Mary Ostler

I have the cartoon, I have a loom, I have the right amount of hedles (my order arrived a couple of days ago). Now I have to figure out how much material I will need to complete the rug, and how much of each color I will need to hand dye.
Determining how much was fairly [...]

The project has been at a bit of a stand still as off late. The main hold up was the loom. I have been pulling out my hair trying to find either an image or a decent description of a near eastern rug loom in period. The closest I could find were a few images [...]

At War has come and gone again this year, and I am sad to think its another 52 weeks til the next time Tir Righ wipes the floor with the Avacalians. I was happy to be included in the Kingdom of Drachenwald’s Encampment. In honor of Queen Caoimhe’s attendance at our little war I decided [...]

When I had made the cone of shame, I had made a banner finial for the top of it. If you have a banner finial… you need a banner. I had originally taken a workshop on the subject taught by Mistress Agnes, and had played with it a bit since then… but this was going to be [...]

I wanted to pretty up the cone tent. I had by this point realized the mistake I had made when making my template, and decided to make it pretty to make up for the fact that it wasn’t going to look like the tent I was trying for. Sadness!

I did a quick doodle of a [...]

At this point I had not realized I had screwed up the template. I marked out all the sections on the painters tarp with wax tailor markers. The template was longer than the tarp, so I ended up using the wasted space at the corners to make up for the short lengths of canvas.

Hard to [...]

Well the verdict on this weekend is in, and it was 4 kinds of goodness. Friday & Saturday I got to hangout with Agnes and some of the aprenti. It was a two day work on A&S stuff gabfest. I got a start on the final carpet cartoon, the wooden board games in the barony’s collection have [...]

I got to go to Daffodil Tourney this year. I’ll be posting soon about the annual Seagirtian event, but I thought I do a quick post on my entry into the A&S tourney.
The contest was “items inspired in some way by the theme “daffodil”. Since I only decided to go to the event the weekend [...]

I was asked how the cartoon was coming. The answer… Slowly!
I will be starting a whole new cartoon soon, as this first one was just to work out some pattern issues. The first problem being the lack of a middle section in the original painting., Thanks to a suggestion from Mistress Agnes, I have decided [...]

While researching  the Turkish Carpet Project, I found an interesting sub section of the carpet weavers. Turkmen Tent bands are straps that go around the outside of Yurt like dwellings. They are partially knotted just like Turkish carpets but with backgrounds of plain weave. The majority are symmetrical knots but…heres the kicker… The knots happen on the open upper [...]