The timing for some of the Canton’s regular activities have changed over winter. Fighter training is no longer being held in Huonville on Wednesday evenings. Instead, Canton Marshal Sir Guillaume d’Oze is running a fortnightly beginner fighter’s course at Geeveston Community Centre, after the Imots. Imot times have been brought forward an hour to accommodate this and are now 12-3pm, with fighter training 3-5pm.

Archery continues on alternate fortnights at Surges Bay, from 12-3pm, depending on weather.

The Canton of Lightwood has added a couple of regular activities to the calendar in 2013. Regular fighter training, run by canton marshal Sir Guillaume d’Oze, is now held every Wednesday at 5:30 in Rotary Park, Huonville. Sir Guillaume has been offering instruction in rapier and heavy fighting to several members. But if fighting isn’t your Thing, it’s also an excellent social opportunity to bring along projects, have a chat, and some weeks, share a meal in the BBQ shelter. Training is usually mundane clothes, but for a bit of extra visibility we will occasionally be appearing en masse in garb.

Archery training looks like it will finally be a regular part of the canton’s schedule this year, with our first meet planned for March 9th at Surges Bay oval. It will be held on alternate Saturdays to the Imot, although slightly earlier in the day, between 12-3 to catch the light. We are still working on accumulating equipment for the canton, but have made progress towards that goal with our first Arts and Sciences workshop for the year, on fletching. Thanks to Anselm da Calabria for sharing his time and knowledge.

Our first activity for the year is the Lightwood Alternative Very Informal Totally Simplified Easter Festivity, or LAVITSEF. The quirky alternative to Festival for people who can’t wayfare as far as Glenworth Valley, but can manage the trip to our favourite venue at Surges Bay Hall. Camping Friday and Saturday nights, with a soup kitchen Friday night, catered Feast Saturday, and hot breakfasts Saturday and Sunday mornings. Archery, collegia and activities Friday and Saturday, Easter Egg hunt Sunday morning, Bardic Circle on Saturday night, heaps of entertainment for the children, and general good fun for all.

Lightwood had its November pot luck feast last night, and it was a lot of fun. We were missing a fair few canton members, after a nasty run of bad news and unexpected medical procedures during the week, but our numbers were supplemented somewhat by the College of St Gildas the Wise.

This was a deliberate attempt at what you might call a “lightning feast”: small scale, short notice, nothing too ambitious, just to prove that we don’t need to kill ourselves to have events. As you can see from the photo, it still looked good. It was also a lot of fun, with everyone pitching in to help.

Pay attention to this website and the Facebook group to be informed of more events. Lightwood plans to have plenty of them!

For a lot of Lightwoodians, the pot-luck feast next weekend is going to be the first actual SCA event they’ll attend.  We’ve had our imots for a while, but they’re more for discussion and planning; if an SCA event is a movie, an imot is the a review in a newspaper.  Now it’s time for the main event… so what do you need to know?

What To Bring

For any SCA event you need garb and feasting gear.  For pot-luck events, you also need some food to share.  And because this particular feast is at the home of the canton’s founding household, which is not hugely well-supplied with chairs, you will need to bring a chair and some candles.

Garb

The basic rule for attending an SCA event is an attempt at pre-seventeenth century clothing.  What that means can vary widely, from this:

all the way to this:

… but we don’t expect you to go overboard.  Our seneschal, Adelindis filia Gotefridi, and our reeve, Morwenna de Bonnay, will help you come up with something serviceable for the event, or if you like going mad sewing stuff at the last minute they can point you to some more ambitious designs.  Or you can borrow something from someone who already has spares.  Contact the seneschal on liz@geeveston.net if you need help, after you’ve perused her list of links on the topic of garb.

Feasting Gear

You’ll have food, but you can’t exactly eat it off the floor with your fingers (even vikings didn’t do that… mostly…).  What you need is a plate, a bowl, some cutlery and a drinking vessel, and maybe a jug for your drink.  Here’s one version of all that. Plates and bowls can be wood, pottery or metal, and the drinking vessel can be a goblet or tankard. Cutlery is usually metal, maybe with a wooden handle. You can pick up passable versions of all of these at an op shop or Vinnies for a couple of dollars at most, and provided you keep them simple they’ll blend right in.

There are a number of potters in the barony and the wider kingdom who make feasting gear, although the prices can add up after a while. Ask Baron Karl to show you a couple of examples of the work of Master Alex the Potter, who makes a living making and selling documentably period work to SCAdians and the mundane world.

Food (and Drink)

Most SCA events in the kingdom of Lochac are fully catered, though always BYO grog. Pot-luck feasts are different: to keep costs down and increase the sense of involvement for the participants, they require that everyone bring a bit of food. In theory, if you bring enough to feed yourself, and everyone else does too, there’ll be enough to go around when you share it. In practice, in the pot-luck feasts we’ve seen, there’s always one dish that everybody wants some of, and a few that don’t excite the imaginations and/or noses of the greater majority, so if you bring a little more than “enough” then we’ll have enough slack that everyone will still get fed.

We’ll put everyone’s contributions on a table and work out suitably equitable arrangement so everyone is happy. We’ll have people with various “dietary weirdnesses”, as they’re called: vegetarianism, gluten intolerance and so on, all of which count as weirdnesses purely because they’re rare, not because they’re unreasonable. People are making plans to allow for that, so we should be all right on the night.

The key point about all this is that the dish you provide should be medieval. There are loads of resources on how to achieve this, the closest to hand being Baron Hrolf’s cookbook [PDF], or again you can speak to our seneschal.

Also, please note that we won’t have anything to drink apart from water. We’ll get some actual drinkable water — the stuff out of the tap in Geeveston is undrinkable — but if you want something harder, it’s BYO again.

Chairs and Candles

The last two things to bring are simple: bring a chair to sit on, and some candles in a suitably medieval-looking candleholder. No electric lights for this feast! We have plenty of spots to put candles, so the more the merrier.

That should be all we need! Come along, bring what you need, and be prepared to have fun. We’ll eat, we’ll talk of matters relevant to gentlefolk of the middle ages, and we’ll even do a bit of singing. It’ll be fun!

The changes to Australia’s insurance laws over the last little while have finally started biting us in the SCA in a special way, and one of the results is… a sharp increase in the number of members! How did that happen? It’s very simple.

The SCA in Australia has a new contract with its insurers, Nosferatu Bathory Dracula and Associates. Under the rules, signed in a suspiciously reddish-coloured ink on the contract, we have to remit five dollars to the insurer for every non-member who attends an SCA event. By “non-member”, they mean anyone, regardless of age. A pregnant woman can give birth in the middle of the feast hall and her child will arrive owing our insurer five bucks. As well, their definition of “event” covers stuff we don’t usually charge for, including non-garbed activities like arts & sciences evenings and our fortnightly imots, as well as feasts, tourneys, demos, pot-lucks, revels, dance practices, fighter practices, and everything else that’s advertised as an SCA activity.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. If you’re a member, you don’t have to pay the five dollars. And while membership has gone up to $30 per year (it would be nice if the SCA committee hadn’t decided to compound this pain by raising the prices at the same time, but they had good reasons) it’s now, more than ever, looking like a good plan to just pay it and not worry about the new rules.

Putting it starkly: if you attend six events in the SCA in one year, you’re down thirty bucks, none of which the SCA gets to see. It’s a straight tax, with no direct benefit to your group (the indirect benefit — having insurance — is there of course, so it’s not all evil). Whereas if you pay for a year’s worth of membership, it still costs you the same, but you get the benefits of membership and the SCA actually gets to keep some of the proceeds to improve itself.

So what are the benefits of membership? For a start, you get a copy of Pegasus, the kingdom newsletter. This keeps you in touch with the goings-on of the whole kingdom and the wider SCA, and is sent by a kind of email notification system every month. Also, you get a vote in the occasional bits of kingdom democracy, although that’s rare because on the whole we prefer to keep things nicely feudal. And as a member you’re entitled to be an officer in the canton, barony or kingdom.  And you or your consort (or both!) can enter Crown Tourneys and maybe, if you’re lucky, end up running the place for six months as King or Queen.  But the most immediate effect of membership is on event prices: not just the five buck insurance fee but also the couple of dollars extra that we charge non-members, more or less as an extra incentive to pony up the dosh and get on the bandwagon.

As an example: imagine you’re a non-member who came to our imot today, and wants to come to our pot-luck feast in a couple of weeks, and plans to attend all the activities at the Baronial Investiture next month.  And you want to come to more imots when they’re on.  How long will it be before it’s cheaper to be a member than not?  Do the maths:

* The insurance fee paid at this point covers you for the whole event; the remaining difference is just the member/non-member price differences.

So as of the very next imot after the Investiture, you’re $32 out of pocket compared to a member.  Any event from then to next September that you attend is costing you more than you saved by not buying your membership now.

That looks pretty cut and dried, and is probably a large part of the reason that Lightwood’s membership, for example, has doubled in the last month after staying steady for ages.  It applies everywhere though.  Think about it, and go get a membership!  It makes sense, and saves dollars!

The canton put in a bid to run the baronial investiture on the weekend of 20-21 October, and we got it! So now we’re doing the headless chook dance and organising everything. We are very lucky indeed to have no less a personage than Sir Oz, officially Sir Guillaume d’Oze, Ynys Fawr’s only (actively playing) member of the chivalry, on board as tourney steward and adviser to the cooks. We also have the support of the whole barony and a couple of really lovely venues for the event. Read all about it on the Baronial Investiture pages!

We had a productive and entertaining Imot this weekend. Adelindis brought in the planned menu for the Baronial Investiture, for which we are submitting a proposal. Work continued on couching the Baronial banner, and Morwenna worked on the newer project of making bunting in the Canton’s colours for adding colour and visibility to future tourneys and events. Libby finished sewing over the lines of a tic tac toe board, which the children promptly co-opted and lay on the floor playing. Adelindis brought in her copy of Joan Sutton (mka India Ollerenshaw)’s book on medieval toys and games, which inspired the idea to compile a Canton toy basket to bring along to events to keep the children entertained. We decided to bring along some materials to the next Imot for the kids to make various kinds of cloth dolls. And the Crux Australis Principal Herald (pro tem) did some consulting with three of the younger members of the canton and produced some excellent heraldry.

Welcome to those who have been inspired by the pageantry of the Medieval Mayhem to find out more about this re-enactment lark! If you want to become involved, the easiest way is to come to our regular fortnightly event, the Imot (pronounced im-OTT, which is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “meeting”). The next one is coming up on May 5th, 1-4pm, at Geeveston Community Centre (GeCo), School Rd Geeveston. At the Imot we get together to work on projects, plan events and enjoy workshops on different topics. No garb is required – just turn up, introduce yourselves, and find out more about us. Children are welcome to come along too, we are a family-friendly group.

Our next event, still in the planning stages, is a residential weekend at the Far South Wilderness Lodge near Dover, provisionally called the Midwinter Scholium. Intended as an immersive introduction to the broadest range of SCA interests we can bring together, our scholars will be able to sample topics ranging from fighting to costuming to fibre arts to heraldry, and much more besides, without having to worry about driving home over Vince’s Saddle in the dark. As well as having formal presenters, all attendees will be encouraged to share any knowledge and expertise they may possess in different subject areas.

If Hobart is more local to you than the Huon Valley, then check out the Barony of Ynys Fawr instead. They run regular fighting and archery practices, dance practices and events.

At the Imot today, Adelindis and Morwenna started on the process of couching the edges of the laurel wreath. The banner as presented at Court was largely machine appliqued because of the short timeframe, but the intention is to gradually replace the machine stitching with corded edging, while still having a fully-functional banner to use at events in the meantime. The exception to this were the apples, which were couched onto the tree before the tree was sewn onto the banner.

Couching, or corded applique, is a common period embroidery technique especially suited to heraldic applications such as banners. A cord is laid across the raw edge of the fabric, and the stitch goes from the outside of the appliqued shape over the cord and down into both layers of fabric, creating a sturdy join while reducing fraying without the need for folding over edges.

By the end of the Imot, the tally was five leaves down, 35 leaves (and an apple tree!) to go…

UPDATE: The news is more complicated than that.  The rules have changed, and all the names are now different.  Under the new rules, we are now proposed, which is a step up from the initial state of unofficial.  When we get our heraldry registered, we will finally be incipient. So it’s all very silly, but the good news is that at least we’re progressing… in one direction or another.

I bear some solemn news.  The proposed canton of Lightwood is no more.

Yes, it’s true.  Tonight, in court, the news was handed down: we are now the incipient canton of Lightwood.  Which means we’re officially on the path to real live cantonhood, having been recognised by the king and queen.

Tonight, at the Feast of the Lions in Ynys Fawr, King Siridean and Queen Margie accepted with great pleasure the banner, made by our own seneschal Adelindis filia Gotefridi.  They expressed their approval, and thus we passed the last test on the road toward becoming an incipient group.  The banner will fly at all Lightwood events (except the one where it’s being further sewn and improved upon by the lady Adelindis and, she hopes, several volunteers).

This is all because all our paperwork has been submitted and appears to be in order, and we are looking and behaving like a real SCA branch.  Which is fair enough: we have five officers, regular meetings, over a dozen active participants (counting kids) and the support of the barony and the kingdom.  We need to keep running events, like the recent feast and tourney, the upcoming Medieval Mayhem and other future events that we’re just beginning to nut out, and recruit more members.  All going well, in 12-18 months we should be able to progress to full canton status.

Bottoms Up!