sca – Page 3 – Nothing In It

Indian Silk Kosode

Posted on 2021.06.042021.06.04 by Elliott Evans

Basically as soon as Sweetie and I had reached full immunity following our second COVID-19 inoculations (it’s not really a vaccine, you know), we went and visited my parents in NJ. They still live where I grew up in NJ, and although we did not want to go into NYC to visit fabric stores, I decided to search around the area to see what might have become available in the 30+ years since I left. Sure enough, the large presence of immigrants from Southeast Asia in my home town had resulted in some great fabric stores catering to their tastes, including one just 15 minutes from my parents’ house, called “Fabric Guy“. I was looking for some figured white silk for another project, but also wound up buying some of this lovely medium-weight silk brocade.

I suddenly decided that I needed a fancy kosode, because who doesn’t need a new fancy kosode every once in a while? One difficulty with the project is that the gold metallic threads for the flower buds (or whatever they are) are pretty much just behind those graphics. Cutting the fabric released hundreds of little whiskers, and I realized that wearing the kosode would break off more of those and they would get into everything else. The solution was to add a lining to the plan.

I had some light-weight habotai silk in my stash, so I used that. I’ve made lined garments before, so this was not alien territory for me, but it has been a while. The trick, for those who don’t know it, is to leave closing the neckband for the very last step. That enables you to attach the sleeve linings to the body lining easily by pulling those seams to the outside of the garment. This silk was so light that keeping it still enough to sew was something of a challenge, but it came out OK, I think.

Sycamore Medallions

Posted on 2021.04.192021.04.19 by Elliott Evans

When you receive an award in the SCA, you usually receive a scroll to hang on your wall, and a medallion or other favor to wear on your person. Many of my braids are donated to the Barony or Kingdom to become cords for medallions. It is quite a treat for me to walk around at events and see my cords worn by some of the SCA’s most talented and dedicated members. I have done a number of embroidered “belt favors” for awards, but a long time ago I bought a few packages of “frame charms” on clearance at the craft store, and I have been meaning to make some medallions ever since.

I tried making a medallion for the Aethelmearc‘s “Order of the Sycamore” using actual sycamore leaves, but even though I used the tiniest leaves I could find they were still too big for the charms. Recently, I sat down to hand paint some paper inserts for the charms, and I am pretty happy with the results. At some point I will donate these to the Kingdom and I hope they will be bestowed on some talented artisan.

Award Medallions for Aethelmearc’s Order of the Sycamore

The Order of the Sycamore is our Kingdom’s order of merit for the Arts and Sciences. These medallions are hand painted using Japanese watercolors on Hosho paper. The frame charms are “antique brass”, but the crystals on the front are just plastic.

Each painting is only an inch in diameter, so it is difficult to get enough detail on the leaves to identify them as sycamore leaves. I have some digital scans of an actual sycamore leaf that I was able to shrink down, print out, and trace so that at least the shape would be vaguely accurate.

Return of the Brushwork

Posted on 2021.03.022021.02.11 by Elliott Evans

These three scroll blanks are traced from a frame captured from “The Tale of Princess Kaguya” a 2013 animated film Studio Ghibli. This film is beautiful, and has a large number of beautiful images in it.

This modern animated film is based on an anonymous 10th-century folk tale called “Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”. It follows the life of a mysterious baby girl who is found in a shining bamboo stump and raised to be a princess by a poor childless couple.

For almost a decade following its release, this was the most expensive Japanese film ever produced, possibly due to the art style that is based on the Yamato-e style of old Japanese illustrated scrolls (emaki). In 1999, director Takahata published a book called “From a Painting” in which he explored traditional Japanese art and its ties to his animation.

In this image, the devoted maidservants of the Princess ready her cart for travel.

This one, I think I laid the color on a bit heavy. It’s vibrant as heck, but you can’t tell that the maid’s gowns are four different colors.

This one’s a bit lighter, but still too heavy. I tried a different green on the cart, and embellished it with bamboo leaves the way it is in the film, though.

This one is so much lighter, and you can really see the different hues on the robes. I’m starting to get the hang of using really watery mixes of paint to wash color into the paper. The paper is super-absorbent, so you need a light touch to keep from creating blobs of color. Super happy with this one.

Old Brushwork

Posted on 2021.02.162021.02.02 by Elliott Evans

It seems that I did this copy of a portrait from the Zuishin Teiki emaki back in June of 2019, but never bothered to scan it in.

This emaki (illustrated scroll) presents portraits of the members of the Imperial Guard Cavalry, and is representative of the highly realistic “documentary” style of emaki that flourished in the Kamakura period.

It is interesting because although this emaki is from the time period when the black-and-white hakubyou style was the dominant expression of Yamato-e, it has light washes of color on the clothing of the rider and the tack of the horse.

I have exaggerated the coloring on this copy, but left the horse pure white.

More Brushwork

Posted on 2021.02.092021.02.02 by Elliott Evans

Next, I decided to copy another image from Sesshu‘s “Long Scroll of Landscapes”. Sesshu is one of my favorites, and I bought book about the Long Scroll when I visited the Tokyo National Museum during my first trip to Japan (for the TV show) in 2016. They have an excellent bookstore in the TNM, but I knew that I didn’t have a lot of room for books flying back, so I just bought this one. Anyway, the copies:

This first one is done primary with black ink lines, then some shading in paint (mostly gray) to simulate the light ink washes that Sesshu was great at and I am not.

For this one, I added a little bit of color, mostly from my smaller set of sumi watercolors. I’ve done this kind of thing before, and I really like the effect this produces. It’s less traditional than the pure ink style that Sesshu used, but I like it anyway.

For this last one, I used entirely paint and no ink. Even the black lines a re black paint instead of ink. I was trying out some of the color variations in my larger set of sumi watercolors, some of which I had never used before. The overall effect is a little impressionistic, but I like the way some of the background washes came out.

Picking Up the Brush

Posted on 2021.02.022021.02.05 by Elliott Evans

I was recently inspired to start painting SCA scroll blanks again, like I did (gulp!) six years ago. My first recent efforts were these, traced from a photo I took of some Azalea blooms in Sharon’s garden.

Original images are all about 8.5″x5.5″ in size. These are all done with Sumi ink and watercolors on 9″x12″ hosho paper. I’m still in love with my “Kolinsky small” brush from Kuretake. Preserve the kolinsky!

The third picture is probably the least “medieval Japanese” of all these, but I think it’s the most attractive. It is difficult to get good shading and depth in watercolor, and I’m just not good enough yet. The outline form is a little easier to achieve.

Mulberry Andon

Posted on 2020.11.152020.11.15 by Elliott Evans

I just completed another lantern for the “six lanterns” project. The frame of this one is made out of mulberry wood. I had a small plank of this that Mr. Arimoto gave to me probably about seven years ago, and it seemed like a good project to use it on.

Of course, with the paper on it like that, you can barely see any of the wood. The fibers in this plank were very rough and wavy, but in the places where my plane got a good shaving, the surface is super-nice.

I rough-milled the sticks from the plank using my band saw, then hand planed them down to 3/4″ square rods. There really wasn’t enough wood in the plank to make it entirely from mulberry. To compensate, I made some of the stretchers a little shorter than normal, and used dowel joinery instead of my usual mortise and tenon joinery. This was a little easier, since it meant cutting short lengths of dowel instead of cutting 16 tenons, but it meant drilling twice as many mortises, half of them into the ends of stretchers. I could not have done it without my drill press.

Anyway, it joins the other three lanterns (oak, maple, and cherry) in the lantern box.

New Banner

Posted on 2020.09.132020.09.13 by Elliott Evans

My old shibori-dyed personal banner is getting a little faded, and my silk banner is too delicate to hang outside in the rain, so I decided to make a durable banner that I can mistreat.

It’s 15 inches wide and 6 feet long of cotton duck fabric in this wonderful deep-yellow color. The black parts of the design are painted on with Jacquard Textile Color, with details on the bunny in gold Jacquard Neopaque fabric paint. The textile color is a really thick pigment type paint, that doesn’t forma film the way the acrylic Neopaque does.

I made a simple 8-strand suspensory braid in some polyester yarn, so that I won’t have to worry about it, either.

White Kosode 2020

Posted on 2020.08.222020.08.21 by Elliott Evans

I had meant to leave this year’s white kosode half-finished, so I could use it as a demonstrator for a class I was going to teach at Pennsic on kosode construction. Instead of leaving it to fester while we’re waiting to see if there will be a Pennsic next year, I decided to complete it so that I could wear it if we ever happen to have an SCA event ever again.

Gosh that all sounds pessimistic, I know, but there it is. Really, I’m much more optimistic about the future of the SCA than that. I think we will have to reconsider what makes an event and how we run them, but I’m sure we will have events in the future. They might just be very different from the kind of events we’ve had in the past, though.

Anyway, this year’s kosode, in white ramie. I’ve already made two kosode from the white ramie I ordered a couple of years ago. When it became time to make my 2020 kosode, I thought about getting some new fabric, but I realized I still had plenty of this terrific 150 gram ramie linen from Morex Fabrics, so why not use it? The pattern is my standard men’s kosode method, starting from 14.5″ panels. For my technically-minded friends, I continue to use half-panel overlaps and three-layer collars.

Baronial Belt Favors

Posted on 2020.08.08 by Elliott Evans

I would have tried to get these done before Pennsic, but since Pennsic was cancelled for this year due to nobody wanting to share a campground with 10,000 other people from all over the world, I procrastinated.

These were all machine embroidered onto some nice heavy golden yellow cotton duck fabric, and display the Baronial comet along with “Salve Accolens” (“Hello Neighbor”), the Baronial motto. Each is about six inches wide, and 18 inches long (they are doubled over in the photo). You can see I tried out a couple of different typefaces before deciding on this classy French Script, and if you look closely you can also see that I tried out some of the dozens of decorative top-stitching patterns that are available on my sewing machine but that I almost never use.