8/9/12 - Irish night at the Open Shop

We started out with barley porridge, asparagus in rice brought by Deirdre and spicy pears in wine sauce made by Gunna and Evie.  (Pears in spicy wine sauce?)  Yummy food!  Jacki and Maelgwyn spent some time geeking out over Y Gododdin and parchment and letters from St. Patrick and other cool discussion topics, but then we all got to work.

First-time visitor Seanan (Shaw-non?) already has his armour together, so he helped out with war shield painting and joined in on the pell-work session later in the evening.

Grain'e made custom patterns for her vambraces and I cut them out for her out of roughly 6 oz. oil tanned leather.  (Note:  Grain'e made a donation to the shop fund for the leather and aluminum.  Yeah!)  These would be way too light if we weren't adding some serious aluminum splints to them.  We patterned and cut out some .125" thick 6061 T6 aluminum splints which will make these plenty rigid enough for spearwork.  Speaking of spearwork, Grain'e came out and worked with the spear while the rest of us were beating on the pell.  Seanan, Grain'e, St. Patrick ...was it Irish night and somebody forgot to tell me?

Dierdre (She's Norse-Irish, so that's...not really different at all)  had recently made some great Mongol-style fighting pants for Wolf and also a nice white under-tunic.  She helped a lot with the shield painting, trained at the pell, and then did some more shield painting.

 

But Wolf is a Mongol who would never ever have even visited Ireland!  He worked on stuffing the channels in his helm liner, did some pell work, and may have even snuck in some shield painting when I wasn't looking.  In the background Ben is working on his own helm liner, which is nearly finished.  Ben also come outside for pell work.

Wyllow mac Muiredaig is a Scot.  A descendant of the Dal Riada.  Who were basically an Irish tribe that settled in Caledonia and forgot to go home.  She worked on weaving hand-spun wool to make a test piece for experimenting with fulling methods/recipes, and helped others with their projects.

Jacki carded wool and spun some yarn while Evie watched and rested up from her cooking efforts.  In the background Belle was on her computer researching 12th century French music for her upcoming presentation at Laurel's Prize Tourney.

Gunna browsed through one of Wyllow's books on Roman cooking.  Will she get hooked and start putting garum in everything?  Only time will tell...

Frosti came out to visit with folks, do a little shield paining, enjoy some good food, and discuss next steps for his armour plan.  And that was enough for one night!