Meals on Camels

A couple of months ago, I put out a call on Facebook: I make ceramic feast gear, you make SCA garb, let’s trade skills. To my surprise, I actually got responses.

So far none of the garb has been sent to me yet, but then, I haven’t sent their feast gear, either. It took me a while to make, since I had to experiment with size, shape, glazes and underglazes, in order to get just what I wanted and just what the clients wanted. You’d be surprised how hard it is to get really good heraldic colors (red, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black) in the colors prized by fans of heraldry. I mean, you can do it, but it takes a lot of trial and error, if your pottery studio doesn’t stock those colors. I had to go through a lot of glazes in the studio, and a lot of underglazes in the studio, and finally I just went out and bought some underglazes of my own because it’s so much easier to just paint on the color you’re after than to use the shop glazes — which are far more beautiful, in my opinion, but they’re not what people are looking for.

So, anyway…

One of the people who responded to my call for garb was a lovely woman who goes by the name of Lady Verena within the SCA. I’ve seen some of the garb she’s made and designed, and I am utterly certain that I’ll be thrilled with what she makes for me. But then I learned something else. She doesn’t just make stuff, oh no. She actually goes out and researches what people from X area of the world, who belonged to Y religion or ethnic subgroup, wore in Z century. She finds pictures, researches sumptuary laws, looks at extant textiles from that time and place, and really goes to town on it. She kicks research’s tachat. She photographs and photocopies her research and her clothing patterns, too. She comes over to your house and measures you in person, so you know you’ll get an outfit that not only looks amazing, but also feels really comfortable and fits beautifully. Then she puts it up on a website in order to keep track of it all. Check that out!

Also, just to mention, it is not easy to find information on Yemenite garb from the early 13th century. There’s very little information out there, so there’s a lot of room for error — but that also means there’s a lot of room for creativity. Given Yemen’s location, and especially the port city of Aden and its importance to the spice and silk trades, the easy proximity to India, mainland Africa, and of course the entire Arabian peninsula, there’s a lot of opportunity there for very multicultural fashion. This is especially true within the Jewish Yemenite community, whose members often either were well-travelled or were connected to travelers. So if someone gets something “wrong,” it’s just as easy to stay in-persona and say “Yes, I learned this style of clothes-making on our most recent voyage to India/the Maghreb/Cyrpus/the Holy Land” as it is to go out-of-persona and say “Oh, oops, guess I should have done more research” or “You may be right, but there’s so little knowledge that I decided to take liberties.”

Lady Verena is making one suit of garb each for me and for Akim, plus all that research, in exchange for one set of feast gear for herself and one for her Lord-boyfriend. But now that I’ve seen all the extra work she’s doing, I think I’d feel like a class A jerk if I didn’t throw in a couple of extra pieces for them. And a meal or two at an event. And the undying adoration of a true fan.