In two days, the Middle Marches Baronial Twelfth Night will be held at Camp Christian, way out in the countryside about an hour north of here. We held Red Dragon there at the end of October, and my friend Janet VanMeter and I froze practically to death. And that was October, not January with the single-digit  Fahrenheit temperatures we are experiencing!

Although the event will be held indoors, the buildings are not what you could really call heated—brrr! So Janet and I have been hard at work sewing additional layers of woolen garb to wear.

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The under-layer is a beige linen chemise, to which I added trim at the neckline. Next comes a cranberry wool medieval kirtle, and to top them off, a wool apron dress I got from a Swedish shop on Etsy. Mysteriously, once I gained 20 lbs in late spring due to a new medication, which I finally was taken off of last month, my apron dress no longer fit! So I ripped out various seams and finally got the right ones open so that Janet could insert new lighter brown gores, seen here at the sides. I trimmed the bottom of the kirtle anachronistically but creatively with a repeating miniature scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. 🙂
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My bronze turtle brooches, my favorites because of their simple, Celtic-inspired design and ease in polishing up. I put two strands of beads between them, comprised of Viking beads; SCA site tokens; a few Chinese porcelain beads which my character’s husband: a Viking raider and trader, would have gotten as they came available from the Silk Road; a dragon I happened to have around (very fitting since our Tirnewydd mascot is a dragon); a favor from then-Queen Kateryn at my very first event, Red Dragon 2016, when I approached her as She was taking her ease, and I played and sang a bit of Willy of Winsbury on my weird circular harp for her.
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Playing the “circular harp” in my back yard in preparation for Red Dragon 2016. I’ve got on my long curly auburn wig, which I wore to the event. It was mistaken for my very own hair! I wish! 😉 This outfit, a warm weather one, has fewer layers and they are all linen.  Photo taken by my dear friend Juhi Banerjee Aggarwal.

We had the option of driving up tomorrow night and staying in a dorm room overnight.  But Janet and I finally decided this week that we wouldn’t, because of the issue of how comfortable the room would be, the fact that we would have to pay $60 USD for it, and that we couldn’t get into it until we had driven those back roads with their many turns in the dark and then finally successfully found Camp Christian.

Some weather people are predicting snow on Saturday morning, when I will be driving up there quite early and hoping to find the place. If it is going to be bitterly cold, I will have to leave my harp at home again, like I did last week for Flaming Gryphon 12th Night. A pity, because Baron Talymar asked me to play before Court. One always wants to please one’s betters! 🙂

On the other hand, I don’t want either to break a lot of strings or to weaken and warp the frame (harps are by their nature very easy to warp, no need to encourage them by subjecting them to extremes of temperature). So it looks like the harp will stay home again. Pity. 😦

Speaking of which, I made a 5 minute recording on the harp of an anonymous 13th century trouvere chanson especially for His Royal Majesty King Cellach, which I gave him last week for a little 12th Night gift, along with some other things both for him and HRM Queen Vukasin.

No one that I gave the cd to last week (of course AFTER Their Royal Majesties had received theirs–precedence, you know!) had given me any feedback on it, so I was thinking the worst about what it really sounds like.

But last night at our Marche of Tirnewydd weekly meeting, (which comprises fight practice and Arts & Sciences project work, plus a business meeting), HRM came up to me to say how much he enjoyed the cd! 🙂

Then he said I should post it here or on YouTube, or both. 😛

I don’t know how to do that yet, because I don’t have the song on a file in my computer. I’ll have to ask my music/IT buddy, Mistress Halla of Mugmort (mka Halle Snyder), if and how I can do that. She is the one who made the cds in the first place.

I’m even having trouble now with transferring a new recording from my little Zoom H1 recorder onto this new-to-me reconditioned PC running Windows 10. My old one, which had the chanson on it, was an 8.1.

Argh–I’m such an end user that I should be given the title ‘end loser’! 😛

A couple of days ago I spent the afternoon making some new jewelry, this time just for myself: an agate necklace and earrings, another set from amethyst nuggets, and wooden beads with a wooden and brass pendant of a tree which is strung on jute cord:

And here is my current favorite necklace, which I did NOT make. It is Fenrir the giant wolf who kills the Norse gods at Ragnorak:

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