Being the King's (and the Queen's) Mistress - of the Wardrobe - In Progress

Their Royal Majesties East: Brennan and Caoilfhionn
Photo by Lindsay Nery

There is a book out there that talks about the five "Love Languages" and how you show your love to others. My way of showing others love is sewing for them. True love is appliqueing circles. (Xavier... Antonii...)

Two people I love in the East are Brennan mac Fearghus and Caoilfhionn inghean Fhaolain. 

Last fall, at the same Crown Tourney where I became an apprentice, Brennan became our Prince again, and Caoilfhionn our Princess. 

And my Laurel became their Chief of Staff. 

And I was asked to become their Mistress of the Wardrobe. (insert nervous but excited squeeing here)

I knew what the job entailed, having recently watched Zippy and Leda do it for Honig and Ioannes, and my friend Ty doing the job for Ivan and Matilde. 

And then they threw me a curveball. 

They want Byzantine. 

BYZANTINE?!?!

I don't know anything about Byzantine other than most of it looks like blingy boxes or that thing Tom Brady wears on the sidelines to keep warm. 

You're still the Greatest of All Time in my eyes Tom.
(Go Pats!)

But. I was promised research help and support from Hypatissa Anna Dokeianina Syrakousina, and she doesn't look like she's wearing blingy boxes, so let's do this. 

I'm going to talk in this post specifically about their Coronation Garments, but I have made other Byzantine for them as well. 

The first thing Anna sent me was a list of words. Words that made ABSOLUTELY no sense to me but with a little research and her page she put together for East Kingdom Coronation, I was able to start down the path. 

We needed a "Khlamys" style outfit for each, including the outer divestesion (almost a dalmatica, but with poofy poofy sleeves gathered into a cuff, the under kamision, two ceremonial cloaks, and a collar for her Highness often called a super humeral. 

Fabrics: 

Clearly, the only fiber that would do for these outfits would be silk. And Tyrian Purple silk at that.

We ordered fabric from SilkBaron.com with the absolute perfect shade. (This site is danger incarnate, I'm so in love) I consulted Brennan on if he was on board with the plan, but I was still terrified to open the package once it came. 

OMG it's so BRIGHT!

I also had in my stash 4 yards of a burnt orange pearled silk I'd gotten at Fabric Place Basement for $5 a yard. Yeah. $5. This fabric made up the majority of the embellishment fabric. 

I also cheated. I admit it. I cheated. I ordered a sari/saree from Amazon which had roundels already woven into it in the right color. The trick for this is to search for "banarasi" sarees, this will have the woven embellishment you're looking for. Now, this is "Art Silk" which is ARTifcial SILK aka Polyester, but I'm using it for the embellishments on the garment. 

I needed fabric as well for the collar, and found a gorgeous gold jacquard silk remnant at Artee's, a high end home decor fabric store in Hudson, MA. Instead of close to $100/yard it was $12. Sold. SOLD. It was one of those situations where you start to suspect the other shoppers of nefariously plotting to take your find. Yeah, there weren't any other shoppers in the remnants really that day, and they could have cared less about my gold fabric. 

For the under tunics, I got lightweight white linen for hers from JoAnn's, and the heavier weight for his. I also had some burnt orange cotton in my stash to make his pants. 

I cut the roundels out of the saree fabric and found they had a perfect pattern already on them to pearl. After cutting I serged the edges of the roundels. If you go back to Xavier's Pelican Hood post, I did that there as well, the serged edge gives you something to push against as you are appliquing the item down and I find makes it much easier to do. 

There were two Roundels on each shoulder, on the fronts and backs of each divestesion, and the under tunics. 

Serging the edges of the Roundels

One Roundel Pearled - Ah-Ah-Ah!
Only 11 more to go!

Whip Stitched onto the TYRIAN fabric, this is how the extant embellishments were applied.

Jewelry Finding from Michael's Completes the embellishement

They were also on the linen under tunics, but I did not pearl the backs of the under garments following the "Don't Pearl Your Butt" rule of Byzantine Garb

I also cut up the remainder of the saree embellishment and made trim which was used extensively throughout the garments. 

Saree Trim

Trim added to either side of the center embellishment for her divestation

Whip stitching the center embellishment on her divestation on

I made all the outfits in this picture!
Photo by Lindsay Nery

East Kingdom Spring Coronation

A few Easterners gathered outside the Armory
Photo by Jenn Surabian Bachour

It's been a while gentle reader, thank you for hanging in there. Today I'm going to tell you a story:

Once upon a time in the beautiful Kingdom of the East, there was a little Shire called Quintavia, and in this shire was a wonderful place known as Higgins Armory.

It was a collection of all things knight - weapons, armor, and period references. It was much beloved by the people, but tragedy struck and on December 31, 2013 it closed. Much of the collection was auctioned off, some went to the local art museum, and the lights went dark in the big steel building on the hill.

I live around the corner during this time, and watched on my nightly commute as it got darker, and darker. One night all the lights were on, and then they never came on again. It was heartbreaking.

Until recently! A developer purchased the building, renamed it the John W Higgins Armory and is working on renting it out. One of my Shire, Perronnelle de Croy, was brave enough to approach them about using the space, and they took a chance on us. We were the first group to rent the great hall as it's now called.

Boyar Aleksei Dmitriev put in the bid for Coronation and asked me to be his deputy. He assembled a team of cooks and staff heads from the Shire and we set to planning. There was a very slight chance that Aleksei would have to be handling issues with his father and we put in place that Siubhan Wallace would be my deputy should that happen.

The site walk was bittersweet. What used to be still echos, but we started to see what could be.

My first site walk in January

I set up a volunteer sign up through volunteersignup.org which is a GREAT tool, highly recommend, and a couple other tasks.

Then a week and a day before the event Aleksei, who had been away handling issues with his father, stepped down formally.

I swear I spent that entire day sending emails. I scheduled a staff meeting Sunday and we went over the plans and any open issues. At that time we had 36 pre-registrations.

Siubhan became by mobile secretary and made any calls that needed doing during the day and checked in with the food folks: Aethelhawk Keyfinder and Cassandra Böll von Bayer. We had cooking nights Wednesday and Friday that I'd previously scheduled in the commercial kitchens of Camelot and Mosaic. I got to work printing site booklets and signs.

Friday was prep day at Higgins from 9-3. Brokk brought the Shire storage trailer (for which we are eternally grateful) and our wonderful Seneschal Matthias Grunewald had gotten the royal thrones and banners for us to prep.

The Barony of Stonemarche lent us their 90 heraldic banners they use in the Armory at Birka (Thank you Master Harold von Auerbach and Mistress Aine Callaghan!) and my wonderful household member Syele von Heidelberg who drove up to grab them from the Seacoast. Perronnelle did an amazing amount of work soliciting other banners and working with the Kingdom Chamberlain to get any kingdom banners to site.

We came armed with ladders but discovered (thank the gods) that the site had a scissor lift which Perronnelle swiftly mastered, marshaled troops, and set to decorating.

Our rental delivery came from Paul's Rents in Leominster (great service and great prices) and the guy running our delivery was as in awe of the place as we were. He kept saying how this had been his favorite place to go on school field trips and how glad he was that the site was being used again.

Perronnelle and Team did an amazing job

This was the first time Siubhan and Aethelhawk had gotten a chance to walk through the building and we quickly realized that the reality of the layout. There was no way we could serve dayboard in the main hall as planned. This had been an ongoing discussion and Aleksei and I had come up with an alternative prior, but until we were in the space with half the chairs set up did it become quite apparent we had to go to Plan B. Beyond that, Plan C, and eventually Plan D.

So this is around 12:30. Aethelhawk, Siubhan, and I walked through what was going to be our prep area and realized the only thing making it the prep area was one sink, which we could live without. So prep moved to the first floor, dayboard and dining to the second, and all my wonderful maps went straight out the window.

Suffice to say I tracked 20,000 steps on Friday, and we got an extension on our set up time and the volunteers which were left quickly got the tables and chairs set up. I then left to go check in on cooking and strategize the new layout at around 7pm. The outcome of that meeting was someone else was going to be running the dayboard service, Weehafoc (Aethelhawk and Siubhan's son) stepped up. (and did a marvelous job)

Matthias, our Seneschal, was there helping food prep. Well, he was running a meat slicer the rest of us were scared of and I may have joked with him that losing a finger is a knightly virtue. When it came out that pre-reg was up to 310 he joked with me that we might hit 500. At this point, gentle reader, I might have said some very unkind things to Matthias, and we all laughed, and laughed at this possibility. I then went off to reprint and redraw all the maps, have my household bartender Tho make me a drink, and sleep.

The shirt I wore all Friday said "Blessed" and I truly felt I was. I cannot say how much I appreciate the work of all our set up volunteers, event staff, and especially Siubhan.

Saturday dawned bright and cool. I tricked my friends into getting up early by promising them a great breakfast at a local diner and got to site. We swiftly and efficiently loaded in and got straight to work. 10:30 I got the news we had hit 475, after last court (first court of the day) started I got the news that we were at 510, and we ended the day at 667.

I only made 14,000 steps Saturday, mostly because I stayed in the dayboard area. Kudos to my parking staff led by Andreiko and ably assisted by Duchess Thyra (the most beautiful of traffic cones) who found places to park everyone, and to our Theresa Giani and our gate staff who swiftly and efficiently checked everyone in.

There were a few fires that needed putting out, but honestly, it went very, very, smoothly. Our shoppers Bianca Anguissola and Elvira Ballesteros found every rotisserie chicken in the area and other supplies to supplement our dayboard intended for 400. We never ran out of food.

I'd also like to thank here Master Malcolm Bowman, the herald for last court. It went on for 3 hours, about twice as long as estimated, which was a good thing. It meant most people snuck out and ate during court and we never had the massive tidal wave we braced for all day. At most people waited 5 minutes for food. That's a miracle with 667 people. A. Miracle.  

I got this shot while running around

Also to the folks who cleaned up at the end of the night. I was along the gallery watching the Great Hall empty. It was like watching piranhas devour a cow. A flurry of activity and it was clean. My clean up rock stars were Sir Colin and his wife Baroness Margaret of Lochleven. They work so well as a team and they just kept going.

I'm still in awe of my team. Such a success!

Jenn and Joe at the site were so wonderful to work with. Anything we needed they worked with us. They truly felt the love of the East Kingdom in how welcoming and respectful everyone was.

I'm sure I'll update this with more pictures and names as I recover mentally. In my mundane life I work in finance, so we're a little busy with the tax season tornado.

And as I said on the East Kingdom page- thank you to each and every one of you who came. Again, I feel blessed to have been able to make this happen.

Thanks,
A Very Grateful Fortune