Out of Avalon

February 18th, 2008 by Ascelyn

After many months of on-and-of searching for a usable template, I finally found one I love. See the main page for an idea of how it will look. The template was for a wine company, but once I have pictures to put up it will be a piece of cake to insert them in the proper places. I’m not sure what I’ll use to replace the bottle of wine clipart, but it will be easy to just match the background to the yellow-ish color currently there.

Then I just need toys to sell.

Aaron’s birthday is in early April, so I want to make him one of the bag kits I’ve been thinking about doing. It will be a nice little bag with several toys inside. For him, I’m thinking about a leather ball, a Viking horse, a stuffed animal or Pict (it’s an action figure, not a doll–really!), and a little hobby horse. Or maybe, if I’m being extra cool, I’ll scale down one of those collapsible chairs that all the cool grown-up have so he can sit in that at events instead of his little camp chair. Or maybe, I’ll make a linen cover for his little tent so we don’t even have to throw a blanket over it in the hall!

Right. In any case, I plan to photograph anything I make him and use it as web site fodder. I’m also hoping to talk his parents, Violante and Miguel, and Cathy into letting me use their kids as models in exchange for lots of cute pictures.

Regarding the bags, I want to make lots of bags with “Ascelyn’s Treasures” or whatever I come up with embroidered on the lower right-hand corner and whatever symbol I use painted or appliqued on the front. Inside will be four or so toys. I want to have two or maybe three different sets for different ages, and the contents can vary slightly (doll vs. stuffed animal, hobby horse vs. Spike, etc.). I’d love to be able to find or convince someone to make some child-sized feast gear, as well. It’s documented and totally period!

As for the site, I’m not sure yet what I’ll do with pages beyond the front.  I have several ideas, all of which I could easily do; I’m just not sure yet which will win out in the end.  I feel pretty lame using a template of someone else’s creation, but apparently my once l33t web coding skills are now completely archaic.  Granted, the last time I built a new site for someone as opposed to just making regular updates was when my mother started doing legal nurse consulting.  That was back around 2000.

On the other hand, I’ve finally given up on Gallery for various reasons.  Not sure if it’s the program’s fault or the fact that my hosting provider is being screwy, as always.  Either way, starting the next time I have unfiltered net access to get on vDeck, I’ll be installing Plogger.  My Honduras pictures are uploading via FTP as we speak (using the form for Gallery was taking forever), and the rest will follow when I’m on my personal laptop.

I’m also thinking about making a subdomain for the kids at church.  It will have reviews of what we’ve been covering in class, games, and a password-protected photo gallery.  I’ll give the password to the kids and their parents, but the photos won’t be available to every creep on theweb.

Think that’s it for the moment.  More later.

September 10th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Went down to the demo at Ed’s church on Saturday and helped out in the food tent.  Nothing too exciting, but it was nice to get to see some people from the barony.  Jason wasn’t overly happy that I was gone all day again, but the alternative would have been sitting there alone while the band practiced or some other such mundanity.  He finally admitted (hooray!) that he’s interested in learning more about history, but doesn’t want to “play dress up” in garb.  If we get a local group going up here, it shoudl work out fine.  He can learn and come to workshops and practices, but doesn’t need to come to events unless he feels like it.  I’d really like it if he’d get into the SCA, though.  He was even looking at tennis rackets yesterday as something we could do together–or not, since the sudden stops and sharp turns involved in tennis are exactly the reason I can’t play soccer anymore.  The SCA, though, is something both of us could certainly do!

Enough of that.  On to the toys.

The first three felt balls I’d made are dry and looking good.  I’ve figured out a vast improvement for the newer ones which makes them quicker to felt and more pleasing to the eye.  Originally, I’d tried covering the white wool that I used inside entirely with the colored wool from the very beginning.  The edges of the colors would never quite felt to one another this way, and the surface wasn’t entirely smooth and interlocked.  I fray the edges colored wool pieces a lot more now, and pull the whole piece of roving apart so much that you can see through it.  When the wool starts to felt and the giant mess of loose wool shrinks down into a ball, that net-like layer of colored wool becomes so dense that you can’t see the white through it.  It also make the outer surface much smoother.

I picked up a box of cheap golf balls, a pack of tennis balls, and some little jingle balls to felt around.  In a way, I feel rather bad using a modern ball at the core, but it uses so much less wool that I can keep the finished toys much more inexpensive.  I don’t plan to make many really, truly authentic toys.  I do plan to make lots of toys that look just like ones I can document to period, but with shortcuts.  I want to be a source of inexpensive toys that are to all appearances like those medieval children would have played with.  Granted, I’m not a parent yet, but if I had a child, I’d rather him play with a big felt ball than a plastic Sponge Bob one from Wal-Mart.  With all the other expenses involved in raising kids, I’d be just fine with having a tennis ball in the middle if it saves me money.  The parents I’ve spoken with so far agree with me, and I’ll have some things available that are made with completely period techniques.  It’s going to cost you, though, if you expect me to hand-sew you a doll made of vegetable-dyed linen and stuffed with wool.  Don’t come crying to me, either, when your three-year-old drops it in the mud or gets a hole in it after you paid so much..

Er, right.  The balls I made yesterday.  There were two large ones (maybe 5 1/2″ diameter), one with a bell inside, one set of three juggling balls (golf balls inside), and  five smaller (3-4″) balls, but a total of eleven.  With the three from before, that makes fourteen finished so far.  Not too bad!  I just kept working with them while listening to Jason practice the songs for service at Cathy’s church in a few weeks.  No thought necessary!

My scroll saw finally came in.  It even comes with a nice stand, which I hadn’t expected.  I have yet to set it up and try it out, but I’m putting that off as a reward to myself once I get some cleaning done.

September 6th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Well, I’m now running of off Firefox, at least part-time. I like it–I’ve always liked it–but the same things that irritate me about the new versions of IE have always driven me crazy about Firefox. Namely, I don’t like the way the toolbars are displayed up top. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, though, and it’s still a million and a half times better than IE’s new setup.

The best news of all is that the site runs just fine so far in Firefox. Granted, there’s not much to the site yet, and Wordpress seems to have been designed by alternative browser lovers, but it’s still good to know it all works out. Now I just need to get the rest of the site up and running. I have plenty ideas, and if I had the graphics I want I could organize them just bloody fine in HTML, but CSS is still beyond me. Maybe getting over my annoyance and actually trying to learn the new stuff would help.

I’m hoping to meet my original set-up-shop date and sell at Holiday Faire in November. The problem is, I also intend to watch Aaron. Maybe if I can “borrow” a wee little tiny bit of a corner of Eadric’s….but no, that’s just kind of rude to ask. I might ask it anyway at some point, but I do feel pretty bad about it. I probably still won’t have much by then, though. Balls, dolls, stick ponies and other animals, games, and Viking horses, at least.

I made three felt balls last night One is dark blue, lighter blue, and yellow/orange, another is silver and dark blue, and the last is bright green and orange, with a tiny bit of leftover blue. At least they’re something I can do while sitting on the floor watching Invader Zim.

Once I have a few days on my hands, I want to do at least a half dozen dolls assembly-line style. Cut all the pieces, sew them, stuff them all, do all the hair, sew all the faces, make all the chemises and undershirts, and then finally get around to designing the clothes. As I find designs that work, I’ll trace them and make a basic pattern so I don’t have to custom fit each outfit. I wasted a ton of time and muslin working out patterns on Their Majesties’ dolls, and don’t want to have to do that ever time.

As for the wooden toys, my scroll saw should be in today. Hooray!

Now I just need to find a good source of leather….

August 20th, 2007 by Ascelyn

Due to circumstances, I’ve decided to make cloth dolls the first of my toys. This is owed mostly to the facts that a) I’m going to be giving super-spiffy king and queen dolls (with appropriate tabards!) in the gift basket from Highland Foorde for Coronation, and b) the lovely Mistress Violante said she liked the little doll I made in a Pennsic class, so I promised her two bigger, nicer ones for her daughters. Felt balls are on their way as soon as I can find an inexpensive, preferably local source of wool, and wooden toys are coming as soon as I can buy or borrow a saw. Hurray!

Someday, I hope to make good enough toys to be able to merchant them within the SCA. Right now, I just hope to make them of enough quality that I won’t feel guilty embarrassed them away! I’d really rather give them away anyway, but that gets expensive, so I hope that perhaps selling some will help me feed my habit of handing them out. I have quite a list of plans for my little booth, one of which involves cookies. I’m hoping to maybe start a little savings account that I can direct deposit a few dollars a paycheck into in order to cover the starting expenses, such as a saw and some materials.

Adam, mentioned above, was my first attempt at my newly-sketched doll pattern. He was…interesting. Either his arms need to be longer or his torso and legs shorter, though it’s not so painfully obvious once he’s clothed. I might want to make his neck a bit wider, as well. His hair is rather disgustingly raggedy. My sewing machine (yes, I generally machine sew things…hiss, boo, whatever) was giving me fits about using paper underneath, and the yarn tended to move about if I didn’t. I’m sure I’ll get better as time goes by, however. I also need to figure out how to do a decent drawstring or gather so that his pants can be taken on and off, but will stay on in between times.

All in all, he’s a sweet enough little fellow. I wouldn’t want to give him away to anyone whose opinion I respected, but I’m sure his younger brothers and sisters will be much more appealing to the eye. They’ll also be made, at least for now, out of a beautifully soft cotton flannel that was on sale at the fabric store, but cheap muslin’s always good for trials!