Sat Sep 24 - Collegium was fantastic. I was originally hoping to be in Mariam's knitting class, but it was full by the time I enrolled. So I went to Thomas's "Bardic Primer" or "So you want to be a bard and you're not sure where to start." And thankfully, I wasn't the only person from the Bard of Caid competition who was there. But the class overall was a wonderful discussion about the issues in front of us and how to deal with them.

The second class I went to was another one where I've been meaning to go for some time now. Astridr has been teaching a variety of "Fiber Preparation" classes for several years, and this one was most specifically about how to prepare a fleece, skirt it and wash it, so that you have good clean wool for spinning. We got to pick through three fleeces to prepare them for washing, and take samples home for our own reference. Those in the class who are going to be there again on Sunday have to do homework and actually wash most of their samples before tomorrow's class.

For lunch, five of us all piled into Aliskye's SUV and headed down the street for Taco Bell together. I think it was just last year that Collegium was at the same location and a bunch of us walked to this very same Taco Bell. It was a weird sense of deja vu, without the long sweaty walk. *grin*

My afternoon first class was with Brianna, a course called "Coats and Kaftans." Besides some wonderful handouts with patterns, the main point of the class was to learn how to "block" the pattern or size of a person, and then build your clothing patterns off the block. Elisheva was in class with me, and she stayed past the two-hour class block and skipped going to her last class. In the extra two hour spill-over, she actually made two blocks and patterns, once off herself and once off someone else in the class, so I can't wait to work with her and we'll do the same for everyone in the Crimson Spade household. She has some great costume plans in mind for her dad first, but just the "how to make a block" is so incredibly important that I still want to pick her brain a little bit. Brianna's measuring method reminds me a lot of my old measuring method onto graph paper, so it really clicked for me.

Finally, I left Brianna's when class was "officially" scheduled to be over, to head over to the "Weight Training and Endurance for Fighters" class, being taught by Guillaume and Gameel. They gave us each a heavy piece of thick steel rebar and sets of exercises to performs, plus just discussed workout issues in general. My roomie was in the class with me, and she's now very inspired to teach her *own* conditioning class next Collegium, to discuss the issues she felt were left out of this class.

After the whole day of classes, a large group of us all went out to dinner together. It was a bit of a mix-up at first, since our directions were off, several of us got separated, and then the restaurant we first chose was a 1-2 hour wait. But there was a Marie Callendar's across the street, with no wait, so we headed back across traffic and had a lovely dinner. It was Saul, Ben, and Erika, Giacomo, Marcos, Lot and Cat, Mina, myself, and two new folks I've only met recently, Oliver and his wife (who's name escapes me at the moment). We all had a great time and then scattered to the four winds as everyone had different homes to go to and errands to run.
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Recently Listening to: Poe "Haunting"