I promised myself that I wasn’t going to buy myself any new clothes until I absolutely have to, because everything I have is falling off. I have plenty of things to wear on the way back down from losing this weight, so I should be ok. I will have to sew a little bit of garb for faire, because I already have it cut out & it was an outfit that matches one that Dawn made (she bought the fabric for me). That’s no big deal, I can always use more garb. The stuff I’m making will fit even after the weight loss, because that’s how it’s made. It’s not like I’m gaining weight or pregnant & need clothes that are going to fit for awhile, you know?

I really wish I had been sewing back when I was having kids, because I could have had some really nice maternity clothing that actually fit me & was long enough, instead of what I ended up wearing. I’m not sure it would have saved me much money, but at least I would’ve liked it more than what i did have, I think. Back in the 80s, everything looked really cutesy, or super frumpy, like we were either children ourselves or grannies. It was a bizarre time in maternity fashion. I’m still not sure what clothing manufacturers were thinking, quite honestly, but they seemed to come out of in the mid-90s, at any rate. Morgan had really fashionable maternity clothes to wear last year.

I bought a woodburning tool set yesterday & a piece of bass wood to play with. I made a nice little claddagh plaque with our family name on it & the words, “Love, Friendship, Loyalty est 1991.” It turned out really nice & I’m pleased with my first effort. My brothers both did woodburning when we were growing up (known as pyrography, by the way), but I was never allowed to try it. I guess my mom & dad thought it was a guy thing or I’d burn the house down or something. I bought Rhi some bass wood, too, and she gave it a try after we went to bed. She had a good time, too.

I’d still like to make a few salves and balms for the booth this summer, like a good acne treatment and maybe something for burns or aches and pains, but I really doubt that I’m going to have time to research anything new at this point. I’ll be making a bunch of stencils to do signs with, and then painting the signs themselves, along with everything else that I need to do, but we’ll see.

I swear, the cats have been driving me crazy the past two days. Mally won’t leave the rest of them alone, so he’s walking around trying to dominate all of the others, so they’re all shell-shocked and freaking out. At least Tiny isn’t acting up, too, if she was, we might have a situation like these guys, sitting in a cat condo:

Sad to say, I can see this happening in my house. I walked out into the kitchen one day & Tiny was sitting on the counter, eating the cat food. She’s not a small dog, mind you. She stands about 2 feet tall from her back to the floor & weighs about 50 pounds. It was pretty funny, especially the look she had on her face when I caught her & asked “What are you doing?” Anyway, I really hope that Malachite is finished terrorizing the rest of the boys, at least for awhile.

Yeah, I know, this post really won’t have much to do with renaissance faires or crafts or any of that.. well, maybe it kind of does. Back when I was in high school & going to formal dances like prom & such, it was always big deal to borrow your Mom’s “real” jewelry to wear with your formal dress. I wore my Mom’s Akoya pearls to my Junior Prom and felt honored and touched that she asked if I wanted to because I knew how special they were to her. They went perfectly with the white dress that I wore, too.

When Rhi went to her Junior Prom, she wore a beautiful orange dress, and I don’t own any expensive jewelry, really. I made her a Tree of Life pendant to match her dress & strung it on an orange ribbon that matched her dress perfectly and she loved it, too. Maybe the point is more that you’re getting something of your Mother’s to wear that special day, or something your Mother chose just for you to mark the fact that you’re nearly grown, but I hope I as able to make her first Prom as special as mine was.

I had planned to finish buying stock & supplies for the booth a couple of months before faire & then start saving up to buy some nice new garb on the first day of faire. I changed my plans in the past week, because no matter what happens, I do NOT intend to be the weight I today in a year, so whatever I were to buy would be a waste of my money. I’ve been trying to lose weight for 8 years now. I even succeeded once, losing everything I needed to except for 25 pounds & then I gave up & started eating like I always have again. I’ve tried weight loss pills, supplements, diets and exercise and never, before this week, have I felt like I had a grip on food.

I never believed I could do it before and now I really, honestly do, and I will. I’m excited for faire for different reasons and I have garb that won’t fit me by then, too, but that’s ok, I’ll find something to wear between now & then, it just won’t be what I usually choose.

When you hear the words “Renaissance Faire,” what do you think of? Is it the beautiful renaissance style costumes? The terrific vendors and unique items that they sell? The delicious food and drinks? Maybe it’s just the atmosphere, and a place you can go to get away from the hustle and bustle of the modern world. I learned something this fall, while we were at a larger faire that it doesn’t mean any of those things to quite a few people. Maybe it’s the fact that that particular faire was right before Halloween, but to many visitors to it, the faire meant it was time to whip out everything from fairy costumes, sexy costumes and costumes from other eras to the downright inappropriate. It was kind of a surreal atmosphere to be in there for awhile.

There were some beautiful & amazing pieces of period garb, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes, those were overshadowed by other people. Those costumes were very nice, too, for the most part, but the renaissance didn’t happen in the USA in the 1950s, if you see what I’m saying, and there weren’t vampires roaming around, either.

I never really realized, until I started volunteering every year, how much work is involved in running a faire. I know there’s a lot of work in all of them, but I think with the larger, commercial faires, there are a lot more people to do the work. With our faire, we’re just a small, non-profit group. All of our labor is volunteer & it consists of our group and the families of the board of directors, for the most part. We take two days to set everything up, starting the Monday of that week by getting the stage started. We are usually finishing the final coat of paint on opening morning. The 2nd day, we put up all of the rides, games and booths. As members of the board of directors, we all get to put our stuff up before anyone else, because we all have so much to accomplish that day, we need to extra time.

At the closing of faire on Saturday night, we have about 6-8 hours to tear everything down, put it all away & have the park clean. That’s a lot of work in that amount of time & a lot of lifting and moving. When we’re finished, we generally go to Jason’s house & party all night long. Last year, I was too tired & we went home after about an hour. I was so tired that the only way I could have taken a bath was if I had one of those walk in bathtubs, because I wouldn’t have been able to life my leg to get in ours. I’m hoping that by streamlining the trailers at the end of the month it’ll cut down on our tear-down time. Maybe we’ll have people come & help us this year. That would be so nice.

Just for the record, I plan to change the focus of this blog in the near future – as in when I get the time to actually make a new layout – to reflect more on faire & the prep that we do for it than about crafts. I just thought I should mention that, in case you’re coming here to get a peek at the crafty stuff I might do & finding yourself disappointed. It’s not that I’m not crafting, I am. I just don’t think it’s as exciting to write about as faire is.

I remember the first time I attended our faire, back in 1993, I wandered around for awhile with my mom the first day. I was enchanted by it. it felt like walking into a different time and place, right in the middle of our own downtown. The kids thought it was pretty amazing, too, after all, there were games that looked like pieces of medieval exercise equipment, rides that looked like giant, flying pickles and a petting zoo type thing. I think back at that time there were even ponies to ride. Add stuff to buy and eat on top of the pile and they were happy little kids. That was the last faire I spent as a spectator, and in mundane clothing. I did go to one a couple of years or so later in my street clothes. We all felt so uncomfortable that we went back home & changed. I’m pretty sure that’s when I realized it was in my blood & no matter what happened, I needed to be there in July, playing, working and doing my thing.

I haven’t regretted that choice for more than a few minutes since then.

We had a meeting yesterday morning, where we finalized a bunch of stuff and discussed what had been going on in the time between meetings. We’ve booked our fire troupe, our belly dance troupe, are working on getting a couple more entertainers booked, too, we just haven’t been able to get a hold of either of them as of yet. We have already secured the use of a hotel room for the 8-12 for our fire troupe (they use it to shower and such) and are working on rooms for other entertainers. I think they just built some new condo hotels on south Main that we need to check into, they could probably use the publicity, since they’ve just opened.

We planned to have at least one work day, to empty out the storage trailers and throw everything away that we don’t use. When we do that, we’ll take the other gazebo we’re using in our encampment out along with the thrones, because they need repainting & refurbishing. We also need to remember to check stage pieces & take the parts out that need to be fixed. It’s almost impossible to get them repaired when we’re in the middle of trying to put the stage up, so we really need to do it early. Hopefully, getting this done will streamline our operation on the setup days of faire & lessen the stress quite a bit.

Sorry that I’ve been so scarce lately, things are really picking up & getting busy, as they always do this time of year. Last night I was multi-tasking in the living room by watching Intervention (a program about addiction & addiction treatment) while I was working on my inventory record-keeping notebook for faire itself. The day before I spent the whole day watching TV while I painted cute signs to sell in the booth. When I’m online, I seem to be doing more product research and hunting down supplies than anything else. I ordered a bunch of inventory the other day and will order more next Friday, as well.

I already planned out how we’re doing the booth layout this year, I really hope this can be our final version, or at least one we can use for a few years. I’d still like to do a drawing of the two open sides, so we know how we’re decorating and what goes where. I’m getting rid of an 8ft table and adding a few smaller ones, to give us more room inside the booth & more visible table display. We got permission yesterday to set up the encampment as early as possible on July 8, so that will save us a ton of time, since we’d been waiting until after 10am to do it. That will give us more uninterrupted time to finish the stage and our booth, thankfully.