Thursday 15 November 2012

Some project updates

I haven't really had much time to work on leather projects lately so I don't have enough to update on any individual project to justify a post. Instead, I thought I'd just do a quick post summarizing some updates and thoughts on some of the things I have on the go:

Stick-Purse

I finally heard back from the museum in the Netherlands about their stick-purse. As I thought might have been the case, my original e-mail must have gotten lost in the shuffle as they were moving to their new location. I re-sent the note last week and heard back within a couple of days. They've passed my questions on to the curator, so at least that's progress.

I was also talking with Avelyn about the project the other night. I'm hoping to have the purse completed in enough time before Kingdom A&S next year that I can actually try to convince the gatekeeper at a small local event (event still TBD) to try it instead of a cash-box to see how it works. I think that's really how the stick-purse would have been used in period, so I'd like to actually apply the concept in real life and get feedback that I can include in my A&S documentation.

Thinking about that, I need to figure out how to tell what coins are in what pouch. I don't think there's any evidence of how this would have been done in period. Perhaps the money-changer would know based on how they positioned the purse on the table. I'm also thinking the use of different colours on the pouches or the draw strings might have been an indicator. Maybe when I hear back from the curator I'll see if we can tell how the colouring on the pouch was applied (were they all the same colour, or were some different).

For my purposes I may just use different colour lacing to do the draw strings on each pouch, unless I get more info from the museum that indicates a different method.

Kingdom A&S

My Kingdom A&S submission is done for this year and I've given it to Eluned for her to take with her to the event. I've also sent in my forms in advance (even though that isn't necessary for beginner level projects) and followed up with a confirmation e-mail to the A&S Minister since I know they were having problems with the online form at one point.

My documentation ended up being a total of 22 pages, but a lot of that was the annexes which include photocopies of my references and resources. My actual written information was about 6 pages.

Hopefully it will go over well and there will be some folks there to judge it. There aren't a lot of people that specialize in leather tooling in Ealdormere (lots of people do it to some extent for armour and such but not necessarily as an A&S activity), but there are some very accomplished leather workers. Hopefully some of them will be there.

I'm a little concerned how they will judge it. While leather tooling is entirely period, and we have evidence that heraldry was tooled onto leather items, my projects are very much modern-SCA in orientation. I'm hoping they'll be OK with using period practices to produce items for use in the modern SCA.

Other Bits and Pieces

My heraldry that I submitted at Pennsic is working its way through the system and is now showing up in the OSCAR system as being out for the commentary period. Hopefully if all goes well I will have both my Arms and Badge passed early in the new year. Then I'll have to figure out the carving pattern for both. :) The badge should be fairly easy, just a blue calamari (aka krakan or squid) fieldless. The arms are a bit more complicated because there are two caravels (basically a large sailing ship) in chief that are fairly complicated to draw.

We've been doing a bit of A&S at home the past few nights, unrelated to leather. We bought some fabric paint markers and are experimenting with them vs using standard acrylic paints with fabric medium. If we can get the markers to work well it will make banner projects sooooooo much easier. We bought a few different brands and are experimenting with them to see which work best, and which have the best colour pallets.

I quickly touched base with Nathaniel at Feast of the Hare about the leather Herald's folder for the canton that he was looking for help with, but we didn't really have time to chat. I'll have to send him a note so we can scope out the project a bit more.

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