Month: August 2021

bookmark_borderArts and Sciences Belt Favors

Posted on by Elliott Evans

A few months ago, I was once again elected to the position of Arts and Sciences Minister of the Barony-Marche of the Debatable Lands. this position used to have a few pieces of regalia associated with it, but most of them have been lost since the last time I was minister. I decided a new belt favor was first on the list.

Belt Favor for the BMDL A&S Minister

The fabric is a navy cotton twill I bought online. The populace badge is one of the embroidered patches I had made a few years ago. The A&S badge is machine embroidery designed by me and applied with my embroidery machine.

While I had the badge loaded into the machine, and good number of Aethelmearc patches in stock, I decided to make favors for the Kingdom A&S Ministers as well.

Belt Favors for the Aethelmearc A&S Ministers

Same rules apply, only (secretly) the candle flames are glow-in-the-dark thread. I’ll hand these off to the ministers when I see them.

bookmark_borderNew Page – Embroidery Files

Posted on by Elliott Evans

I have added the first new page to the non-blog portion of my web site in quite some time. I can’t even remember for sure what the last one was. In any case, this new page is a showcase for all of the “VP3”-format embroidery stitch pattern files I have created over the past several years. I received a request for some of them, and thought I would make the whole collection available to the Internet. Most of them are SCA-related, but there are a bunch of pop-culture and media-related designs at the bottom.

Follow the action Bob to visit

I use a piece of digitizing software called Embird to create these patterns, and the images are all exports of the 3D simulation of the eventual embroidery. Embird is a good value, and I have not had too much trouble figuring out its features. The files it produces work so reliably that I have not even tried embroidering some of these patterns. The fun is in designing and creating them.

Anyway, please read the text at the top of that page if you want to use any of those files.

bookmark_borderPeace Braids

Posted on by Elliott Evans

Last week, we attended the “Armistice” event up at Cooper’s Lake Campground. Informally called “Pretendsic”, this was the event that the campground decided to run on their own after the SCA’s Pennsic War was cancelled again. It was a much smaller and informal version of a war, with no organized battles and many fewer classes. We did not even camp up there most nights, and brought all our own food. We spent a lot of time in camp braiding, and I completed these four braids.

Four Kute-Uchi Braids from Armistice

All four braids were made using kute-uchi hand-loop braiding. The two inner braids are Mitake-gumi 10-loop rectangular braids, both using a single ply of acrylic yarn for each loop. The two outer braids are Maru-genji-gumi 16-loop round braids. The inner of the two uses a single ply of acrylic yarn for each loop, and the outer uses two plies of cotton crochet thread for each loop. To keep the loops together in bundles for the 2-ply braid, I used rope kute handles. These were all braided while seated on a bench, and I used my toes to beat the stitches if the braids were too long for manual tightening.