It seems I just cannot handle doing two blogs right now. The little bit of crafting updates I do (the baby takes too much time to do much) will go to my main blog englandbound.

I really need to update this blog more regularly. It's sad that the last time I posted here was April, but then with only the one big project currently being worked on and the progress in that being slow, there isn't much to update all that regularly.

The last time I posted about the cloak I'm working on, the decision had yet to be made as to whether I was going to fill in the large design.We decided to fill in the cloak and now with some of it filled, I'm very happy about the decision. It's going to look great when finished.I just don't know how many years down the road that will be. I'm sure that with the baby due towards the end of the month, that my progress will be slowed down. Here is what it currently looks like:
( Cut for pictures )
I met someone at Raglan recently who really encouraged me to document and keep better track of the weaving I've been doing (not that any of that has happened in the last year...I blame that on jahanarabanu as she is the one who got me started on embroidery ;) ). I really want to go back and update the book I had started with clippings of the trim I've done and put in the bits she recommended like where the pattern came from and an example of the extant piece it was patterned after. Right now finding the energy is the issue. It's much easier for me right now to sit in front of the TV and pull the cloak onto my lap and work on that for a bit than get energetic about finding information buried in books and online. I am determined to do it one of these days, hopefully in the not too distant future.

I've made some progress on my husband's cloak. Here is a picture withhim wearing it. The heads don't quite line up, but that's just becauseit's on slightly crooked. I've outlined the two heads as they wrap overthe shoulders. It took 3.5-4 hours to outline one head including theneck to where it meets the rest of the knot. I'm using 2/12 silk inyellow for the outlining and will be filling it with red silk of thesame size. It will all be done in a chain stitch. He has decided (afterI ordered the silk from the States) that he wants them to have blueeyes. I'll have to come up with some way of doing that. I may just usemy finer silk that I have rather than placing a new order.
Now tocontinue the outlining. I was hoping to have the outlining finished forwhen we go to Double Wars, but I think that is quite unlikely now.

I've finally managed to start my 'Something to keep you warm project'.Jahanarabanu was kind enough to help me get the pattern from the computer onto my husband's cloak. This is the back of the (very heavy)cloak being held up by me. We used Jahanarabanu's projector and a bit of chalk. She had also been so kind as to alter the pattern for me so that it would fit a bit better onto the cloak. This included swapping the heads and tails of the serpents to put the heads in a useful position.


The second picture shows where the heads of the serpents have been moved to be over the shoulders.
There is a bit of extra line where I had originally marked where the head should go.


Because it is impressive how quickly chalk lines can disappear, my first priority was to then do a long running stitch over the lines to make them more permanent. This will be easy to remove as I do the actual embroidery. I used whatever thread I had to hand to mark the lines.


Here I was going back with a different thread colour and altering some of the lines. Unfortunately, the cloak was not up against the wall for drawing on and despite Jahanarabanu's great attempts to hold a box behind the cloak for me to write against, the very act of placing the chalk against the fabric altered where the pattern sat. I also wasn't able to do the entire pattern this way, so I have yet to add both tails to the pattern but I have altered all the lines on one half, including changing the lines that form the neck of the serpents so that they would meet the heads at their new location. That makes the one half ready to stitch apart from the missing tail.

Helix decided to help out by making sure all bits were covered in cat fur. I did rotate that picture, I don't know why it won't show up that way.
Hex has since claimed it as a bed. Find the cat:

So I've been working on the embroidery for my brown linen robe. This is the one that I decided I should do an all over pattern on it (thanks to my husband). I chose a pattern and started embroidering thinking this would be a good idea. Now I'm not so convinced.



I wanted it to be colourful since so much of the silk they used was bright colours. I think what I'm ending up with instead are just polka dots. The bits in between the roundels are not really breaking them up all that much.

Right now I'm afraid of spending all this time on it and not liking it when I get it finished and therefore not wearing it.

I've been spending much of my crafting time working on my embroidery but I decided that I should make some progress on my weaving as well.




The weaving doesn't really take that long. It goes much more quickly than tabletwoven brocade. I just need to spend some time with it rather than spending all my time on embroidery. My goal is to have it finished by Double Wars (end of April) but I don't know if I will. I may try to take it with me although I'm somewhat nervous about taking this weaving off of the loom and trying to put it back on. I suppose it is something I should figure out anyway. All of the warp threads are tied to what I believe is called an apron at the far end, so that may be enough to keep the tension of the threads from becoming uneven if I were to have to rewind the warp.

I've discovered that my grid is not quite accurate so some of the pattern elements will be closer together than others. I've found this to be a bit of a problem since I had so carefully measured the distance so that the elements were almost touching. I had some elements that just didn't want to fit where they were meant to. I think I've got it figured out now. I've shrunk the patterns by 5% but if they look like they will be a bit too far apart, I can adjust by stitching just outside the line. That's about how much 5% is for this anyway.

I've been able to plot out both halves of the front of the robe. They are now ready for embroidery.



The red ties mark where the centre of each design will go so every other one will be a roundel with the ones in between being the knot. I figured it would be easier to mark the centres a bit more permanently than with the pencil which is likely to disappear before I get very far with the actual embroidery. On this one, I stitched along where I will eventually cut the fabric. I'm not convinced that this is necessary as I'll be able to lay the pattern back on the fabric to cut it out.

I had also washed my test piece and discovered that my red wool that I will use for part of the design bleeds horribly. Well, it doesn't so much bleed (turn the water red) as turn the water very cloudy. I have since washed (just hand washed in cold water) all the thread I plan to use for this project. It wasn't as terrible as I thought it might be, but it meant winding all the thread off onto my niddy-noddy from the spools it was on. I am now in the process of winding it back onto the spools and wishing I had a ball winder. I may not be able to get to the actual embroidery tonight, but it should be soon.

I am still trying to remind myself that I need to finish the weaving project currently on my tabletweaving loom so I can disassemble the loom and bring it with me to Double Wars. Once I get the rigid heddle weaving off and a tabletweaving project back on it, it will become more portable again.

I've been planning my latest project, a 7th Century Persian robe covered in line work embroidery, for a while now. I think this project has needed more planning than anything else I've done. I had even gone so far as to test my ideas on a scrap piece of fabric before getting stuck with something I didn't like on the robe. I'm glad I did.

Since I will be wearing this robe with many other robes of various colours, and since the fabric is brown linen, I wanted to make it colourful. I chose red (kind of an orangey one), yellow, blue and green wool to do the embroidery with.

Here is my first attempt:



I realized that putting the red and yellow together for one part then the blue and green for the other would make it look like I was wearing polka dots. I want to avoid that, so as much as I liked both of the colour combinations, I had to mix it up a bit.



This went from left to right. The first thing I did was put the blue with the red. This left the yellow and green to go together. The colours aren't very accurate in this picture. The light in our living room is not good for judging colours. The brown is a chocolate brown. Because it is so dark, the green does not show up in some lighting or at a distance. There won't be very much of it, so I think that will be ok. The third bit of stitching shows my test to see how this might look once I get repeats of the pattern going. I think it will look ok, but I decided that I might like how it looked a bit better if the knot was a bit smaller. After playing around with it on Gimp, I decided on a size and stitched it out to make sure it wasn't too small for the size yarn I'm using. I think it turned out ok.

This picture shows how it looks next to the roundel to show the size difference. The red in the roundel is not finished, but I ran out of thread on the needle and decided it wasn't worth digging out more thread.


Of course there won't be the fold of fabric, but I didn't feel that it was necessary to restitch the roundel. I like the smaller knot.
I spent part of the evening playing with that, and now have half of the front (I cut up the fabric a few days ago) marked with the outline of the pattern. I stitched along the line so it won't disappear as I embroider. I now just have to mark where the pattern goes and put it on the scroll frame (thanks, J!) to be able to start stitching. I think it should go quickly, but once I get it started, I need to finish the rigid heddle weaving I've got started so I can get it off of my loom by Double Wars. That way I will have a weaving project (some doublefaced that I started a while back) and an embroidery project (unless I finish this by then, but then it would just be on to the next set of sleeves) to bring with me to work on.

The top one is the first sleeve. I had originally planned to make it one more repeat wide, but after looking at it, I decided I didn't need the sleeves to be that wide. My hands are large but not that large. I finished the second one tonight. Now I just need to put them on the outfit...but not tonight.

I have some brown linen that I am making into an early period Persian robe. There are many examples of these robes being made of fabric with a pattern woven in. I am too cheap to buy these fancy fabrics but I thought I would try faking it by embroidering a pattern on the robe. Here is what I've come up with.



The plan is to use this roundel alternating with a knot pattern as seen in pencil. This is a test on a scrap of the linen to check colours as I'm not sure what I want to do with them yet and the colours look different on the brown than my crayon on paper test. The red is a bit orangey, but I don't think I'll have enough of the more red red to finish the project. My length of yellow ran out just before I completed the circle and I didn't feel like starting a new thread just for the test. I'm thinking of doing the knot in blue and green. The roundel took about a half hour to stitch and it is now 2330 so that stitching will have to wait until tomorrow.

This is a project I blame on my husband (which is why I don't feel bad about pestering him for his opinion on design) who planted the idea in my head. I just hope it will look nice when I finish.

It took about 2 hours to fill the first star. That should give me an idea of how long I'll have put into each sleeve when someone asks how long they took (as someone always does).

This took about 1.5 hours (between the previous post and this one). Again, I wasn't really paying attention and it was part of two films. I'm pretty sure it wasn't longer than that. It may have been only an hour. Now to start filling in.

I started the outlining on the second sleeve today. I managed to finish most of the outlining in working intermittently today.



The only part yet to outline are the squiggly bits along the top border.I've removed the paper from most of what I've finished, but didn't want to remove it too close to where I had yet to work. I will probably finish this tomorrow or the next day (depending on whether I'm well enough to go to work tomorrow).

I'm trying to blog this a bit more closely to answer the question of how long these things take. I didn't pay attention to exactly how long I worked on this today. As I'm still ill, I'd work a bit then sit back and wonder at covaithe's awesome Guitar Hero skills or check my email, or stare blankly off into space.
I should get a better idea of how long some parts take once I feel better and work on the filling in the evening. When I put a movie in to watch, it is a good way of me keeping track of the time. I just need to know where I was when I started and finished.

I have been using cut-offs from an inkle weaving project I did last year. For those in ID, you may remember the tokens we handed out during our reign. The yellow and blue are the bits from the end of the loom that you couldn't weave. They are just about the perfect length to embroider with. I had wrapped them around an old core from Handweaver's Studio when I finished. I'm just now running out of both of the colours and will have to go to the original spools of silk shortly after I finish outlining.

I have finished the first sleeve for my red wool Persian robe. It really feels like an accomplishment, but now the second sleeve is looming. I want to finish both sleeves and get them attached by Double Wars so that I'll have something warm to wear over my many other layers.




I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I'm tempted to put either green or blue into the centre of the stars, but I don't know if I will. covaithe feels that I should leave the red bits red.

You can see one more repeat of the pattern outlined but, after outlining, I decided that the number of repeats I had filled in was enough to make the sleeve large enough to fit my hand. The green didn't turn out very well in the photograph. In low light it is difficult to tell the difference between the blue and green, but it looks quite nice in natural sunlight.

The patterns are taken from an Egyptian knitted fragment from the 11th/12th century as listed in Here Be Wyverns. In this book, it was just graphed out, so I have no idea of the original colours.

I did manage to get some lightweight (not technically tracing) paper for the next sleeve. It should be much easier to remove once I get the outlining finished. I've got the wool on the frame. Now I just need to print out (or trace) the pattern on this thinner paper and get it pinned to the fabric..

Recently I was exposed to the idea of doing brocade bands using a rigid heddle rather than tablets. This idea very much appealed to me as TW brocade is annoying. Estrid was kind enough to show me how her loom was set up and how to do the weaving. Here is what I've come up with:



This is my second attempt. On the first, I had used the wrong size heddle and was ending up with a weft faced band where the pattern was quite squished. After jahanarabanu told me what I was doing wrong, I cut it off the loom and rethreaded it onto the proper heddle. This is still not quite a balanced weave, but it looks much better. I will finish out this band like this. This is much less painful than TW brocade and works up more quickly. It also works out to be a wider band because of it being a balanced weave rather than warp faced.

I had thought that I needed a loom made specifically for rigid heddle weaving, but on the suggestions of my husband and jahanarabanu, I was able to use my TW loom. The main problem with this is that I cannot do any other projects on the loom until I finish this band. I was able to remove my TW projects, but I see bad things happening if I try that with the RH weaving. With the TW weaving, I reset the tension each time I advance the warp and kind of ignore the rest of the warp where it just gets wrapped around the far beam. I foresee tension being much more of a problem and don't want to have to reset it so carefully every time I advance. I was able to set up the far side of my loom similarly to how RH looms work. This also has the advantage of keeping the warp properly spread out.



The white fabric on the near side was used to spread the warp out to the proper width. I had started the band by just tying a knot in it to be able to attach the warp to the loom.

This isn't entirely true, but I have been doing quite a bit of crafting thanks to jahanarabanu. I have been working towards changing my persona from Roma in Ireland to Persian. The Roma took names from the area in which they lived. They were known by these names to any outsiders. Their true given name was only known by the Roma. This also means that little is known about Roma names. If my persona were to move from Ireland to the Persian empire, it is not out of the question to select a new name from the area in which they were living. Granted, the choosing of a name that will stick with you (once people learn not to call you by your old name) for a while is the difficult part of the process.

To date, I have made one set of full late period 14th century Persian garb. This consists of a siimple white linen tunic as the undermost layer. J says that the manuscripts show a layer that fully covers the body under all the robes. I'm not entirely convinced that the manuscripts show that, but at the same time I'm grateful to have a layer that won't blow open in the breeze and show what I don't want to be seen. The second layer is gold silk that is actually a gold weft faced fabric where the warp is purple. You see a bit of the purple if you look at it right, but it isn't as strong as some of the fabrics I've seen with different warp and weft. This is a robe that is slit up the front and is pinned at the neck. The next layer is blue silk that is again a robe that is slit up the front. This robe, however is pinned at the waist. Both of these robes were cut as you would for a simple two seam T-tunic then slit up the front. This was so that I could get them finished quickly. A blue turban and gold veil finished off the outfit.

That was how I wore my new garb to it's first event. After that, I made a green layer (that still needs to be hemmed) to be able to change out the blue. This layer, I cut with a more authentic style with still just two seams, but they run up the sides of the back. To go over this all was a fitted caftan of red silk that buttons to the waist. This was the most fiddly bit as the pattern is several pieces. The jacket is not slit all the way to the floor but is hemmed and overlapped where the buttons are. This made it lay a bit odd, but adding a false seam to the floor helped greatly. J gave me some gold buttons to put on it and I made a simple braid of cotton to use for button loops. This jacket has slits at the top of the sleeve that the arms go through. The sleeves hang back off the shoulder allowing the sleeves of the lower layer (green) to be seen. To this outfit I also added my coronet as the event I wore this to was the first that we had the coronets for. I felt that I looked very spiffy in this outfit. I'm working on getting pictures, but since I forgot my camera, I must wait for my friend who did take pictures to get them to me. When I get them, I will post.

The wonderful part of this type of garb is, excepting the undermost layer and the fitted jacket, all layers are interchangeable. This means that when I finish the 6 or so layers that I have fabric for, I will have a great variety of outfits to choose from. Some of the layers will be linen or wool, so that may dictate a bit as to which layer they are, but this also means I can determine how warm I'll be by altering which and how many layers I wear.

In period the fabrics used would have contained woven in patterns. Those fabrics are prohibitively expensive, so all of mine so far are solid colors. Something else they did was use tapestry weaving to adorn the ends of the sleeves (which were often too long and either worn over the hands or pushed back above the wrist when not worn off the arms). I don't really know how to tapestry weave yet, but am working on some embroidery (of which J knows of one extant example from the 7th century if I remember correctly) to add onto the sleeves of one of the layers I have yet to sew.




This pattern was applied to the fabric by pinning a printout to the fabric and stitching through it. I didn't like this method as it was a pain to remove the paper and it left many of my stitches loose. Before I try this again (say with the other sleeve) I must get tracing paper. It will be easier to remove and shouldn't affect the size of the stitches so much. I was tempted, after removing the paper, to just leave it as an outline, but I think I will be happy with it when I get it filled.

Our baronial coronets arrived Friday. I spent some of today making pads to go under them so they would be less likely to give us headaches. This wasn't as painful as I'd thought they'd be thanks to Jahanara who gave me ideas yesterday.
The process:
Take one long thin strip of fabric (about 3 inches wide) and sew it into a tube. Turn inside out. Sew a line along the middle 3/4 inches from the top. This divides the tube into two. One I stuffed with wool to make a place for the coronet to sit on. The other I left flat and and sits between my head and the coronet. I think they turned out rather well.



I've decided I don't like how high it sits in the picture, but moving it down a tad won't be a problem.

jahanarabanu recently talked me into making some early-ish Persian garb. This past weekend we raided London in search of silk from which to make the garb. This is when I re-discovered how much more expensive than wool silk is. The garb is four layers in total. The undermost layer is essentially a white linen tunic. On top of that goes a layer of silk that is essentially another tunic slit up the front and buttoned/brooched at the neck. (Not being a seamstress, I went for the simpler, probably not remotely authentic, cut). On top of that goes another layer of silk in the same cut that is buttoned/brooched at the waist. On top of that goes another layer of silk. I don't remember how that one fastens, but I wouldn't be surprised if it again is fastened at the waist. This layer also has fancy sleeves rather than the simple sleeves of the lower layers.

Last night, we cut out the blue (middle) silk layer and the linen. Today, I sewed up the sides of those layers and am currently experimenting with the gold silk I bought to see if I can make it washable in some fashion without making it too crinkly. I had washed the blue and red layers and they came out crinkly rather than the crisp look that they had in the shop. This is ok with me because I need my clothes to be washable. My husband complains when he has to take things to be dry cleaned, but since he is the one with the car...

I'm hoping to get this all finished by Crown 1.5 weeks from now.

I've recently learned how to embroider using two very simple stitches. For some while now I've been wanting a hood to wear at events when it gets cold. I've finally broken down and made one. jahanarabanu taught me a running stitch and chain stitch (I believe they are called).
I started with a border around the edges



Then I added a roundel to the front gore:


And here I am with my (almost completed) hood:


All I need to do is remove the gore in the back. The hood I used for a pattern has a gore in the front and back, but on me this hood will lay better in the back without the gore. Thankfully I didn't put any embroidery on it. My plan was to join the two borders in the back once I knew I assembeled the hood properly. Removing the gore will save me some work.

This hood took me about a week and a half to do. Once I got started it was kind of like an addiction to get it finished. I don't need to hem the edges as it is wool that ended up a bit felted due to a washing incident that involved my husband not seeing it sitting in the washer when he put a load of whites in to wash. Thankfully our whites are still white. I may end up hemming or trimming the area around the face as I feel a bit lost in the hood. Bringing the edge in an inch or so will make me feel more comfortable in it. The design was done in linen provided by jahanarabanu.