Who am I?
Hello and welcome! I’m Renee, and I really really like to make stuff. Most the time the stuff I make revolves around garments sewing and costuming, but every now and then I’ll branch out to other crafty and creative fun!
What do I do?
Most my sewing revolves around my *other* big hobby, which is participating in historical reenactments with the Society for Creative Anachronism, or the SCA for short.
The SCA covers an incredibly broad time span, focusing on “research and re-creation of pre-seventeenth century skills, arts, combat and culture.” Basically from the death of Queen Elizabeth (in 1603) back is fair game. This broad time period to play and experiment in is one of the reasons I enjoy the SCA so much, since my interest is in the broader aspects of clothing and garment construction throughout time, rather than one particular era or region.
Plus, I really really love to play dress-up, so the ability to be a middle class 13th centaury medieval lady one event, and then a German Noblewoman then next, and then go Rus-Viking when it’s cold but early Grecian in the hottest part of summer just pretty much the best thing ever! (If you’d like to learn more about the SCA, I’ve included some links at the end of this post.)
Why A Blog?
Primarily, the goal of this blog is to create one coherent place to put all my project diaries and research. Since the SCA is such a big part of my creative life, a lot of what will go up on here will probably be a bit SCA-centric. I plan on a lot of my first posts to be the documentation from past Arts and Sciences projects. Art and Sciences are contests and displays we often have at SCA events to share and show-off our pre-17th Century projects and research.
However, I do love me some cos-play and fantasy costuming, and with Halloween-season rapidly approaching as I write this, I am pretty sure not everything that shows up on here is going to be history related. Sometimes I just like to play around and make fun stuff!
One quick aside, in the SCA I am know as Lady Rannveig Hrajshvelgsneys Alfvinsdottir, so you may see that names used along with Renee throughout this blog.
All right then…time to turn this blog live and go make stuff!
Here are a few links if you’d like to learn more about the Society for Creative Anachronism:
- https://www.sca.org
- https://www.scademo.com
- https://aethelmearc.org (this is the Kingdom I live in!)
- https://blackstonemountain.org (This is my Barony! We have fun here!)
- https://youtu.be/yCyu7rveBXs (this is a gorgeous video one of our members made about the SCA)
- https://youtu.be/__rFb8YpEEc (another cool video made by some you-tubers, sharing their experience at their very first SCA event. The event they went to was one of our largest, called Pennsic War. It’s a multi week event that sees between 8 to 10 thousand participants However, most events are much smaller, often day or weekend event with between a couple dozen to a couple hundred attendees.)
Anything I Can Make 