I've made the beginnings toward my first A&S 50 projects. Awhile back Robin had an idea to cast some pewter coins to hand out to bards who particularly impress us, or in some way go above and beyond, at Pennsic and other events. He was going to do this, but I usurped the project from him for one of my A&S 50 projects. He's done pewter casting before, I haven't.
So far I've got a line on some soapstone from a friend who has a bunch of it, and I'm working on laying my hands on some pewter. The design is already created, once I get the soapstone I can start working on carving the mold.
I also had an epiphany yesterday. Years ago I tried tablet weaving, and loved it ... but in not too long a time gave up on it in frustration, for a couple reasons. First, I couldn't find any loom setup I liked. I'd heard of people using inkle looms for card weaving, but at the time I didn't have an inkle loom, and didn't want to get one just for that, since I thought it limited both the width and the length of the bands too much.
After doing a ton of research online, I built several different loom designs, but wasn't entirely happy with any of them. The main reason was that all the loom designs I'd seen or tried involved tying off the warp at both the front and back; but tablet weaving creates a great deal of twist in the warp (usually; it can be avoided with certain patterns, but I wasn't managing to avoid it) which will creep up the warp till it's so close to the cards you can't turn them anymore. Then, to continue weaving, you have to go to the end, untie all those individual warp threads, work the twist out, and retie them.
While I realize that's just part of the process, I detested that part of the process. When you combine that with the time it takes to warp a loom for tablet weaving, I found I spent 95% of the time fiddling with the loom or warp, and only about 5% of the time actually weaving the pattern.
I decided I'd like to try a weighted loom, but knew I'd need a lot of space to set that up, so I shelved tablet weaving until I had the room for it.
It only just occurred to me yesterday - hey! I now have the room for this!
I was never sure warp-weighting would work with tablet weaving, but a bit of research online yesterday gave me reason to believe it would. (I found at least a couple people who said they do it this way, with great success).
I had initially left tablet weaving off of my A&S 50 list because I had shelved it, but now that I have a chance to do it again, it went back on the list. I did some practice bands in the past, but I never completed anything, so I believe this can count as a 'new' A&S project.
I have to tread carefully this time ... the second reason it got shelved in the past was, since I was so fascinated with it, I tried to do too much, too fast. I tried immediately to start designing my own complex patterns, but they never worked out. Tablet weaving is (to me anyway) extremely complex - the theory, not the practice - the physical act of tablet weaving is not difficult. But to understand how to create certain patterns and images, there's a lot you have to understand about how the process works. I didn't have that basic understanding yet when I tried to jump too far ahead, and all it did was frustrate me.
This time I'm going to focus on pre-printed patterns or patterns I can design that are simple enough not to screw up (simple diamonds for one; or words - I have a book that shows how to weave letters to make words, and I did have good luck with that, it was pretty simple). In time, as I do more weaving, and if I pay attention to what I'm doing, hopefully the structural theory will begin to make enough sense that if I still want to, then I can design my own patterns.
Last but not least, there's another A&S 50 category I'm also taking on - learning or developing 50 things about your persona. It's always bugged me that I never had a clear persona, so I've decided to work on that as well. Last night Robin and I did a bunch of research and brainstorming, and came up with some fascinating stuff. But I'm going to post that separate. (If you're interested, you'll be able to find it from the link in the side-bar).
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