...getting ready for the Abbey Festival 2025

 ...and I've been so busy making things, cleaning things (after our camp-out at AROW - the Abbey Reenactors-Only Weekend, in May), and hunting things down that I've been rather remiss in updating the blog...

Aside from being a lot of fun and giving us the chance to catch up with people, AROW serves a very important function: adding to my To-Do list  it lets us set up the encampment after a hiatus of 6-9 months or so and gets all the cries of 'I can't remember how the tent goes up!' 'Where's the cross-pole for the fireplace?!' 'Did we bring any mozzie coils?' etcetera out of the way so that when we set up for the Abbey Festival in July everything goes up smoothly, is washed, mended, restocked, and hopefully we haven' forgotten anything 😉  It also gives us a chance to try out new things - things we've made over the 'break' - to see if they work as expected, or if they're just more junk to cart along because we thought they'd be cool at the time -  and new encampment layouts.  In previous years we've backed onto the ring road at the Abbey site and been a more-or-less circle of tents on the side of the St Edith's Village area; this year we're going to set up in a semi-circle *facing* the road, because we found at History Alive last year that that configuration chopped about 2 hours off our packdown time (and when you consider that we start packing down about 8am and usually finish about 6-7pm, that extra 2 hours is a bit of a godsend 😉)

I learnt how to do 'looping' earlier this year (looping, or interlooping, or knotless netting, is a precursor to the viking naalbinding and has been around since the Neolithic period) and that developed into starting a pair of socks using Coptic stitch... and then decided to run a class on basic looping at the Abbey Festival... and then decided that we needed more veggie bags... it really is a versatile textile method.

I also decided to put all the assorted bits of the First Aid Kit in a central position - for years the main kit has lived under the foot of my bed - my tent always goes to events, so it was a constant place and everyone knew where it was; the Burns Kit (of course) lived in the kitchen tent, and when we recently did up a Trauma Kit (partly because a couple of our folk are looking at taking up combat again, and partly because we use axes and knives, and partly because we're reenactors and it makes good sense to have one) it occurred to me that having ALL the first aid stuff in a central location would probably be wise...  The most central location would be the kitchen tent, but the kits needed to be hidden from public view as they're all rather modern-looking; a (another...) trunk would be ideal but trunks in our period were expensive bits of furniture and what would be appropriate for a kitchen setting would really be more in the way of sacks and baskets...

But...

...a grain ark would be appropriate in the setting 😉!   A grain ark is a box/chest/trunk designed to hold grain (!) with a lid that when flipped upside down is the right shape to use as a dough trough (and all the BEST kitchens would have one).  I trawled around on the internet and found a few examples and (as usual) took a melange of the lot of them and built one, and it does the job quite nicely 😊

 I also made the children an alquerque game (as they get older the wooden toys have less appeal);

and am currently working my way through the updated To-Do list - Rob needs a new banner as the one I made him in 1997 is getting shabby; I need to make/acquire another large kitchen knife and a cleaver; I need to get more mozzie coils, ant spray, olive oil, etcetera; 3 of the table trestles have loose legs which need wedges whacking into them; I need to redo the red paint on the tent roofs as the one we used previously turned out to be fugitive and pretty much washed off at last year's Abbey (which was a week of rain 😢) - this has resulted in orange stripes turning yellow, maroon parts of the valance design turning blue... and the list goes on...

 So - if I'm remiss in updating the blog for a while - you'll know why!

 

 

The most recent magna-mopus...

 I was first introduced to the concept of a magnum opus in the early 70s through an Asterix book ('The Roman Agent', and a big dumb character called Magnumopus) and needless to say this contributed to a) my misunderstanding of the term for quite a few years and b) my underlying feeling that a magnum opus is in some way a Big Dumb Thing, reinforced by my family joking about fairly important things they'd created; so a magna-mopus became (for us) a thing that was really quite special and you'd spent a lot of time on but didn't want to blow your own trumpet so belittled it by calling it such.

 

I find that I create one of those bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew projects about once a year and for a month or two or four focus on it fairly exclusively - I think 'obsessive' is *such* a strong term, but I really don't get much else done LOL.

You may have noticed from earlier posts that I have an altar set up in my tent (appropriate to a noblewoman - one has to have a *place* to say one's devotionals 😉)  The silk mat on the altar, which I got 2nd (?) hand in the 1990s, perished and needed replacing... so I launched into a Major Project.

There are quite a few examples of beaded textiles from our period, mostly Sicilian and German (which were influential in Cyprus at that time due to the interference of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Cypriot affairs), so I cast my eye over the gloves, altar frontals, shoes, capes, bags etcetera and then rummaged though my bead collection to see what I had.

(Sources below)

Being a pensioner AND a re-enactor means a lot of op-shopping - and if I see a necklace or bracelet of freshwater pearls (well, white-ish ones and not ridiculously large) I buy them - often  for less than $10 😄  A lot of them end up on our costumes (and the tiny ones on veils) but I found I actually had rather an embarrassingly large amount of them and so the new mat was planned around those.  Because it's displayed horizontally (i.e. flat, not hanging) I decided not to go for a terribly complicated design and settled on fairly generic concentric circles and star-shapes, which can be seen in the art of the period and place (Roman Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic). I tend to be a rather hasty person and when beading and this translates into not paying attention to stitch tension which results in the fabric puckering and the piece of work shrinking overall somewhat, so I decided to use a heavy woolen felt as the base; I sketched the basic design on with 6B pencil... and then the beading began.

It's not a complicated task, but very time-consuming - I started in Mid-September 2024 and finally finished it in mid-February 2025... granted, I was doing other things during that period and it became my go-to project - do a little every day, and more if I couldn't find anything else to do.

Once the beadwork on the mat was finished I sewed a coarse linen backing onto it to cover (and protect) the stitches and then made a beaded fringe for it - fringes appear to have been an important part of ecclesiastical decoration and I wanted something to bring it forward over the edge of the table as it didn't look like it was sitting right and there was an unsightly gap and fuss fuss fuss 😉  The whole thing ended up weighing 1043g (!)

 

In the end I'm fairly happy with the overall result, and hopefully the mat will last as long as its predecessor 😉

 

 

Sources:

(if you're interested in medieval beadwork these sites are rather good 😊)

Red silk glove, Palermo, 1220 Vienna, was made for the coronation of Emperor Frederick II in the royal workshops of Palermo. Sicily came under Fatimid rule in the tenth century and although the Fatimids lost control of the island in the twelfth century, the influence of Fatimid art is evident in Sicily and southern Italy.  Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, Vienna, Austria, acc. no. WS XIII 11, 2013/8033.

https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/individual-textiles-and-textile-types/secular-ceremonies-and-rituals/imperial-gloves-of-the-holy-roman-empire

An orphrey is an ornamental stripe or border, especially one on an ecclesiastical vestment such as a chasuble; this one is dates 1200-1224 and is German.
https://medievalbeads.com/13th-century-orphrey/
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O362714/embroidery

13th century Altar frontal, Germany - the gold and seed pearls are missing, presumably ‘re-cycled’…
https://medievalbeads.com/13th-century-altar-frontal/
 

 

 

A new candlestick :-) OR 'fake it 'til you make it' OR 'It's only dodgy if it doesn't *look* period...'

 I wasn't terribly happy with the brass candlestick I've had since 2015 for my altar table - it was adequate but not terribly period and the more I updated other things in my display, the more it seemed lacking.  Hunting around online and rummaging through op-shops were equally fruitless - it looked like unless I wanted to shell out a phenomenal amount of money for the Real Thing, I was going to have to make it myself...

Casting brass is a bit beyond me - I could carve a wax image and then shell out another phenomenal amount of money for someone to cast it for me, or I could use the grey between the ears and do a bit of research and see what other forms of candlestick were around in the place and period I'm reenacting, that might be a bit more within my means and capabilities.

It turns out that a ceramic one, Persian-style, would fit the bill; again, I don't have a potter's wheel or kiln but I *have* worked with clay (a bit) and figured that as the piece only needs to hold an unlit candle and get looked at (and look reasonably legitimate...) I should be able to manage.  I have a bee in my bonnet about making replicas - to me, they need to be exact copies of the original and I know I'm not going to get it exact and it'll bug me forever, so I prefer taking a couple of examples and making something in-between.  I ended up choosing two fairly basic and simple candlesticks as models; one from 12th-13th century Persian which had interesting (and decidedly do-able) crenelations around the top, and one from Iran (same period) which had a much simpler top (where the candle goes).

 

I've worked with air-dry clay before - it's an interesting mixture of  papier-mâché, clay, and some kind of polymer that (like the Force) binds it all together.  I find that it's a lot harder that real clay to join bits together (scoring and wetting it don't really do much) and the surface tends to dry out and crack a little within half an hour so Much Planning must occur before the packet is even opened; however, the end result is pretty sturdy and so it's fit for this purpose.

Having worked out roughly how big I wanted the candlestick, I rolled out the air-dry clay on a board and started stamping out the circles in the crenelation before I noticed that the clay I was stamping out was sticking to the board... and so, it turned out, was the rest of it >.<  Scrape up clay into lump, say rude words, massage clay, spread out paper, roll clay out again and do the stamping; I figured if it stuck to the paper then I could peel/wash it off later.  It actually worked quite well and the paper enabled me to use sticky tape when I shaped the flat bit into a cylinder for the body of the candlestick 😊  I cut out a bit of paper roughly the size of the opening of the cylinder and used it as a template to make the top, and made a ring to hold the candle, and let everything dry.

It shrunk a bit, of course... which I hadn't taken into consideration, and the 'join' at the back now didn't... and the damn top was too big... but fortunately the clay is easy to sand so I reshaped things and tidied up the crenelations (which had little paper fibres or something hairy sticking out of them 😬) and fit it together and glued it with Shoe Glue.  It did look a little dog's-breakfast-y so I rummaged around in the workshop and found a venerable half-used bag of Spak-filla (plastering compound) and did some serious patching, and in the end I was pretty happy that it looked acceptable.  The original pieces I was using as models had a bit of engraving on them and I cowardly decided to go with the easier version: just a couple of rings around the body and a bit of accentuation around the crenelations - I have a tiny screwdriver sharpened up as a chisel for this sort of thing 😉.

I let it dry overnight (I need to mention here that I live in Australia and at the moment our days are getting up to 34º-37º and overnight it's about 28º - that's about 82ºF for my American friends) and then the next day set about 'glazing' it.

The glaze is acrylic varnish tinted with acrylic paint, and I've used the method before reasonably successfully on other projects; the varnish is milky in its liquid form (dries clear) and that makes getting the colour right a bit difficult - at least that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it LOL; it bugs me that I didn't get it quite blue enough, but the turquoise is quite acceptable, really...  I painted a layer on, then poured (gently, carefully) - and then spent the next 10 minutes wiping drips off the bottom and patching bits that were still white (although you do see that in extant pieces).

(The piece is sitting on the varnish can, on a cake-cooling rack, above an aluminium baking dish, on a very dilapidated but much-loved Lazy Susan (turntable).

 

Clean up, wash brushes, let dry, time for coffee and lunch.

While I was waiting for it to dry I realised that the candle I'd used with the old brass candlestick was too thick to use with this one, so set about remaking it - made a mould by rolling up a sheet of plastic (it had been an old folder cover) and wrapping it in tape so it didn't unroll, ran a wick (cotton cord) through it (anchored at the top with blu-tack, covered in more tape, just in case) and a bamboo skewer at the base, and then suspended it over the sink by every damn S-hook I could find in the kitchen so I could pour the melted wax into it; meanwhile I pulled the old candle apart and melted it on the stove - it was quite easy to pull apart because back in 2015 I'd had the good sense to make a Very Period dipped candle 😉.

 

The candle worked out okay (a bit of trimming and tidying up here and there) although I royally cocked up the base measurement and had to shave it severely before it'd fit in the candlestick... but in the end I'm pretty happy with the result and it looks a lot better than the old brass one 😊.

(At the time of the photo the candle was not exactly straight, thanks to poor workmanship and summer heat, but I've fixed that... I think...).

Arty-Farty

 I thought I'd also post up some pics of our 'pretty' stuff, showcasing our artwork and so forth :-)

...And now I just need to keep on top of it and *keep posting* 😅

Happy New Year... I discovered Instagram... 😬

 Once again I have been remiss in making regular posts (read: slack, life got in the way, and Christmas >.<).  I ended up (finally) making an Instagram account (mimka369) which of course I then flooded with reenactment stuff rather than personal stuff LOL, as I was inspired to make up pithy, *square* little pics describing the irks and quirks of our hobby... which I'll now share here (occasionally... when I remember to >.<)

The 'Tips'n'Tricks' ones are directed probably more towards reenactors, as most of my friends/followers indulge in the same hobby I do, but I guess they'll let non-reenactors see that it's not all glamour LOL

 

 

There's also a collection of 'Arty-Farty' offerings, but I'll make that the next post ;-)

History Alive at Abbeystowe, 2024

 Rob and I are getting a little old and creaky, so (as with at the Abbey Festival) we went up a week early and set up (the organisers of the show are marvellous people and very accommodating) - this way the (adult) kids can help us load up 2 utes and 2 trailers the Saturday before the show, then come up with us on the Sunday and set up the shells of the tent and lift anything heavy out of the trailers for us; then Rob and I pootle around for a couple of days setting the rest of the encampment up and the rest of the group arrives later in the week and set up the insides of their tents (rugs, wall hangings, beds etcetera).

September here is usually still fairly cool (12º-26ºC on average) but we had an unseasonal heatwave and the Monday after we set up the tents got to 37º! and all we could do was sit in the shade and drink water and grumble about the bloody weather LOL, although we did make friends with the birds - poor little sods were wandering around with their beaks open so I filled a bowl with water and put it out for them and it was very well received :-)  We spent the next couple of days setting up small things, testing out new lamps, being amazed that the tents hardly moved when the wind picked up to about 30kph with 50 kph gusts (but I think we will eventually get some storm ropes in the kit).

I fully intended to take a lot of photos of the encampment this time, and I did take quite a few before the event but once the public arrived I was too busy running workshops and it completely slipped my mind (again >.<)... so these are of the 'quiet' time before the show :-)

 

Abbeystowe gets some spectacular dawns; I'm not usually an early riser except when we're camping - I think the 5 minute walk to the toilets might have something to do with it - usually I'd go back to bed but after that walk I'm quite awake LOL (which is not a bad thing on event days when the public will be arriving in a couple of hours and the encampment is a mess).

The first tent to get sorted out was, of course, the kitchen tent - the centre of all activity and source of coffee ;-)  A kitchen tent per se is not strictly period (although we can document most of the contents); one of our older tent roofs became leaky and while this isn't a problem with a grass floor, water dripping onto rugs and feather beds and small children was an issue so the roof was replaced.  We didn't want to throw out the leaky roof, and I think that in the period we're reenacting a tent roof, however old, would have been re-purposed because fabric was hellishly expensive... so I cut a smoke-hole in the top (modelled on innumerable huts, hovels, and long-house structures), made nice new walls for the new tent roof and kept the old (slightly scungey) ones for the kitchen tent, carved poles for it and we now have a 6m x 3m area for cooking and being warm :-)

 

The fire tray that sits in the centre of it isn't historically accurate either - it's what we call 'in keeping with the period', something that'll not look out of place and disturb the 'medieval ambience' or something like that; none of the places we do events like having their grassed areas marked up by fires, so we all have our fires about 40cm about the ground and the style and method of fireplace varies from encampment to encampment.

However, we can cook when it's raining, and thee tent is roughly divided in half by the fireplace - a cooking area on one side and a sitting are on the other, which of a night gets lined with blankets so the children can bed down; this allows their parents a bit of time off to go and visit other encampments and have a drink or two while knowing that their small folk are warm and supervised :-)

Setting up any of the tents takes a while - there's a lot of small bits and pieces that make the encampment look lived-in and 'real' - I don't really go with the minimalist approach favoured by some of a tent, a rug, a bed, a table and a jug and please-believe-I'm-living-here-for-a-few-days LOL... but it does take time to set up, and we do have rather a lot of tents:

From the left: (hardly visible but there) the sunshade we put up for the public to use, Sam's tent (5 people), Ellie's tent (4 people), my tent (2), the kitchen, a woodchopping area, Nat's tent (1 person), the kids' tent (sort of a playroom) and the pavilion.

(Gratuitous early morning misty pic)

 

The event was lovely - Festival, in comparison, is bustle-y and hectic, which you'd expect with 10,000 people on the ground each day - but HA was, as people kept commenting, 'cruise-y' and there was time to chat with people and it didn't matter much if workshops did go over time because we ended up chatting about other techniques and there was a general feeling of relaxation :-)  Some of the patrons had come to HA because they'd been to Festival and loved it, others were completely new to the whole historical re-enactment thing and were enjoying the experience immensely, and the general consensus seems to have been that everyone had a great time :-)

Footnote - the stuffed cabbage went over very well and every scrap was eaten and could I make 2 next time - and it's been christened 'ogre-head'; and Lyra loved her sewing box and spent the weekend embroidering a Thing for a young friend of hers ;-).

For reasons explained about I don't have any pics of the actual event, so may I direct you to the History Alive facebook page.

After Abbey, and preparing for HA

 Packing the encampment down after the Abbey Festival was slower than usual because it was muddy and raining and we couldn't just dump gear next to whichever vehicle it travelled in (in preparation for it actually being loaded, in a somewhat tetris-like fashion) so it was well after dark by the time our entourage (2 utes with trailers, 2 cars with trailers and a wee small Mazda) got to my youngest daughter's place so we could hang nearly 100m of wet tent walls in her boat shed (and even then the damn things got a bit of mildew) and each took roofs home with us and spread them out.  Everything else got unpacked the following day - it was damp but not terrible - and then the massive washing and washing-up operation began...  The tentage (with the exception of the kitchen tent which is so smoked nothing would grow on it) got sprayed with a clove oil mix - it kills the mildew spores but doesn't get rid of the black spots (unlike bleach which gets rid on the black spots but doesn't necessarily kill the spores, and damages the cotton canvas into the bargain >.<) and once everything had been washed and dried and put away we were back to making things for the next show - History Alive, which was taking place about 2 months after the Abbey Festival.

September can be quite windy here, and our encampment was to be was on the 'open' side of the Abbeystowe field (we're usually nestled next to virgin bushland with tall trees, which really cuts down the wind problem), so there was a brief discussion about whether we needed to make up storm ropes for all the tents or not but in the end and mainly because of the expense) we decided we'd make do with the 40-odd metres we had on hand and keep an eye on the weather; I must note that about 8 years ago we were camped on that side of the field and after a rather windy night where the tent was 'breathing' like a huge beast we emerged to find one of the smaller Viking tents had been picked up and blown over a 1.5m fence into the the cow paddock...  

 

A friend of mine was running a workshop on medieval dental hygiene and one of the recipes called for rosemary charcoal, so I cooked her up some rosemary twigs in my charcloth pot and they turned out quite well :-)

I think it took about 20 minutes to go from bare twigs to smoking to smoke-dying-down then vanishing (at which point a coin covered the hole in the tin to stop any oxygen getting in) and after the tin cooled I took the lid off and voila - little charcoal sticks :-)  Evidently quite a few recipes for dentifrice/tooth powder call for some sort of charcoal, because it's slightly abrasive.

The kitchen burns kit (first aid) which lived in a plastic lunchbox in a basket with a whole lot of other modern stuff (flyspray, mozzie coils, surface spray, plastic zip-lock bags etc.) had to be found another home because the basket was getting over-full; I did up a little bentwood box for it so it could sit out in the open and not look out of place (and most importantly still be accessible); I cannot recommend the Soov spray highly enough - it has a bit of anaesthetic (lignocaine) in it and not only works well on burns but helps chafing as well ;-)

 

My second-oldest granddaughter was having a birthday around about the time we'd be doing History Alive, and she'd recently developed a passion for crochet and embroidery, so I did her up a sewing box with assorted bits and pieces...  As they grow up, the kids are finding the toys in the Kids' Tent a bit 'young' for them and so need other things to do over the reenactment weekend; I dyed up some yarn, grandpa and I spent some quality time with a plank and his thicknesser machine and made some tablet-weaving cards, and I carved her a little shuttle and a lucet (yes, I know they're not historically accurate, but the cord they produce seems to be and now she can make her own damn shoelaces ;-) )

About a week before we left for the show I came across a 14th century recipe for stuffed cabbage ('cabodge y-farcyd', from Richard III's The Forme of Cury) which seemed likely to have been appropriate for our period; I made a test one (with considerably less spicing than the original recipe called for because I wanted the kids to enjoy it) and it wasn't too bad, if a little bland; so i did up a mix of the filling with a little more flavouring and froze it - working with mincemeat in a camping environment, in a 30ºC kitchen, can be a recipe for all sorts of problems...

The recipe basically calls for a hollowed out head of cabbage, stuffed with a mixture of mince meat (ground beef, I think the Americans cal it), eggs, breadcrumbs, rice, salt'n'pepper, and assorted spices.  I left the onion out because a couple of our folk don't handle it well and substituted a bit of aji-no-moto.  Stuff the cabbage with the meat mix, whack a couple of leaves over the hole and tie the entire thing up in cheesecloth and boil for a couple of hours (for 500g mince).  The cabbage loses a lot of its flavour and oddly enough doesn't flavour the mince - I find it watery and a bit ick but evidently it went well wrapped around the chipolata sausages we served as well.

Preparations complete, we were ready for History Alive at Abbeystowe :-)