1st Birthday Party Planning - first steps

It's amazing how quickly these things arrive. We're already planning her first birthday party. These are a really big deal in Hawaii with many parents throwing a party that's bigger than their wedding. We're not going that route, but it's still important to me for the party to be well planned, fun, and cute. It's also important to us that we start the tradition of a non-Christmas theme so her birthday stays separate and special.

Really, we're throwing 2 parties. The first in Hawaii for family & friends there, and another, later, at home. I found some really nice printable themed party supplies from Paper and Cake. They supply you with pdfs of various things like invitations, cupcake wrappers, signs, and decorations. You can customize, print, cut, and assemble them as you need. I'm transforming the Under the Sea Baby Shower package into a First Birthday for Hawaii, admittedly only possible on the invitations since I have more advanced design software than most people.

This is the test of the favor box with Halloween candy for scale. It's perfect since her favorite toy is this stuffed octopus she drags around by the tentacles. I'm going to add her name and birthday to personalize it. The invitations and envelopes are done and mostly sent. We're still deciding the menu and children's favors. And almost everything still needs printing, cutting, scoring, folding, and gluing. Oh my.

15th Century English/French Style Matched Scrolls

I finally made my first foray back into scribal things since G. was born.

Our good friends on Maui received their SCA peerages on the same day recently. Given the logistics of flying with a 10 month old baby, the cost of airline tickets, and our plans to be in Honolulu in December, we decided only J. would go.

Maui is part of the Kingdom of Caid, which does not give out original award scrolls to people without a name and arms registered with the SCA College of Heralds. Unfortunately, neither of our friends fell into this category. So I decided to create small, quick, "promissory" scrolls for them to receive on the day of the award with a more typical peerage scroll to be made once they get things registered.

The very loose inspiration was Newberry MS 166, a genealogy of the kings of England and France from 1465. Basically, I took the style of calligraphy and the bar with devices down the center from it. I added the symbol of the order to the bottom of each, a pelican for the Pelican and a white belt for the Chivalry.

For K's scroll, the central bar is in her color of purple with the symbols of her service awards, alternating with more symbols of the order, placed on top. For E's scroll, the central bar is red, the color of his squire's belt, with the arms of the knights in his SCA lineage leading down to the white belt.

Each scroll is done on 5" x 7" pergamenata paper. These were some of the quickest scrolls I have ever done, about 3 hours each, not including research and thought. Given the limited time I have right now with the Baby-Who-Will-Not-Nap, it was something of a miracle they were finished at all!