Songs of Deeds

Meeting Minutes for 11 October: Lyres

Patricia and Teleri in attendance.

Teleri covered the material in her lyre class: information on the tuning of lyres; ways to hold the instrument; playing techniques; ideas for performance.  We chatted a bit about the possible overlap between six-stringed lyres and five-stringed kankles (CAHNK-las, not CANK-uls).

Kantele Shop - Buy a Baltic five-stringed instrument

Kantele Music - Music and how-to guides for Baltic five-stringed instruments

Michael J. King - English maker of lyres and other instruments. Excellent historical reconstructions, priced accordingly.

Duke Sir Cariadoc makes a lyre.

Master Dofinn's and Mistress Thora Sharptooth's original lyre page - I don't know anyone in the SCA who's interested in lyres who didn't either start here or get here really fast

 

Meeting Minutes for 13 September 2016: Spinning

Sabine, Patricia, Tatsume and Teleri attending.

We spun!  We spun El Cheapo Generic Starter Roving; we spun two-coated Jacob sheep wool.  We spun with top-weighted spindles and bottom-weighted spindles.  We spun with a modern dragon spindle weight and historical clay spindle weights.  We spun wool from the hand and wool from a distaff.  We spun thick and we spun thin.  

Techniques were shared for dressing the distaff; for re-connecting your spinning thread to your wool after the thread breaks; for finishing skeins of yarn.  We tried using hooks, half-hitches and nothing at all to secure the thread prior to spinning.  We watched some YouTube videos of traditional Eastern European spinners and wondered about the SCA's Central/South American-derived drop spindle technique vs. what we see in manuscripts (and Eastern European nonnas).