Connecting to History - There have been many times while spinning yarn or thread, or teaching people about spinning on a drop spindle or on the great wheel, when I've had a moment feeling connected to the history of all the women before me who clothed their families with their spinning. And although I spin and teach spinning and love spinng, I've never been that interested in knitting or weaving. I've (so far) been primarily enamored by that narrow moment of creating thread from fluff, by my own hand. And I happen to enjoy the drop spindle more than the spinning wheel, whether great wheel or sit-down treadle wheel.

Last year for my birthday, Bill bought me No Idle Hands: The Social History of American History. And even though I'm not (yet?) a knitter, I've been enjoying the book immensely. I've also never been much into American History, and sometimes I have to laugh at my lop-sided interest in the history of the middle ages, and notice my lack of interest in the intervening years from then to now. So, today I was reading chapters about the women who knit for the soldiers in the Civil War.

I paused and thought about how I compare to the women of those years. I can hold my own as a spinner, and could easily work for days and weeks on end preparing fiber, spinning, plying (called "doubled and spun again" in some of the accounts of the era), dying, and even embroidery and sewing. But I'm a "child" at knitting and weaving, and cannot imagine what they would think of my life and my skills (or lack thereof) compared to what they endured. I try to picture being lifted out of time and dropped off then, and how hard I would have to scramble to catch up. At the same time, I'm 40, single, no children -- I'm the definition of "spinster" at the moment, which makes me laugh, when I realize I like spinning the best for my textile arts.

Alternately, sometimes I wonder about what I might do if the world were to change drastically in this day and age. What if we were without electricity for years and decades at a time? How many skills could I reproduce and survive on? I could easily help a post-apocalyptic society making thread and yarn, and even comb and clean fleeces, with the tools in my current arsenal. It would be a stretch to figure out how to make soap, but I think the recipes might be in some of the books in my library. I could help teach kids to read, write, and learn from my library, and easily contribute to a hastily-gathered community rebuilding education. Someone else would have to be the expert at finding safe water sources, but then I'd be able to help cook and clean and keep our kitchens running.

But knitting and weaving? I would have so much scrambling to do, to catch up to the simple skills of just 100-150 years ago. True, I have knitting needles already on hand, and actually I currently own a HUGE loom, so outfitting our apocalyptic compound would be fairly easy. But it made me think that next I want a (non-electric) treadle sewing machine. Every now and then I look at photos of third-world communities, where some charity foundation has equipped a women's co-op to make goods for sale, and they've outfitted them with non-electric sewing machines. This is a tool lacking from many SCA homes that I know of -- we all have electric sewing machines, and plenty of hand-sewing tools. But do we have that intermediate technology in-between? Would we know where to get a foot-treadle or hand-crank sewing machines? On the other hand, I know we have folks who can make needles for hand-sewing.

I'm finally beginning to wonder about my love for making yarn and string and thread that never gets made "into something" unless I give it away. And the women in history who's lives and families' lives depended on them are starting to affect me. Next month, several of us are getting together for knitting lessons with double-pointed needles (called DPNs), specifically to look at knitting socks or stockings. I'm personally hoping to knit knee-high stripped socks for myself, someday.

My Weekend - Saturday and Sunday, our Barony hosted "Collegium" -- which is to say we held classes and workshops for 8 hours on Saturday and 6 hours on Sunday, in several categories, for all the SCA folks in our Southern CA region (and adjacent groups). This year, a special track was hosted called the "Inter-Kingdom Intensive Needlework Symposium" (IKINS) which I would have *loved* to attend, but I'm saving it for a future year.

Several times, people have asked me to "teach what I do in music and bardic arts." It was very confusing at first to even figure out what it is that I do right now in music. But with some brainstorming with Jeff and Adrienne, we narrowed it down to Vocal Performance (and how to refine a performance) and Vocal Song Composition. The Performance class was easier for me to develop, and I taught it in January at Bardic Collegium last year, revised it again for Nordwache Academia in August this year, and condensed it a litle bit for the second half of the course I taught at this Collegium this weekend. Song Composition required much more preparation and thought. But I offered a course in "Song Composition and Performance" this weekend, and I'm fairly satisified with my first presentation of the material. The most common question I hear is, "I want to do music in the SCA, where do I start?"

Just that question alone makes me think. "Where do I start?" Well, where do we start with costuming? Where do we start with armor? We start with things like lists of key phrases, categories, places, trends, and fashions. We start with the materials of the trade. And then we give people some research tools to look into their favorite clothing or armor, so they can start making decisions about what they would like to pursue.

So I focused on the research and resources available to the composer and performer, including the vast material of music history and poetry history published. I outlined some key forms, periods, and locations to give people some tips on what to look for in the research. I also touched on the fact that there really are some period records of Middle Eastern music in history. It's not just Western music that has all the written materials available in the research.

After an overview of the history of music in our SCA periods and locations, I went through some writing and composing tips. There are some things you can do to jot down a tune without knowing tons of things about music notation. And I also boiled down some of my composition methodology to "Imitation, Simplification, and Repitition." There are ways to take existing music from history and put new lyrics to them, or take existing lyrics and create new music in the style of historical tunes, and to sample small tiny phrases, embellish them, and take them in other directions to create original music.

Finally, I closed with the main points from my Vocal Performance class, blended with all the composition and research information we'd just discussed, and wrapped it all up with question and answer, application, and ideas for what to promote and encourage in our group, and among our fellow musicians.

I had wonderful students in the class, and am quite pleased with the first run. I look forward to developing the course content further, and working through the techniques myself, to build up my composition portfolio. I definitely have some ideas about the music I want to write between now and a year from now.

Besides teaching, I attended several classes over the weekend. The "Period Drumming" course was not as advanced as I thought it would be, but I did learn some new patterns I didn't know before, and I think I was able to help some of the western-trained musicians make western notations to match the doumbek notation of "DUM-tek-teka." I missed Mary's class about Poetry forms (darn!) but she gave me a copy of her hand-out, for which I was very thankful. I really enjoyed Lot's class on the use of "Contrast in Performance," which focused mostly on the storyteller or poet, but had very applicable material for the singer. And sadly, Rajid's course on the Arabic Maqam (middle-eastern "scales" and their treatments) was moved in the schedule opposite my teaching, so I'll have to meet up with him later to learn about maqam.

Saturday night dozens of us went to dinner at Mongolian BBQ, and then returned to the site for dancing and live music. I joined the instrumentalists on stage, and accompanied the recorders and crumhorns by playing on my doumbek (middle eastern drum). I have a very melodic drum, with a very deep bass sound from its natural skin head and metal body, and have learned to do some very ornamented dance patterns to accompany the Western music. I think it works fairly well, and several of the instrumentalists have appreciated it. I hope it works out there on the dance floor, for the dancers and leaders.

Sunday afternoon, however, was not as nice as Saturday. First, I'd brought my lunch, but forgotten to bring a drink. So I thought I'd just quickly run over to the grocery store for a soda, and come right back. Unfortunately, a driver backed into my car in the parking lot as we were both pulling out of our spots. Her car was fine (just some paint transfer on the bumper), but she dented the "quarter panel" (is that right?) on the passenger side of my car (behind the door, right before the wheel). The car is still drivable, but I spent my whole day dealing with phone calls to the insurance company, the adjustors on both sides of the equation, and a visit to one auto body shop for photos and a possible estimate. Unfortunately, I have to go to a different body shop later this week, and use the other lady's insurance adjustor, rather than mine. Good news: They've admitted full liability for the other driver, and they will repair my car and pay for a rental while mine is in the shop. But *sigh* I still have to deal with the issue, and I still have to stay up late tonight, to finish work from the office. But it gives me an opportunity to finally record hours and hours of Summer Olympics down from Tivo to VCR tape, and finally delete them off my Tivo.

To add insult to injury, by the end of the afternoon on Sunday, I had a low-grade headache and low-grade nausea from my hair extensions. I think I pinned it too tightly, or stabbed my scalp funny with the bobby pins, so I couldn't even "maintain the illiusion" through the end of the event: I had to take my hair down while still on site and still in my costuming.

On the drive home, Marcos called to see if I wanted to get ramen soup from a ramen restaurant with him. And although I'd originally just wanted to get home and hide in the dark, and I'd just turned down going out with Meala and Kythera, the idea of soup suddenly sounded like the perfect food for low-grade nausea. So I drove back 3 miles, parked at his apartment, and he drove me, his roomie, and his girlfriend over to the Ramen place. I'd never had "restaurant quality ramen" before, and all four of us were completely impressed with how it's world's apart from the 39 cent version from college. The bowls were HUGE, and it was hard to find any selection that didn't have pork, beef, or crab in it. But I did find a seaweed and veggies option, and really loved it. Back at Eric's place, we watched Dr. Horrible on their very large flat screen. And just waiting out the headache, having soup, and waiting out the oppressive sunlight made it all the more possible to finish the drive home. By the time I was home, I finally felt better.

Now, I've got hours of office work and website work to finish. But that should go nicely with some of my other finished tasks from the day. I made all the car arrangements with the insurance. I finished the painting for a small gift project that had been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. I finished repairing the straps on my yellow woven belt pouch. And I'm planning to finish the rest of the room laundry issues, before morning.

Oh! And I almost forgot: Huge thank you's to several people bringing birthday presents to Collegium for me. I got a HUGE music-staff journal from Tonwen, an AMAZING book on the Songs of the Women Trouveres from Medb Renata, a book on "Uppity Women of the Middle Ages" from Soraya, and the funniest cat-shaped bottle of wine from Oliver and Kate. I still need to finish some thank you cards and get them in the mail, so that's a looming unfinished project this week.

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Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: New friends, like Eric's roomie Jeff