Come they told me, pah-rum pah pum pum...

What do you get a toymaker for Christmas? A drum!
An EMS Renaissance repro drum to be precise.  (The hat was also a gift, lest you think I was going completely beatnik on you.)

My sister is awesome... and doesn't live close enough to us to have to listen to it.

Happy Christmas to one and all. And if you don't celebrate Christmas, happy December 25th.

The Toymaker's First Weekend

Last weekend was my first full weekend as the toymaker. My friend Christa snapped this picture of me using a small trim plane to shape my new marionette.

Photo by Christa Smiley

I set up my table and tools on the edge of the main path, not far inside the main gates.  Just sat down and started making wood shavings.

It's been a long time since I sat still at faire. I'm reveling in the opportunity to really talk to the patrons rather than just making a quick joke or teasing them as I fly past on my way to the next place where the queen will need me.

It's a lower-key experience, to be sure, but I am enjoying it immensely.  And it tickles me a bit how many people tell me that they didn't know anyone knew how to make things with hand tools anymore!

And when I get bored sitting still, I grab that cage you see on the ground next to me and shoulder my large net and go looking for all of my many escaped marionettes.  (Bloody fairies never ask permission before turning them into real boys.  Like I need another mouth to feed...)

BONUS!
A trip to our faire inspired a series of renaissance faire related comics over on Scott Kurtz's PVP webcomic.  Check them out over at PVPonline.

Yes, we really are that close to Target.  Well... almost.

This weekend is the final weekend of faire!  Come one, come all!

The Clown and the Toymaker :: Exit stage left, pursued by bear.

As I mentioned, I've been having back problems. Between May 5th and July 3rd, my spine went into meltdown until I was walking with a cane. Since then, the cane and the pain both went away, but it was an eye-opening experience.

I can no longer keep up the level of physicality that my role as fool requires of me.  Or -- more to the point -- that I require of me. I cannot meet my own standards and that means it's time to hang up the mask.


This year, my fool will play his usual role of Master of Ceremonies atop the castle gate for the opening ceremonies at the Washington Midsummer's Renaissance Faire, but that will be it for me.  

Next year, Calabash the fool will be retired completely.

That is not to say I'm going anywhere, but I just can't caper like I used to or rely on my body to carry me through the run of a faire without crapping out on me.

In the immortal words of William Shakespeare, "Exit stage left, pursued by bear."

What's next?

I needed something to allow me to keep doing the stuff I love, but also to take my time about it. To be able to entertain and interact as I always have, but at a rate and level that will accept whatever is happening to me at that moment. And I also wanted the flexibility to take my inner Davinci out and take him for a walk.

I toyed with the idea of doing a potter or carpenter/joiner sort of thing, but those involved hauling too much crap out of the faire every weekend. But I still wanted to do something artistic, or at least artisinal. Something that incorporated all the stuff I really love to do...

Enter the Village Toymaker.

Forget Davinci, I'm about to let my inner Jim Henson out to play.


How it impacts this blog...

This is to your benefit, dear reader, because this blog is about to get active again. The next series of posts (beginning with the long-promised leather-working tutorials, I promise) will be about creating the toys and oddments that will sell the role of toymaker to the crowds.

I need to make shoes, toy drums, little leather masks, and a boatload of period encampment stuff that I've never really worried about because Calabash was a mobile character. He didn't need a work table, a leather bottel, or a marionette...

Well, maybe the marionette.

So coming soon will be costuming for me and for dolls. (Shoemaking post coming soon!) Discussions of period toys, marionettes, and the clothing of the merchant and artisan class of the renaissance.

I hope you will join me.

Scott

The Toymaker

The creative impulse takes many forms and often comes from a place of frustration with what's out there not living up to the potential you can see.

When I was a kid, I made many of my own toys.  All of my favorite toy guns came from the crates of miscellaneous junk beneath my grandfather's work bench, not Toys-R-Us.  This isn't because we were poor, but because I thought the toys I envisioned in my head were just that much cooler than the ones you could buy at the toy store.  For instance, the 1980's were woefully short of space helmets and other spaceman spiffery.  I was born twenty years too late for the real teeth of the space race and all the very cool toys that accompanied that space-borne fervor.

Thankfully, my parents and grandparents encouraged this sort of thing.  At least until I went as far as getting into pounding heated nails into tiny swords for my GI Joes.  Dad drew the line at me becoming an eight-year-old blacksmith.

Even those toys I did buy or was given eventually went under the tools.  All of my favorite GI Joe and Star Wars characters and vehicles were custom amalgamations to suit my own fancy, characters in my own extended storylines.

As an adult, I transferred this into sculpture and artwork, but really these are all extensions of the same brain frequency, the translation of a mental picture into a three-dimensional object.  I've made props for renaissance faires and small theatrical productions and science fiction conventions.

My name is Scott and I like to build neat stuff.  I am a Maker and a Modifier, in short, I am a Toymaker and these are my toys.

Tips for Sewing With Cats

TODAY'S TIP...
Cat's can't spit!

I know, that sounds odd as a sewing tip, but if you have a kitty I think you'll follow me on this one. About 5 1/2 years ago, my wife and I held a lovely little renaissance wedding at a park in Nebraska. We made our own outfits and also garbed our wedding party to boot. Lots of sewing into the wee hours of the morning was entailed in this project, most of it with a kitty on the floor nearby playing with fabric scraps or chasing the thread or whatever. One night a few weeks prior to the wedding, Kris was putting the finishing touches on her bodice when Figaro (pictured in an earlier post) jumped up on her lap and got hold of a piece of thread. Lickety split, he had it down his throat, as well as the sewing pin that it had caught on as it passed! His life was saved by timely medical intervention.

The hairs on the tongue of felis domesticus are pointed backward. That is to say they are aimed at pulling things more easily into the gullet. This is why a cat's tongue feels sandpapery when they lick you. It aids in grooming, and lets them do things like drink by curling their tongue backward, or strip the feathers off of birds (in the wild, I mean).

To wit: A cat that gets ahold of a piece of sewing thread is going to swallow it because they cant spit it out, even if they want to! The backward facing hairs work the thread down the throat even as they're trying to spit it out. If there is a needle on the end of that thread... well, you're either going to be $600+ poorer for the surgery necessary to remove it - assuming you get the cat to an emergency vet on time - or... well I think you know the other possible outcome.

Incidentally, this is not why Figaro is currently ailing. But the current events gave me the idea for this post. If you have cats, keep in mind that - as far as they are concerned - you are playing with string and shiny dangly things. Those are cat toys right? Wrong! Of course they aren't. But they can't discern the difference, so it is up to us to keep them safe.

Keep your cats away whenever you are doing handsewing or pinning. Even if you're using so-called safety pins. Our new kitten Dusty will stop at nothing to get at the safety pins Kristin uses to put her quilts together with (easier to quilt through several layers when they're safety-pinned together). It's easy to say 'they're safety pins, whats the harm?' but Dusty can pull those suckers out faster than you can say 'knife'. For cats, 'safety pin' is a misnomer.

Figaro nearly died that night, which would not have been an auspicious event for the weeks prior to our wedding! As it was it was bad enough. It wasn't Kristin's fault, the event was something of a fluke, but the vets told us they see similar injuries all the time. Sometimes they see the same cat more than once! I guess they don't teach 'Sewing With Cats' in home ec! Lock 'em in another room during these activities or keep them above where the cats can get to, and NEVER leave your pin cushion unattended with kittens around. Practice safe sewing habits and your garb project need never necessitate an appearance on "Animal ER".