I’ve been busy creating a new item for my Renaissance Faire shop: bookmarks feature the same weird and whimsical creatures as my wall hangings and throw pillows.
Medieval Bookmarks
New in My Spoonflower Shop!
Sew-on banding (fabric trim) with SCAdian populace badges. Designs for all 20 kingdoms are already for sale, and I’ll be adding the other 200+ over the next few weeks.
The banding is sold as by-the-yard fabric. This means it can be made of any of the several fabrics that Spoonflower offers: basic cotton broadcloth, linen/cotton blend, silk/cotton blend, or even velvet, to name a few. Just cut the fabric into 2-inch strips along the fine lines marked for that purpose, tuck the quarter-inch seam allowances under, and sew as you would with a regular ribbon or trim. It’s a little bit more work to apply than ribbon, but the wide range of options for material are worth it.
(Image shown: “mockup” of a strip of banding with Atenveldt’s populace badge. The flax-colored edges at top and bottom are the seam allowances; they don’t show when the banding is applied.)
November, 2024: Latest Fabric Designs
One of the designs I added to my Spoonflower shop last week, a damask from Renaissance-era Spain:
I’m very pleased with the way it turned out. I made it in several colorways, including silver-grey on black. (Imagine this design on velvet!)
Then there’s this:
So many circles! I think I may now be done with roundels for a while (unless I see a Byzantine design that I really like, of course).
I’ve also added some new wall hanging/ tea towel panels, a Celtic zoomorphic interlace of running hounds in three different colorways, and several more SCAdian heraldic designs.
If something (relatively) more “modern” is your thing…
My other Spoonflower shop (Red Tansy 2 – easy to remember, right?) now has Charles F. A. Voysey’s lovely Arts & Crafts “Briar Rose” in several colorways, like this pink and grey on white version:
And this simple Art Nouveau design by Lewis Foreman Day:
More Byzantine fabrics, more medieval humor
Both the Byzantine fabrics and fabric fat quarters for DIY wall hangings (larger than the ones I sell at Renaissance festivals) will be available in my Spoonflower shop soon.
Something New Coming Soon
I’d been wanting to do something with that cat for a while, and someone at the Lincoln Forest Renaissance Faire asked me for a wall hanging with a rabbit — naturally I thought of the “battle bunnies” from medieval manuscripts.
Recent Fabric Designs: 4-24-2024
I’ve been on a bit of a roundels kick lately. Maybe that’s because arranging an allover pattern of evenly spaced circles — even circles with elaborate designs in them — is a lot easier than arranging one of those asymmetric medieval damasks. And maybe I’m into roundels right now because it’s less than 100 days until Pennsic (that’s the Pennsic War, the biggest event held each year by the Society for Creative Anachronism), and Byzantine-style clothing is popular for hot-weather SCA events.
I’m also continuing to work on designs inspired by the Manesse Codex. The floral allover still isn’t what I want it to be, but the rows-of-people turned out well. And the tea towel/wall hanging design, which I always think of as “A Pike on Your Head” because of the fish adorning the knight’s helmet. (Okay, maybe that pun only makes sense if you know that pike can mean a fish or a polearm, among other things.)