Random Thoughts

I field tested my new red veil on Saturday. The "straight edge over the crown" look seems to suit me better than the "oval gathered onto the forehead" look.

I think most of the weight was being held by the fillet for most of the day, and it wasn't uncomfortable. I had an auxiliary strap which was supposed to pass from the nape of my neck over the temples and then up the crown, to secure the veil in the center and help support the weight. That didn't work so well. As has been my experience with modern elastic circular headbands meant to be worn the same way, the thing slipped off the back of my head repeatedly. Didn't matter if I fastened it over or under my hair. I wasn't careful about pinning it to the fillet at the temples; maybe that's the trick.

The obvious options are 1) try again with better pinning, 2) do away with it or 3) use a chin-strap/wimple instead. I'm not sure when the wimple starts showing up, but I believe Walton Rogers shows it in her book (which covers the era up to 700 CE) as a possibility. I believe I will try options 1 and 2 first, as I am not a big fan of things on my neck, particularly in the heat.

Upon an amblere esily she sat,
Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat
As brood as is a bokeler or a targe.
- Chaucer describes the Wife of Bath on her horse, wearing a wimple and a hat as big as a small shield

The red wool crepe I bought? Advertised as 100% wool? Has small, rubbery, stretchy fibers in it. That's a weird sheep, right there.

I thought it draped too smoothly to be all-natural. It's probably 2% Lycra or something; it's meant as suiting, so this would give it better drape and anti-wrinkle properties.

Oh well. Not much to do about it now.

My red wool came in the mail! I won't need to use an acrylic scarf for my A&S Pentathlon entry after all!

Sanity check: The stain I used on my taflmen wasn't as red as I wanted and I started to obsess over it because it wasn't "right" and... geez. This started because I wanted a tafl board that was more portable than the commercial board I saw. Just because "OMG someone is going to read my docs and score the work!" doesn't mean I have to jump through hoops unless I want to. I think I want to find better playing pieces, because 1" pieces on 1" squares is a tight fit. I'm not sure I will find better pieces, but I do want to.

Leather: Asked the Dear Spouse, "Do you think I'll make a turnshoe in the next three years?" Him: "Yes." So I went ahead and ordered $50 worth of awls, needles and thread from Tandy. Because I really couldn't justify $50 on a joke A&S entry, but I will probably make a few pairs of medieval shoes and/or other small leather goods. They have shipped, hurrah! (Yeah, Tandy is just up in B-more but I think it'll come by mail sooner than I'll have the chance to get up there.)

I think I will sew the item turnshoe-style (edge-to-flesh stitch) and try some different stuffings. Cloth mockups don't actually make sense, since cloth and leather are too different. If none of the stuffings work well, then I'll consider boiling it. I'll use some purchased inkle-woven garters as bands. Wait... then what'll I hold my socks up with? Hrmph.

Veils: The red wool is in the mail, hurrah! I am planning an oblong rectangular wool veil, based tentatively on some 7th century cleric's criticism of nuns. And I've started a rolled hem on a smaller silk half-round veil for fun/comparison/addition to my closet. You can see my learning curve on the hem... it's right where I said "To hell with 'make an 1/8" fold and then another 1/8" fold'" (as teh Internetz said to do) and started actually rolling the edge with my fingers. I may go back and redo the first 3-4" of the thing, we'll see. (I was smart enough not to start with the edge around my face, so it may not be too obvious.)

Latin love song: I listened to some actual chant and got my initial impression confirmed: the tune I came up with is much more 16th-17th century ballad than it is 8th century chant. This is happily fixed by elaborating the melodic structure a bit and paying attention to my isosyllables.

Saxon love song: Old clothes for new competitions; this piece is years old and good to go. I just need to tweak the documentation and decide whether or not I'm using a lyre, harp or nothing for the performance.

I'm planning an English conversion era (seventh through ninth centuries) veil project. The evidence for them is scanty, since burials-with-stuff faded out early in the conversion era, but we don't get all the manuscript illos til the tenth and eleventh centuries. Gale Owen-Crocker's book summarizes most of what we do have.

* Nuns being scolded for trading in their dark grey veils for white and colored ones, hanging down to the knees (or feet? I can't recall. Long, anyway.)

* Depending on how you translate it, the veil is ornamented with ribbons or held on by them (e.g., a fillet)

* Nuns being scolded for curling their hair at the forehead and temples with a curling iron - so hair was visible

* There's a stone carving that also shows a veil over hair - the veil lays smoothly over the top of the head

* I refuse to believe the owner of a fabulous necklace like the one from Desborough would hide it under a wimple

Some Continental manuscripts show what look like oval veils, but the straight over-the-head look that the visible hair implies says, to me, one of two styles:

* A long rectangle worn with the long edge going up over the head and down again. (Like putting a scarf over your hair.) It's very easy to imagine this as appropriate to the narrower medieval fabrics. It could hang down to the knees or feet easily - that's the warp thread. On the downside, the width of the fabric will only fall to the shoulders or so. You get the "long veil" look by tossing the "scarf ends" back over your shoulders so they hang down your back. Fillet definitely required to keep this in place.

* A half-circle, with the "half" line worn to the front. But to get it very long, you either need a very wide piece of fabric or you need to piece it together from triangles.

Any thoughts on which is more likely?

And secondarily - material? "Dark grey" would imply undyed wool to me - that's befitting humble nuns who are supposed to be mortifying the flesh a bit. The "white and colored" veils - also wool, just bleached or dyed? Or silk? (I know the Arnegunde burial (sixth cen) had a fabulous silk veil.) I'm assuming not linen, as I've heard it doesn't take dye well.

"A Northern naughty nun of the ninth century."

I think that'll be the organizing persona - a bored noblewoman consigned to a convent with no vocation and a lot of time on her hands. The five items will be:

* The tafl game, for whiling away time she ought to be spending in prayer

* A white or brightly-colored headdress and fillet, like Aldhelm condemns in nuns

* A (translation of a) Latin women's love song from The Cambridge Songs and (original) music for it

* A (translation of an) Anglo-Saxon love poem and music for it (Wulf and Eadwacer, already done)

* The Leather Object

The tafl game is close to being done (except for the ornamental border but I don't think that'll happen before March)

I have a gold faux-brocaded fillet already, if I don't get to make another one, and I have some white silk and purple silk thread. I could make a nice veil out of that.

Wulf and Eadwacer is done, although I have to get the score right. I don't think it'll take me long to do up one of the Cambridge Songs.

My next hurdle on the Leather Object is finding appropriate leather and a form to mold it on (if I use the cuir bouilli technique, as opposed to stuffing it). An old-fashioned wooden broomstick would be ideal, but I can't think of the last time I saw one. They're all plastic and metal now. Maybe they'd have one at Home Depot?

I feel like I should be taking notes. About calligraphy.

I've been mostly focused on one general research topic for the past few years: medieval music. I've been branching out a bit into medieval poetry as well. Ah, let's call it medieval performance. And I've gotten pretty deep in, to the point where I can just glance around and see all the unanswered questions I have, all the different routes to furthering my knowledge.

That can make it hard to remember what it's like to get started in a new field.

I've got my two beginner's books on calligraphy and my felt-tipped pens. If I were to try an A&S entry right now, my documentation would be something like, "And this is Unical, as described by Duffin and used in (some manuscripts). I'm using a felt-tipped pen because I'm still learning; a metal nib dip pen would be better, and a quill would be most appropriate." And my references would be two books.

Because what more can there be, right? "This is a period handwriting style, I've duplicated it, therefore this is period."

Of course there's more. There's layout and design and decoration (or lack of same). There are materials used. There are thousands of manuscript pages one could look through to learn... who knows what? Variations on technique or style? Methods of correcting errors?

I'm sure there's even more. But, having just barely scratched the surface of this art, I don't know enough to know what questions to ask! Which, in its way, is a positive. First, the trip itself, the "journey to knowledge," is fun and exciting in its own right, and I look forward to it. But second, if I "knew everything," I'd feel compelled to try and do everything, and paralyze.

Apprentices were not plonked down, lectured until they were stuffed full of lore, and set to work making masterpieces. They were given simple tasks, with explicit guidelines. When they mastered those, they could move on, and on, to more complex tasks and to understanding why the guidelines were the way they were. I'm at this apprentice stage, or even a pre-apprentice stage in which I'm learning the most basic skills an apprentice would need to do useful grunt work. It seems appropriate that the scholarship reflects that level of artistic involvement.

"Refs or it didn't happen." ("refs" = references, as in research.)

I has a blog!

Typepad is a pretty spiffy service. I even can has podcasts if I want them - and as a bard, yes, I think I want them! I'm not sure if I can upload PDFs to store on-site, which would be even spiffier (sheet music, yay!). It would be weird of them to host giant audio files but not PDFs, but who knows.

Work on the maypole continues over there.