Da'ud Bob: Sword of Hearts: An Elizabethan Adventure
Hello Scolairi!! Welcome to Spring and our 1st event of the year….the armored egg hunt, Awakening XX—The Sugar Coma. (Gosh Rory, can you believe it’s the 20th one?) This year’s event should be both fun and hopefully a little more relaxing for us. It would have been nice if TRM’s Felix and Madeleina could have made it this year to join in the fun, but we will still have a good time while they are home relaxing (I hear it’s their only weekend off for the month of May).
Please remember, if you don’t want to pay the site fee, you will need to be signed up on someone’s list by the end of the business meeting today. I think we have almost everyone covered, but there is always room for more help
Now, turning to other event news. Coronation was nice. Their Graces, Edmund and Kateryn made the job of King and Queen look easy and they will be missed (ok, so I am a little biased!). However, TRM’s Felix and Madeleina will be a fun reign…...since they followed his 12th century persona last time, they are going to do her middle eastern persona for this one. She was drummed in to be crowned Queen and for their first court, they were again drummed in. So, drag your Middle Eastern stuff out of the closet and have a good time! There are plenty of events that they will be attending, so try to make at least one to show your support and enjoy the ambience.
Angelique
Greetings Fellow Scolairian’s,
It’s that time of year. We have an event next week so volunteer. Word is people are
traveling from afar to hunt eggs in our most civilized fashion. We also have new Royalty.
If there is anyone who you feel is deserving of recognition write in for them. As the
saying goes...write early, write often.
Be nice and play safe
Julienne
Fencing's fun, stab your friends safely today. This has been a public service announcement from your local marshals.
Catalin
Well finally Archery Season is here! Looking at having fun at our event, with our first practice following two weeks later. This year as always practices will run from 9 am to 1 pm. But unlike the previous 4 years I am not doing them every weekend. This year we will go to a biweekly schedule. Several reasons, one I want a Saturday to get things done and my kids get to come over every two weeks and they generally like to shoot.
Also in the interest of stuff that won't be hauled along, loaner gear. If you want to borrow or use loaner gear tell me ahead of time, I will bring it. I may even sign it out to you and you can store it. Such a deal eh? If you need gear so you have your own stuff talk to me, or email, I answer emails and I can make suggestions for places to get gear.
There have been rumblings about getting Marshallate for archery, pretty simple, like other martial activities, contact the regional Marshal and get the form. If you get one before our event hey you might even become a martial that very day! And if not after the event one good practice you will darn near be a marshal, one or so more we can begin to generate our own!
Simon Hondy
"Cum Omni humilitate faciant ipsas artes" -St. Benedict
I don’t have a lot to report this month other than to encourage people to sign up to help at our event on May 6. Also remember, that Arts and Sciences meetings will be held on the first and Third Thursdays of each month. The dates for this month are May 4 and May 18. Also Kingdom A & S competition will be on Saturday, May 27, in the Barony of Flaming Gryphon. Registration will begin at 9:00am and will close at 11:00am. For more information about Crown and the A & S competition please see http://www.springcrown.org/asfaire.shtml
Sites of Interest:
http://userweb.suscom.net/~apolloniavoss/projects/Byz/Byz-modern-fabric-choices.htm
Apollonia’s Projects: Wool, Silk and Linen Choices for Garb
A good summary of modern material equivalents for period silks, wools and linens.
http://www.aon-celtic.com/
Cari Buziak’s site on Celtic Art and Illumination.
Cari updates her site on a regular basis with new online tutorials. This month oo to the
new tutorial on manuscript layout and design.
http://rose.mse.jhu.edu/pages/main_frameset.htm
Roman de la Rose; Digital Surrogates of Medieval manuscripts
A project of the Milton D. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University and the Pierpont
Morgan Library.
http://www.wga.hu/index1.html
The Web Gallery of Art
Here’s a good site with plenty of images for researching garb. The list of artists is
extensive, as is the representation of their bodies of work. The images have a high enough
resolution to see brush strokes.
Eithne
Greetings unto the fair shire of Scolairi from your local chatelaine.
Welcome one and all to the best shire in the Middle Kingdom. (I may be biased.) The Midrealm is the third oldest of 19 Kingdoms in the Knowne World. Below (See last page) is a little word game to familiarize you with the kingdom names. Can you “old timers” out there remember which geographic area is covered by the borders of each kingdom?
Ellen
Missing Officer Reports/Articles:
Pursuivant - Dugan - No article this month.
Exchequer - Francesca - No article this month.
Knight’s Marshal – Angelique du Soleil - No article this month.
Thrown Weapons - Vladymyr - No article this month
Minister of Children - Guenivere - No article this month.
Greetings, Scribendi.
Our event is this coming weekend. I plan to set up a scriptorium area in the Artisan’s Green. Come on by & paint a few scroll blanks or help fill in names on the event prize scrolls later in the day!
The A&S criteria have been updated for those entering the Faire this spring. You can check out the new rules here: http://www.midrealm.org/moas/criteria/contents.html
Or I have downloaded copies of the scribal categories & will bring them to the scriptorium meetings. The calligraphy category has changed significantly for documentation. Be sure to check it out if you’re planning to enter a piece.
See you at the next scriptorium.
Ellen
(Editor’s note—this report was supposed to be in the April edition of S-Notes…..but I lost it! Thank you Vivienne for resending it to me! - A.
Golden Seamstress V or “A good time was had by all?” Event
February 24-25, 2006 was the 5th annual Golden Seamstress competition hosted by the Barony of the Roaring Wastes in Detroit, MI. Serafina Sinclair (Grey Gargoyles) gathered forces with her team of Etienne le Couteau des Roches (Grey Gargoyles), Mistress Ellen, Mary Buchanan, and Vivienne de la Chartreuse (all of Baile na Scolairi) to take on the challenge. After a minor vehicular difficulty, the members of Scolairi headed out on the long journey to Detroit and arrived on site around 10pm, local time.
The autocrats were welcoming the teams and reading the rules of the competition as we entered. Much like the TV show, Project Runway, teams of 1-6 have 20 hours to create a complete set of garb from skin out and top to toe. The teams were divided into Novice, Advanced, and Master, as well as by time periods of early, middle, and late. Since they were anticipating 22 teams, a 10x10 space was allotted to each team, and I believe only one team failed to show. Since most of the teams were already in place when we arrived, we quickly unloaded and organized our VERY, VERY small space. Since our goal was to have a good time we weren’t distressed by the slow start.
Our team, the Burgundian Babes, sorted out the tasks by assigning each member a component of the outfit. Sarafina made the overdress, Etienne made the shoes and belt, Ellen made the undies and chemise, Mary made the truncated hennin, and I made the kirtle (underdress). While Etienne began the shoe fitting process, the rest of the team began pattern-making so the cutting and fitting could begin.
Since the time was so limited and we were all focusing on how to accomplish our task, there was little time to peruse the work of the other groups. Many groups chose early period garb and we saw numerous inkle looms and one warp-weighted loom being used. Oh, the ambition! It was amazing to see what some of the teams accomplished! The only surprising thing we saw where the number of DVD players and TVs playing movies all night.
Everyone on the team, except Mistress Ellen grabbed a couple hours of sleep. Etienne tried but couldn’t sleep through the snoring. The sleep deprivation took its toll as the last hour of competition rolled around. With less than an hour, I realized the front and back lining had been sewn together but I continued to rip out the seam as the tears ran down my face. With only a half an hour to go, Sarafina discovered that the sleeves had been sewn in backwards. Amazingly, these mistakes were corrected before the deadline. We were close enough to be able to dress Sarafina for the judging/fashion show. Not quite a completed outfit but with another hour we could have been done.
Unfortunately, the rest of the evening was poorly executed. Since the groups lined up in the back hallway, we didn’t have a chance to see all the outfits in competition. The judging/fashion show ran from 6:30pm to 8pm and the deliberations ran from 8pm to 11pm. The natives were VERY restless by the time they announced the winners. Most of these people were approaching 40 hours with none or next to no sleep at all. We didn’t place in the skill category since we competed with about 15 teams in the intermediate class. The list later showed us winning 2nd place for our middle period garb.
We achieved our goal to have fun by laughing loudly and often throughout the competition, even at the very end when all seemed black. We worked well as a team and frequently conferred about various aspects of the construction. All in all, it was a good but exhausting experience and we agreed that the next group project should be held in someone’s living room instead. The event was far away so I was wondering if anyone else was interested in organizing our own Project Seamstress?
Vivienne de la Chartreuse
Ah, I’ve got to love my friends! They’re always, it seems, looking out for me. More specifically, they’re always looking for new movies for me to watch and review. Sometimes this works out okay, because the movies they find actually turn out to be pretty good. Sometimes, this works out okay for you, my faithful readers, because you get to be warned about some really bad movie or other without actually having to see it first. (Occasionally, of course, it works out really well for all of us, like the time that Anna Sue taped, and then accidentally taped something else over, Hercules Versus the Mongols. Now that was a close call! And every time I mention it, she swears she’s going to find it again and force me to watch it.) Well, this time Glenn Bob had spent a weekend way up north at WindyCon (held in Chicago, of course!), and had run across, and purchased, a DVD of a little-known, low-budget movie he knew I, and you, would be interested in. So we set up a time on a recent Saturday morning, invited over all of the Usual Suspects™, dropped it into the tray of the DVD player, and hit “Play”. And so it is that this month, Da’ud Bob reviews Sword of Hearts: An Elizabethan Adventure.
Starring Travis Estes as our erstwhile hero Geoffrey Pierce, Kathrynne Ann Rosen as Nola Fletcher, Zach Thomas as the villainous Tristan Durant, Amy Harmon as Grace Durant, Susan Henderson as Verina Durant, and an assorted cast of thugs, townsfolk, and courtiers, and written and directed by David Schmidt, the synopsis of this Sword & Cloak Productions movie is given on their website as: “A young soldier, Geoffrey Pierce, returns to the village of his birth with plans to make amends with Lady Grace, a woman he once wronged. Finding her married into a powerful Durant family, nobility with designs on the throne, Geoffrey is soon plunged into cunning plots, thrilling action and the search for a mystical relic known as the Eurydice Hook.” And, yes, that pretty much sums it up.
Good points: The painted armorial ceiling in the library room. The music. Everyone in the village asks Geoffrey when they first see him, “You’re not back here to cause trouble again?” (Very reminiscent of the observations regularly made about Snake Pliskin in the two “Escape From” movies, “I heard you were dead.”)
Bad points: Naked-legged lady running through the woods. The plywood ceiling in the smithy. The fight choreography was a bit amateurish; well-rehearsed, but too staged and too often jerky, as if everyone were pausing between moves. That just doesn’t happen in real life this way. Hiking through the woods with no supplies. That’s an awfully large (and bright and shiny for having been in the water for long) chain for such a little box. Modern books, some complete with dust jackets, in the library. Why is the laundry being hung to dry way out in the middle of the woods? There were no horses anywhere – not in the farrier’s, and not even for Queen Elizabeth, who had to walk down a dusty road to make her appearance. The villain, in a fit of pique, demands, “I want them [the prisoners] dead by noon tomorrow!” Why not today? For all of the fighting with both pistols and swords, almost no blood is drawn, and no one seems to die.
Zero breasts. Two tablespoons of blood. The only dead body was a rabbit. Ball and chain fu. Pistol fu. Sword fu. Dagger fu. Baguette fu. Stool fu. Mutton fu. Wooden bowl fu. Shovel fu. Cannon fu. Brute squad rolls. Fighters roll. Cart rolls. Gratuitous fake blood oozing. Gratuitously stupid brute squad. Academy Award nominations to Travis Estes as Geoffrey Pierce for “She didn’t actually draw blood”; to Amy Harmon as Grace Durant for her response to Tristan’s question, “Miss me?”, “Not if I had a pistol”; and to Zach Thomas as Tristan Durant for his observation, “You have all the brains of a sausage, Knoll. And if you didn’t talk every once in a while, Bragg would be chasing you with a fork.” A 59 on the Vomit Meter. 1½ Stars. Da’ud Bob says, “Not a good movie, but certainly a good effort. Check it out!”
Veggie Lentil Soup
By Catalin
1 bag lentils
1 bag baby carrots
2 zucchinis
2 cups fresh green beans
1 large onion
1 large can chicken stock
2 cans stewed tomatoes
salt
pepper
oregano marjoram
parsley
Put lentils and carrots in a crock pot. Chop the other veggies and also put them in the pot. Pour in the chicken stock. You may need to augment this with more stock or some water if the lentils soak it up. Also put in the tomatoes. Set the crock pot to low for a few hours. When the lentils start getting soft, add the spices to taste and let the soup bubble for a little while longer.
Labanniya
(As promised here is a redaction of last month’s recipe.)
Submitted by Eithne
Serves 4-8 people, depending upon portions
2 lbs lamb
1/2 tsp cumin powder or to taste
salt to taste
mastic (slightly resinous herb common in M.E. cooking) -optional
water
2 sticks cinnamon
l medium onion, chopped
2 bunches of dried mint
2 leeks, well cleaned and chopped
1 tsp dried mint
1 eggplant quartered lengthwise
1 cup of plain yogurt
1 tsp coriander
1 garlic clove, mashed
Chop up meat into cubes, put into pot and add water to cover. Add salt and bring to a boil. When the water has reduced by half add onion and leeks, and eggplant that has been parboiled ahead of time. Then add dry coriander, cumin, mastic, cinnamon and dried mint. Add water to cover and bring to a boil again, then reduce heat and simmer until meat is tender. Mix garlic with yogurt and then add to the pot. Wipe the sides of the pot with a clean cloth, turn off the heat and let the stew cool, then serve immediately.
This is the on-line version of The Scolairi Notes. Scolairi Notes is the publication of the Shire of Baile na Scolairi, a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. Scolairi Notes is available from Renee LeVeque, 711 E Taylor, Bloomington, IL 61701, at no cost. It is not a corporate publication of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc., and does not delineate SCA policies. Opinions expressed herein are not those of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. Webbed version created by Rory mac Feidhlimidh.