Off On A Tangent

Soooooo, taking a departure from the jewelry for a moment to share with you this most awesome weekend I just came back from. I went to an SCA event. In a nutshell, medieval/renaissance reenactment. You camp out, watch fighting, check out merchant's row and enjoy the general merriment making in the evenings. Did I mention we all get dressed up in period garb? I made my own cloak! Definitely uneven in some places and my hem is absolutely laughable, but it's my cloak and I'm totally stoked that it's something I made. I don't think I actually have a picture of me in the cloak.
Here's a picture of our encampment Rivenoak:

Our tents are in the center of the picture. The guy on the left is John, friend and fellow jewelry student.

We arrived Friday, in our mundane clothes, set up camp and eventually got into our costumes. Dinner happened and after dinner came the partying. There were drums and belly dancers and a little singing. Drinks and merriment all around.
Saturday was pretty awesome. Woke up, had breakfast, took a stroll down merchants row. Court was held. Basically at court there is swearing fealty to the king and queen and the realm. Also, passing off duties and titles from the retiree to the new person. Many huzzahs were shouted.

In the above picture the king was about to hand out to I believe they were his "personal" warriors, these coins that he had helped to fabricate to honor some people. The warriors went around displaying them before returning them to the king.
Fighting began around lunchtime. And by fighting I mean the tournament for declaring the new king for the next year. In a small field men fight one on one in the 4 corners. It eventually gets down to the final two and whoever wins is king. Awesome. Hopefully this link will work. RCA fighting
The occasional pauses in fighting are to determine which blows landed and caused "wounds".
Going back, after court before fighting was a demonstration of alectryomancy, or as they put it: ouija-chicken:














This was the practice of divination using the chicken to pick out letters to create a word. Needless to say, can't imagine it being very helpful. The chicken picked out FDRJX in answer to the question of who would win the tournament for king.
Saturday night there was more food, delicious homemade mead, homemade root beer, drums, dancers and some very naughty songs. Sung after the kiddies went off to bed.
Sunday was basically breaking up camp and going home back to the real world.
Probably the most fun I've had in a while.