Regency-Adjacent: New Jewelry Box Just For Fun

Here's a little wooden jewelry box I just finished making, to house my Regency jewelry: 

It started life as a little $9 blank box from Michael's.  I stained it (Minxwax's "Special Walnut" and "Dark Walnut"), and then painted the insides, and painted the little vine/leaf design on the top and drawer front with gold leafing paint. 

The lid is clear (plexiglass), and shows all the little square compartments inside, so you can show off your nice pieces and the inside of the box, so I wanted a color that would pop against the golds and blues and corals of my jewelry.  

This, by the way, has no basis whatsoever in actual history - I've seen exactly *one* Regency-era jewelry box to date (it was green on the inside), but other than that, I have no idea how a real Regency-era jewelry box would have looked.  From what I know about furniture and accessories in the Regency, natural wood tones were a thing, as well as hand-painted details, so I went with that...but I have no research to point to for this project, I just wanted to make something pretty.   

SCA: Venetian Fan Makeover

Approximately 2 billion years ago, I made myself a little paper hand fan/face screen to go with my Italian outfits. I loved it…but it got loved to pieces. 

The paper is bent, tearing, fuzzy around the edges. The design, drawn in sharpie marker, is faded and crappy looking. The stick - a dowel with hot glue wrapped around it to simulate a turned piece of wood - was chipping off paint. Time to redo this thing. 

I spray painted the stick black, and then dry brushed on a couple of coats of brown and tan, to recreate the wood look. I sprayed it with Polycrylic after that, to protect the finish. 

For the flag, I cut a couple of pieces of damask-print scrapbook paper and glued them together back to back. Then I painted the edges and over some of the detail in the print with gold leaf paint, and attached the fan to the stick with embroidery floss coated in Mod Podge, like I did the first time. 

Brand new fan!  It matches exactly nothing I’m going to be wearing at Baronial, but I don’t care. All my other stuff is blue, this can be blue, too. 

Inspiration pics: 

Italian fans, 1500s

French face screen, 1600s

Woman In White, Titian, 1561

A Heraldic Chest

In 2014, when I made this chest for my friend Simona, I made one for myself, too.   I didn't stain or finish it - it came in very handy at events, but it was always unfinished.  Eventually I painted it plain black.   I've always wanted to do something cool with it, but I never got around to it.








However, I finally painted it!  It's an adaptation of my device: 

I painted one half of each side of the box white with 3 coats of Killz primer;  then painted the red parts with red artists actylics and acrylic craft paint.  I used  artists' acrylics for the green leaves.  I coated the entire box with polyurethane to seal the paint.  While the hardware was off the box, I also sprayed the handles with primer and then a metallic gold spray paint, to spruce them up since they were looking a bit tarnished and gross.

I'm not sure exactly how to use it, though.  I used to use it at big events to pack and store all of my underthings and accessories - braies and bras, socks, headgear, and jewelry.  On the other hand, my feast basket recently died and I'm thinking this chest might make a great little feast box.  I'm not sure yet.

What's Next? 

I still need to fix or replace the back of the blue chair I re-covered a few weeks ago.  I may also make a new cover for my old parasol this week,  if I have time.  And, of course, Valkyrfelt is coming up - not this weekend, but next, and I'm planning and scheming like mad because I'm nervous as hell about camping for the first time in nearly three years.  

Making Over A Camp Chair

There's a big push in the barony lately to reduce the appearance of mundanity.  That means finding ways to obscure the modern and blend it with the historical - things like phones, coolers, tents, chairs, mugs, tennis shoes, etc.  In one of those things I found an opportunity to do my part:

BEFORE

This is my camp chair.  It's brand new, really comfy, and even has a little table that flips up from the side, with a cup holder in it.  Neat!  It is, however, glaringly modern with its metal frame and nylon upholstery.  Fortunately, I've solved this problem before.

The first order of business was to remove the upholstery from the chair and spray paint the frame.  I wiped down the frame to clean off any dust, then sprayed it with an automotive self-etching metal primer (2 colors, not that it matters).  Once that was dry, I sprayed it with a brown spray paint.

PRIMING THE FRAME

I painted the plastic flip-up tray with dark gray all-purpose primer, then the same brown spray paint. I clearcoated the entire tray with Polycrylic to seal the plastic.  With the metal primer, the paint won't flake off the frame, but the plastic might flake or chip if not protected.


Next I made copies of the seat and back pieces that I removed from the chair in a blue polyester upholstery fabric with a swirly Italianate design on it.  I made these double-thickness, the seams reinforced with two rows of stitching on the inside, and the seat 5" longer than the original, so that the ends could be wrapped around the frame and sewn in by hand (which was a big pain in the butt!)


This chair had armrest pads, too, which I copied, and used the velcro and interior padding harvested from the original pads to close.  And yes, the cloth seat and back will be just as strong as the original nylon pieces - the red chair I made over in 2013 held up just fine until the frame itself broke.

AFTER

Now, does that look like a period piece of furniture?  HELL no.  But it looks less modern, and when placed under a tent with wooden poles, next to wooden chairs, it kind of blends in because of the frame color.  It's by no means going to fool anyone, but every little effort helps the overall ambiance.  I do need to re-do the back piece:  see how it looks all twisted?  I tried to cut my fabric as straight as I could, but I was cutting it out of an old dress, and I think I got this piece a little on the bias.  I'll fix it. 

What's Next?  

I'm working on a little painted wooden box right now, and on some embroidery on a new Viking apron dress that I made last month.  Show you soon!

Because I Needed A New Hobby Like I Need A Hole In My Head

So, a friend of mine has been charged with bringing some largesse items to Pennsic for a foreign royal house (who will be giving them out as largesse to their populace members), and she asked for my help.

We went to Café Monet, a paint-your-own-pottery place here in Austin, and IT WAS SO MUCH FUN OMG YOU GUYS.  I've never painted ceramics before - I've painted terra cotta planters to look like ceramic, with acrylic paints, but this was a whole new animal for me.  (It was totally weird to paint something and not really have any idea if it was going to look right after firing, but it was also kind of exciting!) Each of us painted two pieces.  Here are the two that I made:

They're cordial cups - about 8" tall, with a cup about 2", I think.  The one on the right is sort of a fish-scale thing, and the one on the left was meant to resemble an Egyptian lotus chalice (I've always loved them, and this color scheme is basically my favorite thing in the entire world).  My friend made a really lovely green-and-yellow one with a design on the stem meant to make it look fluted, and one in the colors of the kingdom where these cups will eventually live.  It's so neat to think that somebody in another kingdom - another whole country, even! - might be carrying around something I made! Squee!

I cannot WAIT to go back and do some more of this.  I LOVE painting things.  Pictures, yes, and furniture - but my favorite thing to paint is little boxes and containers. I have soooo many ideas of things at the studio that I'd LOVE to paint as gifts and as feast items for myself.

You know, because I have all this extra time on my hands....o_O  

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A Quick Pre-War Update

HOO BOY have I been nose-to-the-grindstone-sewing-machine lately.  Today I pulled ten hours straight!  I'm happy to say that I'm on schedule and moving right along.  I'm a bit apprehensive of this weekend; I'm taking the weekend off to attend a local event (after having spent last Saturday at regional war practice, and most of Sunday at a workshop day at a friend's house (at which I got many things done, actually)  - so I'll lose a day and a half of work time, but I definitely need the mental break!

So I have looooots of things to show you, mostly having to do with client sewing - but I forgot to take pictures of the two gowns I finished for said client last week before I delivered them, so I'll be getting with her soon to take some pics.

Some of the things going on lately: 

1.  A new LBGFD for me (Little Black [Gothic Fitted] Dress).  I'm happy to say that after upsizing and re-drafting the whole thing last year, last week I had to start sizing it down again, and adjusting some of the curves.  I made a second one from the new pattern today, and I'll have pics for you next week after the event coming up.

at war practice last weekend

2.  I finally got around to stripping down Violet and re-fitting her to look exactly like me.  At first I thought, "Wow, do I really look like a Russian Nesting Doll??"  but I'm actually pretty happy with my fitness progress of late. :) 

bewbs

3.  I've been dyeing a whole bunch of fabric: 

Forgot the gloves again. Typing this post with murder hands. 

4.  Painting lots of fabric, too: 

Rory likes to help. 

more heraldic flags for the campsite ropeline! 

Next Up

Tomorrow I'll be cleaning out the garage (because I can't even GET to my camping stuff as of right now, and I'll need it this weekend as well as for war, obviously). 

After that, I have some woodworking projects, which I'll show you; as well as a stack of client projects, and a couple of last things for me.  ONLY TWO WEEKS TO GO UNTIL WAR!  *breathes into a paper bag*  @_@

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Company Table Linens for Feast

A quick fabric-painting project to spiff up company dinners:

One 96x48" white, cotton, Ikea RITVA curtain panel (linen-weave, cotton fiber), with 8" black linen border, painted with eight trios of Caerleon lions;  two 12x48" gold linen table runners with linen borders, Ansteorran star and Caerleon company motto (ut simus invicti: "together we are undefeated").  

The lions and star were first stamped, then painted in and detailed by hand.  The motto was written by hand with a large, flat paintbrush, over a chalk grid drawn in the center of each table runner.  (And no, I don't know what hand/font the text is.  I'm not a calligrapher or a scribe, hehe. This is the hand I know how to do. ☺ ) 

Paints are all artist's acrylics mixed 1:1 with fabric glue, and kept fluid by painting with a wet brush.  (I like working with regular acrylics much better than pre-fab fabric paints. The glue keeps the paint elastic and prevents cracking with wear, the glue and the water both make the paint soft and liquid enough to soak into the fabric on the first coat, rather than just sitting on top of the fabric where it might chip and peel with age).  

All pieces were finished with a silicone water-repellant spray treatment to protect the paint and to give the fabric some stain resistance. 

(Pic taken on my cutting table in the sewing room, with all of my feast gear, since I'm not at all certain of being able to take pics of the feast table at Candlemas this weekend - feast is usually lit by candlelight only, so, any pics of feast will likely be a big dark blur with a bunch of flames floating in it, hehe. (Well, fake flames, this year - the event site doesn't allowe open flames, which: booo!  But we'll make due).  

Tada! 

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Saving A Battered, Old Chair

THIS CHAIR has seen better days:

(all of these pics are halfway through sanding, to show just how much *crud* is in/on this wood)

Don't get me wrong, it's a good chair.  It's extremely well-made, sturdy, and not a joint is out of place, though it looks horrible.  What you're looking at is several years' worth of

• rain/water damage
• sun exposure/oxidation
• corroded varnish
• sweaty fighter butts (ewww)

Not only was the finish shot, but the wood was so swollen with weather and age in places that the chair wouldn't fully open OR close...rendering a really nice chair completely useless. 

I'll be honest, I was dreading the prospect of sanding allllll those pieces individually.  I guess the chair, or the Universe, or the Powers-That-Be heard me - because I could NOT get this thing apart to save my life.  I tried every tool at my disposal, got friends to help me, even tried to grind the hardware out, but it appears to have been made of naquadah-enhanced unobtanium, and sealed with black magic.  @_@  In the end I had to sand and stain this thing WHILE FULLY ASSEMBLED.  I'm here to tell you that was a bitch. 

BUT I got it done: 

(I could no longer feel my hands after this...and it still needed more sanding)

Here's the first coat of stain, applied very, very carefully, with a small brush and a lot of paper towels.  The chair is solid oak, and pretty well weathered and seasoned; still, I didn't want to chance the stain swelling the wood and undoing all the work I put into buffing down the seat pieces so that this thing would move properly again.  Rubbing stain into the wood with paper towels keeps too much stain from soaking in and swelling the wood, and it also gives you a LOT more control over the depth and amount of color.  

(oooh, aahhh)

After two more coats of stain, and several coats of spray poly-acrylic (for a low-tack, matte-sheen clearcoat, rather than a polyurethane which could stick in hot weather), it was finally done:

(The dark area of the back piece was severely stained, deep enough that I couldn't surface clean it out, or even sand it off the wood.  It's the same on the reverse of the piece; in fact, it's worse on the other side.  I have no idea what caused it, but, this was the best I could do with it). 

Sir John's and his lady Bridget's devices painted on the center of the back rest, in acrylic paint, and heavily clear-coated to prevent scratching.

Tada! 

S'mo Bling

Because...BLING.

A Pair of Belts

A pair of gold-colored metal clasps, on a velvet belt.
I colored the leaf detail in the clasps in with green nail polish.  

A pewter belt buckle, bought in 2011, which was kinda...bland.  I spray-painted it gold (the belt is wrapped in painters' tape in the before pic on the left), then colored in the recessed parts with a brown Sharpie marker.  Sharpies can do ANYTHING.  (I kinda hate the copper rivet, but it doesn't show when the belt is on.  This was, by the way, the first leather thing I ever made).  

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Caerleon Over-sleeves

By request, the Caerleon over-sleeves I showed you the other day, with the Swiss kirtle:

Black linen shell, with a gold linen lining.  No interlining.  

Gold linen buttons. 

The Caerleon company motto is painted on the inside of the sleeve cuff, so that when I have the cuffs turned up, they face away from me (see top picture).  The motto is Ut simus invicti:  "together we are undefeated." 

There's an Ansteorran star painted inside the top of the sleeve, so that I can turn the top down over where I have the sleeves pinned onto my dress to show the star, if I want.  

The motto, star, and the three white lion heads (which are the device of the company, though properly they're shown vertically on a black field), were all painted in plain old craft store acrylic craft paints, mixed with a little fabric glue and water, to help the paint soak into the fabric and resist cracking.  

I mix the paint with a tiny bit of water, and some fabric glue or Tacky glue (at a ratio of about 3:1 paint:glue, with just a few drops of water).  The water helps the paint-blue mixture flow on a brush; the glue basically turns acrylic paint into fabric paint, allowing it to soak into the material rather than forming a crust on top which could flake off, and it also makes the dried paint flexible to help prevent cracking.  (Eventually, yes, the paint will crack and flake; but this mixture lasts a long, long time.  I have a banner I made many years ago for another group I belonged to, which hung in a tree by my campsite for about four years in a row, and it never showed any damage from the elements).  

Previously...

The sleeves above are my first set of sleeves.  There's an introductory period to membership in my company, and certain conditions that you have to meet to be fully inducted and to earn the right to wear the lions.  Before that, you can wear the motto and colors only.  So my firs set of Caerleon sleeves were simpler: 

Gold linen with black borders at the top and bottom of the sleeves, and the motto painted in the same way, with the paint-glue-water mixture. 

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A Wee Viking Trinket For A Friend

I'm working on outfit pics from the event over the past weekend (which was AWESOME), but until then, I give you this little bit of fun...

I saw this on Pinterest:

(via)

Which isn't remotely period, but it sure is cute - and I knew when I saw it that I had to make one for a dear friend.  So I glued together a pair of wooden door hanger signs from the hobby store, shaped, sanded and painted them, and ended up with this:

front

back, inspired in part by one of those little
ancient Viking chess pieces

tiny deer! 

Hee.  A cute little trinket for someone I hold dear.  And he was tickled by it, which was all I was after.  :) 

Back to work now. 

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Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky

I made a box for my friend, Simona!

It's not exactly heraldic, more...heraldy.  I've decided that's the new term. :)  Elements of her device worked into the box, without being the actual device itself. Heraldish.

It's made of pine plywood harvested from a large shipping crate that I picked up for free from the warehouse at the company where Simona's husband works.  I had a LOAD of fun knocking the crate apart with a big mallet...

for a while, anyway. 

I'm working on a smaller one for myself as well - should be done and up on the blog this time next week.



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In Which Our Heroine Is Up 'Til 3am

An  11' flattened tube of black linen, 3" wide, all machine-"embroidered" (it's just fancy stitches my machine does).  I'd started with the white and yellow, thinking "silver and gold on black", but then somehow it became a "garden" of green "turf", red "flowers", and blue edging for water around the outside of the white "fence."

Yeah, I have no idea.  It was 3am.  I went through FOUR SPOOLS OF THREAD.  All stuff I had laying around not being used, so, no big.  It also took me just over four hours.  But now I have a pretty, and looooong, cloth belt to wrap and use with my bliauts and things like that.

Tiny picture is tiny.  This is just a plastic "pearl" button.  I painted the "pearl" with red nail polish, LOL, and will be sewing it to the front V of my new purple dress.  As a centerpiece, yes; but also to cover up a place where the decorative stitching is a bit f'd up.  I promise the red doesn't look this plastic and pinky in real life.  You'll see.  :)


Three days and counting!


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Okay, One More Box, and Then I'll Start Sewing, I Promise.

Sadly, I didn't have the presence of mind to take a "before" picture of this, but it was basically just a brown wooden box.  Light brown.  I "stained" it with watered-down red craft paint, sprayed it with a super-shiny gloss clearcoat, and lined the inside with some scraps of a vivid blue uncut corduroy (feels/looks like velvet, but sturdier).

It's hard to tell except in the last picture, which is horribly over-exposed with flash, because it's the only way I could get the red edging to show - the box edges are highlighted in a shiny red lacquer paint, to hide some flaws in the stain, and to better blend the edges of the wood and the blue "velvet" visually.  

Okay, NOW I'm going to go sew.  Two weeks to go from first-draft-pattern to completed 12th century side-laced pendant-sleeve gown.  No pressure. 

σ_ô

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The Big Black Box

I needed a six-panel chest.  You know the one, it's ubiquitous in the SCA.  It comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, finishes, and types of detail.  It's SO handy.

Enter this guy:  

This is a wooden toybox that my grandfather built for me when I was only a year old.  It's as old as me, and like me, it was showing a bit of wear.  It's been useful and beloved throughout it's thirty*COUGH* years, but lacking a hinged top made its use a bit limited.  Eventually it was relegated to storage, tucked on top of a shelf in my garage.

I was hesitant, at first, to refinish it at all (even though I hated the paint job - it's green/yellow on the other two sides), because it was my grandfather's work, I finally decided that I'd rather change it and use it and love it anew, than let it rot on top of a high shelf - and why not look at it like this: he put loving work into this thing, so why shouldn't I? This is as close as we would get to having worked on it together.

The paint was old enough to have been lead, possibly, so I did no sanding.  I spent weeks scraping and peeling and covering it with liquid and foam paint remover, before finally giving up once I realized that even where I'd gotten through the paint, it had long since soaked into the wood, and it would never be stain-able.  So I scraped it smooth, applied a wood conditioner to re-hydrate it, sealed some slightly separated joinery, and painted it inside and out.

From there, the rest was all fun.  I've been working on this guy all summer (you saw the background on the lid, and the smaller box which was kind of a dry run for this one).  Here's the finished product:

Black outside, and mint-green-blue inside (because that's
the color I had, hehe.  The top is stained because it was
cut from an old desktop, and was already finished.  

A close-up of the decorative mountings, which are
just jewelry plaques bent and nailed on with small tacks. 

The handles on the sides, which are simple drawer pulls,
backed with more jewelry plaques.   Not remotely period,
but, as with all facets of this project, I used materials
I already had on hand. 

On the outside of the lid is a mural that took me like three weeks to paint.
I absolutely love it, warts and all, from the derpy little deer to the appalling
mélange of artistic styles used  (this is a learning project, you guys).

See?   I do love how all the colors came out, though, and overall I'm quite
pleased with the finished chest. 

I do have to say that the sky is my favorite thing, though.  It doesn't show
well in these pics, but all of the gold is metallic.  Not leafing paint (my jar
of leafing paint is stuck shut!), but my trusty gold liquid paint pen. 

So, this is going to be my nightstand in my tent, and very likely full of underwear and socks, hehe.  Very few people will ever even see it, but that's okay with me.  I'm really pleased with it, and I want to keep it where I can see it all the time, and where it won't be damaged by the elements.

Next up, woodworking-wise, is another, smaller chest, that I'll be building from scratch; but with the first event of the season only weeks away, I need to lock myself in my sewing room for a while.
See you guys on the flipside.



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