House Capuchin 3

This is a showcase of our Summits folks at KA&S&B this year (March 11-13, 2017). It’s not complete and if I missed someone, please let me know so I can fix it! I’ve tried to tag photographers in where I could and gotten permission as best I can. If I got something wrong, let me know, please! Any pix that were from the An Tir Virtual Feed are labeled, “- Vir Feed”.

From His Alpine Highness, Tsarevich Tjorkill Kanne – “We wish to congratulate the wonderful entries from Our Summits, (and former Summits), populace on their amazing entries at Kingdom Arts, Sciences and Bardic Championships! We had 50% of total entries and at least half of the finalists, (by counting Jessica Smith-Carlock as Summits), along with taking home other awards and honors. We are so very proud for all of you and the truly amazing entries in both A&S and Bardic competitions. The level of talents, both from Our Principality and the Kingdom of An Tir is completely mind-boggling. Some entries were done by perhaps the only person in the world today doing a specific form of art and other presentations are used by scholars as their references. Simply amazing is all I can say and We couldn’t be happier as your Prince and Princess seeing the shining example you all bring to the Known World. Three cheers, Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzza!”

From Her Alpine Highness, Tsarevna Alina of Folkstone  – “Also, I would like to add that it takes a lot of courage for anyone to enter a competition of this size and caliber. We could not have been happier to be there to support all the candidates that entered.
Some of them had some mountainous obstacles that they had to overcome at the last minute in order to take part in the competition. We want everyone to know that this did not go unnoticed either. If we can help anyone in deciding if they would like to enter any of the Arts & Sciences competition we are here to help you and assist you with getting you in touch with the correct people to help you on this Journey.”

The Summits was represented at Bardic by HL Sholeh of Susa (Shire of Couer de Val) who was a finalist. Her entries were:

• “On How an Ottoman Court Dancer Might Compose a dance” – based on Gazi Giray Han, Ottoman Composer
• “An Interpretive Dance with Fabric set in the Golden Age of the Ottoman Court 1500-1600”
• The highest score for the bardic competition for “A Dance Treatment for Depression in The Ottoman Empire in the 16th Century, The confluence of Dance, Music and Medicine”.

A&S Entrants from the Summits were: Vs. Vesta Antonia Aurelia (single entry), HL Marya Kargashina (Championship), and HL Seamus O’Caelligh (Championship). Marya was a finalist on Sunday, presenting her paper on furs. Claire le Deyare (single entry) kinda counts as one of ours since she plays down here a lot and started in Couer de Val, even if she’s currently living in Dragon’s Mist. …and there were other folks who set up displays (Tryggr Tyresson)

HL Marya Kargashina (lives in 3Mts., but is a Sergeant of Adiantum)

HL Seamus O’Caelligh (Alpine Scholar) – Shire of Tymberhavene

A video of the leeches – https://www.facebook.com/raffaella.dicontino/videos/10155185577496318/

Seamus’ entries were:

• Pustules, Pestilence, and Injury: Exploring The Ailments of Henry VIII and his Physicians’ Treatments. A research paper filling in the hole left by Henry’s physician in the records of treatments for the King, with possible treatments from Tudor Medical Texts.
• Defend Against Poison, Venom and Plague: Mithridatium the Most Desired Treatment for 2,000 years. The recreation of the Mithridatium from Aulus Cornelius Celsus’ De Medicina. A cure all treatment sought after from the 2nd Century BC into the 19th Century AD.
• A Sea-moose Gules: O’Caellaigh Heraldry in Glass – The creation of a leaded glass window, styled after the windows at the Selby Abby in England, with the device of Seamus O’Caellaigh. With the method set out by Theophilus.

Vs. Vesta Antonia Aurelia – Goin’ Minoan: An Exploration into the Dress of the Minoan Woman
Exploring and re-creating Minoan women’s dress, according to changes in academic theory and the experience of wearing each version of the five outfit(s). – Single Entry – Incipient Barony of Myrtle Holt

A write-up by Vesta from her Vesta of the Summits page (used with permission)

My first Kingdom Arts and Sciences and Bardic! It’s been an epic journey.
It all started last year when Duchess Hlutwige personally challenged (double-dog dared?) me to enter. I laughed then and pretty much dismissed the idea. I’m a stick jock, not an artisan. But it sat in the back of my head….
I’ve been obsessed with the Minoans for, goodness, decades now. The art, the food, the clothes–the mystery. And after my 1999 Minoan ended up being So. Very. Incorrect., I was always reading up on new developments, new discoveries, new analysis. I was obsessed. And I wanted other people to be obsessed, too–because there’s no SCAdians to geek out with, about Minoan clothes. 😦
I started small. A private party. A class at a local event. Would people respond? Would they be interested? Or would folks just politely listen for a bit before their eyes glazed over? (In modern society, talking about SCA topics, this happens frequently 😀 People who are keeping up with the Kardashians, tend to side-eye enthusiastic sharing about historical textiles.)
And the information just kept growing. I started wondering… could I do a garb-based entry at that level? I’m not celebrated for having mad sewing skills 😀 The garb I’m known for most is a 15-year-old red wool tunic that isn’t even hemmed!
But then some things started puzzling me in the research. So I had to ask some folks I knew in the SCA who would be able to explain things. I wasn’t sure if these patterns were achievable by weaving… so I asked the only hard-core weaver I knew: Khalja. I wasn’t sure about whether I was making big assumptions about trade relationships… so I asked the only hard-core Bronze Ager I knew: Achaxe. They pointed me on to other people…like Isabella Lucrezia, who was the kind of editor Anne Rice and Marion Zimmer Bradley should have had: one not afraid to tell me to kill my darlings.
I think the secret to A&S heaven vs. A&S hell is the people you know there.
A group of Summits folks started talking about ways of encouraging A&S in the principality. I realized… I couldn’t be encouraging people to try things like displays and competitions if *I* wasn’t willing to try them. Gotta put your money where your mouth is.
So when the sign-up deadline came… I put my hat in.
Single entry only… but i was going.
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Getting to KASB was another epic journey. My original carpool had to bow out due to serious illness, which left me scrambling for a bit to find a ride. Thank goodness for the Honey Badgers! Two of them were going and they said I could go with them! And Taran of the HBs was kindly letting me borrow her mannequins to display my gowns, so it was serendipitous. It just meant we weren’t able to get in until late Friday and I had to set up on Saturday morning instead.
I didn’t sleep much and I’m an early riser naturally, so by 6am I was already caffeinated and by 7am, I already had my trolley of clothes, books and mannequins in the Whale Room for set up.
I was in the first wave of presentations, at 9:20 sharp, and I garnered a larger group of listeners than I expected that early in the day, including–to my mingled terror and gratitude–the Queen.
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From heavy fighting, I’d learned the skill of setting your victory condition(s). Sometimes, at practice, victory conditions aren’t “how many did I slay tonight?” Instead, they’re “how many offside leg shots did I land tonight?” or “How many times did I work a face thrust into my combinations?” or “Did I get the moulinet to work?”
Thusly, my victory condition for KASB was “Don’t suck.”
That was my equivalent to “Don’t get one-shotted in the challenge round at Crown.”
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The presentation went reasonably well. All my practicing seemed to fly right out my head once i started talking, alas. Looking back at the presentation, it seems rambly. (Although one person kindly told me after I mentioned it to her that “you rambled INTERESTINGLY.” So there’s that.)
I also achieved the two successes of: not making glazed-over faces and not making my boobs fall out of my heanos. They weren’t part of my original victory condition, but iI consider them achievements nonetheless. I also managed to go over my allotted speaking time by only 4 minutes! In my practices, I sat at 25-30 minutes, so I considered THAT a serendipitous bonus of otherwise forgetting my lines!
I got to plug my two favorite books (Ariadne’s Threads and Tutankhamun’s Wardrobe), too! Ask me about them sometime. I can babble at you about them FOR HOURS.
The Q&A afterwards was less nerve-wracking than I anticipated. I didn’t feel interrogated, nor did I feel like anyone was waiting to “catch” me in a mistake so I could be “made to fail.” (I’d been told stories, once folks started to hear I was doing single entry.)
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After my presentation, my judges stopped me at various times in the hall or at my table to let me know that my scores would be kind of odd. My presentation didn’t fit the process rubric–although it didn’t fit any OTHER rubrics, either! So some of my numbers would be low, due to how the rubric was measuring and defining certain parts of the project.
Ciana, who was also presenting a garb process entry!, was my nearest room buddy and she had the same issues. I heard some buzz later that there might be some rubric tweaking or building to suit these kinds of experimental process entries: where the project is figuring out what the process *was/is*, via trial and error by making a series of objects according to ever-evolving hypotheses.
That would be helpful, I think, if the A&S world wants to push the edges of what we know or think we know.
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One of the things I was frequently asked by anxious Laurels this weekend was “But did you have fun?”
In the end, I had to say, “I don’t know. How are we defining ‘fun’?”
To me, “fun” is… meringue. Light. Fluffy. Not much substance. And KASB was much more …substantial… than that. It fed something in me. It challenged my brain. It was like being served a platter of savory petit-fours, each filled with meats and cheeses instead of fruit pastes and chocolates.
There were fun moments, of course. Having someone run up to you and say, “I love your nipples–wait, that came out wrong” because she thought my breast camisole was hilarious… that’s fun. But the folks who came up to my table during the day to talk to me about murex and byssal fibers and weaving technologies and embellishment possibilities and my source books…. that wasn’t “fun”. It was far meatier than that.
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So I don’t think I can use the word “fun” for my experience at KASB 2017.
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I think “satisfying” would work, though.

Vs. Tryggr Tyresson’s display – Shire of Corvaria

HL Claire le Deyare (Clare o’Tarran) – Lives in Dragon’s Mist, plays in Summits a lot and used to be from Couer de Val! This is from her single entry on Purple dye made from murex. The title of the research paper is “The History of the Sacred Purple: The Use of Muricidae as a Dye Source”.

Recording of the talk – On Purple – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phTHN5DLkcA&feature=youtu.be

Courts

Guilds

Many thanks to the photographers who allowed me to use their photos! Alexander (David Little), Jill Blackhorse, Jennifer Keating, Sheila Louise Wright, Maestro Eduardo, Marya, Landinn de Marest, Vesta, Vandy Ælfgifu Hall, Emma Compton, Rafaella di Contino, and the An Tir Virtual Feed.

In ministerio autem Somnium! Anja, graeca doctrina servus to House Capuchin
Page Created 3/5/17 & published 3/15/17 (C)M. Bartlett
Last updated 3/18/17