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It occurred to me it might be interesting to keep a running log of things I've made over the course of this year. So this entry is going to be post-dated (sorry for those of you who read this journal via the main page, rather than through a feeder, since it will always show up on top).

( Jewelry and metalwork )
( Scribal stuff )
( Sewing and embroidery )
( Other )

Since I started my scribal blog, I haven't posted about my C&I here much. However, I spent the last two months working on a single scroll, which I completed on New Year's Day and which was given out at coronation this weekend, and I'm so very pleased and proud of it that it's worth posting here:



You can read the saga of its making here.

31

I feel like I should have something to say about my 31st birthday, but I don't really. Gwen slept until 7:00 (which is what we always are aiming for, but which she's missed by half an hour -- or more -- most of the last week), so at least the day didn't start off on the wrong foot. But I was still tired from the weekend and so spent most of the day at work in a bit of a fog, slogging through my translation rather than getting to work on anything new as I'd been planning.

For Joel's birthday, I went to the little cupcake shop near our grocery store and bought half a dozen. He was very surprised and pleased, and ever since then I'd been hoping he'd do the same for me. I'm not really a huge birthday person, but a birthday isn't a birthday without cake of some sort, and it had bothered me over the years that I was making my own birthday cake more often than not. That just didn't seem right. And here we have easy access to these phenomenal carrot cake cupcakes with heavenly buttercream frosting...

Still, while I cherished a hope he would, I didn't actually have an expectation. Which means that when he showed up at my office a little past 4:30 with the excuse that he'd gotten more grocery shopping than he'd planned and he was hoping I'd be able to lighten the load, I simply grabbed my schoolbag and told him I wasn't sure how much I could take and still bike home with Gwen, but I could probably take something. And then he pulled out a box of cupcakes. :) We each had one, and then he headed home while I worked for another half an hour before getting Gwen. We then headed to Scheffel's Kulturbrauerei, a few blocks from where we live, for supper. I wasn't terribly hungry (darned cupcake :)), and actually wasn't in the mood for traditional German food, which can be kind of heavy, so was surprised to see that the style here is a little bit non-traditional, and that one of the vegetarian specials -- baked feta with rice and ratatouille -- sounded excellent, and it was. Joel got beef with horseradish two ways, and potatoes. I thought Gwen would happily share my dish (normally she's as cheese-loving as the granddaughter of a Wisconsin cheese-maker should be), but she ended up turning up her nose at all of it, and instead ate probably 1/3 of Joel's potatoes with horseradish sauce. She's definitely not my daughter! On the way home, we passed a little puppy out on a walk, and he ran straight for her and she for him, and he licked her hands while she patted him, and I swear, if she were a little bigger she would've picked him up like her stuffed animals and carried him home with us. She loves dogs so much, and it's so sweet how people will let her say hello to them. I thought she'd throw a fit when we finally had to take her away and let the puppy continue on her walk, but instead when I told her she needed to tell the puppy good-bye, she allowed herself to be picked up and waved to him as we left. So cute. :)

The three of us split another two cupcakes when we got home, and then I asked Joel to try getting a picture of the two of us, since I don't have many, and figured it would be a nice thing to have from my birthday:

---

1000

When I joined the SCA some 17 years ago (geez!), I knew I wanted Aryanhwy (who was, at the time, Aeronwy, and then Creirwy, and then Euronui, and then finally Aryanhwy) to be Welsh and "early-ish". I flipped through the Timetables of History, and settled on the early 11th C as a period where things happened but it wasn't overwhelming, and then I picked 1013 as my birthyear since that was a neat number. I've always said that I hope my persona lives long enough to see William invade England. :) Seeing as I've survived through childbirth (twins, Ysfael and Yslani, and a son, Bran, with my husband, Briafael, who died soon after leaving me a young widow), the biggest cause of mortality amongst women, I've got a good chance of making it to 1066, I think! But what I didn't realize at the time I chose that date, nor even until just quite recently, was that I'd also live to see the 1000th anniversary of the birth of Aryanhwy. That's quite a neat milestone, and one many SCAdians don't get, and one I certainly won't live to see again.

I wanted to do something to mark this, but for some reason I didn't really care to do something medieval, perhaps because even though it's about the SCA, it's actually quite a modern thing to be celebrating. So I decided to make cookies and bring them along to the event this weekend, and hope that people would join me in eating them to mark the occasion after feast. I found myself really wanting chocolate cookies, something which I don't normally go for, preferring either oatmeal or molasses. I have them so infrequently, I don't even have a recipe for them. Google to the rescue, and I ended up with something quite tasty. They were well received at the event, with plenty of people happily eating them as we lingered around the tables after feast talking and exchanging stories. I didn't want it to be a big deal, but I did want people to do something that made them happy and made them mark the moment, and this worked well.

The event itself was lots of fun, almost exactly what I look for in an event -- small, and with classes. Perhaps the most interesting was Lord Aaron's class on cantillation in Hebrew, something I knew absolutely nothing about before attending. My class, on "how to make your C&I look more medieval", went well, with more than just the one other scribe there attending, and Joel ended up doing an impromptu class on pewtering, showing off his mould, the shields he's cast for me, and the two books he's acquired, and speaking of technique, materials, etc. There was fantastic food, and enough flex time in the schedule that I got a nap in before feast -- a nap which was, unfortunately, necessary due to some less-than-preferable travel arrangements. We were going to ride with Stefano and Judith, with Stefano coming to pick us up after he got off work, and then we'd get Judith and head to the site. As the minutes and then hours crept forward Friday night, I eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that if he wasn't on the road to us by 23:30, we were going to have to bow out; I didn't really relish the idea of waking Gwen up (she'd been sleeping since 19:00) in the middle of the night for a ~3 hour car ride. I got an IM from Judith at 23:20 that he was on the way, and would be there by midnight. We made the decision to give it a whirl, and things weren't that bad; Gwen didn't fall back asleep in the car for about 1.5 hours, but she didn't wake up when we arrive and I was able to get her from carseat into bed without waking either, around 3:30am. Unfortunately, she then woke up at 6:30, per usual. aaaaaaarrrrrggghhh. She compensated with a 2 hour nap in the morning, of which I was able to sleep myself for half of it (having to get up in order to go teach my class!), but the result was that we were all pretty tired by the end of the weekend! Still, the event was great, even if the travel to and from wasn't optimal.

Oh, one other lovely part from the weekend was that the scroll I did for court was my very first attempt at gilding:



I am so pleased with how it turned out -- not just the gilding but the entire layout of the scroll (except for the one rather glaring wording mistake, but even that was work-around-able), the long text, the two-columns, the painting in the initials, the entire thing just makes me happy. And it also made the recipient happy, all the same things. Not everyone likes long texts and scrolls that are mostly calligraphy, even though that's my preference, so I was extra glad to hear Aaron saying that this was his preference too! I can't remember when I've last been so glad and proud to see a scroll of mine given out in court. I'm pretty much always satisfied with the work I produce, but this one will always be special to me.

So there's a hodgepodge from the last few days. Time to close up the computer and veg out on the couch with a book and a cat for awhile.

Monday morning I sat down with my leave calendar and my commitments calendar, and logged leave for every single day from now until the end of the year that I don't have all-day commitments (e.g., when I go to St. Andrews in two weeks) or have already scheduled leave (South Africa and Christmas in the US); I took off mornings for days that I had stuff to do out on campus, e.g., seminar meetings, and full days on days I didn't. I still have ~20 hours of leave left!

Yesterday I had a full day off, and I used it to complete a scroll I'd started last month. At Crown Tourney, we received so many verbal recommendations for Dunstan von Wilster that we decided that afternoon to make him a member of the Panache, and so of course there was no scroll ready. I've been bound and determined to make sure there is no backlog from our reign by the time we step down, so I decided that any last minute award like this it would be my responsibility to ensure the scroll was completed. About a week after the event I did all the prep work -- composed the text, picked an initial, drew out the layout and lined it -- and then managed to get the calligraphy done right away. The illumination I'd picked was something relatively simple, but flashy, but it took me awhile to get time and right motivation to leap into it, in part because Ælfwynn's scroll back in June is the last illumination I've done, making this the second piece I've painted in about a year.



I definitely felt rusty doing the whitework, and it shows, given the unevenness of the lines, and my inability to copy my exemplar nicely. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find this morning that separated from my exemplar, I was actually quite happy with it -- it isn't often that my estimation of a scroll improves with time. So, by no means by best work, but I'm definitely happy with it for a first piece after such a long time away. (Except for the smeared calligraphy. Not happy about that. :( Oh, and for some reason, even though I measured and scaled the initial carefully, when I drew it out, it ended up fully filling the rectangle rather than spilling over into the margin as the one in my exemplar did. Not sure what happened there.)

Short update, since I've just come off of about 2.25 hours of non-stop calligraphy. (At the rate of about 250 words per hour...so, about 4.16 per minute, nearly 30 times slower than my typing speed...)

Thanks to a tip from nusbacher, I copied cadels from this source, and for the first time that I've attempted cadels, I'm happy with the result. I can't show off the whole thing, without giving away the surprise, but I can give a snippet:



I'm debating whether to paint to coats of arms below the text; if I do, then this is not quite finished, if I don't, then all I have to do is measure the bottom margin and trim the perg to the right size.

No sewing today.

I did two Panaches for Pennsic, one of which I was really, really pleased with. Since I just received the court report for it, I can now post it here:



From start to finish it took me about three hours -- not much work for such an impressive output. This was my second time using oak gall ink, and I'm finding I like it very much.

The initial is taken from BL MS Egerton 286 f. 2:



I just love purple penwork.

Yesterday afternoon I hosted a scriptorium, attended by racaire1, Livia, and Evelien. (Joel went out to the military history musuem, and Jesse, who'd been planning to come, ended up having a meeting instead so he missed most of it). It was very successful! People were over for about 6 hours total, we had two tables set up, and we completed 8 scrolls, 5 from scratch, 4 of which are for coronation this weekend. Whoo! I'm very pleased that I'll have a big package to mail to Eleanora tomorrow (today is a holiday so the post office is, I'm assuming, closed).

Saturday Joel, Jesse, and I went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which is immense and I don't think we could've gotten through it all even if we'd arrived right when they opened and stayed all day. As it was, we made it through the Greek and Roman section, and then we got split up and Joel and I went through the special exhibit on German portraiture in the 16th C (Dürer, Holbein, & Cranach), though we discovered afterwards that we missed a room, and then went to the Munzkabinetten upstairs (one of the three was closed for the preparation of a new exhibit), and spent about an hour looking at coins, and also at this fascinating collection of over 1000 miniature portraits of popes, saints, church figures, and a who's who of 16th C European and Asian nobility. I'd love to go back and spend all day just looking at the portraits.

We were there until closing and then Joel and I waited out front of the museum for Jesse but he never showed up, so just the two of us went to have supper at the fladenbrot place I had lunch at on Monday with racaire1. The place also does their own beer, and Joel said it was really good. Afterwards we were still a bit hungry and we kept seeing people with icecream cones, and so we walked a bit and found where they were coming from. I got currant icecream and he poppyseed, and both were great.

I just completed what I think is my best scroll ever. I am SO HAPPY with it. My interpretation of the original (for those of you keeping score, I went with BL MS Arundel 68, f. 41) turned out great, I got to diaper a coat of arms for the first time, there's no spelling errors, and in fact the worst mistake was that a tiny bit of gold paint smeared before it dried, but if I didn't tell you where, you probably wouldn't find it. And now I have to wait until Double Wars is over before I can post pictures of it.

This weekend and last have been very productive, scribal-wise; I did the three scrolls I had assigned for DW, and also the calligraphy for a backlog (using a blank that Lady Agatha had done, so the result is gorgeous). One of the other DW scrolls has me absolutely tickled; I'm so happy with the "theme" of the scroll that I'm resigned to the execution of it, especially given that I was attempting realism beyond my comfort level, so with that taken into account, the execution isn't actually all that bad (I just know that people with more skill than I could've done it better). I'm also looking forward to being able to post that one here.

I've written here before about my usual lack-a-daisical approach to my scribal set-up -- sitting on the edge of the bed with a cutting board balanced on my knees, or at the table with a cat on my lap and a cup of tea to hand. This weekend I added two more things to my repertoire, things that I know would make some scribes recoil in horror. Usually while scribing I listen to music (which is not so good when I'm doing calligraphy, though only once have I actually started writing the lyrics to the song I was listening to instead of the text I was supposed to be using...) or watch bad movies. This weekend I found a different way to occupy myself, reading a blog online. It wasn't until half-way through yesterday afternoon that I realized how distinctly odd it is to be reading and painting at the same time. But it works quite well. Then tonight after supper, I was still hungry, so I dished up a bowl of snacky food to put next to my tea. Yeah, handling food with the same bare hands that hold my paintbrush. And yet, with the exception of the typo (would that be a "write-o"?) mentioned above, all of my taunting does not seem to have raised Titivillus's ire; I've never spilled tea or ink on a scroll, I've never had something ruined by Slinky bumping my hand or my elbow, I've never dropped a loaded paintbrush when I'm holding it in my mouth (I have dropped them from my hands, and have always miraculous managed to catch them without getting any paint anywhere), I haven't smeared salty greasy goodness over a scroll, and, as yet, I haven't thrown out my back with my horrible posture. *knock wood*.

EDITED: Fixed the link to the Arundel MS, thanks bend_gules for the heads up.

Well, nusbacher is pleased with it, so whom am I to complain otherwise? This is the scroll I did on Saturday:


Queen's Order of Courtesy for Lyonet de Covenham

Scroll	Exemplar

The exemplar is BL MS Harley 2253, fol. 131, a late 13th/early 14th C manuscript. I still find this type of secretary hand perplexing.

This manuscript contains a number of secular and religious lyrics, and I adapted the lyrics from one, the song of "Annot and John", appearing at fol. 63 of the MS. The text reads:

Þese are the wordes of Caoimhe drachenwaldish quene
Ase saphyr in seluer semly on syht,
Ase iaspe þe gentil þat lemeþ wiþ the lyht,
Ase gernet in golde ant ruby wel rhyt
Ase onycle she ys on yholden on hyht,
Ase diamaund þe dere in day when she is dyht;
Ase all þese ys þe ladie lyonet of covenham,
pearle of grace and goodenesse and þus we
Caoimhe make her a member of oure Order of
Courteisie, on augst seventh, a.s. xlv, at raglan.

Lines two through six are copied from the song.

This was a Lindquistringes for a friend, given out last weekend:


Lindquistringes for Kathryne Elizabeth Gordon



The design is based on British Library MS Harley 2793 f.33, from the first half of the 9th century. This was my first attempt at doing a zoomorphic initial. I didn't quite capture the look of despair on the fish's face, or the bored look on the duck, but I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out.

The text reads:

By these words let the will of Ulfr and Caoimhe, king and queen of Drachenwald be known. We have not only heard many testiments of the deeds of our subject Kathryne Elizabeth Gordon but also seen them with our own eyes. We wish to reward this service by making the said Kathryne a member of our Orden des Lindquistringes in witness of all she has rendered to us. This we do on the 4th day of December, a.s. xlv, at Yule Ball in our shire of Flintheath.