Feel Good Friday

Feel Good Friday is a weekly meme hosted by The Girl Next Door Grows Up (click the button above to go visit her). This week Liz at Eternal Lizdom has stepped up to the mark to host while The Girl has a break. I've seen Liz and others post to the meme over past weeks, it's a nice warm fuzzy idea and I could do with some warm fuzziness, so I'm joining in.

I'm going with the list prompt - 5 things that made you really happy this week.

1. Our Yulefest holiday

At the end of last week we went to Moss Vale for 4 nights and stayed in a big house with a pool table, tennis court, slightly inadequate heating and an open fire place that insisted on filling the house with smoke before settling down to be pretty and toast marshmallows. It was awesome! We were there with fabulous friends Ariane & Crash and Toni & Andrew, there were 8 kids between us, and I'm pretty sure I can safely say everyone had a great time. On Saturday evening there was roast turkey with stuffing, ham, baked veggies, Christmas pud with custard, fruit mince pies, white Christmas slice, a gingerbread house, vast quantities of booze and totally inadequate sleep.

I baked a gingerbread house and some extra 2D house-shaped slabs for the kids to decorate thinking it would keep them occupied for a while. Not so much. Don't get me wrong, it all got decorated, it just didn't take very long AT ALL!

Fastest gingerbread house decorators in the land

Saturday night Yulefest dinner

2. My tablet weaving, I'm quite happy with the way this latest one has turned out.

Just starting out on the ramshorn pattern.

3. Clara cuddles, they always make me happy.

4. Last night's dinner, a variation on this recipe. I added a diced capsicum, used an 800g tin of crushed tomatoes and baby spinach. It was yummy.

Garlic prawn risotto

5. The fact that when I typed the title for this post it came out as "Feel Goof Friday" :-)

Fancy a few more feel good offerings? Head on over to Liz's and check out some other FGF posts.

Blacktown Medieval Fayre

I have a new apron dress! This is very exciting! No, really!

It started with a beautiful length of handwoven woollen cloth made by the very talented Pat which I bought at the Armidale Easter camp. I made a piece of tablet weaving with the intention of using it for the straps on the dress. The cloth and the braid sat looking at me expectantly while I dithered for weeks on account of really having no idea what to do next. Then this morning, I was talking to Deb, and the subject of how much I hate sewing came up, one thing led to another, a little bit of barter came in to play, and the next thing I know she's hand sewing my dress for me, with an antler needle and hand-spun woollen thread and using hand-made brass pins no less! And the best bit? Not one scrap of either the cloth or the braid was wasted.

Me in my new apron dress with Deb, seamstress extraordinaire.

We were at the Blacktown Medieval Fayre with the Ancient Arts Fellowship as part of a living history display this weekend.

The Ancient Arts Fellowship encampment

Adam had his pole lathe set up and we had the tent with our replica Viking bed on display.

The kids hanging out in our tent

The group's camp kitchen attracted much interest as various meals were cooked, lunch on Saturday was coq au vin, Saturday dinner was beef stew with dumplings while Sunday lunch was pumpkin soup with bacon and sour cream followed by a lamb stew.

Adam in the kitchen

Beef stew with dumplings

The Craft Geteld

The Craft Geteld housed a display of textiles crafts, we had drop spindle spinning of both wool and flax, tablet weaving, sewing, naalbinding, embroidery, viking wire weaving and finger loop braiding happening at various times during the day.

That empty seat next to Deb is where I spent most of today.

There was jousting, fighting, executions, pike and musket drills, theatrical swordplay, plenty of market stalls and even free pony and camel rides. Tom had three camel rides and neither Adam or I were there to take a photo of any of them. Independent kids are such a trial!

I was going to throw a whole bunch of other photos in here too but my Flickr upload is taking for freakin' EVER and I am very, very tired. So I'm going to bed. But I may add more photos in the morning. Or I might not. Who knows!

Don't forget to head on over to Unknown Mami's to see what's being shared by all the other fabulous Sundays in My City bloggers!

New stuff, some made, some bought

Every Monday night this term Adam has been taking himself off to pottery classes. Tonight, on the way home from the Discover Mahler concert we stopped off at his teacher's home to pick up his finished pieces.

1. Decorated tiles, 2. Frog on a leaf, 3. Wol, 4. Dragon lidded pot, 5. Pot and lid with sleeping baby dragon, 6. First attempt using the wheel

He has also made us a chesky so that we don't have to hide our esky in the tent when we're at reenactment events.

It's a chest that's large enough for our rather large esky to fit inside. Which means it's kind of huge. So it's probably a Good Thing that we also got finally got this:

My new VW Multivan

I had been planning on calling it The Blimp, Adam was putting in a vote for using The Zepplin instead, but as it turns out I'm leaning more towards calling it The Loungeroom (on wheels).

It even has a table - it's between the two seats there and can slide out and open up to a fairly decent sized top.

Let's take a closer look at that back seat shall we? Not even a week old and look at all those paw prints! Clara is completely confused by my sudden insistence that she sit on the floor of the van, not to mention being very put out that she can't see out the windows from down there. I feel mean, but then I think of those great big black claws on the leather upholstery and cringe.

Those paw prints happened on the way to the dog park where Clara has been playing while I weave. I decided to try something a bit more interesting and threaded up a kivrim pattern and gave it a go. I think I ended up with the threading slightly wrong but decided it didn't really matter for the purposes of a test piece, I'll get it right next time hopefully.

First attempt at a kivrim pattern

I finished that piece and am now working on a simpler (and really rather boring) pattern which I'll probably use to trim one of the kids' tunics. Then I'm going to focus on getting some lengths done to sell at reenactment events, I need to choose patterns that look interesting but are relatively quick to weave. Hopefully the wool I've ordered from Bendigo Woollen Mills comes in time for me to use - I'm getting pretty fed up with the colours I have at the moment.

But wait! There's more...

I'm having that "it's never-ending!" feeling about life just at present. I rather suspect that when I stop I'm going to crash, Monday may be a bit of a write-off.

Yesterday at 7am, after going to bed at 4am (I was working, laptop disaster & database problems legacy), I kicked Adam out of bed to get the kids off to school and went back to sleep. Adam woke me at ten to nine and I hauled myself out of bed, my beading kit out to the car and me, car and kit down to Ariane's for a craft day. I made some more Christmas tree earrings, including some green ones, and a sodalite necklace (photos are a bit ordinary, there's no sunlight at 11pm :P I took some new ones, much better!).

Swarovski crystal and sterling silver Christmas tree earrings

Sodalite and riverstone necklace
Length ~52cm

Then it was back home to meet the kids - I arrived 30 seconds before their bus dropped them off across the road. I did a quick blog post and then abandoned the boys while I popped up the road to the shops to pick up salad supplies for dinner and a few odds and ends for the market stall on Sunday. Then came home and cooked date scones as a present for my Grandma while the boys made the salad.

99 years old and looking good!

Dinner last night was a buffet affair at my Grandma's nursing home with pretty much the whole extended family - my Mum, Dad, sister & family and brother & family, my Aunty Liz and Uncle Rob, cousins Warwick, Cameron and Rebecca and her family. Twenty four of us all up. It's not every day the matriarch turns 99 years old!

Food!

Today was Caitlin's dance concert - matinee and evening performances - which has taken up pretty much the whole day.

Ballet costume



Song and Dance costume

I did manage to grab an hour to finish pricing all my stuff for tomorrow. I'm now tossing up between sleep and making a few more earrings. The markets start at 9am so I'll need to get going pretty early, sleep is sounding pretty good...

Jupiter jasper

Another riveting edition of stuff wot I made.

Jupiter jasper, tiger jasper and sterling silver necklace



a couple of bracelets of the same





and a bunch of earrings - Jupiter jasper and sterling silver.

Grey skies are making this photography business a bit tricky, wish I'd got around to doing number 3 in my 12 things to do this year list. (Wish I'd got around to doing any of them really...)

Moukaite jasper

This morning's efforts, Moukaite jasper and gold plate:

Necklace



Bracelet



and earrings

(I've also done 2 loads of washing - productivity is my middle name :P)

Now, off to a meeting with David's teacher...

It's a lovely day for a battle.

We went to Berrima today and completely failed to go to any of the fabulous antique shops, or historic buildings and little museums, or the cafes, or even the pub. Instead we spent the whole day at the village green for a combined groups training session organised by the Ancient Arts Fellowship.

It was a beautiful day, perfect weather for not wearing a long-sleeved Viking dress. So I wussed out and didn't get dressed up :P We took Clara with us and for a little while, just after we got in the car this morning, we thought she was going to make excited puppy squeaks for the whole 1hr 20min trip. But she settled down and contented herself with trying to fit on the one seat with Caitlin so she could see out the window properly.

Just after everyone arrived at the park someone discovered a baby magpie on the ground - it had fallen out of the nest. WIRES was called and the kids got to look after "Fluffy" until the WIRES person arrived to collect the little ball of fuzz.

Fluffy the baby magpie

Clara was in seventh heaven, there were new people to say hello to and other dogs walking by and new smells to smell and new trees to investigate and people giving her massages and and and...

Clara happily ensconced on her picnic rug

Having a combined training session meant that there was a fairly large contingent of fighters on the field, something most groups can't manage on their own. I've uploaded a whole bunch of photos and videos to flickr so you can head over there if you want to see them all, I'll just pop a couple up here as a teaser.

The battle lines approach each other with caution

Action shot

Spears, swords, javelins - it's carnage I tell you

Click here if you can't see the embedded video

While Adam collected a nice assortment of bruises I alternated between a bit of tablet-weaving and a lot of trying to find the right angle to take photos from - bit of a challenge that, on account of the fighters wanting to stay in the shade and it being somewhat dangerous to stand too close to them. Right at the end of the day I got a quick lesson in nålebinding which, if I can remember how it goes, adds another Viking craft to my repertoire.

Then I retrieved Caitlin from the tree she'd spent most of the day in

and we headed home. Clara flopped on the floor of the car and was sprawled out fast asleep before we'd gone more than a few hundred meters.

Clans on the Coast

I'm sunburned. So is Adam. But for some reason the kids seem fine, at worst they have a slight rosy glow on the cheeks. Yeah, I completely forgot to take sunscreen with us today...look, it was DARK when we left the house, the sun was the last thing on my mind!

We dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:00am and managed to be on the road a bit before 6:00am with half a lumber yard in the back of the car. Pretending to be Vikings involves lots of wood. Made it to Nelson Bay by about 8:00am and got all set up for the day. We were at Clans on the Coast, an annual Celtic festival - lots of bagpipes, dancing and tartan everywhere. Will definitely go again next year if the Huscarls are invited back, but we'll make it a weekend away instead of a day trip I think.

Tom started off with enthusiasm on his back-strap weaving but lost interest before any members of the public actually arrived, he did go back to it later in the day - after most of the public had left - ah well, he still managed to charm several women with his weaving expertise.

Adam got the pole-lathe up and running, which brought people over from the other side of the field out of sheer curiosity wondering what on earth that thing with the big stick was for, and I alternated between yet more tablet weaving and working on the dress I've been making for Caitlin. I do not like sewing. So swapping back and forth between the two activities works quite nicely.

The Huscarls gave two fighting demonstrations during the day, Adam's swordfighting lessons seem to being paying off, he reckons he threw the last fight on account of thinking it would look bad if he won every bout he fought. (Fellow Huscarls, if you're reading this? Consider yourselves challenged - take him down!)

Woz showed off his woodworking skills in front of his gorgeously carved tent, chest and stool as he worked on a new chest panel.

The best bit of the day was when David decided to have a go at woodturning and then asked me to teach him to do tablet weaving. Two new things tried in the one day!

Here, have some crafty type stuff

Adam made me an arm guard for archery, since he made it I've only hit myself with the string once, no more huge dramatic bruises for me!

I've been doing some more tablet weaving, I'm still experimenting with patterns and I'm kind of wishing that the 5.8m batch was a bit more interesting.

This took 2 weeks of picking it up when I was watching TV in the evenings.

Two different patterns, the bottom one I've finished, the top one I've just started.

And I finally got around to making some more jewellery on Friday:

Botswana agate necklace

Sodalite bracelet

Seems I haven't forgotten how

On Sunday we headed out to North Richmond for a Huscarls training and crafting day. Tom was all set to spend the day weaving, so I decided I should break out the tablet weaving loom and get back into doing that for the first time since October last year.

The only question was, would I be able to remember how it worked? Oh, and "where the hell are all the bits of the loom?" (We found everything except the patterns so I made one up.)

Turns out the answer is yes, I do remember, and here's the results - just over 1m of braid representing about 3 hours work. The tension is a bit wonky and I kept losing track of where I was up to so the pattern isn't quite regular in spots, but it'll do.

Now all I need to do is make about 6 times that much again and I should be right to trim a cloak.

Weaving update

Here's Tom's first ever piece of back-strap weaving, he finished it up at Winterfest on the weekend where he was a big hit with the public.

He's all fired up to start his next project and has been asking me to help with getting it set up so that's what I'll be doing after lunch.