bookmark_borderElevation Items

Our friend Kusunoki Yoshimoto (or “Yoshi” as we call him) who lives in the East Kingdom of the SCA, received a writ for the Order of the Pelican. He’s a pretty good friend of ours, and we camp right next to him at Pennsic. He made Sharon’s crossbow and her first set of bolts, and he helped her figure out the best shooting style for her. He does a lot of service to the archery community in the East and elsewhere, and it was really good to see him recognized.

We were tapped to create a few items for his elevation. Sharon made his elevation garb, which was a full hitatare sugata including undergarments, and his “Pelican Cloak” which was styled as a dobuku coat. I wound up making a silk hata-jirushi banner with his heraldry and his “Cap of Maintenance” which was styled as a hikitate eboshi with ermine spots block-printed on the band.

Silk Banner with Yoshi’s Device
Eboshi of Maintenance

The eboshi was so tall, the King had to stand on a bench to get Yoshi’s Pelican medallion around his neck!

Here is what everything looked like in action:

Yoshi in Vigil, with Banners
Yoshi and Hara in their Pre-Elevation Garb
(Braided embellishments by Forveleth Dundee)
Yoshi During the Elevation
(Printed fabric designed by Morikawa Rei)

It was a wonderful event, and a great elevation. We were so happy for Yoshi’s elevation to the peerage, and to have our work be a part of it. Travel to Bangor, Maine and back was a terrible experience, but the day itself was wonderful.

bookmark_borderMonitor Jitters

This is a technical problem I have been experiencing for some time, but have only just solved. Web searches revealed that a lot of people have this problem, but I was not able to find a solid solution. So, I’m posting my solution here to my blog so that maybe somebody else can find it.

The Setup

I have two external monitors attached to my Windows laptop through a docking station. For a long time, both monitors were identical (Dell S2415H) 24″ 1920×1080 flat screen monitors. Then I saw a larger (Acer EB321HQU) 31.5″ 2560×1440 flat screen monitor on sale for a really good price. The Acer is almost comically large for my desk, especially with it looming over my normal-sized laptop.

Now, both monitors have always been connected to the docking station using HDMI cables, but the docking station only has one HDMI jack and two DisplayPort jacks. I have the Acer monitor connected to the one HDMI jack, and connect the Dell monitor through an HDMI to DP adapter.

The Problem

Video on the Dell monitor “jitters”. Moving windows around creates “ghost” images on the display. The second monitor was basically unusable in this state. Now I thought that the problem was caused by the HDMI-DP adapter, but switching the connections around did not make any difference. The Dell always jittered, even if it was connected directly with the Acer on the adapter.

I did not have this problem when I was using the two identical Dell monitors. I could not figure out what was causing the problem, so I stopped using the Dell monitor with my personal laptop, and connected it full time to my work laptop.

The Solution

Open the Display Settings dialog, and select the jittery monitor. Open the “Advanced display settings” for the jittery monitor, and choose a different frequency from the “Refresh rate” menu. That’s it!

The jitter problem seems to have been caused by a refresh rate mismatch between the two monitors. The Acer recommends a refresh rate of 59.940 Hz, so having the Dell configured for a different rate was a problem.

Syncing the two rates solved the problem. No more jitters!

The Catch

Something about my hardware setup is unable to support the Acer monitor at full resolution with a second monitor. It’s probably a limitation of the video hardware in my laptop. For now, I am back to “just” the one (giant) external monitor. I know, “Qué lástima” she said.

bookmark_borderKichō Curtains

Kichō are curtains that ancient and medieval Japanese nobles used inside rooms as movable partitions. The curtains hang from a stand, so they can be moved around as needed. You can think of them as the ancient version of “pipe and drape” dividers that you often see as trade show booths, but slightly more decorative, and for the home. They differ from other kinds of Japanese curtains in that the stand makes them freestanding and more portable. You will frequently see them in illustrated scrolls as backdrops, or screens to block a figure from view. They largely fell out of favor by the end of the Momoyama period (1573) and were replaced by the more solid shoji and more decorative byobu. Wikipedia actually has a whole List of partitions of traditional Japanese architecture, and you can learn more about differences there.

Anyway, I’ve had kichō on my to-do list for a while. I assembled a working stand a few years ago, and used it to display some projects in the interim, but only got around to constructing the curtains themselves until recently. There is a little more to it than you might imagine. Here’s what I wound up with:

Kicho from the front
Kicho from the back

The white curtain bodies are twill weave silk from Dharma Trading, and the black “streamers” are black lightweight habotai also from Dharma. The curtains (or “katabira“) are double layer. Very often, the katabira would be decorated on the front panel, and plain on the back. I decided to skip the weeks that it would have taken me to decorate the fronts and skip directly to construction. Maybe I will get back to the decoration later. I made each panel by cutting 12-foot long 15-inch wide panels from the 45-inch wide fabric. I gave all of the panels a rolled-edge on the serger to simulate the selvedge that would be present on narrow-loom fabric.

The streamers (or “ribbons” according to Wikipedia) are half panels 15-feet long and 7.5-inches wide. I sewed the half-panels into tubes, turned the tubes inside out, and ironed them flat with the seams down one edge. I tucked in the loose ends and sewed them shut. The streamers needed to be longer because they are supposed to drape over the top and come a bit down the back. The slits for the lacing go all the way through both parts of the ribbons, and both layers of the katabira. I did not want to sew the dozens of buttonholes this would have required, so the slits are just cuts in the fabric that I made with my Clover Button Hole Cutter.

The lacing is basic edo yatsu braid that I made with some cotton yarn that I dyed as part of a group fiber activity back in the Autumn. I twisted up the hanks of yarn so that more dye got to some parts of the yarn than to others. The yarn itself is not super interesting, but I think it makes great pebbled-texture braids. Two lengths of braid lace the panels together, and shorter pieces of braid tie the rod that suspends the curtains (or “curtain rod”, if you will) to the crosspiece (or “te“) of the stand.

The stand itself is made of wood, as you might imagine. The base (or “tsuchii“) is a box with enough room inside to hold 20 to 30 pounds of iron weights. There are holes in the lid and a brace in the bottom to hold the two legs (or “ashi“) upright. The te rests on the tops of the ashi. The te and ashi are made of 6-foot long poplar dowels from the hardware store. The te is secured to the ashi using some custom made brass brackets that secure with brass cotter pins. The ends of the te are also embellished with a little brass. Everything wood is finished in black polyurethane to simulate lacquer.

I’m pretty happy with the way this all worked out. I may or may not make the curtains more interesting. I’d like to add more metalwork to the stand, and there are some problems with stability. A number of people have been talking about these lately, and I’m glad I went ahead and just made them. They should come in handy for defining smaller spaces in larger rooms, and they are much more portable than shoji.

bookmark_border“The Road to Roswell” by Connie Willis

Much of Connie Willis‘ novels can be pigeonholed as “romantic comedies”, where two young people thrown together into a difficult situation manage to overcome adversity and wind up falling in love. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it does make me wonder why none of her books have been made into movies. This kind of energetic romp plays very well with general audiences, and Willis’ “difficult situations” are usually sfnal in nature so they appeal to genre audiences as well.

Can two people find love while traveling through time for the History Department of a major university? Can two people find love while being psychically linked to somebody they dislike? Can two people find love while researching death and the possibility of an afterlife? Can two people find love while finding out the truth about interplanetary aliens on Earth and alien abduction?

That last one, of course is the premise of The Road to Roswell. Our main characters are actually abducted by aliens, but it’s not what you think! Everybody is still on Earth, and they really are on the road, and the road does lead to (and from) Roswell. The cast is what you might expect in any Western: a kidnapped damsel, a criminal on the run, a lying conman, a lonesome cowboy, a dishonest gambler, and a religious fanatic. Most are not played by the stereotype you might expect from that description, however. The criminal on the run is a space alien who resembles a tumbleweed. The fanatic follows the ‘religion’ of UFOlogy and quotes from its sacred texts about abduction and history.

This book is also about communication, and how hard it can be to communicate when it’s not just that you don’t share a language, but you don’t share basic concepts. What is alien, anyway? What is love? How do you tell somebody what you’re looking for and where to find it when you can’t describe it and you’re not sure where you are? This is the kind of thing that Connie Willis is really good at. I saw her speak at an SF conference long ago, and she is literally charming. Her unassuming language and subtle presentation style have a lovely way of suggetsing these deeper concepts bit by bit until suddenly your head is in the right place to really “get it”, youknowwhatimean?

I’ve enjoyed previous books from Connie Willis, and I enjoyed this one. I feel it bogs down a little in the middle, though. It’s part of the story, but even the characters start to get confused about what’s going on and what they are doing. This all pays off in the end, and the pace picks up towards the crashing conclusion where they all live happily (?) ever after (?). When’s the movie coming out?