s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

So, these last few weeks have been consumed by wrangling large pieces of silk. Come April is Rowany Festival, the big SCA event in Australia (and probably the biggest in the southern hemisphere). Southron Gaard, the SCA group down in Christchurch, decided that cool silk banners would look good. They arranged to buy silk and silk dye. Each major group in NZ had to do two banners, one with their own heraldry on it, and one with another groups (as part of a gift/surprise). Tam, as the resident artist, got tagged with doing the banners. This involved many hours of drawing, transferring to the silk, pinning the silk into frames, painting resist onto each piece of silk (the banners are in two pieces and will be about 2 meters square when done) and then applying the dye. The first time we tried to put dye on the bottom half ot the Rowany banner, we screwed up. We didn’t realize you had to dilute the dye 1:1, and it went on too think, and dried all funny. That was depressing, as it added many hours to re-do that would piece (thankfully we were given extra silk in case of screw ups!). We also learned that there is a lot of skill involved, we were much faster at painting silk dye by the end! I should also say we got lots of help from fellow Dartonians, and we have had lots of people over these last two weekends to help with the project.

As of last night, the last of the painting/dying work was done. Now the banners get passed out of our hands to others who will do the sewing! Huzzah!

In other news, this past weekend we took the ‘paca walkies. Kerry had some over to help with the banners. While the resist was drying we had an hour or two to kill, so we haltered up Jim and the cria (though they are nearly a year old now!) and took them over to Stuarts property. Stuart has a bunch of concrete culverts that he got years ago. He is slowly using them up around the farm, but about 20 are still left standing in a paddock. These making interesting tunnels. Perfect size for llamas and alpacas.

In animal training, if you can convince the animals to do something strange/frightening/unnatural, and then it all goes well, you build confidence. These tunnels fit the bill perfectly. We started on some of the larger tunnels, and then moved down to ones where they had to duck to get through. While nervous in the beginning, they seemed to enjoy it (being curious creatures).

As we were finishing up Stuart dropped by on his spiffy new quad bike.