It was a marvelous Saturday. Even the part where I got up at 6am for some inscrutable reason, because that meant I had time to repair the torn shoulder seam I hadn't noticed on the back of my grey gown (and as far as I know, there are no photos of that gown, so don't go looking).
We drove through rain to get to the site, and I learned why skirts that are an inch off the ground are preferable to skirts that just touch it...linen stretches when wet. So I had a lovely little train all morning, with three sodden inches of skirt trying desperately to stick to my legs or flop into new puddles.
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| Disregard the skeleton tent. |
This photo is from the end of the day, just before Court. Seven yards of alum-mordanted silk broadcloth drying in the breeze and timely sun, after a day of marauding thunderstorms to the north and south. Lady Lina and I helped wrangle fabric much of the day for this year's Tailor's Tent project, which is based on 16th-century Japanese shoguns' clothing. Mostly that means several dozen yards of fabric, as far as I understand—this is an area where I'm firmly in the "unskilled labor" category.
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| Note the remains of lunch all over the table. |
Earlier in the day, a storm blew up and sent us scurrying for the populace tent like a flock of brightly-colored quail—and then I employed the time-honored tactic of making friends by feeding people indiscriminately. It's a good ploy, made better by having excellent bread, cheese, grapes and olives, hard-boiled eggs, and tomatoes. I'm tempted to eat like that all the time, although the next event I bring a picnic to, I need to plan the containment units better. Slightly too many ceramics in the basket made for a very heavy lug around camp in the morning as we were exploring.
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| This was before the wind really wreaked havoc with my veil. Also, more lunch on the table. |
And a demonstration of Why One Should Always Bring A Cloak. Despite it being summer proper here, the storm brought a freezing wind with it, and two layers of linen just isn't enough to keep me from going all blue at the edges.
It was also perhaps not the best day to take advantage of being young and unmarried and so to leave my hair down. Between performing a delicate sort of dance with five other people and a piece of silk sodden with dye and gleeful with wind, and...well...the wind...I would have been safer braiding it.
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| Very accurate 12th-century shoes. Totally. I did not buy them at a certain evil empire for ten bucks last year. |
Technically this is a photo of the grey gown, mostly dry again and back to its usual length.
And after we came home, there was just enough time to clear another garden bed—these are the before and after, and you can just see the frame at lower right in the before photo. Someday very soon there will be
plants in these! It's a little late in the year, but winter tends not to happen until November nowadays, so I'm not too worried about the growing season.
And after we came home, there was just enough time to clear another garden bed—these are the before and after, and you can just see the frame at lower right in the before photo. Someday very soon there will be plants in these! It's a little late in the year, but winter tends not to happen until November nowadays, so I'm not too worried about the growing season.
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