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All caught up!
By which I mean I have caught up on LJ, JF, LT, and DA, and all the personal journals I read on DW (minus the nagging possibility of posts going missing) + the DW communities I'm interested in keeping up with. However, have not even poked independent blogs, webcomics, or kinkmemes. And there are still comment replies and stuff like that to deal with too.
Also, my browser tabs look like they're under control only by the magic of tab stacks: I 'only' have ten tabs open, but that's because one of them is a stack (15 tabs high) of video/audio/multimedia things I want to look at; one of them is a stack (7 tabs high) of reactions to a certain discussion that was ongoing when I left; one of them is a stack (8 tabs high) of entire communities/fests I still want to go through; and one of them is a stack (28 tabs high) of fics and rec posts I want to read.
Umm, yeah.
So at Pennsic, I took ALL the fiber arts classes. Well, not all, but a lot. I went to a bunch of other classes, to, but it seemed like I kept leaving all the classes that weren't either "this is how to do one particular thing" or "this is a presentation on particular academic research" frustrated and/or disappointed. Possibly I am a terrible person, possibly it is a symptom of Knowing Too Much and the classes were just below my level and I should deal, possibly I should just know better by now never to go to a class about magic or folklore (man, I have a whole separate rant about the things that were wrong with the magic/folklore classes I tried to go to before I gave up.)
Which is okay, because I wanted to cut back on the classes this week anyway. What I ended up doing was learning a new fiber arts skill pretty much every day of class, which was great! I know a lot of these could theoretically have been learned from books, but there's something about a using-your-hands skill that makes me want to learn it first from a real teacher if at all possible - even if it just means that I watch them to it to figure out why their written instructions make no sense to me.
Here are some of the things:
Clockwise from top left, then spiraling in, we have:
1. New embroidery stitches: I always take the embroidery classes because I am almost entirely self-taught and it is nice to have a real person confirm what I'm doing. And I did a few new stitches for the first time! Including couching stitch! (And yes, that embroidery stitch sampler of tentacles writhing from a pool is totally going toward my kink_bingo.)
2. Netting with a netting shuttle: So awesome! I can now make my own hammocks if necessary, heh heh heh. What I have not done is actually write down the stitch in my Pennsic Boke of Useful Skills in a way that makes sense to me, so I hope I have not forgotten in the interim. The one downside of netting: people will come up to you and ask what you are doing, and you will say "Netting!" and they will say, "Really? That looks nothing like the netting I've done," and then you will talk about tied netting vs. netting with a netting needle, and they will say, "Don't you use two needles for netting?" and then you will facepalm and say, "No, netting like a fishing net, not knitting like a scarf", and it will take you three days to learn to anticipate this conversation happening.
3. Tied/macrame netting. See above. I did this before I picked up the netting shuttle; it has its benefits, but the shuttle method really is a lot cooler.
4. Stick weaving, which makes long strips of weaving with only the weft threads showing. It's apparently one of the oldest know weaving methods, dating to the Neolithic, goes fairly fast, takes almost no equipment, and is highly portable while you're working. The cloth it makes is not terribly strong, though, and there's not a lot of versatility compared to other weaving methods. Also there's some evidence that it's on the way to becoming trendy among the fancy-yarns crowd, which, :P . The awesome bit is that the class was taught by a nine-year-old girl! Who was very good at it.
5. Advanced lucet cord - Lucet is a method of cord/braid making "on a forked stick" which is arguably of greatest antiquity; it's also the first SCA craft I ever learned, but in the past - oh, 8? 9? years that I've had my lucet, I've just been making the same two cords over and over again, so it was great to learn some new braids I can do. (Also, if the teacher can be trusted, a technique to never have to sew a buttonhole or eyelet again unless I want to.)
6. Card Weaving / Tablet Weaving - !!! So card weaving is basically an ancient way of making a programmable pattern in a woven strip using PUNCHCARDS. It is awesome. I want to just sit down, string up some cards, and mess with it and see what patterns I can make (much like any other programming language that has been set in front of me, actually.) Slightly slowed down by the fact that I have neither cards nor a loom, alas, but apparently cards are very easy to make, and I've wanted to play with very simple backstrap looms for awhile. (I learned on a special tab-weaving loom, but then the guy who taught the class was selling them, so. If I mess on backstrap and decide I want one of those - which again has the main advantage of portability - it would be within my woodworking skills to make my own, I think.)
7. Naalbinding / Nail Binding - this is the oldest known fiber art in the knitting/crochet family, dating back to some of the oldest finds of string, and still used preferentially to knitting up to very recent times in some places. The final product seems to combine the evenness of knitted fabric with the solidity of crochet, and an intermediate amount of stretch. It uses short pieces of string, threaded through a large yarn needle, rather than a continuous piece, which on the one hand is great - finally a use for all the little short pieces of string! Finally something I can do with my short, abortive attempts at handspun! But the downside, you are expect to felt the end of one string to the beginning of the next, and I cannot felt. At least not when I want to. I suspect this connects to my magical ability to make shoelaces come untied.
I also took classes in, hmm, among others, a bunch of really excellent reconstructive archeological work with extant medieval lower-class garments, with lots of details on fit, construction, stichery, and finishing, which makes me really want to re-work the Greenland Gown I made right before Pennsic (which is good, because it needs re-working: I love it, it is an amazing, all-purpose garment that is so comfortable and usable, but it really needs fully finished seams if I'm going to use it that hard. Also some serious stain-removal work post-me wearing it the last three days of Pennsic straight, but that's how it goes. If I do more SCA events I think I will make at least one more (probably in cotton broadcloth though.)
Also a class in wool-combing, which left me full of fire that I can comb and spin that fleece I've had sitting in the closet! I can! And an awesome class on do-it-yourself buckskin, which was designed to make me want to go out and take a more in-depth class on how to really do it, which worked.
Now what I really need to do is practice all those new skills until I have them down in muscle-memory and won't forget. Unfortunately, between crocheting several dozen Spinks, desperately hand-sewing to finish my garb, and then doing all of that at War, my right wrist has been telling me it is Done. In that same peculiarly piercing and unignorable way as a three-year-old who has walked too far. So it is in an ace bandage for now, and I am not allowed to do any fiber arts until next Monday or said wrist has gone an entire day without complaining, whichever comes later.
And. Um. For those of you who were interested in the Dresden Files/SCA thread I linked too? I had forgotten entirely, until I found her again this year, that Sue the Tyrannosaur actually comes to Pennsic every year. It's canon!
Proof:
Also, my browser tabs look like they're under control only by the magic of tab stacks: I 'only' have ten tabs open, but that's because one of them is a stack (15 tabs high) of video/audio/multimedia things I want to look at; one of them is a stack (7 tabs high) of reactions to a certain discussion that was ongoing when I left; one of them is a stack (8 tabs high) of entire communities/fests I still want to go through; and one of them is a stack (28 tabs high) of fics and rec posts I want to read.
Umm, yeah.
So at Pennsic, I took ALL the fiber arts classes. Well, not all, but a lot. I went to a bunch of other classes, to, but it seemed like I kept leaving all the classes that weren't either "this is how to do one particular thing" or "this is a presentation on particular academic research" frustrated and/or disappointed. Possibly I am a terrible person, possibly it is a symptom of Knowing Too Much and the classes were just below my level and I should deal, possibly I should just know better by now never to go to a class about magic or folklore (man, I have a whole separate rant about the things that were wrong with the magic/folklore classes I tried to go to before I gave up.)
Which is okay, because I wanted to cut back on the classes this week anyway. What I ended up doing was learning a new fiber arts skill pretty much every day of class, which was great! I know a lot of these could theoretically have been learned from books, but there's something about a using-your-hands skill that makes me want to learn it first from a real teacher if at all possible - even if it just means that I watch them to it to figure out why their written instructions make no sense to me.
Here are some of the things:
Clockwise from top left, then spiraling in, we have:
1. New embroidery stitches: I always take the embroidery classes because I am almost entirely self-taught and it is nice to have a real person confirm what I'm doing. And I did a few new stitches for the first time! Including couching stitch! (And yes, that embroidery stitch sampler of tentacles writhing from a pool is totally going toward my kink_bingo.)
2. Netting with a netting shuttle: So awesome! I can now make my own hammocks if necessary, heh heh heh. What I have not done is actually write down the stitch in my Pennsic Boke of Useful Skills in a way that makes sense to me, so I hope I have not forgotten in the interim. The one downside of netting: people will come up to you and ask what you are doing, and you will say "Netting!" and they will say, "Really? That looks nothing like the netting I've done," and then you will talk about tied netting vs. netting with a netting needle, and they will say, "Don't you use two needles for netting?" and then you will facepalm and say, "No, netting like a fishing net, not knitting like a scarf", and it will take you three days to learn to anticipate this conversation happening.
3. Tied/macrame netting. See above. I did this before I picked up the netting shuttle; it has its benefits, but the shuttle method really is a lot cooler.
4. Stick weaving, which makes long strips of weaving with only the weft threads showing. It's apparently one of the oldest know weaving methods, dating to the Neolithic, goes fairly fast, takes almost no equipment, and is highly portable while you're working. The cloth it makes is not terribly strong, though, and there's not a lot of versatility compared to other weaving methods. Also there's some evidence that it's on the way to becoming trendy among the fancy-yarns crowd, which, :P . The awesome bit is that the class was taught by a nine-year-old girl! Who was very good at it.
5. Advanced lucet cord - Lucet is a method of cord/braid making "on a forked stick" which is arguably of greatest antiquity; it's also the first SCA craft I ever learned, but in the past - oh, 8? 9? years that I've had my lucet, I've just been making the same two cords over and over again, so it was great to learn some new braids I can do. (Also, if the teacher can be trusted, a technique to never have to sew a buttonhole or eyelet again unless I want to.)
6. Card Weaving / Tablet Weaving - !!! So card weaving is basically an ancient way of making a programmable pattern in a woven strip using PUNCHCARDS. It is awesome. I want to just sit down, string up some cards, and mess with it and see what patterns I can make (much like any other programming language that has been set in front of me, actually.) Slightly slowed down by the fact that I have neither cards nor a loom, alas, but apparently cards are very easy to make, and I've wanted to play with very simple backstrap looms for awhile. (I learned on a special tab-weaving loom, but then the guy who taught the class was selling them, so. If I mess on backstrap and decide I want one of those - which again has the main advantage of portability - it would be within my woodworking skills to make my own, I think.)
7. Naalbinding / Nail Binding - this is the oldest known fiber art in the knitting/crochet family, dating back to some of the oldest finds of string, and still used preferentially to knitting up to very recent times in some places. The final product seems to combine the evenness of knitted fabric with the solidity of crochet, and an intermediate amount of stretch. It uses short pieces of string, threaded through a large yarn needle, rather than a continuous piece, which on the one hand is great - finally a use for all the little short pieces of string! Finally something I can do with my short, abortive attempts at handspun! But the downside, you are expect to felt the end of one string to the beginning of the next, and I cannot felt. At least not when I want to. I suspect this connects to my magical ability to make shoelaces come untied.
I also took classes in, hmm, among others, a bunch of really excellent reconstructive archeological work with extant medieval lower-class garments, with lots of details on fit, construction, stichery, and finishing, which makes me really want to re-work the Greenland Gown I made right before Pennsic (which is good, because it needs re-working: I love it, it is an amazing, all-purpose garment that is so comfortable and usable, but it really needs fully finished seams if I'm going to use it that hard. Also some serious stain-removal work post-me wearing it the last three days of Pennsic straight, but that's how it goes. If I do more SCA events I think I will make at least one more (probably in cotton broadcloth though.)
Also a class in wool-combing, which left me full of fire that I can comb and spin that fleece I've had sitting in the closet! I can! And an awesome class on do-it-yourself buckskin, which was designed to make me want to go out and take a more in-depth class on how to really do it, which worked.
Now what I really need to do is practice all those new skills until I have them down in muscle-memory and won't forget. Unfortunately, between crocheting several dozen Spinks, desperately hand-sewing to finish my garb, and then doing all of that at War, my right wrist has been telling me it is Done. In that same peculiarly piercing and unignorable way as a three-year-old who has walked too far. So it is in an ace bandage for now, and I am not allowed to do any fiber arts until next Monday or said wrist has gone an entire day without complaining, whichever comes later.
And. Um. For those of you who were interested in the Dresden Files/SCA thread I linked too? I had forgotten entirely, until I found her again this year, that Sue the Tyrannosaur actually comes to Pennsic every year. It's canon!
Proof:
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That's where I'm at about both teaching and taking classes in the SCA.
TABLET WEAVING IS THE BEST. Um. I need to make a proper backstrap, but for futzing around, a wide belt works for short periods of time. The super-easy super-cheap tablet loom is a 2x4 and a couple C-clamps.
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Is there somewhere that reveals the secret of this C-clamp based loom? Because I have to admit, visualization is failing me with just the ingredients list. (Put a C-clamp on either end of the 2x4 and string the warp between them?)
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Put the C-clamps at either end of a long table so that their screw-handles are point *up*, and use the handles as poles to tie your thread too. It works *great* and it means your entire set up is usually under $20.
If you want to get into fancy cardweaving, Nancy Spies' Ecclesiastical Pomp and Aristocratic Circumtance is *full* of fabric porn, as it is the go-to reference on brocaded tableweaving.
Weaver's Hand is your resource for all sorts of off-loom textile techinques -- cardweaving, ply-split braiding, kumihimo, sprang, etc.
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I'm so glad you had a good War this year!
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Obviously it is a somewhat unwieldy loom, but it works really well and is relatively easy to unclamp for untwisting of warm, which is not true of most actual looms.
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The stick weaving product looks really cool. I totally want to try that!
How did I not know about Spinks? And where is the photographic evidence of your production? Where?
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Spinks: well, this is one of the first production runs, but there have been several hundred more made since then.
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Come to think of it, I bet my mom the former crafts teacher knows about stick weaving... She might even have the needles for it lying around.
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