Unexpectedly, A Story About Will

[Forgive the careless writing. I wasn't planning on writing this today but I did so here we are.]

So in 2018, we went to the ren faire and the theme was vikings. Had a ball, got TRASHED (atypical for any of us to be day drinking but it was the medieval pub crawl). Went back in 2019 but we determined to level up our costumes.

2019 was, again, vikings themed. Not officially that year, but basically, everyone loved 2018 so much they ignored the 2019 theme (i want to say it was like, the battle of hastings? Who cares)

Like 3 counties worth of patrons ignored the formal theme and showed up as vikings 😆😆

Will and scott and i went together which means Will and i made all 3 costumes,  as a buddy project,  at my house

At this point will and i had worked together enough to know that our weakness as a team was biting off more than we can chew 😆

So we very seriously assessed this project and determined: this will be fine. We just need simple tunics. Not a massive undertaking. We bought nice linen and sat down to make 3 tunics (should be a project for a day, tops, w two of us together). Then we would use my existing costume stash to fill in accessories, boots, pants, capes.

Easy peasy right?

Spoiler alert: we complicated it.

First off we finished the tunics so fast that we fell prey to the classic "with the time we saved we can add a detail" trap and i had a fairly new embroidery machine and one thing led to another and i found had a stitch that looked like runes. OBVIOUSLY we needed embroidered tunic hems.

Well as i said, new embroidery machine (or at least this was the first time I used the feature). Learning curve. Lots of seam ripping.

So that was how I complicated matters. Not to be outdone, Will decided to make "one or two tiny leather accessories using this scrap of leather from his desk"

To this day I own a dozen leather renfaire accessories, due to the 2019 vikings incident. Also, i learned I HATE LEATHERCRAFTING. My sewing machine (and most home machines) isnt powerful enough to reliably sew leather (it doesnt have the horsepower to puncture the leather repeatedly). So that means we hand punched each hole. EACH HOLE. my fingers literally bled.

Well at this point we had committed enough time that we were like well, i guess we might as well check in on historical accuracy since we have all this effort into it (because maybe there would be aome small detail that would tip us over into being more HA).

In for a penny, right?

I didn't know much about Vikings except superficially (my knowledge of that era was limited to more mythical stuff - Beowulf & King Arthur being special interests, as well as Tolkien). So it was new to me when we read about how the locals kicked out the vikings who had settled in england after a hundred years because rhe vikings were "too attractive and tempting away all the women."

Why did the women prefer the Vikings? The consensus was, because they showered regularly and groomed themselves. (Heathens!) Being the nerd i am I looked it up - how often was "regularly"? (Side note: things like this matter to me because you never know when you might have to suddenly pick an era to time travel to and be stuck in.) The answer? Once a week. (Local bros apparently bathed once a year.)

When I read this aloud to Scott and Will, the latter cackled and said, "Showers once a week - covered in bitches!"

It ended up turning into one of those shared things that deepens a friendship immeasurably, but is completely stupid on the surface. In the subsequent year before Will died we must have said "showers once a week, covered in bitches!" hundreds of times, in the most outrageous contexts possible of course. At least a dozen people were read into the joke. At Will's wake you could tell rhe difference between his friends and his parents friends by who was confused by this statement and who immediately burst into tears 😆

But back to the costume part of this story.

My tunic turned out terrible so the boys wore their viking outfits and i wore my mithril shirt with leggings

The three of us went to the 1st weekend of the 2019 faire and had a great time. Scott and I were super broke that year (we had just moved the bookshop, which was EXPENSIVE) and so we couldn't afford to go back the following weekends - or so we thought.

After the faire day Scott flew north for a few weeks for family stuff and I was on my own with only Will's influence on my schedule (a dangerous cocktail). Will REALLY wanted to go back and he convinced me quite easily by getting us free tickets 😆 (he had made friends with the guy who ran the pub crawl in 2018)

So naturally, that Tuesday decided i needed a whole new costume by Sunday. As one does.

I was still completely broke (and i had limited time since i was working). So I consulted with Amber (who has designed many of my costumes) and she came up with a way for me to be a myth, and also scary, but still pretty (because im vain). That was my Washer at the Ford (/banshee) costume!

I was still broke though. Budget, literally: $0

For the skirts and other dress parts i used the offwhite tablecloths from my wedding in 2010. This was perfect because the tablecloths were basically all stained in some way or other (merlot probably), such that they didn't work as tablecloths anymore. But they had only been used the one time, and the fabric was good, wherever it wasn't stained (generally 80% of each one). So, ideal to cut dramatically "rent" garments from!

I used my then-new spray paint skills (which i perfected during spring of 2019 when i redecorated the bookshop on a zero budget) to decorate the hems in black and red - because the character spends time walking through battlefields, the blood of the fallen staining her gown. And like, not to brag, but i nailed the spray paint effect.

So that took me like 2 days, which brings us up to Thursday. The day i decided i should take apart and remake the corset i intended to wear that Sunday. (It didn't fit right and had some loose bones.) You'd think this is the part of the story where i really learned a lesson. But honestly, it went great. Took it apart, fitted it correctly, put it back together, even had time to properly embroider the bones. 🤷‍♀️

I added some leftover black tulle as a veil, and i wore leggings under the skirt for practical renfaire reasons. And i wore a pair of leather boots from Nine West (i had gotten them in 2005, they were my "divorce boots" lol). This was their last hurrah, having been resoled before, but it was a GOOD last hurrah!

So, early Sunday morning i picked up Will to go to the faire. He was all decked out, and he loved my costume but he goes : "its missing something." He ran back into his house and grabbed a roll of jewlery wire "for the road." Over the next hour, while i drove us to Sarasota, he rode shotgun and  literally made me a crown from scratch. By the time we got there, I had a proper coronet to go over my veil.

Again we had a great time, it turned out the pub crawl guy not only got us admission but also gave us pub crawl lanyards !! (This year we followed the rules and didnt feel shitty later.) Also, the weather was GREAT. Nice and cold! Cold is good for costumes because overheating is unpleasant and because any type of history costume is improved by the addition of a cloak. Some years (like 2018) Florida is just too hot for cloaks :(

In fact the weather was SO perfect that Will convinced me (pretty easily) to return the following week - and now it was his turn to undertake a ridiculous project in a short time frame. He wanted a proper viking cloak. So we hit up joanns (he wasn't on a zero budget like me lol) and found a beautiful, soft fabric that looked a lot like the complex wovens that you see vikings have in the movies. And because we hate ourselves, apparently, we picked up some lovely faux fur trim for the edges. Why does this mean we hated ourselves? Because of course, attaching the trim required learning a new technique on Will's new Serger. Because of course it did. (There is no one so overconfident as a cosplayer at Joanns thinking "i saw that in a video on youtube, it can't be that hard to do.") I deisgned an easy pattern for it based on a cape i had made in 1999. (No pockets, but we were short on time.)

The cloak turned out BEAUTIFULLY. There was a slight hiccup the night before the faire when Will decided that 98% perfect was insufficient, and he simply MUST redo the trim seam and get it more perfect - annnddd being exhausted, his hand slipped and he cut a small gash in the fabric. He was very upset about it but i was like "hey, its a viking cloak, probably someone stabbed you! Nice distressing!" And since he had no choice, he accepted this backstory 😆

The 3rd weekend, it was still just us two (scott being up north). An unexpected side effect of the fancy ass cloak was that now people thought we were a couple in our wedding outfits. 😆 We got stopped for photos a lot, because we did look fine af.

[TW: now it gets sad. Stop reading here if you dont want the sad ending. The ending you just read is perfectly valid and is true as far as it goes. ]

Considering it turned out to be our last costumed outing before 2020, I'm so glad the weather was perfect. It was also the day I found out he had a brain tumor. He died a little more than a year later. But covid turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because we spent most of that last year together at my house, sewing and watching the Mandalorian on loop.

And because of the pandemic, it was possible for us to go to Universal Orlando and so we got to take Will to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Which we would never have done if not for the "Florida resident covid special" and the fact that there were practically no lines at any of the rides, and Universal did such a good job with their social distancing /etc practices that we felt safe going there every other weekend for summer /fall of 2020.

I miss him every minute of every day, but I have no regrets. We spent our time exactly how we should have, and I'm better about doing that with other loved ones now, because I know it's the right choice.