kareina

When the autocrats for the Jungfru Maria Bebådelsedagsgille SCA event, which was scheduled for 20-22 March in the Shire of Reengarda (about an hour or two south of where I live, in Frostheim (depending on which part of the shire you measure to) made the painful decision to cancel the event on account of pandemic, I promptly sent an email to the King and Queen suggesting that perhaps we could do something in the way of an on-line event, pointing out that I would be happy to put on my costume, sit by the computer (or phone) working on a sewing project and still be able to see everyone, and perhaps they could even do court and give out the awards they had planned. They replied that they were looking into this, that I was not the only one with this crazy idea. A couple of days later I was in the right place online at the right time to hear the Kingdom Seneschal say that she wanted a deputy for facilitating official on-line meetings and courts, so I promptly volunteered, as it seemed like the best way to be certain that I would get my SCA fix and get to see my friends.

This meant for a busy couple of weeks, setting up guidelines as to how it will all work, participating in the test-run court so that the Royals and their herald and the court technician would all know how it would work. Getting things set up took long enough that the court was actually held the Saturday after the event was supposed to happen. However, it wasn't like any of us had anywhere else to be, so there were still quite a lot of participants in the meeting. Before the meeting their Majesties decided that for this first try at an on-line court they wanted to keep it small, so invitations were sent only to those 70 people who had registered for the event.

The zoom meeting started out informally, with people able to arrive from 15:45, and it was possible for anyone to speak during that pre-court session. Most people had put on costumes for the occasion, and had a video connection. Some people choose not to put on costumes, and thus left their cameras off, and others simply didn't have a working camera on their end. I was, of course, one of the people in costume, so I connected from my phone, and used my handy phone holder, attached to the arm of the recliner (that I had made to make it easy to sit comfortably, relax and sew during meetings). However, Kjartan and Caroline had chosen not to put on costumes, but they wanted to watch the court on the big screen in the living room, which is wear the recliner is. As soon as he connected his computer to the meeting we got an audible feedback loop from my phone and his computer, so I promptly disconnected my phone audio, but kept my video connection.

When everyone had gathered the Court Technician muted everyone save for the Herald (at his home in Reengarda) and their Majesties (at their home in Gyllengran), and the herald called for all to pay heed to their Majesties, who processed in, and sat down upon their thrones. They then conducted business the same as they would for a normal Drachenwald Court. However, when they called forward someone to receive their award the Court Technician would un-mute that person, so that they could, if they choose to, speak and be heard by the royals and the assembled people.

One of the people to receive an award wasn't present in the meeting when they were called forth, so the herald read the scroll anyway and Their Majesties asked everyone to keep it a secret until they got a chance to tell the recipient themselves. But, presumably, one of their friends contacted the recipient via a personal message, because a short time later they joined the meeting, and were able to receive the award.

Perhaps this means that if it should happen again that someone isn't present at an on-line court that the herald can ask if anyone is able to get in touch with the person and ask them to please join, and go on to the next award? Then, if they still haven't joined by the time the rest of the court business has been conducted the scroll can still be read to make it an official award at the end of court, but if they make it then the herald need only read it one time.

Part way through the court the Court Technician sent me a private message asking about my lack of sound connection. I explained about the feedback loop, and said that if she needed me to say something I could go downstairs. Court had felt like it was drawing to a close, and I was thinking that they might want me to say something during the planned after-court feedback session, in my role as Kingdom Deputy Seneschal responsible for facilitating on-line meetings and courts. She replied with "gärna" (the Swedish phrase used instead of "yes please"), so I picked up my phone and went downstairs. As I was still in the process of sitting down on the floor, and before I could figure out where to set the phone (since downstairs doesn't have a handy phone holder already set up) the Herald called me forward to receive an award. I was so surprised.

If any of you wish to see the court for yourself, it is available here. I just looked at it, and my award falls between 21 and 25 minutes. The first glimpse of me is while I am still sitting down, so the image is moving around a fair bit, and I can see that, not only was I crying tears of joy, I must also have bumped my circlet and veil as I went through the curtains to go downstairs, because they are rather rotated to one side. Oops.

Possibly not my prettiest moment in court, but a happy one. One doesn't expect to be getting arts awards at the Kingdom level when one already has a Laurel. Never mind that, in my case, I got the Laurel without having ever gotten a Kingdom level arts award from any of the (at that point) three Kingdoms I had lived in. I have gotten Kingdom level service awards, for making dance happen, in three of the five Kingdoms in which I have lived, but I moved often enough that I hadn't gotten arts awards above the Baronial level, and wound up jumping straight to the Laurel, about 18 years after I first joined the SCA.

Getting this particular arts award was even more special to me, because they specify that it was my musical contribution to the Kingdom which prompted it. My laurel, which I got in January of 2000, was for hand-sewing and embroidery, or, as I like to say, "for fidgeting". But the place I have always loved best to do that fidgeting is at a bardic circle at events. There is something magical for me to gather in costume with friends as we all raise our voices in song, while some of us work on sewing, or nålbindning, or whatever. I love to sing, but, having grown up with a hearing problem, I was never very good at it, not realising that human voices could (and do) hit specific notes. I just thought that singing was words and timing, and that musical instruments were what did notes.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I found out that I "couldn't sing". My beloved best friend was the one who explained to me that I sang in a monotone, and who started me on the path of learning to move my voice up and down to hit various notes. It was a long and difficult path, and I only really started to make good progress on it years after obtaining hearing aids, which I got for the first time when I was 25 years old (and should have had from childhood). While I have always been good at memorising lyrics and the timing/rhythm for songs, these days, sometimes, and if someone helps me start on the correct note, I can actually sing a song correctly, all the way through. Since moving to Frostheim in 2011 I have also obtained a hammer dulcimer, and have learned to play a few tunes, and I love to bring it to an event to share the beautiful sounds of this instrument.

Perhaps this long explication explains why I was moved to tears by being admitted to the Order of the Panache, for trying to share with my friends something that means so much for me.

Tonight I managed to finally get started on the embroidery for the sleeves on the 12th century dress I started six month ago on the lovely 3-in-1 wool twill I bought at the last Medieval Week I attended. The neck embroidery is done, but since it took six months to accomplish just the neck, doing the sleeves are likely to take a rather long time.

Today was the first Ore Geology Seminar for the year at LTU. This is a new thing we are starting, and the hope was that it would be a good place for our PhD students and researchers to share their work in progress and get good ideas. So far so good--today's presentation was on a structural geology regional research project here in Norrbotten. He showed pictures of some troublesome thin sections. While most of the samples from the area have kinematic indicators with one sense of shear direction, a few of the ones with K-feldspar porphyroblasts show the opposite direction. He noted that, in the case of the ones which show the opposite sense of movement that the pressure shadows are very weakly developed, and perhaps he can discount these as not being a very good reflection of the deformational system. This prompted another of us to point out that he could send the samples to the really good SEM with EDS down south and they can measure the C-axis orientation, which could help answer the question as to the true sense of shear. Several of us now sound rather interested in using this technology...

And, finally, the reason I am posting tonight after Nyckelharpa, when I should have already done my yoga and gone to bed. Week 8's summary of how I spent my hours (now that week 9 has started):

Goal:	56	25	20	20	20	15	10	2
	sleep	useful tasks	Durham	LTU	social	exercise	entertainment	make music
Week 1	48	40	0	13	37	15	14	0
Week 2	56	38	20	14	20	7	15	0
Week 3	52	25	11	24	37	12	6	0
Week 4	54	25	44	1	25	10	10	0
Week 5	53	28	38	1	22	11	14	0
Week 6	52	38	9	22	16	17	13	0
Week 7	51	29	8	17	23	19	22	0
Week 8	50	35	9	23	30	11	10	1

I managed to get LTU back on track after week 7's downturn, but my Durham work suffered (five of those nine hours were accomplished on Sunday, after deciding to start sharing my totals).  If I hadn't exceeded my social goal by 10 hours, and had put that energy into working on my thesis instead.  It would also have been good to use those extra five hours of useful task time to work out a bit more. But at least I finally did a bit of music--singing in Choir. Now if I would just tune my poor dulcimer, which has been sitting neglected all year--I have only touched it to show it off to visitors, and then with an apology that it has been too long since it was last tuned (even I can hear that it is off, which is saying something).

I spent a good chunk of the daylight part of today outside doing things to get the yard ready for winter. I managed to trim the branches of the birch next to the earth cellar--now that we have put a bit of a hill next to it, the lowest branches were suddenly too low, and it wouldn't have been safe to do sledding on said hill once the snow comes, but now it will be (well, after I fix the hill a bit--there are still too many rocks sticking up). I also took the roots of the silverbeet and kale out of the raised garden beds and covered them for the winter. Then David and Caroline came over and he and I managed to sort the pile of scrap wood and logs that have been living under the eaves of one of the sheds for a few years. Now the wood that is worth keeping is in the container, and the wood that is only firewood has been broken into reasonable sized bits and added to the wood pile. While we did that she packed more of her things to take to her apartment. It was nice to have them here for a few hours, but I have also been enjoying living mostly on my own. It will be interesting to see what their pattern is once they have finished the "moving in" part at the apartment.

After they went home I sat down and started work on the embroidery for the prize for the Norrskensbågskyttt (photo in the Frostheim group here), and next thing I knew six hours had elapsed. Oops.

Then, after posting a photo of the day's embroidery progress I spent more time than I should have reading stuff on FB before remembering I have a chatealines' report due next week, so I did that. Now it is after three in the morning, and I need to put down the computer, do my yoga, play my dulcimer, and do a bit of reading in the archaeological literature (because I define "day" as "before I go to sleep, and thus it is still Saturday in terms of doing these things "daily", which I am trying to do this month. (though when I am at Crown I will have to see if I can try playing some other sort of musical instrument, since I won't be able to take the dulcimer with me, since I am flying to Helsinki).

(finally making time to post about this)

Last weekend was a fun adventure--Mom and I drove Thursday evening as far as my friend K's house, which took five hours, because we dropped lord_kjar off at the airport on our way out of town. Twice. (We got to the airport the first time, and he said "Where's my back pack?". It was right where he left it, on the floor by the door at his office. As a result what should have been a 15-20 minute detour took pretty much an hour with there-and-back again driving. Luckily, he still caught his flight on time.)

We arrived late, so pretty much went straight to sleep, and did our visiting with people in the morning over breakfast. Then mom, K, and I hopped in the car and drove south. We stopped at Skulleberget, where I had planned to do a quick climb up the mountain, at least as far as the cave, while mom relaxed in the visitor center. Sadly, it turns out that the visitor center isn't open this week--never mind that it was last week, and will be again later in the month.

Undaunted we instead drove across the highway and took the small road in to one of the other park entrances, just because none of us had ever been there before. That road leads past some cute old farm houses and a small village with lovely views out over the fjord, and ends at a park trail head. Since mom isn't up for hiking we just used the outhouse and then got back on the road.

The next stop was at a hotel with lovely views of a bridge, in hopes of getting mom some coffee. However, even though they serve lunch, they wouldn't sell us a cup of coffee, so we kept driving.

The next stop was the winner--the museum in Sundsvall, where we and a few other SCA people had a guided tour of the Högom find exhibit (but first we ate lunch at the cafe and mom got her coffee). I first read Margareta Nockert's book on the textiles from that find in 1998, and it was a delight to see the display. Not that they have much of the textiles here--the rest are apparently in Stockholm, but what they have were wonderful to see. And they have the buttons! Ok, round decorative things that attach to a clasp, not buttons in the modern sense. But they are every bit as stunning as the photos make them out to be. I want some. (Ok, I now have some--mom bought me the postcard with a photo of them, because she loves me.)

After that we drove across town and walked about on the burial mounds themselves. The local SCA kids grew up sledding on those hills.

Then we went out to the SCA event, which was held in a cute little scout cabin in the woods on the bank of the river. Lovely setting, nice hall (save for the part about sleeping on the third floor but the only toilets being on the first floor, I prefer a shorter trip for those middle of the night runs to the loo).

Friday night I did a talk on the history of the SCA and read Dorthea's story about the first event. Saturday after breakfast they started with a lecture on various types of embroidery during various SCA periods by an embroidery/research laurel. Then those of us who were doing hands-on workshops each had a quick turn to describe the stitch or technique we had on offer, then we each took a table and people came to us to learn (many people rotated through more than one workshop). Some of them learned osenstitch by working on the cloak, others on a scrap of fabric they could take home with them to look at later.

This mixed class approach worked really well in terms of everyone getting a chance to try everything, and made for good energy in the room. However, the cloak may not have gotten as much attention as it might have if the workshops were totally separate rooms or something. Not that I can complain, as of today (three days after the event), the cloak is up to 109 hours: the musical instrument is nearly done and the first set of northern lights is nearly done on the green part and well along on the red. It is looking likely that we will be able to finish this before the event (13-15 Nov).

Saturday evening was a pot-luck feast, which turned out to be a great feast for all carnivores and cheese lovers, but I felt bad for the poor woman sitting next to me, who has so many allergies that she just eats vegan to play it safe--not so much on that table in that category.

During the feast the Prince and Princess held court and gave my friend K her award of arms, which pleased me greatly (especially as I hadn't checked the registration list in advance, so didn't know they were coming, so I hadn't sent any award recommendations myself). They also gave another friend of mine an award for arts and sciences, to which my reaction was "She doesn't already have one?!". They also did a very nice speech to the new people, welcoming them, and encouraging everyone else to do so as well, since new people are the future of our society.

Sunday we helped out a bit with cleaning, and then got on the road early enough that even with one stop to visit friends on the way home we still got here on time for me to drop mom and the stuff at the house and head to our normal Sunday folk dance class, where I was delighted to discover that we have a couple of new people!

However, much though I would have loved to stay and keep dancing, I had to leave a bit early to head to the airport and pick lord_kjar.

Monday was our first Finnish class (which I already posted about), and Tuesday was choir. Today some friends came over to help me work on the cloak, and tomorrow is Frostheim's A&S night at the uni. This weekend is the first one without something planned in a while, and I am looking forward to it. Perhaps I will finish unpacking from the event--I have been too busy doing stuff in prep for Norrskensfest in November to get to that.

When I first met lord_kjar he was wearing a lovely second-hand red wool tunic which is just enough too small for him, especially in the arms, that it gave the illusion of him being much younger than he is--since he looked much like he had only just had a growth spurt and become too long for the tunic. However, the fabric is gorgeous, and I have long wanted to modify it to fit him better. Last summer we bought some grey wool to lengthen the hem and sleeves, and I have finally, in the last week or so, started attaching it to the tunic with some decorative stitches in blue silk.



The stitching I am using is based on this web page.I love this seam finishing technique--the loops through the previous stitches are lovely, and the main stitches surround the seam both front and back to help hold it together, which is good since I did the attachment using a single strand of sewing thread, which will, eventually, break, if it is all that is holding the seam together.



I wondered for a bit on what to do with the hem itself, and finally decided to try the same decorative seam as I am using to join the two bits of fabric. I have never tried this before, and it turns out that when worked over the hem gives a raised bit to help prevent the edge of the fabric wearing out.



However, when seen from the side view it looks like plain old blanket stitch.



I am looking forward to getting this one finished and seeing it on him. Now, if I only had more time for projects...

or updating my sticky post that is meant to record all of my projects, but I just noticed, while adding a link (this paragraph is, needless to say, an after-thought edit) there for this post, that this is my first update to the sticky post in a couple of years. I wonder what all I have finished in that time, and when I will add them?