Thursday 9 June 2016

Planning for Trillium War

We're less than a month from Trillium War and things are starting to firm up. Looks like this year at war I'm going to be spending most of my time on A&S activities, rather than rapier or thrown weapons. I'll still be doing some rapier marshaling, and I'll make sure I throw in some of the tournaments since I'm the Baronial champion, but I can see me spending most of my time at the A&S tents.

I've confirmed I'll be teaching two classes this year, both of which I've taught a few times before. On Friday I'll be teaching my Intro to Leatherworking, which is basically making a small basic belt pouch as a way to learn some basics of leatherwork. I go over types of leather, stitches etc, and then we spend some time assembling a pouch.

The second class is my leather dye class, which I taught at Practicum, and at Trillies last year as well. It was specifically requested that I teach it again this year as some people missed it previously. It's more of a roundtable where we discuss what colours were achievable in period, the period leather dye sources, my experiments to get the recipes to work, and people can see the finished projects and test swatches of dyes. Aside from learning the dye process, the real goal is to show people what colours are appropriate in leather items so they can choose their leathers and modern dyes accordingly.

I'm mostly prepped for both classes, so that's good. I had some kits left over from last time I taught the intro to leatherwork class, and went to pick up some more leather at Zeli's on the weekend so I can make a few more. All the leather got cut out and pre-punched last night so all that's left is printing out the hand outs and throwing  them in the bags. There's nothing really extra needed for the leather dye class other than making sure I have copies of the hand outs.

There are also a handful of classes I'm going to want to take as well, so lots to do and see this year.

We also have some things we would like to do before Trillies. For one, we'd like to finally get some banners done up (either silk or some painted ones, just to have something to jazz up our site). We're staying in a hotel, so we won't have a full camp, but some heraldry to mark us out would be nice. Fortunately we have all the supplies for doing both silk and fabric banners in the basement, so last night we spent a bit of time plotting out what we want to do. I'm hopeful to have at least a small banner or standard done up by the end of the month.