#normannis

I did a thing today and now every time there's a new comment I get a heart palpitation. I might not make it through the day. People keep tagging people and I just need to know if I passed! XD

One thing I love in Normannis, that I don't think I got in any other reenactment group, is rules. Maybe there just wasn't enough time, or maybe resources, to get me clued up in my previous dark ages group and maybe the way I entered the civil war group meant that I wasn't exposed to the necessary infrastructure. In Normannis, I was introduced to guilds, which play an important role in the making of regulations, sharing of information, and making LH displays. I love having resources on how to make kit, how people lived in the twelfth century, and the wide variety of things that aren't "here's a pointy stick, go stab that dude with the different heraldry".

Me to the photographer: I'm actually quite a good looking Norman boy for the time.

Also me: *does dirty old man face*

Embroidery

Some of this is unfinished but I'm banned from working on any more craft until my essays are complete (I've got a week to write 8,000 words because I'm dumb XD). What I will be doing is white work (white linen embroidery on a wimple for a noblewoman), embroidering the rest of my tunic and my boyfriend's hood, embroidering my boyfriend's housemates' hood and making him a coife, making a 3/4 Cloak for someone who one a raffle (he says November is fine), embroidering said cloak, making an underdress, maybe making a new dress, tablet weaving a leaving present for a friend, and putting my tag in all of my stuff so it doesn't go missing. (I've had a whole kit impression get nicked which might honestly be the reason I don't do seventeenth century anymore which honestly sucks because they had canons. I love canons.

So, TORM (The Original Reenactors Market) is "cancelled".

So, I knew it had gone online beforehand and didn't consider it as being canceled. XD This is the life of a student during a pandemic; I've just had to get used to everything being online so in my head it was still going on. To people who haven't been exclusively behind a screen since March, it's just not right.

Combat

Since there hasn't been any shows, I have nothing to show for show combat but here are some pictures from a practice session we had where I had to sit it out.

Most people here are wearing their kit, though some of it is unfinished. It's good to practice in lot because there's no point practicing in really great sports clothes when on the day you're going to be wearing a tonne of wool, potentially a gambeson, helm, and maille.

Here, were practicing lines - where two line of spear and shield come together. There's a commander on each side, who will shout commands in French, Welsh, or Anglo-Saxon.

So everyone has met my wimple?

I'm repurposing it into an altar cloth so that I can pass my next assessment with it. It almost seems a shame, but I've gotta really bite the bullet.

This project involves maths! I've measured all the sides, within the borders because that's the area I'm embroidering. There's a slight discrepancy but I seriously expected more!

There will be discrepancy from a slight unevenness when you cut something, and then additional error from hemming, and then more from the embroidery itself. I did honestly expect something closer to 2cm of difference here and there. It might yet be due to poor measuring but everything looks good on my graph paper.

I feel comfortable letting a centimetre or two slide when it comes to the maths for the grid. In all honesty I'm debating whether I should make such huge effort to make things even as the extant pieces (the original examples from the time) are uneven themselves as measures and grids weren't used in this way for freehand embroidery - or not to my knowledge. I'm not a historian, just a reenactor. When I looked, the tablecloth we have from the time is very uneven but the altar cloth (the example I'm trying to more closely copy) is almost even.

One challenge I'm encountering is that the pattern in the square spaces looks "random". It's not; it repeats. However, I'm struggling to make it make sense for me! I'm wondering whether I should replace one of my grid patterns with that lovely knotwork in the circle on the top right of the picture or whether I should just learn how to make that swirly whirly pattern.

To make the grid, I just stuck some sheets of grid paper together and then checked I'd done enough. If you're going to do this I recommend using masking tape over sellotape and doing it on a solid flat surface (not a bed like I'm doing now). A nice clean floor works great because it's generally the largest hard flat surface anyone has. Masking tape is easy to draw over and sello is not, and if you're trying to line things up and stick them together from underneath it gets messy. Masking tape means you can work from the top, no problem. I did bugger up a couple of times but I tend to do that.

Day 13 of Medieval May

Craft

The top left is some of my Craft supplies when they arrived. There's leatherworking stuff and colourful wool embroidery thread.more thread arrived today, I ordered about twice as much this time.

On the top right is me sewing at my machine. I like to do most of my machine sewing at home despite turning up to most group craft sessions. I get really anxious when trying to sew in groups of people and the loud noises stress me out anyway so I usually put some super loud Doom Metal on, or sometimes listen to Sheelanagig.

The picture of the white cross of fabric is from when I was part way through making my braies. I made a lot of mistakes that could have potentially been costly. This is when I realised that it's not something I could just relax through and not pay attention, and the mistakes I made through not concentrating actually made me stress out so badly I refused to work with linen for a while again. To be fair, it was cheep nasty linen. After this, I promised myself I would concentrate harder and learn to do french seems.

Then we've got a picture of a normal day at Craft. The craft sessions are pretty great. Making your kit is so much cheaper than buying it. It's always such a great way to get to know people better as well as sharing information and there're usually some shinanigans.