My sweetie answers her writ to the Order of the Laurel tomorrow. Here is the silk banner I made for her!
Argent, a brown rabbit sejant affronty proper within eight irises in annulo purpure slipped and leaved vert
This banner is made with “Dye-na-flow” paint on habotai silk. I pre-treated the silk with “No-Flow” sizing to make it react to ink more like paper than fabric, so I could just trace the artwork as if it was an illustrated scroll. I’ve had mixed results with this method, but I think it came out wonderful this time around. The suspensory braid is a 16-strand braid in white silk, actually a length of braid left over from Duchess Sir Morgen’s elevation garb.
Rounding out the projects that I will get around to finishing in 2021 was a kind of large one. I made five of these large nobori banners with the mon of Clan Yama Kaminari.
Kaminari Nobori #1
I would have made only four, but four is an unlucky number in most of Asia, so I made an “extra” one which is a little narrower and which I will probably keep for myself. The clan already has four nobori, so this will make 8 we can put on display in camp.
The banners are all rip-stop nylon, and about 12 feet tall. The ones for clan are 20 inches wide, and the extra one is about 17 inches wide. The nylon is all serged to avoid fraying edges. The red band is about 6 feet tall, and the black bands are 2 feet and 4 feet tall. The “tabs” around the edges are about 1.25″ wide and start out ten inches long. I cut all the tabs from extra rip-stop so that I didn’t have to buy ribbon or webbing.
The mon is done by cutting the white pieces out of fabric, attaching them to the red fabric like an applique (that is, satin-stitching around the edges), then cutting out the red fabric behind the white.
A good friend of ours, Mistress Master Baroness Illadore de Bedegrayne, was being elevated to to Order of the Pelican in the SCA, so I decided she needed a new banner to display during her pre-elevation vigil (which was not really a vigil, but there was a tent, so banners were needed).
Banner for Illadore de Bedegrayne
This banner was made with acrylic fabric paints on blue linen. The unicorn rampant in the center was one of the more difficult charges I have painted, and the repeating fleur-de-lis border was challenging.
Stencils
I printed out a stencil for the Unicorn. That helped me to get the outline and fill that in with white paint. Then, I cut the stencil apart to help me get the internal lines of the design in the right places.
Stamp
I made a stencil for the fleurs-de-lis, too (you can see it in the “Stencils” photo), but it turned out to not work so well with the dauber, due to how non-flat the fabric is after painting with the white base coat. I wound up cutting a small stamp from some craft foam, and that worked great. I still needed the daubers that I bought. One became the handle for the stamp, and the other was used to apply a nice coat of paint to the stamp for transfer to the banner. This work so much better than the stencil that I will certainly use this technique again for the annoying repeating patterns that Europeans seem to be enamored of.
Back in February, I was elected the new Baronial Minister of Arts and Sciences. I decided that this office needed a new banner to display at events, so I made one.
BMDL A&S Banner
This hata-jirushi style banner is made with acrylic fabric paints on navy blue linen. I’m not super happy with the way the comet came out, but I think the A&S badge is perfect. I should get some glow-in-the-dark paint to do the candle flame and the comet. That would look awesome, I think.
