First Thursday in August - Period Cooking Night!

We got off to a great start with a slow-roasted chicken stuffed with venison sausage. As you can see, the photographer did not get there before the ravening horde, I mean, before the first diners started in on the chicken.

For a side dish we had the cabbage that was cooked with the chicken and more sausage, and a Roman sauce with tumeric and laser. On the table we had another Roman sauce with frutum and mustard seed. Both were excellent!

Wyllow managed to get some work done on her gorget earlier in the week:  She dyed all of the roping lines with iron to get a dark brown near-black color.

During Open Shop she added a band of indigo on the outside edges as a test.  If this goes well she will add some red (brasil?) to make it purple and then dye the area inside of the roping the same way.  She plans to use buckthorn on the roping itself to make a golden yellow.  The resulting gorget will have the heraldic colors of Calontir where she first started playing in the SCA and where she learned rapier fighting in the secret rapier underground movement back in the '90s.

Many of Wolf's plans came to fruition this week as he picked up his beautiful "custon Iolo crossbow". For any fans of the Ultima computer games or the Myth Inc. fantasy books, yes, Iolo is real and he really does make crossbows. Verra nice ones! This is his new target bow, but he plans to commission a combat bow as well. 

Notice that Wolf also finished assembling his half-gauntlets.  Here he has borrowed a pair of my deerskin gloves to wear in them.  The supple deerskin is great for swordfighting or shooting or anything else where you want leather protection but you still want to be able to feel what you are doing.

We welcomed first-time visitors Bastian and Tib and Rene'  to Open Shop night.  Tib and Bastian came to work on gorgets while Rene came to provide moral support.  And to read!  As you can tell from the back-drop, this is a good place for reading.  Bastian is making a late-period steel gorget from 18 gauge stainless, while Tib is going for a brigandine-style gorget using pale grey/beige leather and hidden aluminum plates.

Cameron managed to dodge the camera by hanging out in the garage and working on the aluminum splints for his vambraces.  The new (to me) belt sander provided by Duke Hoegarden made this process much faster!  Cameron also showed us his new recurve bow but nobody took pictures of it!

Evie and Gunna and Artorius hung out in the kitchen and baked cookies.  The 3-layer pin~ata cookies with frosting and M&Ms in the middle were awesome.

Ben sewed up all the channels in his new helm liner and began stuffing them with cotton balls.

Dierdre took the night off from peening rivets in her helm to work on a weaving project indoors in the air-conditioning.

Wyllow also did some weaving, finishing up a sampler of several shades of red from her recent dying project.

Tristan and his dad managed to avoid the camera by working in the garage on modifying hid gorget, but we caught his mon doing some hand-sewing on one of Tristan's shirts.  I know I heard their names again last night but I'm afraid I didn't do anything sensible with them like write them down.  Tristan has turned 16 now and is ready to get authorized on the adult field for armoured combat.  I'm looking forward to having him in the War Company with us this fall!