Thursday, July 14, 2005

Exercise in Being Creative

Been very busy the past couple weeks. Our A&S event is coming next weekend and I'm teaching 2 classes - cloth covered buttons and voided work. So spent time developing the handouts and examples. Love having an excuse to go researching. I get to spend time in my library, on the web and if I really good, I get to buy more books (big grin).

We also have a competition in our kingdom called the Golden Poppy. There are 20 arts and sciences competitions during the year. They are divided into 4 categories. You need to have qualifying entries (50% +1) in each category plus 4 more for a total of 8 to be considered. The person with the most overall points become the Poppy for that year. For the next year, they serve as Kingdom Artisan being available to teach and assist in the A&S.

You can guess where this is going. So far I have entered and won for Tinctures (Dyeing) and Underpinnings (the stockings). I've been preparing entries for A&S. There are 8 possible competitions to enter at A&S and NO I am not willing to kill myself by enering all 8. Each has to be researched in some depth and a paper written on them.

I am having lots of fun doing the research. The paper writing is WORK. Preparing the entries is both fun and work. But it is all creative. It has been good to challenge myself. I hope to have 4 categories of entries done in time for A&S. If all qualify, then I only need to do 2 more to meet the Poppy requirements. Of course if someone else qualifies, then I would need to consider more than 2 entries to get higher scores. Lots of work, but having fun.

Did 2 for the Preserved Foods category. Yes I love to do medieval cooking and these were fun. No I won't disclose them here until after A&S. Now back to doing the paper for the Heraldic Banners.

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