Adventures and Observations - First, the Adventures. When we last left our intrepid heroine.... (quick aside: I had to look up "intrepid" to make sure I was using the right word. Did you know it meant "resolutely fearless; dauntless"? Cool! That's the word I meant!)

Oh, right. Back to the tale. So I mentioned that I was taking my hand-work for Scott's fighter outfit to practice on Wednesday. I stitched up both cuff hems, and then over dinner on Thursday found out that I stitched the wrong end of the cuffs. *meh* So I knew I needed to rip that out and redo the correct side -- hem the end that sticks out of the sleeve, not the end that gets attached to the sleeve. *sigh* But I did get the neckline cut out correctly for both the main outer layer and the false under collar, and some measurements done for the final hems. Things are still looking good.

On Friday, I went north to Reno with some friends, to attend the Coronation of the King and Queen of the kingdom that covers northern California (plus other areas). My friends here are friends with the new incoming King and Queen there, and my friends here invited folks to travel with them to the northern event. So I got to spend 9 hours on the road with my Baron and Baroness, plus two members of their household (and the guy driving happens to also be one of the guys with whom I play Quidditch). So, still with me? Thomas and Angelina, Rick from their household who plays Quidditch and his son, JT. On the 9-hour drive on Friday, I got tons of sewing done on Scott's outfit. I ripped out the wrong hems, put in the new correct hems, and finished the outer neckline. Then on-site on Saturday I finished the inner false neckline, and on the drive home I finished attaching one of the false cuffs (including ripping out 2/3rds of the first hemline because it drifted a quarter-inch and I just couldn't stand the error), and pinned and started the second cuff.

The folks I rode with and another set of household friends all booked rooms in a hotel in Reno, with the intent of just driving out to the event site for the day. I didn't get a hotel room in time, and so I made arrangements to share a tent with my friend Shosh, who was driving down from school in northern CA. She brought the tent, I brought the blow-up camp bed. She brought the blankets and pillows, I brought the fitted sheets. We set up in the dark on Friday night, then my driving buddies left site to return to their hotel. Shosh drove down to the event with Liz and Kate from school, and they had a tent right next to us. When I woke up in the morning, I found that we'd set up directly next to another friend of mine from down here that moved up there about a year ago. So lovely surprise, I got to spend some time visiting with Michelle and 2 friends from her newly formed household.

The event itself was somewhat unremarkable for me personally, since I didn't know the incoming King and Queen. The site was miserable: a cow pasture, basically, complete with what you normally would expect to find in a cow pasture, plus lots of dust and dirt. And the weather made it more miserable -- hot and very, very windy. We had dust all over us, grit in our eyes, all over our clothes, coating our skin and belongings. It was truly disgusting, and very tiring to be buffeted by constant heavy winds. But if you got completely out of the wind, the heat got to you again.

The coronation itself was pretty okay (if you get over the fact of having an outdoor coronation in the middle of a cow pasture), and then we had to wait out the hot and windy afternoon until fighting for Queen's Champion at sunset. My friends from down south finally quit the site before the fighting even started. I got to enjoy dinner with Michelle, Sebastian and Morgan from her household, plus Shoshi and her two college friends. The seven of us had a lovely dinner out of the back of the U-haul that Michelle rented to get to the event, because it was the perfect wind break. Then Michelle and Sebastian left site to get a hotel room, and the five of us girls went to lounge around on my camp bed, and chattering together for several hours.

In the morning, Rick drove out to pick me up, took me back to the hotel where their household was staying. I got a chance to finally shower (ah! blessed water and soap!), and we all went to breakfast with the new King and Queen. Then the 9-hour drive back home, a lovely quiet dinner, and an evening at home catching up with my roomie.

I keep some projects around the house just for working on at home. I'd been playing around with some alpaca that Bjo gave me for free recently, and it was one of my "living room baskets of projects." So as my roomie and I chatted about our respective weekends, I started carding the alpaca fiber, which is a little bit like using large pet brushes to comb out the hair. After a few brushes full of fiber, combed out neatly, I decided it really should be washed. So my roomie pulled out her plastic shoeboxes for washing fleece, and I washed the combed fiber, and all the uncombed locks of fiber, then lay it out to dry. The combed fiber came out much cleaner than the uncombed locks, which surprised me. I wasn't expecting there to be such a significant difference between the combed and uncombed locks. Now I want to finish the other 5 ounce bag from Bjo, with more photos of the actual washing and combing, to document the whole cleaning process.

Monday evening (still "today" but it's after midnight, so "yesterday" sorta?)... I went over to Rae's house for dinner again. It looks like we're going to try and get together nearly once a week for dinner and projects. Tonight she made yummy turkey kabobs, tzatziki (which is that cucumber, yogurt, dill dressing), rice pilaf, and green beans. The ladies are spoiling me rotten by cooking for me once a week! Yum!

After dinner, Rae worked on a slice of wax used to create pewter cast items, and I continued working on Scott's fighter outfit. I got one more seam on the 2nd cuff done, including only the tiniest 1/16th or 1/8th of an inch drift in the last 1-inch of the seam, but I declared it neglible enough to ignore, and set up the 2nd seam so that both cuffs will be done.

While we worked, we chatted and chatted and chatted about all things artistic and apprentice-like.

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Which is a perfect segue to: Second, the Observations.

One thing that popped into my head after all the conversations this weekend, my own observations and project planning, and my exercise walk with Meala this afternoon, I noticed a major difference between the following two questions:

(1) What arts do you want to be pursuing?
(2) What kind of Laurel would you want to be?

...and perhaps I needed to make those two converge into the same kind of answer.

To translate into some modern (possible) equivalents, (in my personal opinion) I often think of the work I put into an art form as being high-school level work, college bachelor's level work, and finally grad work and PhD work. The beginning level, that kind of skill I might have developed by the end of high school, might be equivalent in the SCA to what's called "Award of Arms" or "AoA" level achievement. You've done well, you're on a great start, you have shown some skill and accomplishment.

That mid-level work, the achievement of the "Grant of Arms" or "GoA" level acknowledgement, (in my mind) is equivalent to completing college-level bachelor's studies, and maybe even dipping into the realm of the graduate student. You're showing a depth of research that's more like college-level papers, you're performing at a higher standard of artistic work, and you might even be a TA who teaches some of the younger students.

Finally, there's the advanced studies and the in-depth publishing for thesis work, that is like pursuing the work of a Laurel. When you graduate with your PhD, if you stay in academia, you're still the newest researcher in your field, and you still have room to expand in further research and publication. So too, a new Laurel isn't at the end of their achievement when they receive their "Patent of Arms" but now they're at that place of high achievement and some acknowledgement that they are truly a master of their art and a knowledgable instructor.

There are probably some people who would agree with this parallel and probably some who would disagree. But this at least gives us a starting point to discuss what I think of, when I consider what kind of effort I want to be putting into my artistic pursuits.

I started my brainstorming lately with lists of the arts I want to be pursuing -- What do I want to work on, and what projects are on my shelves now, vying for my attention. But this morning, I began contemplating "how would I want someone to introduce me, years and years from now?" This past weekend, Thomas and Angelina sometimes introduced me first as "and she's our Chronicler" which means I work on the monthly newsletter for our chapter of the SCA. I wouldn't have thought of myself as the Chronicler first, and it made me giggle a little bit on the inside, that this was the first identity being ascribed to me. Sometimes, one of them would continue the introduction to include other attributes like, "She's also a bard," which also made me giggle a little.

So I began wondering today about how I define my identity. Who do I say that I am? Do I say that I'm primarily someone who works in textile arts? Do I consider myself a singer first, or a bard in general? Do I identify with the websites I work on? Do I think of my household identity, or my character persona? Do I first consider my job as the Royal Scribe to the King and Queen?

And if I were a Laurel someday, what kind of Laurel would I like to be known as? Would I want to be "A Spinning Laurel who also does Bardic performances" or would I prefer to be "A Bardic Laurel who also does quite a bit of Spinning and other Textile Arts..."? Would I want to be known for calligraphy and illumination? Would I want to be known as a Researcher?

Tonwen's achievement as a Laurel is for Research. Some people believe that an apprentice's job is to learn the skills that their Laurel is strongest in, and is teaching them. When I look at all my arts, I know I have a passion for seeking out better research for all of them, whether that's Bardic or Textiles or any other passing fancy. This is one reason I'm completely jazzed about learning what Tonwen can teach me about research. She won't be teaching me how to be a Bard or how to be a Spinner or anything else. She'll be teaching me how to do ridiculously wonderful research (my adjectives), and how to become a better artisan in whatever I might pursue.

She's been quizzed by some people about "what in the world would you be teaching her?" and she answers two-fold: Focus and Research.

Over our projects this evening, we talked (meaning: I babbled non-stop) about all my ideas about focusing my arts down to what would I want to be known for, what matters the most to me, which identity do I prefer, and even which research I would rather delve into and share with others. So oddly enough, even without her direct prompting, I was already starting to focus my brainstorming lists down into my managable "next steps." (Of course, I say that she wasn't directly prompting me to focus more, but she certainly was influencing me that direction already.)

Second, in focusing on which paths I plan to pursue next, I now have a better sense of which research I want to embark on, so that I can improve my personal artistic skills. So I'm really quite jazzed about our project conversations tonight, along with my other brainstorming work, because I have some distinct paths to follow and to which I plan to apply my efforts. I like this very much. *beaming grin*

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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Richard and Uta, in Hawaii, for being good examples of music research put into practice in wonderful ways.