Rosalie Gilbert

Shhhhh!  I haven't told everyone that needs to know yet, but I'm going to re-activate a group I started some years ago which folded up due to many issues. I was a founding member and the secretary and chose the name, which I've always loved.

I've spoken to the last two members of the group and they are happy for me to step up again and take the group in a different direction, which will be, of course, exclusively 14th century. Some impressions will be early, and some later, but the restarting will give me a bit more organisation as far as attending events and insurance etc.

I've made a a webpage which I haven't shared a link to but this is the new group banner. The group was just Ex Libris previously, but I think this will just indicate a fresh start.

Why am I leaving the group I'm currently in? For once it's not about egos or personality clashes. The current group is multi-period and the Persian contingent is growing so much that I really am the only medieval person left in our group. This means that I'm the only one attending medieval events, so it's not really fair to expect others to do my applications. I'd also like to be housed with other medieval re-enactors at festival time. Our insuring body required groups to have a certain number before insurance is considered and standards are checked, and I've not been able to get solo insurance. At the moment, I have a few willing helpers who are prepared to sign on so we can do our own thing (and have a say in hosting people from other places if we wish.)

Anyway, I'm excited.

The testing and experimenting of the Trotula hair powder recipe at the 1300-1600 Medieval Collegium Event was wildly successful and worked so much better than I expected. I learned quite a lot and certainly there were quite a few surprises along the way with not only the ingredients, but the methodology also. I'll be doing a post about what I expected and what happened in the next day or two.

There was an enthusiastic crowd of fellow history nerds, so I was able to think out load about my process and what I was expecting and things which worked and didn't.  I was fortunate that I had a fearless friend who let me test out the powder and the comb dip liquid on her actual hair and then let people sniff her hair. The entire crowd all agreed that the recipe certainly did what it was supposed to, and it was fun playing around the the quantities. 

I did manage to take photos along the way and over the next week, I'll edit them for the proper blog post, but this photo was taken by a member of the audience. Not for the first time, I was glad that I had accumulated a bunch of small, ceramic dishes that I didn't need because "someday I might want them" because they were PERFECT for the demonstration.

Tonight I poured the left over powder and hair comb dip into my bathwater and soaked myself and my hair in it and quite frankly, it was wonderful-smelling! The residual smell in my hair is very subtle since it was very dilluted in the bath water, but it is still there.

Stay tuned for more Trotula Hair Powder!

My gosh didn't I have fun today!  The Medieval Collegium event was great. More than anything, it gave a chance to try new things, test newer things and sit around and actually talk to the people that you promise you'll talk to at other events and don't get to talk to because everyone is busy.  It was my first visit to the site, so it was good to see what the amenities were like and where and how I'd set up next time. The have a guild hall for workshops, a long house with a bar, an outdoor bar, a trebuchet, a lake and a jetty with a little shelter on the end of it and a really big fire-pit which could comfortably cook two entire pigs. Portaloos and tap water were a real bonus since it's held on a private property.

Here's the short version:

• Venue was fantastic. lots of great spaces.
• Did some sewing on the Ham Kirtle.
• The Trotula hair powder experiment went really well.
• I took lots of nice photos of the test.
• Photo taking at the lake was really great.
• Spent time with nice friend.
• Put a bit more thought into a group name for myself.
• Decided group name needs to be squirrelly.

I'm now utterly exhausted, but have a lot to think about and need to do and a bunch of photo editing from the day to make usable pics for blogs and social media. Also unpacking the chest of things I used for the Trotula experiment and eating things.

That's a job for tomorrow.

 
I've finished my brown kirtle glow-up. It now has a laced front to go under surcotes and groovy buttoned sleeves to be 14th century stylish!

I am loving the autumn colours. I have a brown surcote I can wear with this too.

I love autumn colours!

I've got quite a few kirtles which I've had for quite a while. A few of them are not quite up to my current standard and therefore don't get worn very often. For quite a lot of years, good wools were next to impossible to buy in Queensland, so we re-enactors relied on Op shop buys, old, really thin blankets and whatever did make it to the shops. Sometimes, due to the fabric not being quite what I wanted, I've taken some shortcute with finishing touches, and that's exactly what happened here.

The kirtle is made from a really thin blanket which I dyed with commercial dye. the wool is a little worn in places and there's a tiny hole, but as I planned to use this for working class clothing, I figured that if it looked less than pristine, that was completely okay. I have a secret gripe about re-enactment which goes along the lines of "I really wish every single person in every single group wouldn't bleach and iron their gear all the time" because an entire camp of pristine clothing just isn't realistic to actual life. Life today is not filled with every single person you work with wearing brand new clothing every day. it's actually quite normal for work clothes in trades to have some wear and tear, stains, mending, and be a little rumpled at times.

Anyway, so a work dress with a small hole and some worn patches is okay in my book.

I have bought new wool since than, so this kirtle gets passed over for other things. And there was that whole gaining weight and not fitting thing. Having decided to wear it in a few weeks, I did remember that I had always planned to re-open the lower sleeves and insert buttonholes and make buttons. The kirtle is front laced so it sits nicely under surcotes, but buttoned sleeves would be just that bit nicer and a bit more 14th century fashionable.



Happily, a good look through my fabric stash found the offcuts I saved in case I actually did make the buttons. The number of buttons per arm was decided by the amount of wool I had left, and worked out at 11 each arm- total of 22 all up.

It really doesn't take too long to cut them out, but with the thicker wool, it does take about 12 minutes each to sew, plus the needle-threading and fiddling around.

That's roughly 3 in 35 minutes if the thread doesn't break and extra time sewing them on.

It sounds like it really doesn't take that much time to make them, but it really is a good few hours plus the buttonholes which I am rather slow at making. Hopefully, this weekend I can get quite a few of them made.

At the moment, I'm still sewing on the linen reinforcing strip on the inner sleeve which is a technique seen in the Museum of London's textile's book.

Still, I've got 2 weeks, so I should be fine!

We are LIVE! The interview you've been waiting for or dreading: Rosalie speaks candidly with Shad Brooks from You Tube's  Shadiversity You Tube channel, and it's now LIVE HERE.

In July, just gone, Shad visited my Rosalie's Medieval Woman tent at the Abbey Medieval Festival for a few words about medieval women, and he had questions. Many questions. Was he always that bright red or did he get redder as we went along? You decide for yourself. While the topic was sensitive, so were the euphemisms employed to ensure the conversation stayed safe for most ears.



Of course, there are many things that can't be discussed fully online in polite company, so some tid-bits of information were only hinted at.

And of course, if you've watched and would like to learn more, there's an entire book you might care to explore. Available online or ask your local book store to get a copy in for you.

A few weeks ago I was excited to attend the Tania Crossing School of Illumination workshop of Figures & Drapery held in the hall at the Abbey Museum of Art & Archaeology.  I've done one of her workshops before on illuminated letters, and I have done some art over the years, so it was more of a refresher and a look at her ideas and techniques.

She supplied all the goodies we needed, and we got down to work!


Firstly, we had a little chat about supplies and what we were using in case there were any newbies in the group who hadn't done any illuminating before, then we drew in our main figure, working from an image Tania had provided to us. I found this the most challenging of all, because I prefer to draw stuff from scratch, not copy someone else's work.



We had a drawing guide, and I did well enough with the figure itself. Once the drapery started to go in, however, I struggled to put folds where they were in the guide picture, because I really wanted to put the folds and crumples when I felt they would fall, not where they had been put in the artwork. I was pleased with my work, but already at this point it was starting to stray a bit from the image it was supposed to look like.

I kept correcting it, but that was a real exercise in frustration.

Once we started in with the colouring, I was feeling a bit happier. Tania offered advice on how to use the colours to look like they do in manuscripts and showed us which order to do things and when to start adding detail. By half time, I was sort of happy with how it was going, but the folds in my picture, were definitely not like they were supposed to be.



Here's how it was looking with large blocks of colour and very little detail. I was pretty pleased with her hair and face at this point, which was a definite win for me. Sometimes my faces in medieval art really don't quite work, and again, my face wasn't looking like it was supposed to, but it was consistent with art and didn't need fixing.

The folds in the fabric were another story altogether.

I redid the folds and scraped them off the parchment multiple times and was supremely unhappy with the end result. We all enjoyed looking at each other's work and progress and seeing everyone's interpretations of the image and their results. Some more experienced illuminators produces really fabulous results. It was very obvious who copies well and who kept wanting to add a bit of license. (Which is fine normally, but less so in a class where we were supposed to be doing a certain thing.)

In the end, I will need to redo the folds again to get a result I am happy showing people, but I managed to take some nice photos with my glasses artistically placed over the bit I really was unhappy with. If you look closely, you can see why it isn't really working. Overall, I really enjoyed the workshop and learned a few things but I had hoped there would be more "This is how you know where to draw your folds" and less "Copy this picture."  I have done fabric folds in art before at High School, and I can draw folds from life. I just struggled seeing how all the folds and crinkles on the supplied picture were formed, so it was extremely stressful for me on a personal level.

The end result is this:

Work in progress.

It was a wonderful Abbey Medieval Festival at the Rosalie's Medieval Woman tent! I had a very special visit from Heraldic Illuminator, Tania Crossingham who did the cover artwork for my book, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women.

Tania is Australian born but had made a wonderful life in Finland and flew in especially for the festival and some workshops on illumination for the Abbey Museum of Art and Archaeology. 

Pictured here, are myself, Tania and the original artwork she created for me.


 

We had a few words about some of the more surprising aspects of medieval women and I will be posting a link to the episode or segment when it goes live.

Stay tuned Shad-fans!