March 2025: More and More Projects
March Goals:
Garb:
Finish assembling the camisa, if it has properly repented.
Red saya project, all day every day.
Classes:
Finish the editing of my Foods That Built Spain class
Competitions:
Maybe find a thing to do at Coronation, pending announcement.
Kiki continues to be an excellent project su-purr-visor.
The camisa did not repent its sins sufficiently this month, so I did not make progress on there. Which was totally fine, because I spent a lot of the month helping Bea with Coronation garb for Abran and Anya for the first weekend of April. This project was a super fun exploration into 13th C Spain, which I never really explore myself. We made some fun new kinds of garments and predictably ended up stamping things again. Those projects took up a significant amount of my bandwidth this month, interspersed with the red saya.
The red saya itself didn’t get as much attention as I would have liked. The bodice is largely constructed, and I took some time to address some of the design concerns I had, mostly surrounding the green trim. My main concern there was that the green is really garish and with the very bright (though cooler toned) red, I was worried it would look too Christmas-y. I was able to find some very thin green trim that I’d used on previous products still in my stash, and I’m going to use that to to a thin line of trim down around the bottom of the skirt to give it some weight/pizzaz without being too ostentatious.
Lady Alessandra at the University of Atlantia is amazing and helped me finish getting The Foods That Built Spain edited. I did managed to get the sound working again on my PC, but she took it and ran with it and now it’s up both on my page and on the University YouTube channel, which is great! It feels really nice to get that off my shoulders for the month. It is somehow miraculously once again time to think about whether or not to do a class at the next university and I’m leaning toward a virtual class and recycling one of my usuals. I’m teaching The Foods That Built Spain at L.E.A.F.S. next month as part of the agriculture track. My goal there is to see if I can get the lecture, which ended up being about an hour and 15 minutes, down to an hour so I can more regularly offer the class and not take two full hours for it. Aspirationally, I’m going to submit it to Summer University as a 1 hour class option, just for fun.
For Coronation, the theme of the event itself is 13th C Toledo and one of the competitions that was announced was a sweets competition! My orange sweets from The Foods That Built Spain fits in perfectly to this so I prepped a batch of those for entry. It was nice to get around to doing this for people to actually eat, instead of just making it for myself and class pictures. The specific documentation for those candies can be found here. I did play around with the idea of doing a second candy for this competition, with roses instead of oranges. These were a challenge because food safe roses can be hard to find without a lot of trawling, and I didn’t get around to experimenting with using dried rose petals instead but I’m thinking that post-move, that will be something I want to try.
April is going to be a very quiet month. I’m moving into a new home which is going to severely limit the amount of time and access to equipment that I have for doing projects. In light of that, I’m setting my bar pretty low on goals.
April Goals:
Garb:
Continue working on the red saya project
Classes:
Prep The Foods That Built Spain class for an in person-session
