Financial accessibility in costuming communities

Wearing my red and gold damask sideless surcoat

I wanted to talk a little about attempts to make costuming, cosplay, sewing (etc) more financially accessible to people who think that it’s too expensive to do well, to compete, to join in all.the.things that are out there.

In the last while it’s really jumped out at me – well-meaning folks who truly want to share the thing they love with as many people who want to be there as possible. There’s this big push “join us, it doesn’t have to be expensive!”

Much for all those good intentions.

However… saying this kinda thing while posting photos from 3 different conventions in three different cities it becomes clear that a lot of the ideas on “how to save money” are steeped in a lot of economic privilege.

Well-meaning or otherwise – travel is expensive, conventions are expensive, costume college is expensive… While I do not fault anyone for prioritizing these things if they are passionate about them – they are often talking to people who couldn’t prioritize those things even if they wanted to. 

Out of Kingdom education

Drifa, Graduate of the Royal University of the MidRealm with an emphasis in SCA and Historic Topics

One of my favourite things about the SCA is the classes – the opportunity to learn new things (and share things as well). I think it’s a great way for newcommers to both learn about the SCA, as well as gives folks who feel awkward or unsure, or whatever in their first few months… something to DO – its a good way to sort of organize time.

Samhain Post-mortem

Montengarde Samhain (Nov 6-8 2020) class: Construction of an Iron Age Finnish dress

A while ago I posted about working on the classes and whatnot for the November 6-8, 2020 Montengarde Samhain event. I don’t know that I’ll end up working on another similar online event anytime soon…. but I thought I’d record som

e of my thoughts about working on the event.

This is another one of those “probably only of interest to me” kind of posts.. and I do geek out a bit with statistics and analytics cus that’s my jam…

SCA involvement

Award of Arms

I understand that part of the SCA involves lots of challenges and commemoration, so I thought I’d try to keep track of things as much as I was able. There’s some things I’ve totally forgotten or never picked up on to begin with at all because I hadn’t even thought of recording it!

This post is really more as a way of recording things for me… and honestly, I doubt anyone else would be interested. It’s also subject to be updated as more information arises.

Montengarde Samhain (Nov 7) – instructors wanted

Lucet cord class at the SCA Festival of the SnowEaters

While pretty much every SCA event has moved online, the upcoming November 7th Samhain event is no different. Oddly (?) for the past few years I haven’t been very involved in the SCA, but with things moving online, all of the accessibility (and other) issues that plagued me with in-person SCA events are mostly gone!

With that in mind, I offered to join the team working to make the event happen. The Baron wanted to focus on classes and Bardic, so I’m putting out a call for volunteer instructors for the classes!

There is no strong theme, so we’re pretty open to any classes that suit the SCA, and are functional with the online medium.

A woman demonstrating the drop spindle. She was one of the demonstrators at the Turku Medieval Market from the SCA group.

However, in order to help some folks folks who have such huge inventories of classes to choose from….

• Our Baron’s main persona is German Renaissance, so I’d like to include German Renaissance related classes
• Our Baroness is Viking, so Viking-related classes would be great
• I’ve felt in the past that culinary is under-represented at TUA and A&S, so would like to include culinary classes
• Likewise, I feel that family activities / youth-centric classes are under-represented, so would like to include classes around family activities or classes specifically for youth to attend online. (Given that many children are doing schooling online, I recognize that they might be online-school’d out however.)
• I’m super excited about the new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and would love to included classes in that area – especially around making SCA accessible to people, regardless of wealth, education, physical ability, neuro-diversity, religion, gender identity, race, etc.
• And of course…. anything bardic related – from dance, music, song, performance…. any classes relevant to the bards.

On a personal note, I’d also love to include hat-making and Finnish Iron Age classes as well!

If you’re interested in teaching – please drop me a line on Facebook! The event will be in Mountain Standard Time, and is scheduled for November 7th (though I’m told if there’s enough interest November 8th is an additional option).

Join us!

Naalbinding class at The Vikings marketplace at the Royal BC museum

There isn’t a Facebook event yet, but one will be coming. In the meantime you can see what’s happening on the Montengarde website calendar –  of course I’d love any of my readers to join in too if you’re interested!