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I'm back from the Middle Ages! Had a blast ( I know this because I have very few pictures, which means I was having too much fun). My favorite part was the Fibulae Class I took. A fibula is a roman style pin used to close a cloak or hang jewelry from. Basically it's a fancy safety pin. It was a 3 part class that spanned 5 hours.

These 3 pics show what we made from the 3 classes progressively. You can see in the first class we were making large springloaded safety pins out of 16 gauge copper wire. Class 2 progressed to adding swirls and curves and then class 3 got fancy, used some 14 gauge square wire that we twisted and did some hammering for texture. Our household mascot is a boar and you can see my somewhat feeble attempt at making a boar shaped one, (lower right, third pic) as my freestyle one after we had done all the class examples.

Those are just gorgeous! What a fun class that would be.

Here are 2 more of the fancy one's that I used to attach my viking treasure necklace to my garb, no pic of me wearing it 'cause, you know--too much fun! I need to decide which one I like best for this and then make another one to match, but mirror image. All in all, a wonderful time although it was Freakin' COLD at night. Probably 70 during the day and then below freezing by sunrise.

I also took a lecture class on period kumihimo, which was really informative and we got to do a few turns on the instructor's beautiful wood kumihimo stand, don't know if I can start a new craft though, my room is already stuffed with projects.

The last class I took was on making a leather water vessel. We got kits to make one of these too, but it is a long (days) process, so he pretty much just showed us all the steps and gave out detailed handouts to make one. I will probably try this in the summer when hopefully it will have STOPPED raining here. We've been gone 2 weeks and it was as if we never left, still raining, hailing, snowing, and windy. At least I enjoyed the sun while I was in AZ.

We spent 4 nights at our property in Snowflake, AZ and I took lots of pics there, since it was probably our last visit there. We listed the property for sale, it's just too far away now to visit it more that once a year and we're not even making it there that often.

Very cool!! Thanks for sharing those pics... sounds like a fun day, indeed!!

Sounds like a great trip - and you learned some really cool stuff!
Glad you could enjoy some warm weather, at least during the day!!

I'm sure you were going north on 99 while we were going south - by-passing each other in Fresno!!

I'm sure we were, Nancy. We usually go I-5, but just decided on a whim to go 99. It was so much better, I-5 is just trucks and people going 80 mph between LA and SF.

What interesting classes, Rachelle, no wonder you were having so much fun. Your work is beautiful.

Rachelle what wonderful things you learned! Your treasure necklace is outstanding and you will get so much pleasure wearing it with just about anything.

Very interesting classes Rachelle, and fabulous work! I especially like the hammered square wire examples. I also enjoyed learning a couple medieval terms I wasn't familiar with - although I'll confess I'll likely forget them before long.
Reminds me of a school assignment from years ago, something about choosing a word and providing a description. My word was parfilage. Go ahead and look it up; for some reason that has stuck with me for decades, although I've never engaged in the hobby.

Keitha wrote:Very interesting classes Rachelle, and fabulous work! I especially like the hammered square wire examples. I also enjoyed learning a couple medieval terms I wasn't familiar with - although I'll confess I'll likely forget them before long.
Reminds me of a school assignment from years ago, something about choosing a word and providing a description. My word was parfilage. Go ahead and look it up; for some reason that has stuck with me for decades, although I've never engaged in the hobby.

What did they do with it?

Love those pins, and the piece with the beads is just gorgeous! That seems like a class I'd really enjoy.