Re: Work In Progress--Deryni Action Figure Project (was Duncan Action Figure)

[Evie]

The only thing I know about Carrot Top is that he was the comedian who happened to be playing at the Comedy Club here in Birmingham, AL, in March of 1993 when we got hit by the Blizzard of '93.  A city that normally only gets one or two inches of snow a year at the very most suddenly found itself buried under 2-3 feet of snow overnight, with no infrastructure such as snow plows, road salt, etc., to deal with the weather emergency.  Several buildings that caught on fire during that weekend ended up burning to the ground because the fire trucks couldn't get to them, and one of those buildings happened to be the Comedy Club.  Carrot Top lost all of the props he'd brought with him for his show.  I remember that making the local news shortly before our power went out, and we couldn't follow the news reports anymore until the power returned.  So now there's a permanent mental association for me between Carrot Top, blizzards, and buildings going up in flames.  Probably just as well that Rhys doesn't resemble him so much anymore.   

[Evie]

I finally managed to find some 4mm cube beads that would work for 1:6 scale ward cubes. (You have no idea how hard it was to find cube beads that small! ) I tried for months to think of the best way to fill in the holes and then paint over the surface so the former holes would be invisible, but it dawned on me this weekend that filling in the holes is actually unnecessary. The cube shape is for ease of stacking, but the wards would work even if disks or some other stackable shape were used. And also my mini-Deryni live in a post-KKB Gwynedd, so having to hide the cubes isn't as much of an issue as it once was. So I thought, what if some Deryni decided to string their ward cubes onto a sturdy leather thong that could either be carried in a pouch or worn on a belt like a string of prayer beads? They could also be worn like a necklace, either openly or hidden under a tunic.  Having a strung set of ward cubes would also make it less likely to accidentally lose one. So here is a set of strung metal ward cubes. These beads came in a silver string, but I used black satin spray paint on half of them. I have enough beads to complete several sets of ward cubes. There were also some teeny crystal seed beads as spacers between the silver cube beads, so I will keep those for another project. Maybe one of my littles would like a crystal bead necklace or rosary.



Alaric checks out the new cubes to make sure they will work properly.



The dog wanted to check out the new wards too.

[Shiral]

Fiat Lux! 

[Evie]

"Christus resurrexit!  Vere resurrexit! Alleluia!"

[Evie]

I finally found a few minutes to work on Ailidh's hair:

Ailidh gets her hair curled by evian_delacourt, on Flickr

The hair was stick straight, so I put it up on straw curlers.  I'm hoping this will result in large ringlet-style curls.

Ailidh gets her hair curled by evian_delacourt, on Flickr

After rolling her hair, I dunked her head in freshly boiled water for a minute, then into an ice bath.  Here she is letting the hair set and drip dry.

I'll post a follow up photo once it's fully dry and out of rollers.

[Evie]

Here are the "After" photos:

Freshly unrolled by evian_delacourt, on Flickr

Freshly unrolled and not yet picked through.  She looks like a cocker spaniel!

Finger picked by evian_delacourt, on Flickr

Finger-picked through to tame the curls a bit and make them go where I want them.

Styling mousse added by evian_delacourt, on Flickr

With mousse added and frizz tamed somewhat.  It's getting there.  Not as long as it ought to be for a medieval maiden (though it wasn't long enough even before it was curled), so I'm going for the freshly-shorn look she had going on at the end chapters of Maidens of Mayhem.

[Laurna]

Oh!  I like the last picture, the curls are looking real.

[Jerusha]

Even though it is a bit short, I LOVE the colour!

Once married to Jass, she would be veiled and wimpled out in public, so no one would know it is a bit short.

Come to think of it, though, with the exception of Jehana in her mourning attire, did the married women in the Deryniverse usually wear wimples, or just veils?

[Evie]

I don't recall Richenda being described as wearing wimples, just veils, though a wimple would certainly work for that time period. KK's characters don't seem to adhere too strictly to fashions of their precise time periods, so a bit of leeway seems to be acceptable. I imagine Ailidh's hair would have only been this short after her elopement from Rhemuth, when she was disguised as a Border lad, so a wimple or caul and veil would help hide the lack of length. Though this particular doll isn't too expensive, so I may get a spare and try rooting long hair into her head to see what that would look like curled.  I have some red hair I originally bought for Dhugal before I discovered I wouldn't be able to completely reroot his style of head, so I could use that for her.

[Elkhound]

These pictures reminded me of the old perm machines I've seen pictures of, with all the wires hangin from the unit, each with a curler at the end.

[Evie]

LOL!  Now that's an interesting mental image.   

[Elkhound]

One of these:
http://www.modern50.com/oddities/30s-electric-permanent-wave-machine/

There was an episode of "The Waltons" when the mother got a perm--against everyone in the family's advice--and it ended up looking awful, and they teased her mercilessly.  She went running out into the woods and met the family dog---and SHE wouldn't have anything to do with her (probably because of the smell of the chemicals.)

[Evie]

OK, today's project:

Portable physician's manual for Rhys by evian_delacourt, on Flickr

I drew the basic inspiration from a couple of 15th Century physician's almanacs that had folded pages bound in such a way that they could hang from a belt loop and serve as a quick reference for a healer.  But the original design looked too fragile to shrink down to 1:6 as it was.  The narrow binding/belt loop would have been the problem, and also the difficulty of folding printer paper into the necessary thinness.  Onionskin parchment paper doesn't exist as far as I know.  So I modified the idea slightly, turning the manual into a fold-up guide (like converting an atlas to a fold-up map).  Since four copies of the guide would fit on a page, I made copies for Alaric, Duncan, and Dhugal also.  I figure if even one ancient Healer's Quick Reference managed to survive to Kelson's day, a copy of it would have been preserved in the Royal Library, and Fr. Nivard would arrange to have fair copies made for the Kingdom's present-day Deryni Healers.  Now I just need to make tiny belt pouch/covers for them.

[revanne]

"I don't recall Richenda being described as wearing wimples, just veils, though a wimple would certainly work for that time period. KK's characters don't seem to adhere too strictly to fashions of their precise time periods, so a bit of leeway seems to be acceptable."

I wonder whether it was a bit like Muslim headscarves today - there is a formal way of wearing them which would appear on pictures etc but in practise as long as the hair was covered there could be a lot more imagination in what was actually worn.

Whenever I see someone in a headcovering elegantly draped I can't help feeling that it is much preferable to a 50 something series of bad hair days

[Evie]

In cold weather (which they had a lot of during at least part of the Middle Ages, as they were going through what some call the Little Ice Age, which is one reason besides modesty that they wore so many layers of fabric in certain periods), a veil can keep the wearer warm by preventing body heat from escaping.  The flip side of this is that they can be beastly hot to wear in summer, at least in the modern Southern US.  Wearing natural fiber fabrics helps (and of course they had no other sort back then), and there is even an Italian journal in which the writer expressed amazement at the freedom of Englishwomen to walk about bareheaded and even visit the neighborhood women rather than staying at home all day, but I imagine head-covering styles would vary somewhat from season to season as well as culture to culture, and there are loads of ways to wear even the simplest veils.  IIRC, women weren't required to wear a veil or coif indoors if only family was present (although they might wear either for convenience, to keep hair tied back out of their faces while doing their household work), but of course in a portrait you'd wear your nicest outfit and fanciest headgear.  And even in pictures of peasants working the fields, women had their heads covered due to the modesty issue, but that almost turban-like wrapping of a veil that you see in illustrations of peasant women working would be something that even a highborn lady might find practical if she's in the dairy or kitchen supervising her servants.  Wouldn't want loose hairs falling into the cheese.  And even the noblewomen were a lot more hands-on in their work than ladies of some later centuries like the Victorians.  There was less of an "upstairs/downstairs" divide, and a lady would sometimes work alongside her maids rather than just issuing orders to them, although a woman of sufficient rank wouldn't need to do the messiest sorts of work herself.

Now that I've worked out how to make a form of 1:6 style wimple that will actually stay on, I can make more than the few I've got on hand, so that would be a handy solution to Ailidh's anachronistically short hair.  Or...well, she's Ailidh; when has she ever bothered with being conventional?  Women sometimes got their hair cut short when they were battling a bad fever, so maybe if she keeps showing up at Court with short hair, people will just assume the poor lass is prone to catching every fever that goes through Transha, and that's why she can never manage to grow it back out again.....