Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

War survived. Trip home uneventful (except remembering half-way home that I forgot to grab our drink jug from camp on the way out). First layer of dust scrubbed off feet.

This year was by far the best weather I’ve seen for Pennsic in the 15 I’ve attended.

Also, linen and viking apron dresses are for the win.

The Durango has been unloaded but much more stuff is still in the trailer. We’re going to go to the movies since it’s raining.

Do I really have to go to work tomorrow?

More later I’m sure…

tags: linen, pennsic, pennsic xxxvii, sca, travel, vacation, viking apron dresses

We’re leaving in 12 hours or less. :)

This year, the manic sewing marathon yielded:

• 3 Pairs of Fop Pants
• 2 Viking Aprons
• 1 Green linen under dress
• Several repairs
• and a crazy project that took longer but was less stressful than expected

Not bad. I was afraid I wouldn’t finish any of the sewing for myself but some did get done. The sewing day yesterday was very productive. The Fop did all the packing of the truck and trailer while I sewed today. And this evening. And now I’m done. And I packed almost all my stuff today which was rather insane as well. Pennsic packing was rather last-minute this year… We have remembered something we meant to buy (and bought it! Super-sized ziplock bags FTW!) and also remembered what we forgot to pack (and bath stuff is now on the list to pack) so hopefully we have remembered everything else.

Tomorrow morning, I’m going to be a good little viking and raid Starbucks before the Fop wakes up.

Then, we drive, drive, drive! YAY! Hopefully it won’t be too hot when we set up camp tomorrow evening!

Have a fun time while we’re gone! See some of you really soon! YAY!

tags: packing, pennsic, projects, sca, sewing, travel

I think we’re on the 7th wave of thunderstorm blowing through here. This is awesome. The house is still bloody hot, but it has cooled down considerably outside. Sadly, the storms kept elzregina from coming up to take away basil, but the rain will mean I’ll have twice as much basil for her by the time she does come by. This all started here a little after 4 pm. It’s been storming on and off for 8 hours. What an awesome day! (…I should go check the basement before I got to bed…)

Much sewing has been achieved today. I somehow ended up making the apron dresses slightly too big in the bust (how does that happen???) and need to nip them in just a teensy bit. I may cheat and take a dart out of the top of the back panel… but really I should take it out of the sides under the arms. It’s probably an inch to an inch and a half that needs to be taken out. Pesky self-measurements. Unfortunately, I already finished the top seams so I’ll need to do a little bit of extra seam-ripping to do whatever I end up doing. The hems are done too. Other than the small measurement issue, I’m quite pleased with how they’re coming out!! Hurray!!!

I spent some quality time with the Goddess of Irons tonight too… I love my Rowenta iron. She sure uses up water quickly making steam too!

Of course, I’m starting to get the “not enough time” jitters. I haven’t really started any packing. Our garb isn’t even all on the same floor for sorting and inspection. I do have running lists of “things to buy” and “things to remember to pack”. I also have packed for Pennsic *mumble* times before so I suspect I can survive. I’m just twitchy and tired and blogging instead of sleeping because my brain is trying to convince me to keep sewing even though my eyes have already said, “No way!” to more sewing tonight.

What’s really excellent is that I’m excited about Pennsic! No pre-Pennsic blahs for the first time in several years!

tags: goddess of irons, packing, pennsic, sca, sewing, thunderstorms, weather

Hot days like these call for polar bears.

I borrowed slyppi’s shopping karma today, sort of in exchange for some zen I loaned her earlier in the week. I had extraordinary good luck at Kohl’s and Fashion Bug. I ended up with a dress for the wedding next Saturday without too much trauma! I also found 2 fabulous tops for work, 2 casual tops and 2 piratey tops (one is even pink to help me embrace my “pirate chickness” - I even have a flag). Finally, I snagged an awesome dress - black lace over red slinkyness. It wasn’t an awesome dress when I tried it on a few months ago and it was $70. But, at $14 this dress qualifies for awesome status.

I have also achieved a great deal of pleating in the past 36 hours. Stupid Fop pants. They still need buttonholes, but the cuffs and waists are pleated into their appropriate sizes. I hope. Can I mention one more time that I hate pleats? Yes? Good. I hate pleats. A lot. They tweak the little OCD chick in the back of my head and I end up using a zillion pins when I probably shouldn’t have to. There’s probably a better, easier and faster way. In fact, I expect an e-mail from my mother in the morning telling me there is indeed a better, easier and faster way to put in pleats and that I’m a silly goose for not realizing sooner.

I also finally got around to doing a mock-up of a Viking apron dress. I’ll be having Gertrude help me tomorrow with cutting the hem right. Then I’ll rip it apart and cut one or two out of real fabric. The apron dress does not involve any pleats. I’m excited by this. I’d rather do dags than pleats. The apron dress doesn’t involve dags either, it’s okay. I have a ridiculous list of things I’d like to get sewn for Pennsic. I think if I get a quarter of it done, I’ll be doing well.

This weekend has been stupidly hot. I hope all the folks at EKWC are drinking their water. Well, at this hour they’re probably drinking something else, but I hope they drank their water all day! I have been chugging ice water today. I was reminded earlier why I don’t usually drink ice water - I drank 2 big glasses very quickly. Ugh. Oops. I’m glad I could spend the day being productive in air conditioning. I am a wimp when it comes to heat. I skipped war camp this weekend in the interest of not starting Pennsic already cranky about heat. I’d be fine with a cold Pennsic this year - days in the mid-70s, nights in the low 60s or 50s… Yeah, that would be lovely.

Right, now it’s time to go to bed, but not to sleep… I haven’t finished Jhegaala yet.

tags: clothing, garb, heat, pennsic, sales, sca, sewing, shopping, weather

Components to a bad day:

• Finding out information too late to save time for yourself and others. Twice.
• Having to force people to answer your questions directly rather than deflect. Twice.
• Getting stuck on an annoying, soul-sapping conference call without much hope for extraction.
• Not having any tasty pudding-yogurt left for lunch.
• Needing to go grocery shopping desperately.
• Being exhausted and fearing the grocery store and therefore procrastinating it. (good and bad really)

Bonus round that almost makes up for the day:
I put in the deposit for our new yurt. It’ll be ready in a couple weeks! Sadly, we’re only getting it in time for Pennsic because someone else had to drop out of the yurt queue… but at least we can give their yurt a happy home!

tags: bad day, communication, meetings, tired, work, yurt

I don’t quite have a “Somewhere Safe” but I do have a little box where I put little things that I don’t want to lose but don’t have immediate usefulness or relevance to my world. It is my little box of awesome. This is where I put the Spectrum Scientifics business card the Fop handed me. It’s also where the business cards of people like our accountant, mortgage dude and various doctors end up. Merchant cards from Pennsic and quilt shows? In the little box of awesome. Card for the random 60-something man dating a a 20-something guy my coworker tried to hit on in a bar in Mystic? Tempus’ card? Charles the potter’s card? Colleen’s card? All in the little box of awesome. I also keep the various membership cards and expired ID in this box.

But, most awesomely… I thought to put the pinnacle of handy things in the little box of awesome. Instructions, hastily written in metric units on two 3×5″ pieces of paper torn from a little notebook by a lovely woman (with a lovely accent) at Pennsic whom I accosted*** from the line for the ATM two or three Pennsics ago, to make a viking apron dress. I was terribly clever to put these 2 bits of paper in the little box of awesome. They would have been lost long ago if it weren’t for the little box of awesome.

I have transcribed them to one of my notebooks and ordered linen. I need crappy, ugly, horrible fabric for a mock-up. I might actually have an apron dress by Pennsic!

Of note, I apparently can translate metric to English but I fail at converting feet to yards. For a good 10 minutes I thought I was going to need 8 yards of fabric when in fact I only need 8 feet. I should sleep more. Now perhaps…

***To say I accosted her is a terrible exaggeration. Really, I remarked to lisaf that I needed to make an awesome apron dress like that fabulous one on the woman walking by. The lovely woman stopped, chatted a bit, and drew up a quick pattern which she then thrust upon me. She apologized for being in such a hurry - she was late for court preparations or something.

tags: little box of awesome, random, sewing, unit conversion, viking apron dress

There is a short set of photos from the Rapier Champions battle up on Flickr. By short I mean 59 photos. For those of you interested in paging through bout after bout, I exported a much larger set (259) and put it up on its own pages for your view pleasure. These photos haven’t been cropped or edited at all - something I will eventually get to with the shots I really like. But not now.

I want to thank everyone who wore sashes, capes, ribbons and other swooshy things - the photos are much more interesting when you can see that there was movement going on. Next tournament can I tie ribbons to all the fencers to make the photos even more fun? Pretty please?

Duncan’s bouts with Falling Down Woman start here. She drops her first sword here. Her dagger starts to fly here. If you start from the beginning and step through the whole set of bouts, it’s pretty entertaining. To me it looks like she’s always got her weight on the wrong foot (hence spending so much time on the ground). She does get one good shot in, but ultimately Duncan is victorious.

• Rapier Champions - full set
• Rapier champions - short set
• Other Pennsic XXXVI shots




• Ducan’s expressive fencing eyebrows
• Griffith chases that cute butt around the field - they were totally flirting…
• The Queen smooches Andre
• Um… are they dancing? - Pascual and Connor

tags: fencing, pennsic, pennsic xxxvi, photographs, photography, rapier champions, sca

I’ve posted the first round of my Pennsic photos. The second round will come later and include more of the fencing photos. I took a lot of photos at the Champions Tourney. Enough that I was tempted to go offsite for another 2gb memory card for the camera…

The shots behind the link (clicky the photo) are mostly of people in camp and up at that tournament. There is, of course, the gratuitous “drying our boots by the fire pit” photo as well. Hurray for the Stargate!

The heat, wet and lack of space on my memory card gave me excellent excuses not to go up to the field battle. I get really paranoid about getting the new camera wet. Funny that. Oh, not to mention the mud… goodness there was a lot of mud. This was definitely one of those years when I didn’t feel like I needed to stay at War past Midnight Madness on Wednesday and I probably could have skipped that as well. It’s best we stayed — the canvas dried out a bit making it lighter to pack up and move — but the volume of rain really made it tiresome there for a while.

tags: pennsic, pennsic xxxvi, photographs, photography

Pennsic was hot, humid, wet, damp, and great. I have a cold now, but I think the happy chinese medicine nisaa gave me held it off an extra day (so I could help unpack yesterday) and in general lessened its impact on my life. Hurray! Of course, that still means I’m rundown and congested today, but that’s better than having it hit me Saturday or Sunday.

So here’s the quick rundown of things I want to remember for next year while I can still remember it.

Lessons learned and/or reinforced at Pennsic this year:

• I need another large memory card for my camera.
• We need to level our bed next year.
• Acupuncture is amazing.
• Heat and humidity of mighty oppressiveness make it easy to skip Pennsic classes.
• Rain and mud of mighty quantities make it easy to skip Pennsic classes.
• More linen and silk.
• Viking apron dresses are key and I should make some.
• Food at the food court is boring and fattening. We should bring some food to grill in camp next year.
• On the topic of food, it’s such a pity to watch an amazing bed of coals go to waste in the Stargate (our amazing firepit) each night… I should put together some interesting things to bake in the coals for breakfast. (Either in foil or a dutch oven or both…)

I’ve imported all the photos from my camera’s card. Most of them are of the Rapier Champions Tournament, unsurprisingly. Most of the sunburn I got was from that Tournament too. Hopefully I’ll get some of them up this week. I’ll probably throw the whole series from the Champions tourney somewhere other than Flickr for you fencer types.

After 2 showers and a loooooong bath, my toenails are still dirty but the rest of me feels clean. I should start to tackle the laundry next. Eek. Laundry.

tags: heat, pennsic, pennsic xxxvi, rain, sca, sick, travel, weather