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!

Favour spinning

Lightweight hand spun 2 ply wool yarn for a friend’s Arts & Sciences experiment.

A while ago a friend posted in a Facebook group – asking if there were any volunteers for her Arts & Sciences project. She was looking for volunteer spinners to take a small amount of wool, and create yarn. Her plan is to look at how different types of spinning (woolen vs worsted, plied vs unplied) would impact dye take-up.

Bead hangers

Finished bead hanger

One of the artisans in my SCA Barony offered to teach a bronze casting class in early November. His offer was to cast either an early or later-period sword pommel, but then also offered that students could cast another reasonably flat object if they wouldn’t use a pommel.

One student asked about a penannular brooch, but I had something different in mind – bead hangers in the style of a 9th century Finnish find.

Classes at Snoweaters

Lucet cord class at the SCA Festival of the SnowEaters

I attended Festival of the Snoweaters in October, and it’s taken me this long to get to the few photos I took to share them…

I taught two classes – Introduction to naalbinding, and Introduction to lucet.

Indigo dyeing at Harvest Feast

My finished cotton hankie from the indigo dyeing class

You might recall that in a previous post I mentioned ‘tie dyeing’ with indigo natural dyes, and that at a class I had another chance to try this out. This class took place at Harvest Feast, an SCA event in September as part of the Shire of Bitter End.

This post will share photos and some information from that class… though some of the insights from our instructor I also shared in the previous indigo-related posts!