Seeing Red

I'm loving the colour of my new parade shield with my personal Rosalie's Medieval Woman Crowned R. The red is a sort of iron red and the gold trim really pops.

Unfortunately, the R stencil I had ready was a little too small, so I need to enlarge it a little before I can trace it on. I'll be adding roses of another shade or red across the background similar to the Blue shield with the Crowned A that I finished in June this year.

I'm loving it so far!

Bath bands glow up

Finding things I can use for displays in my medieval tent in the modern world is tricky. A lot of things need to be taken into account- what can I get? What can I afford? What am I prepared to compromise on?

This was one of those things. Yes, I could have commissioned a full size hand-coopered tub for a display but transporting it would have been a major pain in the rear. The bath I decided to use was a half wine barrel bought from a gardening outlet. It's solid wood, but it has metal bands which couldn't pass for wood or rope bound or forged metal. Even though most baths don't show forged black bands, they are infinitely preferable to grey, modern-looking ones.

With that in mind, I needed to paint them. It's hard because I don't want to get paint on the wood and the little edge needs to be black too. The best way to do this was to slip a little piece of paper between the timber and the metal and slide it around where I could. This wasn't too hard, as in the heatwave we are having, the bands have loosened a little.

Not ideal, but certainly doable.