Kingdom A&S

Me at my display (photo by Marion Forester)

I entered my kumihimo materials survey, that I have been working on since 2019, to Kingdom A&S/Queen’s Prize. Documentation, including images, available as PDF here

My thoughts on the competition

I received some really valuable to me feedback on things to look up and try next - e.g. places in Denver where I might find Japanese speakers who I might ask to help me interpret Japanese-only documentation, and fiber art techniques to try to join broken threads more smoothly than with a knot. (I am curious about this and need to look more - not sure if a technique known contemporaneously as a “Russian join” would be used in period Japan….)

Authenticity and the rubric

I entered with the “Process” rubric, found here.

I also received some feedback on how to make a more thoroughly authentic and well researched kumihimo project, e.g. to pick a specific time epoch to be authentic to, since kumihimo was done over a wide time span, or to use more period tools and techniques.

I am not sure if I want to make a more historically accurate kumihimo project. A major focus of this project was to acknowledge the cultural context I live in as a modern recreator today, and to explore how this relates to the recreation I do. I firmly believe that any work I create in the SCA is a product of both the historical context I am exploring and the modern filter I see it through, and I see no reason to stop explicitly acknowledging that both cultures shape this work.

Of course, the Outlands A&S rubric used in this competition has the goal of awarding points based on whether the work would be noticeably out of place if it went back in time, so I don’t score as many points this way. I suppose it’s useful to see the way in which I am graded, in case I want to try to win a competition later. The rubric is quite clear on the criteria used, and to score very highly one would have to create museum-quality reproduction work with associated thesis-level research, which I am not really prepared to do at this time. To be perfectly honest, I remain unconvinced that this project would have been enhanced by looking into the ways in which filament silk was processed and dyed in period Japan before being used in kumihimo, even though I lost points on the rubric for not including that history.

Conclusion

If I’ve added the rubric correctly, I scored a 55/120 overall. I feel that’s quite respectable for my first entry in the Outlands/second entry overall, and for an entry that (deliberately) doesn’t align well with the judging criteria.

I am not sure yet if I will submit more kumihimo for A&S judging in the future. It took me nearly five years to submit this one, so check back in 2028 and see what I’ve done since?

One additional thing I want to note was that the judges appreciated me sending the documentation over in advance - which was not explicitly stated anywhere, and I only thought to do because I saw that another competitor who I am Facebook friends with had sent hers over early, and that hers was of similar length (~20 pages).

Acknowledgements

Thank you to THL Bryn for being my sponsor in this tournament & for her encouragement throughout. I especially appreciated her voice of reason in telling me not to try to submit a second project in addition at the last minute. Thank you to THL Hannah for the documentation review, which was exactly what I needed as a push to actually take the braid pictures, and for the tip to send it over early. Thank you to Mistress Liepa for the advice at the Caerthe library craft day on research, especially to look for extant pictures - I found it really rewarding when I did find a picture that looked like what I was making. Thank you to all the tournament competitors and organizers! And thank you to THL Jenna in Østgardr for starting me on this journey years ago by suggesting I try kumihimo.

Also thanks to my lady Aífe for bringing me food and water during the day as I presented at the table, to Don Tahir for hosting craft nights where I worked on this and for having a color printer which I used for my documentation, and to my Doña Ibara for doing the driving to and from the event.