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!

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!

Period food night

 Wyllow prepared 4 game hens using/adapting a Roman recipe for roast hens in "green sauce".  She told me many more details about ingredients and methods and adaptations for missing ingredients like green nard, but what I remember is that they tasted exotic and delicious.

And Wyllow served up the hens elegantly on a platter.

 Deidre brought a middle-eastern dish of rice and lentils and...other things.  What things?  You'll have to ask her.

Belle and her friend Josh worked on a Rube Goldberg device for physics class, resulting in intermittent crashing sounds and exclamations throughout the evening.

In other news, Wolf finished shaping his lamellar scales so we worked out a lacing pattern/plan and he is busily assembling them.  Abby rounded the corners of all the metal bits for her brigandine gorget and we discussed design ideas for the remaining parts.  Gunna warped her loom with blue thread for a new project. Khutulun brought her stage-armour elbows and knees over and we worked together to dish the last elbow, planish all of them and drill holes for strapping/attaching them.  Deidre peened more rivits in her Valsgarde 6 helm.

Sage came over with his dad and little brother.  All seemed fascinated with what we do so we will see how many of his family decide to get involved.  Sage seems inclined towards 15th cent. Italian renaisance for clothing and armour.  It would be great to see someone do boffer in a hardened leather King Renee suit...and then he could easily upgrade it for adult combat in about 3 years.

And that was enough for one night!