SCA: Weaving Stuff - Birka 6

I've been doing a bit of tablet-weaving lately, mostly for practice, and to fill up my time since I don't have any big projects to work on at the moment. 

Birka 6, wool

I'm trying out a new wool yarn for weaving - Hobbii's "easy care merino", which is absolutely lovely to weave with:  it's smooth and even, and doesn't stick to itself the way some wool yarns do.  The pattern above is Birka 6, which I love to do, even though it's kind of slow.  I'll get faster at it the more I do it, though.  

I've also begun teaching tablet weaving, a little bit.  I spent a few hours last weekend semi-teaching weaving to a couple of friends of mine (not total newbies, but wanted some guidance) at the local library's "crafternoon", and it went really well.  I'm not really cut out for teaching in front of a class, but I really enjoy these little one-on-one sessions.  I have a couple more planned for the coming month, too.  

I've also been replacing the trim on an old smokkr.  I donated a bunch of my old Viking clothing to the local Gold Key a few weeks ago, and only kept  my five favorite pieces.  This is one of them, a favorite because of the color of the fabric ("blue bonnet" from Fabric-Store.com): 

The problem was, the trim on it was manufactured jacquard trim in a semi-Persian design that I purchased online a million years ago.  It was pretty, and I loved the blue and gold, but it wasn't accurate for the dress at all.  I took it off and replaced it with another blue-and-gold Birka 6, this time in cotton (cotton, because I wanted to be able to throw this thing in the washing machine).  

Somehow I managed to warp this one up backwards, and the pattern came out on the underside of the weave instead of the top, and the design is blue-on-gold instead of gold-on-blue. After much conversation with a weaving buddy, and a fantastic explanation by a kind soul on Reddit, it was determined that I wove too many picks at the beginning of the band which threw off my pick count which threw off the gold/blue rows by 2, and reversed the colors. Does that make sense? It barely makes sense to me, but I mostly get it. I need to spend some time playing with turning sequences to get a better feel for how this all works - I can follow a pattern, but I don’t know as much of the theory as I would like to. 

  

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Anyway, just a couple of little things to work on to fill my time, nothing big going on. "Event season" is just around the corner, starting with Kingdom A&S in September, about which I'm very excited and very nervous.  In the meantime I'll be weaving some more, doing more teaching, and playing around with Spring projects, which I'll show you as I go along.  

SCA: Goofy Little Tent Flag

 Last month I showed you my new heraldry which was passed in June: 

I used to have a little cloth flag that I would put up in front of my tent to say, "this is my tent," but since I changed my heraldry this summer, I needed a new flag. 

Rather than try to replicate the entire device on a 12x14" flag, I decided to make one of those little "weathervane" style flags like you see on Norse banner poles (like this).  (No, it doesn’t look remotely Norse now that it’s finished). 

There's a blue background and a gold pomegranate on one side: 

And a black raven rising on the other side: 

(If you're curious, the cloth is white cotton sheeting; and the paints I used are plain old artists' acrylic paints mixed with a little bit of Tacky Glue and some liquid matte medium. The glue keeps the colors from running in the rain, and the matte medium is just to water down the paint and make the finish the same across the different colors).  

Just a small fun project which will absolutely NOT make up for the fact that I have a big, blue, modern tent, LOL.  (I would love to build myself a real Viking tent, but I don't have the time or the money, or the space in my workshop to do all that carving!)