Greet's Middle Ages

This blog is moving! Find me at greetsmiddleages.com

Since I'm playing again, and doing research again, I thought I'd update the format and location of the blog.  New posts will appear at greetsmiddleages.com.  I've already moved a few posts from this location, and will be moving more, and condensing/reorganizing.  It'll take a while, since there's 550 (!) posts accumulated here.

However, I expect to permanently deactivate this location at the end of 2017.  As during the Blog Hiatus, I don't expect Typepad will take down material, so your bookmarks and Pins should still work in 2018...but you might want to check out the new organization, since I'm trying to make the base material easier to find and understand.

Hope to see you there!  ~Greet

Help me put a sail on The Byrdraka!

Photo courtesy Illy Brownlee, taken at Royal, AL.  Thank you so much!

As some of you may know, my husband is the instigator and chief crew member of The Byrdraka, a fictional Viking 'boat' which brings revelry places seaworthy craft cannot, since she is built on a 20' trailer.

(Follow her progress on Facebook!)

In that picture above, I'm sitting on her stage, getting sunburned.  For this and other reasons, we want to put a yardarm and sail on the boat, and I need YOUR HELP to learn how!

I don't really research/play Viking for myself (only as a Sif barmaid for the boat), so I'm not sure where to start.  I did research modern sailboats quite a bit last summer, so I know what it means when I read "The single square rigged sail allowed sailing close to the wind"...that doesn't help me build the yardarm and rigging necessary to hoist a useful shade-giving sail.

Please, make suggestions in the comments, and I'll start reading and posting progress and what I try out.  Thanks SO MUCH!

COMPILATION OF HELP

Longship Company (Facebook group, thanks Greg Hartley!)

Sailing Manual from the Longship Company (thanks Mark Blaydoe!)

The Gyrfalcon

Alison Fuch's collection of Viking rigging illustrations on Pinterest

What is Art For? Why Bother?

(A break this week from my series on the Sprang Hairnet.  I'll return to that subject next week.)

"We believe that the main reason to study history is to rescue certain good, provocative, and inspiring ideas that have been lost in the past, in order to put them to use in relation to the dilemmas and problems of our own times."

That's taken from this short film on the Renaissance, embedded below, from one of my favorite YouTube channels, The School of Life.

It's also the reason I love historical 'dabbling and dressing up' - not just because it's novel and romantic, but because I do discover things about myself while trying these things that help me make decisions in my modern life.  

And I likewise believe that ideas from the past are in danger of being overwhelmed by the flood of distraction that the media sends us, with little vision beyond its art other than to make us buy things.  (As a Stuff Maker...this is challenging to think about.  What Vision for the Greater Good does my art serve?)

 

Spend 20 minutes and watch the film, and try out some of their other offerings, too!

 

 

Researching and re-learning the basics of Sprang

(2nd in a series on the Sprang Hairnet. Start reading from the beginning here.)

Sprang is a way of making fabric that I think of as being the inverse of knitting. If knitting is all horizontal threads, that are distorted to create vertical links, sprang is all vertical threads, that are distorted to create horizontal links. Similar to knitting, sprang is very drapey and will flex in its structure to contain a lumpy mass. (Like a pile of hair.)

You create the fabric by twisting vertical threads (warp threads) together, and by looping them through each other. Twisting together more times creates bigger holes. Looping through across the fabric creates horizontal lines.

This is a diagram from Margarethe Hald's now out-of-print classic, Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials.  I'm lucky enough to know someone with a copy, though I've also gotten ahold of it through inter-library loan.

(Legal disclaimer: GMA is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.  Why?  Because it's faster to grab an affiliate link from Amazon and get lovely pictures and links.  Haven't earned any actual money yet.)

You keep the twists from untwisting by threading a long rod or a separate 'stay thread' through the loops as you go.

(I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but there's the stay threads passed through the loops, and tied to the frame.)

Sprang is ancient, and has been done by various cultures for a long time.
I'm interested in Bronze Age Norse sprang.

But Coptic Egyptians made sprang caps in the 5th-7th century AD.  Here's a great blog post on one cap.

It's quite different from the Danish hairnet.

These crazy pants are a museum reproduction of a Trojan archer.  I found this picture via this lovely Pinterest board of all sorts of sprang applications, which is very educational!

Check out these wonderful leggings, inspired by a 15thc Venetian painting!  Read more about them at their creator's blog, here.

 
Go there, and look at pictures of sprang sashes and bags running into the 19th century and into this country, South America...it's everywhere!

Some people today propose shaped sprang as very modern-looking garments.

 

This is very lovely, and shows off sprang's drapiness quite well.  I am not quite THAT ambitious - I just wanted something to cover my modern haircut!

I started this hairnet project with a basic understanding of sprang construction, having taken a class at Pennsic back in 2009.  I think this Lady is who taught this class - there's a great tutorial of technique here!

I also *had* owned a copy of Peter Collingwood's The Techniques of Sprang, which is widely regarded as *the* textbook for sprang. But my previous interest in sprang was another one of those activities where I just wanted my product, and variations in the activity itself don't hold my interest, so I sold the book. 

(It's out of print, and now expensive. If you don't want that, I've looked at the reviews for this one, and I think it could carry you to good results.)

Although the Pennsic class had provided me with a small PVC loom, I'd long since passed it on, so I needed a loom. I wanted to try alternate ways of making a loom, since I wanted to have a primitive look as I hauled it around. I'll cover how I made a loom for sprang hairnets in the next installment.

Introducing my Sprang Hairnet project! The find, and why I wanted one

I've made a sprang hairnet!  This series of posts will share what I learned by making this project.

When I first made my Danish Bronze Age outfit, I had long hair, so figuring out how to dress it to complete my impression was pretty straightforward.

I wore my hair in these stacked braids, because Elling woman was executed wearing this hairstyle, and that's really rather cool.

It was also practical - most SCA events are outside, where it may be windy, so it's nice to have something that doesn't flap in one's face.

But in the Blog Hiatus, when I went back to school and got a corporate job, I cut my hair to a bob, and flapper curls are both incongruous with prehistorical (edit: early historical) appearance, and a mess in the wind. So what to do?

Here's my solution to historical impression uncertainty: Find a burial site(s) with a nice collection of stuff you like, and just Collect 'Em All.  So what does the dig offer for hair?

The Borum Eshoj and Egtved dig documentation showed hairnets made with a technique called sprang, and it occurred to me that a hairnet might work as well to conceal short hair as to corral long.

Conveniently, others have made reconstructions of these hairnets, and detailed diagrams of the structure are available, so I figured 'how hard could it be?'

A lovely artist's rendition of what this hairnet might have looked like worn.

No, I'm not setting you up for irony. It's not hard.

In the next installment of this series, I'll cover what sprang is, and how to learn it.

Metal clay instruction found!

I've found an instructor for metal clay!  (2 spots left for the June 3 class, at Lowe Mill...)

(image courtesy of Cindy Miller. Go look at her beautiful work!)

One of the challenges of cosplay, or historical re-enactment, is getting All The Stuff.  Providing oneself with the various pieces of one's impression can take quite a long time and be expensive...not just in money, but in commitment to learning new skills.

I'm trying to be more strategic about this.

So, in order to get some metal pieces that I need, that I can't buy, I could trade for them with someone who feels as comfortable in metalwork as I do in fiber....but that means I would have to Project Manage in my hobby, and I do enough of that in my day job.  Also I would have to sew for others, and I think I'm pretty much done with that.  (I so miss the Selfish Seamstress...I owe her so much self-realization!)

I do like playing with clay...here's some Gorgons I threw together for a Medusa mask in 2016...

...so I am very excited about the possibilities of metal clay.  It's metal powder suspended in an organic binder, that you fire in a small and precise kiln, and the binder burns off, leaving metal.  Real silver.  Real bronze.

I was given this book, Metal Clay for Jewelry Makers, for Christmas, and several packets of BRONZclay™.

(Legal disclaimer: GMA is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.)

Studying this book has been both inspiring and a bit intimidating.  Lots of new things to consider.  So when, during the local ComiCon, I stumbled upon Cindy Miller's studio at Lowe Mill, filled with her beautiful work aligned in aesthetic with my Bronze Age impression, I decided to ask her about instruction.

She does several levels of metal clay classes in the summer, and I pounced on one of the remaining spots for Intro to Metal Clay.

Cindy is a trained archeologist, and was very encouraging regarding the artifacts I want to try to make.  I was under the impression that I was kind of 'cheating', by approaching metal objects via a modern processed material that reduced the need for force in shaping the metal, and controlled heat to make it possible. She pointed out that although the steps may have been rearranged, the basic ideas were unchanged from ancient times, and showed me a ring that was made using techniques from ancient Egypt.

This explanation addresses some of my concerns, as this is a 'means to an end' sort of activity for me, and not one where the historical production method itself holds my interest.

So now I'm gathering ideas for all sorts of things metal clay might do well for making...more on that in a following post.

 

 

When last we left our heroes... 2017 reboot

...Randver and I had stopped playing in the SCA, and I'd mislaid my voice for this blog.  So I let it sit.

But in the meantime we didn't stop having Adventures and building Things.

As these adventures continued, I saw a common thread, and in pursuit of that, I'll be blogging again, but there will be some changes to Greet's Middle Ages.

(Not the name - still middle-aged.  Here's hoping we have a long ways to go, on that point.)

Larger Focus - Enjoying the present through arts of the past

I started this blog to have a place I could get to from any computer to track and to plan my activities with the Society for Creative Anachronism, and to be able to connect with others about those activities.  I wasn't sure what I'd be interested in, and as the sidebar indicates, I tried lots of things.

I've learned in the blog hiatus, that my personality Likes To Try Things, so that won't change.

But the limit of SCA-related activities will.

I do find, and maybe it's a reaction from having a day job wrapped up in technologies of the present and future, that I find investigating and experimenting with things of the past to be a fun hobby.  So that's what you'll find here: I'm continuing my Bronze Age impression projects, but also including past arts from the New World, and post-1600. Many of our friends still play SCA, so there will still be SCA things here, but also non-SCA things.  I still like fiber arts best, but I'll be playing with some new materials.

Thank you

To those of you that have continued to use Greet's Middle Ages' content, thank you for appreciating the effort it took to build this blog.  I'm encouraged by the numbers I still see, the emails I still get from around the world on this little bit of navelgazing.  It's kind of amazing to research something on Pinterest and find pictures of yourself.

Of course technology hasn't stood still in the last few years either, so I'll be making some changes to the structure of the site.  I'll do my best to not break links - but there will be changes.  Thanks for your patience as I revamp, and here's looking forward to lots more playing in the past!

 

Tuam construction details

I recently got a request for details about one detail of my tuam project.

Hope these pictures are helpful!

 

Craft materials are not groceries.

I've become fond of the blog "The Happiness Project". (No, I haven't read her book, but I'm sure it's lovely, if it's anything like the blog.

Reading a couple of years of intermittent posts in which Gretchen explains the Truths of Adulthood, Secrets of Happiness, and Personal Commandments that she has found for herself has helped me understand that I can do this too.

(I don't entirely understand why I have this reputation for intelligence when I can be really, REALLY slow about some things.)

So..."Craft materials are not groceries."

You know how groceries work.  You run out of eggs, you buy eggs.  You don't have something particular in mind, you just know that at some point in the next couple of weeks you're going to be standing in front of the fridge with an urgent need for an egg, and you need it to be right there.

Well, maybe craft materials used to be like that.  When I was ten, and had no allowance, and depended upon my parents taking me to either the library or the fabric store.  But now that there's the internet, and places everywhere at hand, and since the internet delivers...I have too much stuff.

I've gotten to the point where piles of materials no longer make me feel rich, but hassled.  Like a closet ripped from an episode of Hoarders is arguing with the lovely new ideas rolling by my door.

So I've been culling my stash.  It's been slow going, fighting the internal 10-year-old who is terrified of interminable summer with no tv allowed.  Here's another Gretchen-worthy Truth, stolen from XKCD:

 I've got a box of Ziploc bags...craft closet, you're getting pwned.

For anyone who's ever left a comment...

I promise I didn't mean to ignore you.  TypePad has evolved so swiftly, and spam comments (hiss!) proliferated so quickly, and I went back to school, that I just stuck my head in the sand re: comments.  I've figured out how to kill spam comments efficiently, and I'll look for some sort of notification setting, so I can tell when you lovely people talk back to me.