It's been another long time...

 I really am terribly slack with this whole blogging thing...  The group's grown and developed considerably since 2015 (and that one little post in 2017).  Lemme trawl through phot albums and see if I can get up to date...

BEFORE THE PLAGUE:

Ellie brought her magnificent bed to History Alive 2017 (June) and Jan Hollingsworth took a fantastic photo of it -

I carved a little saint statue and made a wayside shrine for the Abbey Festival (July 2017)

The group travelled down to the St Ives Medieval Fair (Sydney) in September 2017

2018 saw me moving house, replacing a couple of leaky tent roofs, and making some textile-related toys...

We 'did' History Alive, the Abbey festival, and the Queensland Living History Federation Conference; a dear friend of mine went overseas and I ended up with her beautiful carved sella curulis (which I then painted ;-) )...

... and made a few pretties to zhuzh up my tent a bit, including a new pole for the lamps to hang off, a hanging based on a piece of Almoravid brocade, and some pearl-shell-spangled red silk curtains with goldwork and gemstone beads (to go behind the triptych).

2019 was a bit of a meh year - we went to the Abbey reenactors' Only Weekend (AROW and History Alive, but then my friend Rob had health issues and we decided to give the Abbey festival a miss.  Even so, there were trunks and tent poles to paint,

pretties to acquire and tweak (the jug was originally white, the condiments dish un-patterned, and the Stinky Kitty a most distressing grey colour thanks to a faux bronze 'patina'...

...and of course more textile stuff - another hanging for the tent, a strip of tablet weaving for my latest gown...

... and then came the Great Plague >.<

The Bed, Part 2

We were invited to a camping weekend, celebrating another group's 20th birthday, last weekend. Aside from the fact the it was cut short by me feeling a bit 'off', and a level of disappointment felt by the girls that people weren't that sociable and there wasn't that much to do (we were the only people with a campfire - everyone else clustered around the hard-shelter accommodation and kitchens etc and didn't really camp at all), it was a valuable experience in that I got to pack what I thought we'd need for the weekend, fit it all onto the ute (just!), and then we spent nearly two hours setting it up (far too long!). There was much going-through of lists after we got home and a lot of stuff got ... rationalised...

The bed, however, was a great success: very warm and comfortable and a real showpiece, if a little bulky to pack. I smugly received compliments from the few people who bothered to wander up to the tent and who saw it; one young woman had seen a rope bed in one of the castles in England and expounded at length how different it was to the one I had created... I asked her what century it was built in but she couldn't remember (just that the wood was original and the rope was a modern replacement LOL); I asked her to point out, specifically, the differences and it turned out that the English one was a double bed whereas mine is single, and theirs wasn't painted... at that stage I suggested that she should be very proud that the bed she'd built was such an exact replica of the English one; "Oh, I haven't made one!", the creature exclaimed. This didn't surprise me as about the only thing she had made was her costume, which was of a rough cotton fabric (which, I suppose, was meant to represent linen) decorated with a band of the same fabric in a contrasting colour around the neck and cuffs... Chez Spotlight, I'm guessing and probably cost her a fortune LOLz.

So, I breathe a great sigh of relief at the knowledge that re-enactors really haven't improved any over the time I was out of The Movement - there were about 30-odd people there and I think I saw maybe half a dozen wool garments - a lot of cotton and "linen"; very little decoration and that badly done most of the time, and the accoutrements were negligible or crap - one does not turn a modern item into a medieval replica by wrapping bits of it in leather or rags (sigh).

It's a little sad, too; I had hoped that the presentation of groups and re-enactors would grow and improve over the years, but it seems they have found a level of historical accuracy that they're content with and stuck with it. LOLz I shouldn't complain - it makes my mob look bloody good!

Anyway, whinge, whine, planxi et hoc totum; and back to the bed... If you squint in just the right way, you can see the frame of the bed and the ropes, the flock mattress, the feather mattress, linen sheets (dear gods I hate hand-hemming sheets!), a flokati rug dyed what is meant to be a red colour but it came out a bit washed-out, a coverlet made of mink (a 1950s A-line coat was sacrificed for this!) and raw silk (which is actually red but looks pink in the photo) and a selection of feather pillows. I really need to make a flock bolster (as suggested by Alexander Neckham, an English traveller who died in 1217 but not before he'd written at great length about his travels, up to and including how a bedroom should be furnished), and another couple of feather pillows as we tend to use them on the chairs during the day... oh well, still got a couple of months until the next show!!

The Bed, Part 1

I felt there was a bad pun in the statement "I finally got around to making my bed" but at the moment (fortunately) it escapes me...

The bed is modelled on those in the Maciejowski Bible - it is painted and has rounded ends on the bedposts with the head end being taller than the foot. Other than that the construction was fairly much at my own discretion (and limited to the tools in mine and Dad's workshops!). I wanted a bed for shows, so it had to be portable; I decided that using mortice and tenon joints to fix the side pieces to the head and foot pieces would be appropriate as that joint was used in the period, and to have the mattress supported by a rope web would probably be fairly right (they haven't found any 'rope beds' from our period, and as you can see from the manuscript picture (from the Maciejowski Bible) little more than the legs show so it's hard to guess at the construction). Not wishing to rely wholly on the rope and my body weight to hold the bed together, the joints are also pinned by dowels (another period method), and the result is something that creaks a little when you first get onto it but is remarkably quiet once it's got some weight in it - even rolling over is a silent procedure!

The mattress in the pictures is the flock one (the feather one, which goes on top, is currently 'under construction'... I need to murder a few more pillows to get it comfortably full) which in itself was interesting to make. I started with a cotton duck (about the weight of mattress ticking but not black and white striped) cover more or less the size of the bed and stuffed about 10 kilos of wool into it (hence "flock"); I must note here that I've been collecting wool since 1991 when I took up re-enacting and spinning and had baskets and boxes of the stuff in varying degrees of usability for spinning - a lot of it is brown or grey (medieval folk favoured white - it dyed better) and some of it has been sitting there unwashed for nearly 20 years and is a little brittle, and some of it is clippings and sweepings and fairly grubby - vegetable matter and dags and such (and, as I found while teasing the pieces open prior to stuffing them in the mattress, a mummified mouse!). Having loosely stuffed the cover I sewed it shut and regarded the sausage shape before me. To flatten it out a bit I sewed through it (yay for the 10" doll-making needle!) with heavy linen thread from a leather reinforcing on the back to one on the front and then

tied it down tightly - 12 of these flattened it out adequately, as you can see from the photo.

So, I guess ATM I've only partly made my bed... the next step is to finish the feather mattress and then to create some voluminous sheets and a coverlet. Judging from MSS pics and the songs/poetry/stories of the day, the coverlet was an all-important piece of bedroom equipment - the words 'costly' and 'silk' frequently crop up... Mine will be of heavy red silk lined with mink from a 1950s calf-length coat donated by a rellie for that purpose.

And as I need it to be in working order next Saturday, I better get sewing!