I hope all of you had a very happy Thanksgiving.  We spent the holiday with my husband’s family and had a lovely day.

Grettir has also made the class notes for is I.33-Liechtenauer Symposium available online.  You can download them here.

This past weekend was Atlantian Crown.  I had a fabulous time but, as usual, I brought my camera and didn’t take it out all day.  I really need to stop that!

Finally, I spent most of Sunday working on it and I’m now nearly finished with my current Foundations Revealed article.  Now I’m hoping that if I really dedicate the rest of the week to it and don’t allow myself to get distracted I can finish it early and possibly be free to day trip Tourney of Friends this weekend.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m still in the process of organizing my plans for the wardrobe project, what I want to work on first, and what I’m going to do about the Flanders gown.  I’m almost ready to make a fabric order but first I need to make a couple of pairs of brais and maybe a new fighting shirt to send of with my husband to Gulf Wars.

One thing I have been debating is whether or not I should merge my website with my blog moving everything into WordPress, or whether I should continue to maintain both a separate site and blog.  While I still think Joomla is better than Worpress for creating a stand alone site, I do like the idea of having everything together and I think WordPress would work better for merging the two since it’s way better at handling static pages (its weakness) than Joomla is at blogging.  Still weighing things out though.

I’ve done a little reorganizing on the website and I’m in the early planning stages of two major projects.  I’ll be able to talk about them in more depth once I’ve finished outlining my plans a little better.

I have been looking through a 1591 edition of A Book of Cookrye and I wanted to share one of the sauce recipes with you all.  The following is a rough transcription of the recipe.

To Make Sauce for Capons or Turkey Fowles

Take onions and dice them thin, and boil them in fair water until they be boiled dry, and put some of the gravy into them and pepper grore beaten*.

From reading through the recipe I believe you are to thinly dice the onion and boil it, allowing the water to reduce until the onions are nearly dry.  Once the water is reduced add some gravy to the sauce from you birds and a little ground pepper to taste.

I’m planning on trying this recipe for myself in the next week or two.  I’ll let you all know how it goes.

*I believe “pepper grore beaten” means ground pepper but I am very new at working with period recipes.

No related posts.

KASF was really inspiring.  I’ve been rather uninspired project wise lately and it really helped to get my juices flowing.  I’m currently brainstorming a couple of projects and I’m getting back to my long sidelined jacket project.  I am doing some reevaluating of the jacket project though.  My vision of where I’d like it to go has changed a bit and I don’t know whether it’s better to alter to project to suit my vision or to continue to push on to finish it as is.

I’m also considering a website reorg and maybe a new template.  It’s been about two years since the last one and since I usually get this itch every 2 years or so this one is hitting me pretty much right on schedule.

Not much happened with the Flanders gown this weekend.  We helped friends move into their (very beautiful) brand new house on Saturday, Saturday and Sunday I had to go into work to check on a freezer that decided to start acting up Saturday, and I spent Sunday afternoon running a low grade fever, drinking lots of juice, and working on a web design project.  I’ve been thinking though that I would really like to wear the gown to KASF in a couple of weeks (Feb 5th).  Everything is cut out and the interlining has been stiffened so I really think I could finish it up by then if I set some time aside for it.  So my plan for tonight is to make sure everything is ironed and sketch out a rough schedule for myself.

The other thing I’ve been considering over the past week is what to do about my site and my expanding costuming interests.  I’ve been branching out more and more into 19th and early 20th century fashions.  However discussing them and putting them up on “Elizabethan Mafia” seems out of place.  I’d like to continue to keep Elizabethan Mafia focused but at the same time I’d like to start discussing my other costuming endeavors.  Currently I have several options running around in my head:

1. Just keep everything at Elizabethan Mafia.  I’ve spent six years building a following here and this is already how everyone knows me.
2. Make a second site dedicated specifically to 18-20th Century costuming and keep my 14th-16th Century costuming and HMA research at Elizabethan Mafia.
3. Refocus Elizabethan Mafia around my HMA research and move all my costuming to a new site.
4. Build an entirely new site from that would cater to all my interests and redirect traffic to it from Elizabethan Mafia.

Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Am I over thinking it?  Am I crazy?  (Most likely but it would be nice if you all told me no.  )

I know I generally reserve this blog for posts about my projects or my fencing but I’m going through a rather introspective time right now and it’s brought these thoughts around because it’s during these introspective periods that I miss LJ and the community feeling the most I think.

I love WordPress.  The platform is so much better for blogging than LJ’s old platform and I love the control that having a self hosted site allows me.  But I do miss that community feeling LJ had.  I don’t feel like my blog posts are read anymore like they used to be, even with posting links on Facebook, Twitter, and cross posting to LJ.  I don’t feel as in touch with my friends as I used.  I miss that connection and I wonder what I can do to regain it.

Things felt a little closer knit on LJ I think mostly because of the filter features.  You could direct your posts to particular friends and I think that allowed us to feel like we were forming connections and bonds even with people we hadn’t yet had a chance to meet in real life.   I also think the blogging format geared around longer posts allowed us to feel like we were deepening those connections, both new bonds and old.  Facebook’s shorter format feels more superficial.  It’s not that Facebook is bad and LJ was good.  Facebook is a perfectly great site and its set up allows me to stay in touch with far more friends than LJ did.  But the shorter status format makes me feel a bit like I’m missing something.  I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

I don’t know what the answer is.  Mostly I’m just thinking out loud about a few things I’ve had running around in my head lately.  I would like to hear your thoughts though.  Did you use to blog on Livejournal or on a platform like Livejournal?  Have you noticed similar things lately with the growing popularity of platforms like Facebook and Twitter?  What are your thoughts?

So in the spirit of getting back to my unfinished projects I pulled it down last week to get to work on it.  All the pieces had to be re-ironed and the interlinings needed to be basted to the outer layer.  I then assembled the outer layer and the lining and stitched them together.

The next thing I did was assemble the sleeves and prep them for inserting into the gown.  But part of the problem with picking back up old projects that have been sitting on the shelf for a while is that sometimes you run into one of those “what was I doing here?” moments.  The sleeves I had cut ended up being much too large to ease into the armscyes.  This could end up being a bit of a blessing in disguise though.  The sleeves I had originally cut were short.  I had thought about making new long sleeves but in the end decided that I’d just go ahead and use what I had already cut.  Now I get to decide whether I want to alter the short sleeves a bit or just cut new long sleeves.  I think the long sleeves would be more versatile and could be layered with other gowns and surcoats but the short sleeves would be cooler.  Decisions, Decisions.

Anyway, I put up a few pictures in my gallery.  Left to do I have:

1. clip curves
2. press front opening
3. make up new sleeves
4. insert sleeves
5. hand finish front opening and sleeves
6. eyelets
7. hem

Not such a bad list.  Also, for those of you who missed it I have new pictures up of my jacket in addition to the stills I pulled out of the video from last week.  I also finally got my dueling article for the class I taught at June University up on the site.