looks at first glance like leather. Removing the staples that held the plastic to the stick gives one long strip of 13 bells and two short strips of 6 bells each. So far I have attached the long strip to some scrap heavy linen fabric--one strip in back of the plastic, and small strips in between each bell and attached to the backing linen. The next step will be to attach strings to the corners to tie them on to an ankle, or hips, or whatever, and then cover the linen with some blue velvet I have. I worked on this during the instrumental jam session on the event, and managed to shake the bells in time with the music while stitching, save for when it was time to start a new thread.

*embroidery: indigo and white wool on linen in bayeux stitch which will go on the above mentioned black/brown linen. I brought this along to the event, but didn't take it out till the drive home, where I manged to colour in another couple of inches of the pattern. Will need to work on this more often if I want it done when the dress is ready to assemble.


In addition to my projects, in between sessions of music and archery archinonlive managed to finish the embroidered dragon (well, appliquéd, really) for his musical instrument bag we made some time back, and got it attached. It looks great! Will look really good with the matching tunic that is still in progress, but we can't find the spool of linen thread with which we were stitching it (it was there one day, gone the next).

We made it to a number of dance sessions, and had much fun with them. We met many delightful people (and so far I have eight new FB friends from the event) and got better acquainted with ones we had met previously. Saw many good furniture ideas and did a couple of pavilion tours. It was so nice to have my pavilion again! Two years of not camping it in was really quite long enough. We need camp furniture! A bed would be nice. More wooden boxes that serve as benches on site and ways to transport stuff to and from the event. The goal is to store everything in boxes so that there is no "packing" before or after an event, just load up the boxes and go. Sadly, his car is only large enough to hold the three boxes we already have + the pavilion, so some other arrangements will be needed once we reach this goal.

The trip down was also very pleasant--a bit more sleeping than the trip home, because we got on the road at 11:40 on Friday and arrived on site around 07:00 on Saturday. I was amused to note that when it was my turn to drive on the trip down I was a bit nervous, since I haven't really done any driving to speak of in so long, but on the return trip I wasn't nervous at all, despite winding up with the shift that went through Stockholm (the only traffic of the trip) around noon on a Sunday afternoon.

On the drive down I did my yoga for the day in short (five minute) sessions on several different stops, but on the return trip, while I did stretch a bit when we stopped, I didn't do so in as focused of a manner, but instead did my yoga after we finished returning the cars. Damn, it feels GOOD to stretch every day, especially after such a long road trip! I also managed to remember to do my situps every morning (something I used to forget at camping events before Mari challenged everyone to do their abs daily), even on the day I woke at 03:45 so as to be done with them and ready to depart at 05:00. I am so glad I do them--I remember a time when my back hurt at events from standing around talking to people while having bad posture. Those days are long past! Between the strengthening of the situps, crunches, leg lifts, etc that I do every morning and the yoga/stretching I do every evening my back rarely hurts, and then only if I do something really stupid, and as soon as I stop and stretch it feels better.

I am enjoying being part of an active shire. Frostheim is a really good group of people. We are hosting the Nordmark Coronet tourney up here this summer (18 days after I have to depart for Australia to apply for my visa application, so I don't expect to be back for it, but one can hope), so to encourage folk to come up for the event we brought down some large bbq grills and we cooked up a couple of wild boars which we fed to everyone who wandered past, and we took a huge platter of it to court to present to the Crown, who then bade us to serve it to the populace. Since we had the fire going all day we also mixed up a flour/water/salt dough and cooked some bread on sticks. Yum! When the Prince and Princess called forth SvartulvR (click on his name on this page, since there isn't a way to link to it directly) to present him with a thank you token for being one of the people who, to their mind, made the event more fun (by roasting the boars), he then called out "Frostheim" and was answered with the same call from all of us present.

Interesting observation of the event: I counted one dozen laurels present for the laurel ceremony, and 15 knights for the knighting. I am so used to places where the laurels outnumber the knights, and the pelicans way outnumber the laurels that it was a surprise to see that there were more knights. I should remember to check the OP to see what the proportion of knights to laurels to pels is in the kingdom--was this only an artifact of the event being a War? (which would surprise me, as there was a VERY full arts and sciences calender at this event).

The war itself is fought over the question of which side one should butter the local flat bread--the flat side, or the holey side. I still haven't tried that bread (since I eat home-baked breads instead of store bought bread), but to my mind the answer should be "both--that way one gets more butter!". They did a very fun presentation in court, showing the history of how it came to be that there was a war on this subject, and everyone got up and choose their side. Near as I can tell, the split is roughly 50-50 (indeed the King favours one side, and his queen the other, ditto for the Prince and Princess). After sides were declared the King stepped into the space between the sides and declared that there remained only one thing left to do before the war could be fought, and he summoned his Knights to his side and they brought forth a new candidate, who was sent off on vigil to contemplate becoming a knight the next day. I rather enjoyed the way they did that. I am told that doing a vigil is standard operating procedure here in Drachenwald. I never had one, but went straight from the surprise offer to swearing fealty as a Laurel. Hearing the language in which they send the candidate off to think about the offer, it actually sounds like a good idea. I gather that people nearly always accept after their vigil, but it is quite possibly a good idea to make them think long and hard about it first, anyway.

The war was held off site, at a local "castle" (not like a traditional castle with all stone walls and embattlments etc, but still a period building, built with lots of stone), where they had a Medieval market open to the public. some of the SCA people were selling stuff, and some of the merchants (I gather) do Medieval markets all the time and are not (necessarily) SCA folk. We picked up a nice straw hat and some lovely wool for over tunics in a blue/grey herringbone twill. The fabric merchant had already sold out of the really, really nice very, very light weight white wool that so many ladies I spoke to bought for making veils, and which archinonlive wants to make himself a hood. However, she is happy to do business mail order, and tells me that she has some of that same fabric in black at home, which I think would make a very good bliaut. However, it will likely be a while before I buy it, since that stuff is expensive, so I should wait till I have an income (and finish some of the projects in progress). We also bought a nice ceramic water pitcher from the castle gift shop, because we failed to bring one with us to the event, and they are nice to have.

This morning we didn't get to sleep in, but instead got up early so we could head out to Gamelstead and practice for our dance performance this afternoon. I gather that today is a National day for Sweden, and there was a very full program of folk dances and music and other entertainments out there. We did our rehearsal, then joined the procession from the church to the stage, where we had time for a picnic lunch before our performance (which was fun, and went well). I borrowed a costume from one of our fellow dancers, and was told that it looks good on me. I would like to make one of my own that fits me a bit better. While it was easy to overlap the bodice to fit, that puts the seams in the wrong place (not that the audience noticed, but I do!). We then relaxed and visited with friends for a bit longer till his performance with the other folk musicians, followed by more visiting with people, a much needed trip to the grocery store, and an evening spent doing a little unpacking, a little baking (yum, baking powder biscuits!), and a fair bit of reading of LJ and email. It will take ages before I catch up, though!

My plan for tomorrow includes the rest of the unpacking, work on my visa application, work on my paper, and go for a trike ride.