But for now, TRON:
There are days when I love being a geek.
Why I don’t save more money: I am impulsive.
Like today, for example – on a whim, I went online and checked to see if there was a copy of Social Life in Medieval Rajasthan available, and lo and behold there was (for $25!) so I bought it. This is fine if it is an isolated case, but generally it involves a book here and a sari there and an ice cream cone and three lattes and a pair of shoes on sale (that I will never wear) and a dress from Target and then I have no money at the end of the month.
I say that I wonder about it, but really I don’t.
Anyway. So I bought the book. The other part of this being impatient is that I requested it from Interlibrary Loan a month and a half ago, and so far it hasn’t shown up. Rather than being patient for it to come to me for free, I purchased it (and in all truthfulness, I most likely would have purchased it after I had to return it, anyhow, so there you go).
August will see me making a valiant effort to save up for DragonCon. Or perhaps I will also make an effort to be a good girl and will not buy things I don’t need at DragonCon. Which totally works all the time. Yeah.
I went to Merkerson’s Fish Market with a coworker and although it is an Atlanta “thing” and although it satisfied the hole-in-the-wall feel she requested, it was sort of a hole-in-the-wall quality (not in a good way), so I feel the need to get some fried okra from Yasin’s to make up for it (odd personal note: fried okra is my favorite food ever). So now I feel gigantic and am waiting not terribly patiently for next week when my book will arrive and perhaps I can get closer to figuring out what Margavati’s surname is.
I have a knitting tomorrow at Claudia’s, so perhaps we shall see some progress on projects (actually, I get a lot accomplished in knitting groups, so probably yes).
In that I tweeted this, and now I’m posting it to my blog:
I should remind myself in the future that if I watch these things, I will cry, and if I do so at work, I will embarrass myself (huh… embarrass has two “r”s in it; I have been spelling it wrong always).
Yeah.
It sure seems like I have.
You know sometimes how you go a place that you’ve been several times, and you’re used to it being a certain way, but when you go the next time it’s completely different and so you feel like you’re not in the same reality you started in? No? Well, this morning was one of those mornings. I usually get to work a little early, and there’s generally someone else there. This morning, the side door was unlocked before it usually is, and then the office was completely dark and silent. There wasn’t a soul around. It was incredibly eerie. So I made myself some yogurt (by “made” I mean “dumped in a bowl with some blueberries and honey and stirred”) and then sat at my computer blogging for a minute, and now that it’s the official be at work time, there are other people here.
To compound the strangeness, it’s going to rain mightily at some point, so it’s all overcast and quiet outside, too.
Alright. I have a plan.
(1) Will be making printed fabric with robbingpeter. We shall be printing ducks. Lots and lots of ducks, maybe in gold. Not this weekend, but soon.
(2) House cleaning, which is ever ongoing. I need to straighten things.
(3) Tassels (and this is the exciting part). I made some quick-and-dirty tassels for RUM, but I really wanted fancy ones. I found some on the internet that were cool, but still not quite right. However, they had gold caps which can be pirated for handmade tassels (I think; I’m not completely sure). Which handmade tassels, you ask? Well, these:
(Yes, this is from that miniature I posted a few days ago. I’m being frugal with my time.)
As you can see, there are three-ish sizes, and all of them have pearls on more than one part of the tassel. The end pearls are the ones I’m trying to figure out at the moment. (And I just noticed that the tassels at the waist have beads on them, which is cool.)
The tassels I made originally, when I was first attempting this, had pearls at the top but not on the bottom, which bothered me. I tried stringing pearls and then tying knots, which was imprecise, then making the strings longer and doing the same, which was similarly imprecise, and then gave up and made my tassel daleks, and then didn’t use them for anything. Then I made a bunch of plain tassels because I just really needed tassels. Luckily cotton crochet thread is ~$3 for 100 yards. I go through a lot of it (in the end, when I figure this out, I’ll probably shell out the money for silk, but only once I’ve figured it all out).
Then I did some internet sleuthing (yes, I realize this is not ideal, but sometimes it yields inspiration) and found this:
The image is tiny, and it’s hard to see, but the beads on the end of the tassels are plied into the cord. Aha! This is a new and interesting development. This means that I wasn’t too terribly far off track in the first place. I plied some cord last week with my drop spindle, and this would just involve a beading step, so I think that it could work. I just have to figure out how to stitch the beaded cord onto the tassel body, and voila – beaded tassels.
I’m going to give it a shot on Saturday and I’ll show off the results (if any).
Now that RUM is over, I don’t quite know what to do with myself (I imagine this is short-lived).
I have done some more spinning, and am almost done with half of the 8 oz of vegetable-dyed roving. I’ve also started on the husband’s scratchy brown stuff from the Peachtree Handspinner’s Guild. I have a feeling that although it is scratchy now, if I wash it with a little soft soap (the kind with a bit of lanolin in it), it should be pretty cushy. Which is good, since I have a LOT of it. I will take photos over the weekend; this needs to be seen.
I killed a moth this evening, but I’m fairly certain now it was just a regular (non-wool) moth. You can never be too careful, though.
Lastly, Burt’s Bees deodorant does not work any better for me than the Tom’s of Maine. In fact, it works worse. I am going to test it again tomorrow. Woo! TMI!
It is also extremely difficult for me not to spend money on books. Perhaps this is also why it is extremely difficuly for me to save money. Hmmm…
[NOTE: this is a very SCA-heavy post. VERY.]
There was much of both to be had this past weekend, which is both an excuse for my blogging absence and not one at all.
That is, I blog when I’m much busier than I have been this past week, but I got a whole lot of sewing done, and then went to my first RUM, and it was both productive and awesome so I am feeling pretty good about the whole thing.
Firstly, I finished my first set of Rajasthani garb. It is from this miniature:
This miniature has been what I’ve been obsessing about lately, and also is what I am basing my current set of garb after. It’s in the book Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and it’s very informative. A great deal of the book deals with post-period and Mughal miniatures, but there is a significant section on pre-Mughal Rajput miniatures in the front of the book, complete with color plates (for some images) and close-ups of certain miniatures. I will scan most of these eventually and put them someplace accessible on the SCA_India list, but not tonight (we are stuffed with Persian food, and I am sleepy).
So. I’m focusing on the two gopis following Krishna’s chariot. Here is a detail:
Aren’t they lovely? Well, I certainly think so. Moreover, they are really useful references in my costume reconstructions, primarily because (a) you can see each and every bit of jewelry they are wearing very clearly, down to the fingers they have rings on, the little ties on their arm bands, the arrangement of pearls on their hair, and the beads on the tassels on their skirts; (b) the clothing details are great, showing the embellishments of the skirts, the embroidery on the cholis, and even the individual threads on the ends of their odhanis, where the tassels attach. I’ve been studying this image very closely for quite a while now.
So. I got to things a little late, and was making tassels in the car (did you know that parandas are harder to make than they look? well, they are), but ultimately managed to get it all together, sans arm-bands. I knew this was going to be the leftover thing, so I used a piece of sari fabric (the blouse piece, actually, from a rayon sari that will find a use come DragonCon) for my choli, and the fancy gold borders became faux-armbands. Another sari became both the patka (drapey fabric piece in the front of the skirt) and the odhani (veil).
And here is what it looked like:
Showing off my anklets.
As you can see, I made the printed fabric into a rather voluminous skirt, and I am very pale, but it works somehow. The veil ought to be more sheer than it is, but I didn’t want to destroy a fine one, so the poly-cotton sari piece will do for now. The skirt ought to have a border around the bottom (probably printed, too) and the patka is still in the works. I had a long conversation with Madhavi about it, attempting to figure it out. I’m still working on it. And now that I see it not on my body (but in a photo on my body), the choli looks a lot better than I thought. I need to tweak the shoulders and armscyes, but it works decently enough. I will probably keep this outfit in rotation as the everyday garb, and do something fancy for court attire. I am learning chain-stitch embroidery.
Here’s a more demure view, in which I am not making such a strange face:
Overall, I am very pleased.
So. I met all kinds of awesome people, including (and perhaps especially) Madhavi and Greet, and I must say that it is nice to geek out over this stuff with folks who understand it. I spent a LOT of time with Madhavi. She is thoroughly awesome. Greet makes my brain hurt.
I took a couple of classes on illumination, Madhavi’s Indian costuming class, and part of a class on alchemy (I bowed out as it was very warm and I didn’t want to fall over). Then came Lorenzo’s invitation into the Order of the Laurel (I cried a little) and feast, and then I drank my body weight in rum punch (haha – rum at RUM – I am so clever), and then there was this:
Yeah, man. I wrapped that thing, and I was a little silly at that point, and it still doesn’t look like complete crap, and I think we’ve started a new fashion trend here, namely saris plus Italian undergarments and chopines.
And that’s all, except the husband and I shared a twin dorm bed for the weekend, which was a little like college only not (because I am a square).
Today I am going to spin some more blue yarn, and go to bed early. I am pooped (but already planning how I can make my garb more and better; I think I’ve made the right choice).
That’s all. I have gone on long enough, and I think the rest can wait until tomorrow.
Take that, people. I have plied yarn, and I have documented its plying (or the aftermath, at least).
But first, cats cannot be trusted with sealed bags of loose ends, apparently. This one had a cat-induced hernia:
Leftover yarn, yes, but cats are in big trouble.
Anyway. Here it is, in all its windy, lumpy glory:
Woo-frakking-hoo. I got it all horribly tangled at one point, but corrected it with an hours worth of cursing and knot-unraveling.
Here is a detail shot:
Not bad! Really uneven in some places, and kind of fuzzy, but it will do! I will knit it into a scarf before anyone has a chance to scrutinize it closely, so the various knots throughout are hidden oh-so-cleverly.
I am working on my next handspun now. This is the best craft ever.
First, though, I got a lot done this weekend. I finished one of the Rivendell socks (it’s a little short, but not wholly uncomfortable), plied my first singles (woohoo!) and then sewed up the ghagra and patka for my garb. I stitched the ghagra 3 times, as the first time I stiched the drawstring opening closed, then the second time I had to undo it and cut some out, because it was overly voluminous. It’s still overly voluminous, but only by about 28 inches (okay, that’s a lot); I don’t really want to try to fix it again before this weekend. The patka belt/ghagra combo theory works well, though, and I shall post photos soon.
I also met the Chickengoddess’s family and went to Knitch with her and Jennie, who came over later while I sewed some more. It was great.
The choli, though… Well, the choli vexes me. I have been working on it for a month now and it is clear that I am not a seamstress. I have gathered together photos of people in modern backless cholis, to see if perhaps I can apply their construction to my period backless choli. It has a lot of gaping issues around the ribcage, and I think I’m going back to the fitted version because the flat version puckers and wrinkles oddly. Hopefully before the end of this evening I can come up with a working prototype, which I can use to make an actual first wearable version on Thursday. I don’t know when or if I’ll get around to making the 18 tassels I need, though I imagine I can do some that are not spectacular but will do for the time being. I can even do them on the car ride to RUM.
In the meantime, to help with my frustration, I’m continuing to knit the other Rivendell sock, now that I am done with the cursed wrap portion, and I can wash my handspun. I’ll take a photo and share soon.
knitters = angry mob 