guenievre | Entries tagged with kasf

harleenquinzell and I were talking the other day - perhaps Friday? and I spent a large amount of time kvetching about how my lack of planning combined with 12th Night and Ymir had led to a 3rd year in a row with out a Pentathlon entry for KASF. (2008 I displayed random food from the 2 feasts I was doing in 6 weeks that KASF fell in between, 2009 I went and schmoozed and judged and displayed nothing). This was not the first time I've expressed this particular complaint; however, everyone ELSE I mentioned this to said "Be sane, you don't have time to put something together".

Enter Livia, who was planning on putting together something fairly quickly because she's crazy like that.

Crazy is contagious. As is the realization that I *do* have a couple of projects that I put a reasonable amount of research into already done.

So....

Entry 1: Heraldic Silk Houppelande. Done (might go back and tweak the attachment of one sleeve) and docs done (pending a few comments from the gallery). Yay!

Entry 2: Coral paternoster. Done, need to iron tassel and do docs.

Entry 3: Wheat pudding - Well, the recipe's picked... and I have all the comparative sources - so we'll call that half done.

Entry 4: Another food from the same manuscript - still deciding on this one.

Entry 5: Painted silk banner - this one's gonna be fun - I'm using the silk painting techniques in Cennini just to see how they work - I suspect that it won't flow at ALL, but may still be attractive...

10 days left...

You may note that that tends to be a common theme of "When G actually writes LJ entries". Anyway, I had a fabulous time at KASF after riding up with

galeran and

splagxna - conversation was lovely in both directions, although I was a little discombobulated for the first little while I was at the event (I mean, it took me like 20-30 minutes just to get dressed and my hair up, I think) eventually the sleep dep wore off a bit, I got things set up, and I had a good time geeking about the effects of fish sauce on food (it's a natural source of glutamates, lots more information here if you're curious) and convincing people that pickled tilapia was tasty.

And I got decent feedback on my Ymir documentation, though I kept waiting for the East German judge to show up (Anyone? Bueller? maybe EGJudge is on LJ instead?)... now I just have to write up stuff for the St. Catherine's tourney. I'm doing several dishes from Le Recuil, haven't entirely decided *which* ones (I have favorites, but I'm trying to make a coherent and appropriate supper out of them rather than just random dishes, and I'm still trying to track down exactly how many dishes and in what assortment that will be.)

Meanwhile back to the photoshopping... the graphic design stuff is the *fun* part of my job, so why I am procrastinating? (Oh, right, because I can't stand the sales rep this is for... yay passive-aggressiveness...)

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: waiting to go home and sew...
Current Music: my coworker's heater that she runs CONSTANTLY

Now that I'm done with my documentation...(note the time stamp).

One of these years I'm going to quit doing this to myself.

Now, of course, there's the question of is 1.5 hours of sleep worth getting, or will I feel worse?

Current Mood: exhausted yet satisfied
Current Location: couch of dead
Current Music: The printer printing

Question for all y'all - I want to go to KASF, my darling husband isn't quite as enthused, and I *detest* driving (not to mention going up with just me in a car is sort of silly and wasteful). Is anyone daytripping who'd like a passenger? I won't have a huge amount of stuff, and I will of course pay for my share of gas, etc...anyone?

Ride found. Yay. Thanks Rae!

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: cubeland...

For the first time, my KASF Pentathlon in Persona entry... actually got done!!! (This was somewhat surprising, really, given last year's flood, etc - I to some degree didn't really think I'd get done). And it was a near thing - I took the day off on Friday (due to a difference in tenure at our jobs, I have more vacation time than N this year, so I might as well use it for something) and STILL didn't sleep.

The sieve project had to be shelved, due to the sheer length of time naalbinding at that scale takes, though I did show a few people the work-in-progress and they went ooh-ahh so I'm definitely going to have to finish it. (Also need to figure out a way to rig a loom, so that I can compare the length of time the naalbinding takes with how long a woven one would take, and compare the sturdiness of the two...)

So my entries turned out to be:

A research paper - the translation of Le Recuil de Riom
A comparison of three Cameline sauces (from Le Recuil, Le Menagier, and Chiquart)
A lamb-and-parsley stew (Haricot de Mouton) from same
A subtlety - a Golden Chicken (boneless, gilded)
A calligraphed copy of the same (in the original French, I don't trust my translation enough yet to want it immortalized in calligraphy

Actually, that's approximately the same order of the scores I got - the first three things did REALLY well, the last 2 needed a little more work. Not surprising, really - I'm a cook and research geek, not quite as good at making things pretty - and the chicken was a little more of a documentation stretch. And calligraphy? Well, that I'm just new at - this is the first project I've actually finished.

Anyway, I had lots of fabulous conversations, though I didn't really get to leave my table and thus I didn't really see anyone else's stuff. ::pout:: This makes me sad, as I *heard* about lots of fabulous stuff I didn't see.

I didn't win the Pentathlon... but! Their Majesties gave me a Silver Nautilus because, to quote His Majesty, I "had people stacked three deep around my table to taste stuff all day." Which is pretty near true, actually - thus the lack of wandering around. I don't mind though - for whatever reason, people just won't try stuff without someone there to explain what it is, even if there's PLENTY for both judging and random samples. (Is there any way to fix that? I'm planning on entering food in A&S at Crown, and well, am NOT planning on staying with it...)

So...now I have to get everything up on my website. Though I'm thinking about a site redesign in the meantime... and tonight? I'm digging out my armor and going to Buckston practice for the first time this year. Yay!

Edit: Photo taken by the lovely pinkleader, who was much more intelligent than I and actually took her camera OUT of her bag...

Current Mood: bouncy

Not that I think any of you were waiting with bated breath or anything.

So I never really wrote about Ymir (ancient news, I know, but bear with me). It was cold and wet, but I was ok with that, as I wore my blue 1430-ish wool gown and stayed surprisingly toasty. Ysolt got her Pelican, which is *awesome*, since she (well, John too, of course, but mostly Ysolt) took us to our first event - I doubt I'd be a SCAdian now without her.

kfitzwarin and Steve, and

puck_eater and

geniealisa came down and stayed with us, which was a blast, and we even seduced the K-Mistress into the WoWCrack. (squee!) All the work I did on Nick's fighting garb paid off, as he got enough compliments (in my hearing) that I'm glad I was wearing a train, as otherwise the fact my feet weren't quite touching the ground would have shown. And to top the day off? My friends were conspriring behind my back...
( Come to think of it, these are large enough I should cut them... )
Did I mention that

harleenquinzell (whose lovely work the scroll is) tricked me? (And believe me, the scan doesn't do the thing justice - it's GORGEOUS, and only about 4" wide). She showed it to me like 5 times while creating it (before the name went on it) asking me whether I thought the recipient would like it. Thus leading me to threaten "appropriate revenge" in court...

Anyway, the two weeks between Ymir and KASF were insane, and included flooding (eek! all fixed now, though, and it led us to discover a new comfy organization for our living room furniture, not to mention an excuse for a trip to IKEA, where we ended up with new dining room furniture.

As fo KASF? Even though I didn't enter Pentathlon, I still had a blast. I took up a set of 9 sauces (in adorable little mustard pots my husband found for me at Southern Season), and the hat and calligraphy in progress. Talked with lots of people, got lots of comments and ideas for future projects, and saw other people's VERY nifty stuff (when I managed to get away from my display, that is - I didn't finish labels, or anything, so I spent most of the day hanging out in boy garb and convincing people to come try stuff) and finished up the evening with yummy prime rib at Outback (washed down with an abundance of margaritas, even).

I've spent the last week vegging, to be honest - we've been to Molten Core three times now. I like the guild we've been running with, since WH isn't big enough to support MC runs, but the new point system is... arcane, to be honest. ::shrug:: they're new at it, it'll all work out. We ended up spending the weekend working on a new site for work - I'll link to it to show off when we get it done, as I'm kind of proud on it. N and I had to learn CSS to do it, which will come in handy in the future. (Erminespot needs content, badly).

This week, though, it's time to get off my ass and start working on Pennsic stuff, and some other Nifty Projects...

Current Mood: enthused

So even though I've been talking about it incessantly and spending much of my waking time on it for the past few months, i've decided I'm not going to enter the persona pentathlon. I was cutting it close to get it done, and then my apartment flooded on Monday, which threw everything into a kerfluffle. I tried to keep going after that, but when I sat down to paint last night half of the pigments I had ground and mixed with gum arabic had molded, and some of the others were too grainy to use (and one of the things that got broken in the moving-things-around-to-let-them-rip-out-all-the-downstairs-carpet was my mulling slab, so I couldn't just regrind them). Though I do *have* modern paints, I decided that it wasn't worth trying to paint the Tacuinium page with them since the whole point was doing it with period stuff (I have NO artistic talent, in terms of drawing/painting and such, and was trying to make up for that by doing it with period ingredients). So, with that entry gone... well... I decided it just wasn't worth the sleepless nights of trying to come up with something new at the last minute.

I'm not quite as disappointed as I thought I would be, though. I got the paper done, which in many respects was the hardest part. Girard will have a nifty hat when I get done sewing the lining. And I made ink! I'm still going to bring some food to display, I'll decide what and document it tonight, and if I'm feeling really creative, I'll enter Royal Baker. After all, I have a period pie pan to try out...

And really, the whole preparation thing was fun anyway, even without actually entering the competition... next year, though...

Edit: Forgot I hadn't told everyone about the flood! (and Nick never posted about it either...) The powder room toilet had a valve break, and covered the 1st floor of my apartment with an inch of water. This necessitated the complete removal of the carpet (they'll replace it tomorrow, once they're sure everything's dry). No other real damage though...

Current Mood: contemplative

So I'm beginning to wonder what the effects of weird sleep patterns are - I haven't been this sleep deprived since NCSSM, I think...

First, before 12th night, I spent a few nights up late making biscotti and gingerbread. Then there was 12th night (which was fabulous, of course, but not exactly restful), which I arrived home from and promptly wasn't able to sleep. (I blame the large amounts of coffee I was drinking in a short-sighted attempt to not doom Nick to driving 5 hours while listening to me snore). Somehow I never quite caught up this week, then there was the party on Fri night (happy birthday again

zihuatanejo) at which much champagne was consumed and little sleep was had, and then there was the 13th night party-ish thing on Sat, which was a blast, much good food and we got to break out the game collection (Trivial Pursuit, Apples to Apples, Illuminati and the Achilles' Heel, Settlers of Cataan).

SoC, however, is evil. Somehow (and don't ask me how this happened), I found myself stumbling to bed at 5 in the morning, not to wake up until noon, at which point I decided to make cinnamon rolls. (Found a nifty recipe for those, in fact, based on biscuit dough rather than yeast dough, which goes flour->table in under an hour - the texture's a bit different than one). Next thing I knew, it was 3 o'clock, which was somewhat unfortunate since we were supposed to go down to Fuquay for the Baronial meeting. ::sigh::

At least I got a bit done on the Research Paper of Doom. Though - for fellow medieval foodies out there - if you've been pondering picking up Dangerous Tastes by Andrew Dalby, prepare to be frustrated. There's a lot if nifty info in there, but unfortunately it's obscured by a WEIRD organization (by spice's place of origin) and an overly broad focus (800BC->1800 or so, including both eastern and western hemispheres). I probably would have enjoyed it more as a "thing to read" than a research text, but still...

( Guilty Pleasures Meme: )

Current Mood: bored

I have lots of things to do, SCA-wise, to the point where I get home and I have to ponder - hard! - what I want to do.

This is a nice feeling.

In No Particular Order:

1. Website and AOTC-FAQ
This really needs to be a priority, as I said I'd do the latter half of this project months ago and haven't done as much as I should with it. (bad me!). I do have the stuff in place to do it now, so it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it. Still need a good website design for myself though...I'd *love* to get one that I could set up my LJ to match, but that may be asking too much...

2. Persona Pentathlon Project:
a. Tacuinum project of doom (this is the book-made-from-proper-materials project, which everyone assures me I'm crazy for trying to do in an 8 month time span starting from nothing. But we already knew I was crazy, so that's ok.)
b. Write the article/finish sauce redactions for the "Humoral Effects of 14th century sauces" paper. (i.e., the project I've been playing with off and on for years, that REALLY ought to get done).
c. clean/card wool for the Felt Hat Project, and decide how/if to dye it.
d. pick a sewing project
e. Test period methods for making the "Golden Chicken"...

3. 12th night garb for G and I...

4. Clean the house so as to have persona and/or medieval cooking parties.

5. Work on encampment stuff for next season.

The even nicer thing about these projects? Long-term deadlines....

Current Mood: enthusiastic

So, let's see, the official KASF rundown.

Way too much of Friday night was spent baking and such. Made shepard's pie for dinner, turned out OK though there was something odd about the mashed potatoes that I couldn't quite pin down. It's not the first time it's happened to me, either - it's this vaguely... green? taste, like the potatoes were slightly undercooked, except they were falling apart so I don't think that's it. Maybe not enough salt? (was trying not to oversalt the potatoes since the stew they were going on top of was quite salty, having been made with canned (i know, i know) broth.
And, of course, there was the massive yeast failure. (well, it wasn't so much a yeast failure as a bakers failure - if you dont' put enough yeast, it won't work - the yeast were 'givin it all she got, Cap'n'..)

Anyway, I entered Mescelin Bread and the Bread Tart from Sabina Welserin in the Royal Baker competition. (Links go to M$Word docs on my website (which mostly isn't there yet) - if you can't read them, I can make them PDFs, I was just being lazy). If you have comments on the documentation, I'd love to hear them, as that has, in the past, been my bugaboo and I did *much* better this time. As far as the actual FOOD goes, well, the judging on that was interesting - I didn't actually *like* the bread, but it got better scores than the tart, mostly b/c I used the wrong crust for the tart. Oh well, at least I learned how to make a fairly good standing tart, lol...and the tart filling was GOOD (

brynpobydd said she kept coming back and stealing bites of it, which made me happy - after all, I cook to make people smile). Need to work on a starter that DOESN'T die in my house - doing the "beer" thing didn't work too well, the bread had a slightly off taste which both judges noted. But at any rate, this was the first time I've ever entered an A&S competition and NOT been disappointed with myself. That was a nice feeling...

No, I didn't win -

brynpobydd did, which is fabulous and way overdue, since the whole thing was her idea in the first place. The funny thing, of course, was that the two of us were the only people that entered - it's the Kberg bread show! And lots of people commented on Solvarr's bread marker - I think I've figured out how to fix the next one, too. (Yes, I know, I should post pics. But I haven't yet - there's a reason for that. Some of the things from Ymir hadn't been unpacked yet, and I had assumed the camera was there. It wasn't. Apparently we left it at Ymir. But, the SCA is a wonderful place - some honest gentle found it Friday night, turned it in, and it made its way back to us at KASF. Woot. yes, I know I should be less careless - but at least it didn't bite me in the ass this time) Speaking of

ramblingheritic, congrats to the newest Pearl!!!!!!

Sunday was filled with WoW (we did the Stockades instance with Tom, Illyria is now up to level 33!) and then we went to see Constantine. Not a bad movie, but Marion and I both agreed it was TOO gooey. Oh well.

Then we ended up with another random dinner party - roast pork (wrapped in bacon, with thyme, salt and pepper) roasted with onions and apples, with a sauce of pureed apples and onions with cream. Yum. Oh yes, and

zihuatanejo came over and taught me how to make Spaetzle. Yay. Now I need one of these, or maybe one of these - I'm leaning towards the latter, as I could make mashed potatoes with it too...

Current Mood: accomplished

And suddenly you realize that you're inspired enough to try and create 5 new objects for the competition in less than 2 months. This is what happened to me last night - Claire started talking about how easy it was to enter the Pentathlon in Persona and suddenly I found myself convincing myself that I *did* in fact have time to do so, even though I had decided none of my 12th night stuff was appropriate.
So that's my next project, even before my Arnolfini gown (which I think will get entered at the next Pentathlon - *that* one should be interesting .

( So... the deal with this competition is that I have to enter 5 items, in at least 3 categories. )

I definitely want to enter a hat, so that's "costume accessories". I also want to enter the golden chicken from last year, so there's "subtleties". I'm thinking I'll do another cooking thing - maybe mustard? or better yet a selection of period sauces/condiments. That could be fun. Especially if I could figure out exactly what would be on the table and how it would be served... now *what* did I do with Fabulous Feasts (yes, I know the recipes sucked. But it had good source material). I could do calligraphy... and a dress? The dress is what I'm most dubious about entering - I'd like to make another GFD anyway, and I do have time... but I don't know when I'd get someone to help me fit it. I suppose I could do a smock instead... or (yet another) houppelande. With nice dags that's a possibility, actually.... Actually, I like that possibility. In fact...even though I swore I wouldn't do it again... that white silk I've got is wispy enough for those layered dags of Maria of Gueldern... Yep, I'm a crackhead. And my fabric addiction is going to bankrupt me one of these days... oh well. Now off to find some more blue wool or silk...