Done!

For certain values of done, anyway. Last night I finished the beading. In case anybody has been following the saga of the beading needles on Facebook, the final coda to the whole silly thing was discovering last night that the beading needles I'd bought explicitly for the purpose are too big for the pearls. *facepalm* I had once again misplaced the needle I'd been using, so the final product is a bit heavier on beads as opposed to pearls than originally intended. However, the good news is that I found my original needle eventually and was able to apply a couple more rounds of peacock pearls, and it's not like the pearls aren't fabulous. Mmmm tiger's eye and gold beads...

Tonight, along with a bit of official business, I will be getting together with Katja so we can do the layout and get the orphery applied, and send the whole thing off to Pennsic. We're hoping to be able to send it by courier rather than having to resort to mail, but it'll get there one way or another...

I'm hoping somebody will post pictures of the final result, because I'm convinced it's going to be great. If so, I'll either post them or a link.

Oh, and just in case this week needed any more deadlines, I ended up doing my very first calligraphy project last night for court tonight. Whee!

Chasuble project

THL Dahrien Cordell is being elevated to the Pelican this Pennsic, and he has asked people to create a chasuble as a thank you gift for Fr. Olav, the priest who has agreed to say Mass for him. I and a bunch of other folks volunteered, and Annetje, who's running the project asked me to design the orphery, which is the ornate embellishment which overlays the body of the chasuble. Due to time constraint of needing to finish by August 9 and preferably earlier so I can send it to Pennsic complete, while I want as much period accuracy as we can manage, realistically we're not going to be able to get much heavy duty embroidery in place by August 9th.

So those are the constraints. On the upside, people have been very generous with materials and I think I understand what the overall vision of the project is. Handmade, period style, with as much bling as we can manage in the limited time we have.

My hope has been to find fabric that will help us get as much bling as we can for the effort. In this case, I have a gold fabric which happens to have the sort of S curves that Annetje asked for as part of the design. It'll be going over a wider piece of red velvet, which will then be applied to the gold silk body of the chasuble itself. We've decided on a Y shape like the St. Bernard of Clairvaux chasuble.



I decided to try to add some visual definition to the fabric with black satin cord.





I'm pretty happy with the effect. It does definitely make the pattern pop from across the room as compared to the plain fabric.

Once I finish applying the cord, the next phase is beading. Constanza was good enough to donate several strands of pearls, and more will be arriving with the velvet, plus garnets, and possibly gold beads and peacock pearls. So this is my somewhat optimistic beading layout idea. I don't think I'm going to finish it all, front and back, but if I get the arms of the Y finished I'll be pretty happy.




My Paint skills are pretty nonexistent so don't zoom in too close, but this should convey the idea of what I have in mind. The white dots are pearls, and the red and grey are garnet, peacock pearls and whatever else ends up in the final package of bling.

So that's the plan. Now I just need to make sure everybody else is okay with it and make it happen.