kareina

At the SCA event this weekend I spent the first part of the event wearing a tunic and my new Tjorsberg trousers, with the really comfortable sheepskin feet, but as it came time for the evening feast I decided to change into a dress. Remember how some weeks back I said that I had needed to change out the underarm gores in my 12th century underdress so that the sleeves would fit over my larger arm muscles? Well, this time, when I put on the dress I noticed that the fabric was kind of straining over my lats. (Which explains why I found it so difficult to put on. Yes, it has always been difficult to wriggle into this dress, but I barely managed getting the narrow part of the waist over my shoulders at all this time.) Yet, it was still reasonably comfortable, providing the same really good breast support it always has, so I put on the overdress and enjoyed the evening.

However, late in the evening I managed to move my arms and flex my shoulder muscles in such a way that I heard a ripping sound, followed by several other ripping sounds. We looked, but saw no damage to the over dress (which laces up the sides, so better handles the larger muscles), so suspected that it was the underdress. Sure enough, when I finally took it off that evening I saw several rips in the part of the dress that falls between the shoulder blades--a long one pretty much dead center, and a few smaller ones parallel to it between the mid point and my left shoulder blade. Sigh. Luckily, none of them extended low enough to compromise the breast support the dress provides, since that mostly comes from the fact that the dress diameter just under the bust is exactly the same as the circumference of my ribs at that point, and that point is all ribs--it is just under the newly bulging lats.

Therefore today after work I cut out a diamond-shaped hole from the back of the dress and sewed in a diamond shaped replacement, cut on the bias, so it is a bit stretchier, though the same size (after finishing the seams) as the shredded part which I removed. Then I opened up the seam between my back and the underarm gore from the bottom of my lats to where the underarm gore hits the sleeve, and added an insert there. I used the original square underarm gores for this--sewing one straight side to the bottom edge of the underarm gore, one straight side from that point along the body rectangle to the point at the bottom of my lats, and then sewed along the hypotenuse of the triangular gap to let third the edge of the new gore curve to fill the space. Then I trimmed off all of the square that wasn't needed and finished the seam. This adds about 2 cm at the widest point, which takes the strain off of the fabric over my back. With luck I won't grow so much more in the way of muscle bulk, even though I have every intention of continuing to train and get stronger. But the new underdress in progress will be cut a bit loose over the shoulders, just in case.

Other than damaging the dress (which was fun when it happened), the event was a good one. I did much crafts, got to visit with many delightful people, did some dancing, some singing, and even took a short walk. I should have brought my fur hood and muff though. I hadn't expected to go outside, but I did try to watch the fighting, both the torchlight tourney Friday night (where my poor champion took a cup shot :-( and the day time tourney on Saturday. I didn't stay out long for either of them--while the weekend weather was generally warm and sunny, there was also an icy breeze, which I wouldn't have noticed if I had brought the fur.

It must have been sunny and warm at home over the weekend, too, since the bike path between here and uni has pretty much had all of the snow and ice melted away from it since last I took it. Only places which are shady still have some ice. I noticed when dropping O. off at home after the event that the part of the path I can see from the road was clear, so I opted to take my trike in this morning, and was pleased that my 45 minute walk was thus shortened into a 26 minute pedal. (good thing, too, since the above mentioned repairs to the dress took nearly 4 hours!)

My apprentice was supposed to do her analysis of the Roman coins today, but we are nearly out of the Argon gas needed for the ICP-MS, so instead we just set up the experiment, polished the coins, and took photos of them under the laser camera--it will automatically stitch together as many as 7 x 7 photos (which measures about 4 mm wide and 3 mm tall), and it took six sets of 7 x 7 photos to get the entire coin cross section photographed. But it makes sense to get good photos of "before" we fire on it with the laser.

So the plan is (assuming that the gas arrives on time) to run her analyses as the demo experiment on Wednesday during our lab demo day. Hopefully my colleagues will be ok with this.

( This got long (no surprise there), so: Friday summary )

( Saturday summary )

( Sunday summary )
Which meant I had time to go home, take a short nap, unpack most things, and still make it to Swedish folk dance that night.

Much to my surprise, after spending a weekend at a major feast, I weighed a full kilo less this morning than I had on Friday morning. Today's weight was 55.3 kg (about 121.9 lbs), which is the smallest number I have seen since purchasing the scale. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, while I ate something every round, I told the servers to only give me tiny bits of each item, since I didn't feel that hungry (except for the rice pudding with raisins and lingon berries--I had a normal size serving of that, yum!), and my total intake for each day was noticeably less by volume than I normally eat. I think I may have made up for it today though--it will be interesting to see what the scale says tomorrow.

Thursday: Attend the normal SCA/Frostheim gathering at the university campus at 18:00. Leave there and drive to K & H's house just south of Umeå (a nearly 4 hour drive, so we will be getting there kind of late).

Friday: Drive from there to Sundsvall, stopping at Skulleberget along the High Coast for a short adventure. We need to be in Sundsvall by 13:00, but from K & H's house it should only be a 2.5 hour drive, so even with the adventure it should be doable.

Saturday: Teach embroidery workshop at the SCA Glöta Gillet event.

Sunday: return home, with stops along the way at Skulleberget (because, mountain!) and K & H's house (because she probably wants to go home, and she is coming with us to the event).

Ok, so I am rounding by 1.5 years years yet, but the photo taken of me at the event this weekend doesn't look to my eyes that I am really as old as the calendar claims I am:



This, not surprisingly, pleases me.

I also like how the dress came out. Still needs a few more beads on the sleeves, but other than that it is done.

Photo credits: Uladzislau Iwanou, who bought a camera good enough to take photos of spiders, but it works well for people, too.

Last week was Umasmedeltidsdagar, an SCA camping event which ran from Sunday evening through Thursday morning. Since it was happening during the week lord_kjar couldn't attend, since his summer vacation starts this week (his company splits the summer in half such that half of the employees can take their holidays during the first half of the summer, the other half during the second, and the next year they switch, that way there is always someone on duty with the necessary skills to cover everything that has to be done). Therefore, Sunday afternoon saw me doing the not quite two hour drive to site on my own.

I arrived early enough that only the two autocrats and B, the visitor from the West were on site yet. We decided where I should put the pavilion, they stuck around long enough to help me raise the pavilion center pole (the only part of camp set-up I can't manage on my own), and then they all went to the summer house to get more things needed for the event, and I happy moved in to the pavilion. I have always loved camp set up--there is something fun for me in getting everything into place so that it looks nice and is well organized so I can find things quickly. (I also like moving into a new house.)

By the time I was done with moving in they had returned and others had started to arrive. The site for the event is a privately owned Lajv (Larp) village that some friends have built on their family land from old timber houses that other families wanted removed from their property--some houses they were given free because they came and fetched them, others the Ljav organization paid a low price to obtain. The site has no electricity, but there is an old fashioned well full of cool, clear, tasty water, and they brought in a hot tub for the occasion.

Therefor most of the people attending the event were staying in one of the houses--most in the bunk rooms above the main tavern/guest house, others in some of the smaller houses. There was one other pavilion set up on site, and one couple stayed in an RV, parked out of sight down the road a bit.

The weather was pleasantly cool and cloudy, and the ground was a bit wet from several days of rain before the event (which is why I set my pavilion on the highest ground I could find. On Tuesday it started raining, and rained most of the day, but Wednesday dawned clear. Early Wednesday evening I took my phone off of flight mode (batteries last much longer in flight mode) and checked the weather report for the area, which said that it would start raining around 01:00 and keep raining till 13:00 on Thursday. Noting that my pavilion had mostly dried off from Tuesday's rain, I decided to break camp early, and sleep in the loft above the kitchen that night.

This meant that I missed out on the pot-luck feast that the others enjoyed on Wednesday evening, but since I am never hungry in the evenings anyway, that didn't bother me. During the time of the feast I managed to get everything packed down and stashed in the tool shed, save for the pavilion, which we hung from the rafters over the balcony in the main tavern/guest house, so that it could dry a bit more. This meant that I was ready to be social again just on time for the bardic circle, which was so delightfully fun.

Even if we hadn't had a formal bardic circle I would have gone home from the event satisfied with the amount of music, dance and song that we had--there were only somewhere between 15 and 30 people on site (30 had booked, but a number had last-minute things come up so they couldn't make it), but most of us sing, I had my hammer dulcimer, one lady had her violin (she also played for dancing on Tuesday), and another a mandolin. There were three children on site--sisters ranging in age from 7 to 13 who, along with their mother, who directs the choir one of the autocrats sings in, sang, in beautiful harmony, with one another off and on all day every day. But adding in a bardic circle, which encouraged others, who don't normally sing out, to participate, made it even more fun.

Thursday morning I woke to the sound of heavy rain, and smiled for having had the foresight to pack away the pavilion. True to the prediction, it didn't really stop raining all morning, though it varied in intensity levels. I managed to get the car loaded up with my stuff, and the luggage of our Western guest, and she and I hit the road for one last tourist adventure before she returned to California.

First we drove to Storforsen, Europe's largest rapids, and a stunningly beautiful place. She put a video of the rapids on line, if you enjoy seeing the power of huge quantities of water rushing over rocks feel free to check it out.

Luckily we arrived there just as the rain stopped, so we enjoyed 40 minutes of wandering around the various smaller side streams and over the rocks without getting wet. Given how much rain we had had recently, I wasn't that surprised to see how much higher the water was everywhere than when I had been there a few weeks ago for the department meeting for work.

Then we took the road north towards Jokkmokk, stopping at the Arctic Circle for the obligatory tourist photo.

Then we finally wended our way back to my house, unloaded the car, and spent the evening hanging out with lord_kjar before finally heading to bed rather later than was wise, given that we had to leave the house at 05:00 the next morning to get her to the airport for her trip home.

Friday I managed to get the last of the things unpacked and put away, and the now dry pavilion (left spread out in the shed Thursday evening, then spread on the gravel driveway in the sun Friday evening) has been put away ready for its next use, next summer sometime.

Saturday C arrived from Gothenburg and we had some hours to relax and hang out with her before we drove two hours to Burträsk for a folk dance, held in conjunction with their folk music festival weekend. We arrived at 21:15, thinking we were 15 minutes late for the dance, but it turns out that their schedule had been pushed back, so the dance didn't actually begin till 22:00, which gave them time to buy a quick burger from the stand run by the local folk music group.

The dance went till after 01:00, which meant that it was well after 03:00 before we were home. Needless to say, not much was accomplished Sunday, as I recovered from the SCA event, tourist road trip, and folk dance road trip. Today I went to work in the morning, and we have worked on projects in the afternoon. Tomorrow C has to return south again, and I work every morning for the rest of the week. Then I get two weeks off to work on projects at home--we hope to make good progress on the earth cellar. However, we won't be able to borrow his father's tractor this summer, since he bought the new house/farm, and has many things he needs it for. Therefore moving the large rocks will be a bit more complicated and time consuming. It will be interesting to see if it is still possible to finish it this summer without the tractor. Oh well, if it isn't his dad says that next summer he will be available to help with that project if still needed.