Laurel cloak: Mistress Ygraine of Kellswood

I answered the phone and heard Li King Lo drop into bartering mode, with  flowery praises of my work and promises of good barter if I would  undertake a  project.   While I  generally trust Li Kung Lo,  one never makes an agreement with a Chinese/Turkoman without counting  ones rings and fingers before and after cutting a deal, so I pressed him for more details.  He finally told me that he wished to commission a  Pelican cloak for his lady, Mistress Ygraine of Kellswood.

I think I confounded him a bit when I immediately agreed and only let him reimburse me for materials.  Now if he had realized that a number of us admire Ygraine’s work enough to fight over who got to make her  cloak, then I would have been in trouble.   I probably would have ended  up paying him for the right to make her cloak...

Laurel coat: Master Yevsha

For the Laurelling of Master Yevsha, Rose otter requested that I help her  to prepare a coat in the Russian style with pearl and gold cord  decorations.   Working from a set of documentation of  period styles of pearl and cord decorations, I drew up designs and  patterns for the following coat and its decorations.  It is made of red  wool, decorated with freshwater  pearls and gold cord from my never  ending spool.

Mistress Rose Otter did a wonderful job taking my design and decorating the back panel, the decorations I did on the sleeves and front are less  impressive.

Laurel cloak: Mistress Rose Otter

When Rose Otter was being given her Laurel, none of us knew that she was  apprenticed to Dame Elayne Courtney, and thus when I enthusiastically  volunteered to  design and make her cloak, I was handed  the project.  Drawing on her name for inspiration the following cloak was created. The cloak is a lovely deep forest green  Melton wool that I had been hoarding for almost fifteen years, the  yellow leaves  and red rose bases are 20% cashmere, 80% wool and very  soft and the brown base for the otters is 80% cashmere and 20% mink.  The gold trim is of course from my never ending spool of gold trim. (Ok, ok, it is only 1000 yards.)

My original otter drawing was reworked by Mistress Lucretzia Franceschina  Andreini, who felt they were too heraldic and not “otterlike”€� enough.  The embroidery on the otters was done  by Mistress Lucretzia, Lady Angelina of the Wild Roses and Lady Morwenna Westerne.

Laurel Robe: Mistress Lucrezia Franceschina Andreini

My first journeyman Lucrezia Franceschina Andreini received her Laurel in  costuming on the same day as her Lord, William the Alchemist received  his for his  work in astronomy.  Working from a  pattern in Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion, and taking the decorative idea from a set of chair backs documented in The Hartwick Hall  Treasures, I prepared the following gown  for her out of a red cotton velvet.  The black decorations were added using a stencil and thinned black paint to stain the velvet.  The pattern was then outlined using my  endless spool of gold cord. The roundels are white velvet with green  and brown embroidery.

Assistance was provided by Lady Christine du Pont, Lord Lionel Blackheath, Lady  Ki Lin, Lady Angelina of the Wild roses and Lady Morwenna Westernne.

While we were working on hers, Lucrezia was busy with William's cape.   Working  from an Albrecht Durer woodcut which  shows the astrological view of the  heavens as seen by a god looking  down on the earth from above, Lucretzia  embroidered and beaded his  cloak with faux pearls. Though the constellations  appear "backwards,"  it is accurate in both the location of the stars and the visible  magnitude of the stars, the latter indicated by the size of the pearl  sewn for each star.  There is an  additional star attached via a pin, meant to represent the star in Cassiopeia that went supernova at the end of the 16th Century.

Also of note is William’s Laurel medallion, which is a working bronze  armilary sphere prepared by Master Fryderick Eisenkopf and Lord Lionel  Blackheath.  The tolerances on it are so tight that  it must be oiled for it to turn. This gave Fryderick and Lionel a  couple of bad moments after they had used a sonic bath to clean it and  it stopped turning.  A couple drops of oil and it was  working again.