hudebnik

Another episode in the saga of building Tent #5 (see this post and that post). I've attaching loops to the edge of the roof from which to hang the walls. The triangular roof panels are roughly 26" at the widest point, so I figured I would space loops every 6-1/2", four per panel, and would just wing it on the rectangular front-and-back roof panels. So I started at the right-hand seam of the tent front and started attaching loops every 6-1/2". To my great surprise, when I got halfway around, to the left-hand seam of the tent back, the next loop fell exactly on the seam, where I would have chosen to put it anyway. To my even greater surprise, when I got the rest of the way around, the measurement from the last loop I attached to the first one was almost exactly 6-1/2". The odds of that happening are comparable to those of drawing a Royal Fizzbim in your first game. It perhaps indicates the existence of a benevolent God who wants me to finish this tent before I die.

Next up: attaching to the tops of the walls a bunch of toggle-and-loop assemblies that are supposed to hang from the 96 loops I just attached to the roof edge. And making sure I've got webbing stake loops sewn to the wall bottom all the way around. And then making guy-ropes. And the stakes won't actually go through the sewn-in webbing stake-loops; there will be short twine loops between the two, so I have to make those. And a ridge-pole -- I'm thinking clear pine 2"x3" or 2"x4", a little over 6' long. And there's the matter of center-poles: I think it's too late to try to build new ones by this Pennsic, so I'll probably just get some longer pipes to connect the wheelbarrow-handles that we've been using as center poles for 28 years now.

Got up not quite as early as yesterday and took the subway to the bus to the town of El Escorial, which surrounds the Royal Monastery of St. Lawrence at El Escorial. See, in 1557 King Philip II won a major military victory on St. Lawrence's Day, and in celebration, he spent twenty years and mind-boggling amounts of money building a combination monastery, basilica, school, library, and Royal palace.


It's not the warm, cuddly sort of royal palace; indeed, it makes most royal palaces look warm and cuddly by comparison, and the guidebooks describe it as resembling a penitentiary from the outside.





And even from the inside.



The library, which connects the monastery side of the building with the school side, is somewhat friendlier.


It boasts a number of 1000+-year-old Arabic, Latin, and Greek texts, and at least four volumes of Alfonso X El Sabio (two versions of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a book on astronomy, and one on the properties of stones).

We squeed over the Cantigas ms out on display in a glass case, then realized it was a facsimile (the same facsimile edition D. had access to when she interned at the Lily Library as a student).




But the real one is probably somewhere in that room, or at least that building.

The Basilica is decorated by top-notch 16th-century artists, such as Titian and Cellini, but again it's designed to be coldly perfect and impressive rather than welcoming.

The school side of the building, I think, still functions as a school and isn't open to the public, while the monastery side appears to serve only as art gallery and office space. It's crammed full of Titians, El Grecos, Tintorettos, Bosch-followers, and lesser lights. Mostly very well done, but this idiom really doesn't do anything for me.... Behind the Basilica are the royal residences, which Philip and his long line of descendants made liveable... and decorated with oil paintings, frescoes, tapestries (with cartoons by Goya), etc. including a lot of paintings of battles. I picked out some that had good pictures of tents.





Some of the walkways inside the complex look like Nine Men's Morris boards:


And the whole place is surrounded by starkly-beautiful mountains:


Had lunch across the street from the Monasterio, then caught a bus back to Madrid. It was only about 4 PM, but we were too fried to go back to the archaeological museum. Next trip, I guess.

shalmestere started building a 10' round medieval pavilion (henceforth #1) before she met me, I got interested in the design challenge, and we finished it together in 1994. After an especially rainy Pennsic with the two of us and our musical instruments sharing a 10'-diameter tent, we decided it wasn't nearly big enough, and started building a 12'x17' oval tent (#2), which we finished in 1996. Pictures of both here.

That served us for many years: we've replaced many of the ropes, and replaced the valence once or twice, but the roof and walls have pretty much survived. But they've gotten thinner, and less water-resistant, and more faded, and around 2013 she suggested we build a new one — another two-pole oval tent, slightly larger than #2. So I started designing, and bought the fabric (50 yards of 84" Sunforger canvas) in April 2014. But it was never a top priority, so I made only minimal progress every year, and it dragged on.

In 2015, Will McLean died and left us his beautiful round arming pavilion (#3). It's about the size of our #1, but better-made (largely by Mac & Marianne); not big enough for the two of us to camp in with instruments, but it works nicely for daytime living history shows.

In 2022, shalmestere put her foot down and said she wouldn't go to another event in Tent #2 (which by this point was 26 years old). I reopened the design docs and started working on our new pavilion again, while she mail-ordered a 5m-diameter round tent from India (#4). So far we've used the mail-order tent at two events in 2023; it requires ten vertical perimeter poles, which I object to on historical-authenticity grounds, but they do allow you to take up less real estate than a tent with no shoulder structure at all. And if you're setting it up on sloped ground, you have to compensate by using perimeter poles of different lengths, which is a pain. But it seems to be well-made, and better than no pavilion at all.

Anyway, I'm very much hoping to finish tent #5, the one we started designing in 2013, by this Pennsic. The roof was finished in September 2023, and I turned my attention to walls, which are simpler. There will be two wall pieces, overlapping at front-center and back-center so we have a front and back door. Each wall consists of two rectangular door pieces and eight trapezoids to go around the semicircular ends of the tent. So I've been cutting trapezoids. More precisely, I've been cutting rectangles from the bolt, pre-washing the rectangles, and then (after they've shrunk as much as they're likely to) cutting two trapezoids from each rectangle.


Selvages are top and bottom edges of this diagram. The trapezoids are supposed to be 27.5" at the narrow end and 34.5" at the wide end, a difference of 7", so an isosceles trapezoid should be 3.5" off the perpendicular on each side.

But where is the perpendicular? When you pre-wash fabric like this, the cut edges come out somewhat raveled. So in order to make sure I was cutting proper isosceles trapezoids, I spent at least an hour finding weft threads that started or stopped part way across the fabric, and pulling them the rest of the way out, until I had a single weft thread forming the edge all the way from selvage to selvage; then I could use the corner between that weft thread and the selvage as a consistent starting point for the measurements in the diagram.

And it didn't work. Every measurement was right, but the trapezoids were decidedly non-isosceles. Whether I folded vertically down the middle so the selvage matched itself, or crosswise, one selvage to the other, one bias edge always stuck out several inches farther than the other. (We're talking 2-3" off, over a fabric width of about 80" after shrinkage, so that's maybe a 2° angle.)

This happened for at least half a dozen trapezoids. I rechecked the arithmetic, measured everything three times, and it kept happening. The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that the weft threads are consistently not perpendicular to the selvage.

So my revised cutting method is "fold the cut edge toward the center of the fabric so both selvages match themselves, even if that means one end is folded several inches farther than the other; use this perpendicular fold as a measuring reference." Which has the advantage that I don't have to spend half an hour pulling out weft threads, and the resulting pieces look isosceles. But I worry that they may stretch weirdly because one bias edge is farther off-grain than the other.

Have any of my sewing-and-costume colleagues run into this problem?

When it stopped raining yesterday, we went outside and planted some bulbs. And I edged the front edge of the yard with decorative bricks. And replaced the low fencing around the front sublawn. There are more bulbs to be planted, and there are still some gaps left behind by the front-walk construction, so I think we need to buy a couple of bags of topsoil, and probably some mulch -- I hope we can find some that aren't water-saturated, after the past few days of rain. And I need to bake bread today.

[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]

I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.

Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.

About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.

For this oval tent, the roof consists of a "cap" (about 18" high) which is a rectangle plus a wide pie-slice at each end, and a "skirt" (16 trapezoids and two rectangles, sewn together into something like a belt, if your belt were 75" wide and conical, and had a circumference of over 200"). In fact, on a suggestion from Robert McPherson, I made two theoretically-identical caps, so there's double thickness at the top of the tent where the most tension is. So I needed to sew together the bottoms of both caps and the top of the skirt, with a sufficiently strong (i.e. flat-felled and top-stitched) seam.



I think that'll be the single most difficult seam in the whole tent, and it's done. Still need to add to the roof a valence and whatever mechanism we're using to hang the walls, and still need to put the walls together. And there will be lots of eyelets or grommets or webbing loops or something. (The webbing loops might be the easiest, but they also feel the most obviously modern.) And lots of ropes and stakes.

A miscellany of Things Happening, Things Not Happening, Things Getting Done, and Things Not Getting Done:

The cherry tree we planted in the front sublawn last fall has had green-tipped buds for a couple of weeks, but as of yesterday they looked as though they could eventually be leaves.

The quince trees we planted probably ten years ago in the front lawn came into leaf three or four weeks ago. I hung up a sticky trap, baited with allegedly Oriental-fruit-moth sex pheromones, about two weeks ago, and it has a bunch of black dots in it that look more like fruit flies than full-grown fruit moths, but I'll take what I can get. I have a bunch of tabs of eggs of OFM-parasitizing wasps in the fridge, and will hang up one of those as soon as I'm convinced we're getting OFM's in the sticky trap.

A couple of weeks ago we mail-ordered and installed a handheld bidet attachment to the toilet, to reduce demand for toilet paper. It was sort of a pain, because the toilet that came with the bathroom renovation a few years ago tries to hide all the hardware out of sight, so I had to attach everything without seeing it, reaching around into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall. But eventually I got things to work without leaking all over the floor. I imagine the effect could be "invigorating" in the dead of winter when the tap water is really cold. OTOH, I imagine it could be quite pleasant in the hot-and-sticky summer. And it does seem to be reducing our demand for toilet paper.

The first harp we bought, a Hobrough, is now a wall-hanger: it hasn't held tension in years. Our large Lewandowski Gothic harp is currently in a faculty office at Fordham University, to which I had lent it for this semester's Collegium Musicum before all that stuff was cancelled, and I haven't had a chance to get to Fordham to retrieve it since the Pestilence started. Our Lewandowski Romanesque harp is in good condition but has only 13 strings, which limits what you can play on it. Our Morillo Gothic harp is a little larger but several of its wooden tuning pegs have died over the years, so I've been whittling replacements for them. The last time I tried that, the smallest drill bit that fit in my Craftsman power drill was arguably too big, and the power drill is definitely too heavy and unwieldy for this kind of delicate work. We had a bunch of teeny tiny drill bits (#61-80, I think -- no idea when or why we acquired them), but they don't fit in the power drill, nor even in the Dremel. So last year I bought a set of different-sized Dremel collets (the doohickey into which bits have to fit), then discovered that my old Dremel no longer held a charge. So later last year I bought a new Dremel, then misplaced the teeny tiny drill bits. A week ago the new, mail-order teeny tiny drill bits arrived (#41-80, just to cover all the bases). (I promptly found the previous package of tiny drill bits, but most of the previous package had been lost or broken so it's OK.) Over the weekend, I finally managed to use all these things together to drill holes in some newly-whittled harp tuning pegs. I've been using maple, on the theory that it would be hard enough to withstand string tension, but they've been compressing significantly where the string goes around them, which hasn't happened to the pegs that came with the harp; I have no idea what kind of wood Morillo used, but does anybody know what kind of wood would be sturdy against both lateral (cross-grain) tension and compression? I should add some pictures.

Our third medieval-style pavilion is still a bunch of piles of fabric. Two roof-caps have been sewn together (Mac had suggested that this part is under the most stress, and so should probably be doubled), but one is an inch longer from peak to peak than the other, so I need to remedy that before putting them together or attaching them to the rest of the roof. Then we need to attach a valence on the outside of the shoulder, and probably a buttonhole strip on the inside of the shoulder, and we need to make walls, and we need center poles and a ridge pole, which I was thinking of commissioning from Mac (on the model of the lovely jointed center pole he made for Will McLean's pavilion).

Started a batch of bread dough yesterday, using the starter I got from ilaine last fall. With both of us at home all day, we're using more bread than usual so I've been baking a loaf every four or five days rather than every week or two. Haven't had to worry about yeast, since the starter has been working well without commercial assistance, but flour has been scarce every time I've been to the grocery in the past few weeks. Pictures to follow.

Last night I dismantled an old fitted sheet that Thibaut (upon whom be the peace and the blessing) had put holes in, and finally made a couple of masks, using this pattern from the Washington Post. After making the first one, I understood the pattern instructions better, so the second one is neater (and has fewer cutting errors, and fits shalmestere's smaller face pretty well). The first one basically works for me, but I may go back and make another one for myself now that I understand the pattern better. The directions call for four strips of "elastic ribbon", without specifying their length: I thought "If I'm using elastic anyway, why don't I just use two so I don't have to worry about tying them?" So I did that. It turns out I needed about 14" of elastic for the top band; 14" for the bottom band was too long on both of us, so I did 12" for the bottom band of shalmestere's mask and that seems to work. It's important that the elastic be pointing in (with the cut end almost at the edge of the fabric) when you sew it on. Pictures to follow.

We got a couple of used wooden shutters mail-order last week. Haven't attached them to the office windows yet, because the widths aren't exactly right and it'll take some customizing to get them to fit, but they're propped up in the windows now and they look cute. Pictures to follow.

Saturday we attended an early-notation class, led by Pat and Doug in Durham, with people joining from the San Francisco Bay Area, the DC area, Louisiana, British Columbia, etc. I don't think any of the Hawaii early-music posse were there. The notation itself wasn't difficult -- Petrucci, early 16th century, and very visually clear -- but the rhythm was sometimes tricky, and they picked some lovely pieces. On Zoom, there's enough propagation delay that people can't "play along" and hear one another in real time, so Pat and Doug picked a bunch of three-part pieces of which they played two parts so students could play the third and hear all three. shalmestere and I, however, were across the dining room table from one another, so we usually played two different parts, so one or the other of us was usually doubling Pat or Doug.

Today is Monday, which means I should actually get clean and dressed and "go to work" (either in the home office, on the living room sofa, or at the dining room table).