The Great Clear-Out (With Added Cat)

Achieved the Great Clear-out over the weekend having taken advantage of the fact that my flatmate is abroad for the weekend and there was no-one left in the house to inconvenience except said flatmate's cat who did her best to inconvenience me. Every time I tried to put stuff on a shelf, I kept finding it had developed a sudden cat. The low shelves anyway. A point in her favour is that she doesn't jump very high (or at all if she can manage it). I also ran into problems while trying to untangle one of the nests of linen thread from one of my drawers (Note to self - stop chucking thread reels into random drawers. Put them away properly!) and cat decided that this was a great game purely for her benefit and my, already complicated, thread tangle suddenly acquired a feline component who miaowed piteously while I then had to untangle her too, swearing all the way.


Still, I have chucked out much, I have found items that I've been looking for for ages and have put them away in different places that I won't remember and, most importantly, I have sorted all my fabric, it is now easily accessible and I have set up Maud again (Maud being my tailor's dummy with adapted chest without whom I would still be making sack-like clothing for someone 3 times my size and tying it together with belts. Not an ideal Tudor look...).

I have located and rationalised all my re-enactment accoutrements (mostly chucking my incredibly badly made and uncomfortable first pair of C15th boots of dubious authenticity and my disintegrating machine-made latchet shoes that have done good, if hard, service); I have untangled, tidied and gathered together in one place all my needles, threads, buttons, tape-measures, linen tape and whatnot; I have re-cycled my C18th petticoats and jackets (because, while the best I could do at the time, I can do far better now and would never wear them again through sheer embarrassment) and shifts of linen/polyester mix (similar) and have sent my off-the peg C15th kirtle to a more appreciative home and also bitten the bullet and donated 5m of a weird bright brown heavy wool (something mix I think) with a very pronounced twill weave to another friend. Gods alone know what he intends to do with it because I think it's the 1st fabric I bought when I got back into re-enactment at Tewkesbury in a fit of, well, I'm not sure what, but I remember it was a very hot weekend and I've hung on to it all these years. I didn't know what to do with it then and I've still no idea what to do with it now and I really, really don't have the space for it. No doubt, in the next couple of days I'll suddenly think of something that I desperately need it for no matter how unlikely it seems, but, ah well, tough! That said, I still have some other incredibly unlikely fabrics which were also presumably the result of bizarre early panic buying episodes including a strange dark blue wool/poly mix and what looks like a dark green upholstery fabric but these are less bulky then the brown stuff and so have a reprieve. I have also finally binned the teeny tiny scraps of linen and wool from previous projects that I have been saving as cabbage but am realistically never going to use. 

What is left, fabric wise, is a lot of linen (and I mean A LOT of linen. I buy linen as a reflex action in all weights, whether bleached or unbleached on the principle of 'you never know'. I don't think I'll ever need to buy any linen again. I still will of course...), some dark sheepy/poor black wools, various strange wools that I don't remember the reason for buying but for which I can see alternate plans developing, some mustard yellow wool that I bought back when I last did Kentwell before falling for the red/brown wool that I finally used for my kirtle but which now has Tudor kirtle written all over it, the gorgeous madder red wool I bought from the Tudor Tailors to make a petticoat and the super authenty various brown and grey russets and white say that I acquired from Historical Management Associates Ltd (I may have wasted quite a bit of time just sitting and petting these wools before putting them away). Plus I also have lots of water-damaged muslin and red Ikea linen (which I tried to bleach, somewhat unsuccessfully) for use in making up toiles and some lilac polyester and lots of green and black fabric scraps which are intended for, respectively, clog dancing kit and border morris kit. 

Anyhow, now that I'm sorted, I'm going to ease myself back in gently by finishing of my tatter coat (and redecorating my top hat and bells) for Morris. Not Tudor but easy and needs doing.

I have also bought a cheap digital camera for the purposes of documenting what I'm doing in the hope of breaking up the vast walls of text to which I am prone. First, however, I will have to learn how to work it. My relationship with technology is one of the reasons I'm so happy re-enacting so it could take a while...