Vigil Planning - Thyra

I'm pretty good at keeping secrets.  Keeping a secret from someone you see multiple times a week while also trying to prep for said secret...yeah  Now that's a challenge.

Disclaimer:  I met Thyra in college and have been lucky enough to have her put up with my terrible sense of humor and shenanigans for YEARS.  That includes Household, wedding, and general life shenanigans as well.  I am unashamed in how much I'm a fan of her and my ridiculous desire for her to have nice things.

For those of you who may not know, I spent 15 years working on and throwing LARP feasts, being kitchen help, and generally cooking for large groups of people.  I've been in only one SCA kitchen since I've been an active member.  When I was asked if I wanted to be "food boss" for the vigil, I was very excited.

Some food was farmed out to some amazing people whom I'm very grateful for.  The rest was either bought or made by myself and my husband Sergei.  I wanted to do a mix of medieval and modern food to appeal to more people.  I have a limited amount of medieval cook books so I flipped through and tried to pick out some favorites.  I'm going to talk about the medieval recipes below:


Elizabethan Lemon Cookies ( A Feast of Ice and Fire-, p166; adapted from Lucanyos Cookbook 1690)

Yes these are out of period.  Yes this is from a Game of Thrones cookbook.  No, I don't care since these are always delicious.  I have a tremendous respect for the ladies that worked on this book (who I hear rumor are local to Carolingia) and it's a personal favorite book.  It's enough of a favorite that I made an entire LARP feast using recipes from this book (including the rattlesnake recipe).

Another reason for using this recipe is it fits my idea of Thyra in a proper tea party.  Moire was already making scones so I thought this would fit.  Bonus, the naked lemons I had left over were used to make lemon curd for her scones.  Win-win!

This cookie is a weird one to work with as it doesn't really form a dough so much as a sugar lemon crumble,  Milk was added to the dough so it hold together a bit better.  They are light, lemony, and have just enough crisp at the edge to play nicely with the soft center.


Norwegian Pasties:(Pleyn Delit, 4)
Pre-made pie crust was used due to time constraints.  These hand pies were beef with pine nuts and Jack cheese.  I omitted the currant due to their use in the Ember Day Tarts and the ginger due to an allergy.  The pasties got an egg white wash on the crust to give them a more golden appearance.

My thoughts - the beef could have seen seasoned more and would have benefited from the homemade dough.  They were still tasty and I might have the leftovers for dinner on Monday. :)


Hirchones: (Pleyn Delit, 138)

Sausage hedgehogs!  The translation of this recipe went in a different direction than the original text in a variety of ways that I didn't feel bad throwing their seasoning "suggestion"  o just using ginger out the window.  Pork, especially ground pork, is very mild.  In the immortal words of my grandmother : "No one likes stingy cookies" (referring to underfilled/underspiced cookies).  Well the same goes for meat.  The spices should enhance and complement the flavor of the meat.  I used a bit of pepper, salt, more ginger than the recipe called for, a bit of garlic powder, and pinch of parsley mixed with the garlic powder.  The flavor of the meat was still mild, but you could tell there was some depth in there.

Sliced almonds were lightly toasted in a pan with sugar before being stuck into the oblong "hedgies".

Totally hedgehogs....

Tarts in Ymber Day: (Pleyn Delit, 3)

Also know as Ember Day Tarts.  This food is a bit of an inside joke.  I've made these tarts at least twice for LARPing for about 60-100 people each time.  Yes they are tasty, but they are pain to make.   Thyra made a huge grin right at me when I groaned when that got added to her "in Case of Peerage" letter.  *shakes fist in culinary rage*

Both Sergei and I leave out the saffron when making these because 1) we never have it in the house and 2) it's expensive for LARP food.  Due to time constraints, a pre-made pie crust was used.  I also substituted the individual spices listed her for my pre-mix stash of Pouder Douce that I had prepared from a variant of this recipe.  Just a pinch or two is more than enough.  In true Italian cooking fashion, the eyeball test was used to increase parsley and currants as necessary for the batches.  I also use sweet onions vs white onions as I think they play better with the savory aspects of the other ingredients.

As much as I might complain about these tarts, they're really delicious.

Ember Day Tarts:  my sworn nemesis.

Silver Mantle - Bia

This is my first Silver Mantle which was going to one person in a squad of combat archers up north.  The first thing that struck me on this was the recipient's name.  Woooo!  I get to do another Italian scroll!  I went looking for a new source and found one that was pretty neat and I happened to really like the color scheme on this one.  Since the source had a Hebrew script, I opted for my trusty Humanist hand for this scroll to match the time/place of the scroll.

Thyra and Marieta provided commentary on my wording flow as that was my main hang up.  .  Thankfully the write-up had some good talking points.  This is another 5x7 scroll so I tried to keep the wordiness to a minimum while being true to the deeds of the recipient.

This is my first time doing this much rubrications (aka pen doodles).  Thyra lent me some of her stash of walnut ink to get the right look of the brown designs.

Recipient: Bia di Firenze
Award: Silver Mantle
Source: British Library - Burney 70 f.1
Materials: gouache on pergamenata, silver gouache, Shminke gold watercolor, walnut ink (for the pen work)

Finished scroll, just needs the margin lines erased.

Comparison to the original.

Scriptorium work - AoA calligraphy swap with Marieta

This is a tidbit of calligraphy work I did for one of Marieta's scrolls for a Bengali merchant.  The time period and source worked out that it would need my faux-Arabic hand in action again.  My work was just the calligraphy and the word smithing on this.  Everything else was all Marieta.

Source for words: The Humayunama (https://archive.org/stream/historyofhumayun00gulbrich/historyofhumayun00gulbrich_djvu.txt)

Hand: faux-Arabic

Silver Crescent - Sara

Another Silver Crescent with a quick turnaround needed.  The recipient had an Italian persona so I checked my store of print outs for one of my favorite Italian sources. 

I spent a good chunk of time on this doing the calligraphy practice.  The finished scroll is about 8"x10" since I got a little wordy and wanted to make sure I have the right amount of spacing between the lines.

Recipient: Sara Sala di Peruta
Award: Order of the Silver Crescent
Source: British Library - Yates Thompson 29 f.3
Illumination: gouache on pergamenata, Schmincke gold watercolor
Calligraphy: humanist

Side by side comparison to the original.

Remember kids, practice sometimes means making a giant mess but it's still practice.

Silver Crescent - Francesco

Another of my "wee scrolls" at 5'x7", this was a fun one if for no other reason that we had a ridiculous time working with Erhart von Stuttgart for wording. Finding words that "rhyme with speak" devolved into giggles during out weekly Scriptorium get together.  Because "on fleek" and "Mozambique" also rhyme with the target phrase. :)  He was a good sport who let us take his key words and run with it.

I'm particularly proud of the sketching on this.  I decided to include the peacock because of Her Majesty's heraldry.  I think he turned out pretty cute.

The hand I used for this was a humanist bookhand.  It's a little late for the source, but I didn't want to do a full on gothic script.  I had wanted to go a "proto-gothic" transitional but lost the source document for the script I liked.  My thought on this was humanist at least made it recognizable as an Italian source which was the key in picking this for the recipient's persona (even though the original is Italian with wording in Hebrew).

Recipient:  Barone Francesco Gaetano Gréco d’Edessa
Award: Order of the Silver Crescent
Source: British Library - Additional 11657 f. 27 and f.110v
Illumination: gouache on pergamenata, Schmincke gold watercolor
Calligraphy: Humanist. 

Side by side with the two originals.  The scroll became a blend of the two so I could include the peacock.

Finished scroll.  The outlining here is done and just needs signature lines.

Award of Arms - Dorian

This assignment was one of my self-assigned projects while everyone else was at Pennsic this year.

The story behind this assignment was that I was put into contact with a gentleman in New Jersey who was looking for a replacement scroll for his AoA that was lost during the Hurricane Sandy which affected much of the Jersey coast in October 2012.   He's been in the SCA a while and wanted to get a new scroll made at the urging of his children who are now getting interested in the SCA and wondered why he didn't have a scroll.  In comes Christiana and her ever vigilant facilitating of people who need old scrolls done to talk to the Backlog Deputy (me).

Coolest thing about this assignment?  Check out the royals.  Tsurunaga and Genevieve...1993

Recipient: Dorian de San Kalogero
Assignment: Award of Arms - backlog/replacement
Illumination: British Library - Harley 3957 f. 4v
Hand: Humanist bookhand

I ended up entering this piece into the A&S Defender's of Quintavia competition (theme was Quintavia colors which are white and green).  Think baronial champs, but for the Shire.  Also #3 scroll with gilding on my own.

Silver Brooch - Gregor

This assignment turned into a crazy two part project.  The time frame for this to be completed was while I was elbow deep in painting for Fortune's Silver Crescent scroll.

This would have been a simple update if not for the story attached to it.

Original Scroll:
Award: Order of the Silver Brooch
Recipient: Gregor von Medehem
Calligraphy by me - hand is gothic
Illumination: Mergriet van Wijenhorst
Illumination add-ons (badge and illuminated capital) -by me
Words: Alys Mackyntoich

My gothic looks nice, actually.  May it live on in blessed memory.

This scroll was another piece of scroll karma where I picked art that connected with the recipient so much more so than I ever thought.  When I got the assignment, the recommendation didn't say a whole lot about the recipient and the recommender was different than the listed contact.  Being on a tight timeline, I used my time to practice the hand and do some additions to the art I had set aside for this.

Panteria comes and goes....this scroll was given out on Sunday and I had left Saturday night.  Per usual, I can't sleep in and go check the interwebs while drinking coffee.  So I get a message from Christiania (because she has a knack for knowing when I'm tuned in to respond to messages) with a tale of woe, tragedy, and every scribe's worst nightmare.  This incredibly nice gentle who received my scroll was cursed by a cruel twist of fate and what was described to me as a Rube-Goldburg-esque series of events that cause his guitar strap to break, the swing of the instrument to hit his beer, the beer to arc upward and over to the scroll, splash all over the calligraphy, and the guitar to be smashed upon the ground after in a final destruction and mayhem.

Somehow...someway...could I reproduce the scroll?

O_O'

Well....huh....I'd like to say at this juncture I looked at my event schedule, the timeline for finishing Fortune's scroll, the likelyhood I've have another assignment shortly given the reign schedule, and said sure but it likely won't be until after GNEW.

A few days before GNEW I had just finished the chibi scroll for Fortune and had an idea. I took the deceased's scrolls sister that I had earmarked for another project and went to work on it it.  My deadline would be tight and there was a chance I wouldn't finish.  Still, I jumped for it and forged ahead.

I finished the additional artwork to Mergriet's illumination and specifically hand drew a new snail on this one.  The illuminated capital got away from me and decided to be large, awesome, and super fussy with some white work. I ended added the leaves to make the artwork of two people blend just a little bit more and make the piece look polished.

Snail rides again!

At this point, it's my bed time.  I just finish the fussing with the illumination and I'm debating fighting with my gothic hand at 10pm.  Like an angel appearing in the night, Thyra casually made an offer to do the calligraphy for me so we could hand it off done in person rather than waiting until after Pennsic.  In return, I'd owe her some illumination for one of her upcoming projects.  This meant I could prep for the wedding I had to go to and pack for GNEW the next day.  Wooooo!

The scroll was completed and given to Aneleda and Christiana for hand off now with Thyra's lovely calligraphy and an unholy bargain of TBD illumination.  All in all, I'm happy with my art additions and the snail is adorable.

Oh, actually both scrolls were handed over so the tale of Martin Scroll-Killer (Gregor's guitar) could grow in infamy and legend.