Moving along...

My classes yesterday seemed to go very well. My polychrome class is down pretty solid- it helped to have done it twice at Pennsic. My monochrome class was a little bit rougher, but I think I communicated successfully what I wanted to, which is that that is a whole world of uncounted blackwork out there that should be explored, especially for the Elizabethan time period.

Moving ahead, I think I'm going to be working on two more classes: The first will be "Elizabethan Embroidery Emblems Explained". While driving to the site yesterday, I was reflecting on how the contextual Elizabethan understanding of motifs is missing from my knowledge- I know that these motifs meant something to their audience, in part due to their shared socialization, but I don't know what that is. For example, we (mostly) understand what "he's an ant, I'm a grasshopper" means. So using an image of an ant or a grasshopper would have meaning for ourselves and our audience. The Elizabethans had a similar and similarly complex language of symbols and metaphors, and I need to research that, and assimilate it into my schema, as best I can. (I'm suddenly reminded of a Star Trek episode and a culture that only dealt in metaphors.) This will absolutely help my understanding of the embroidery in it's time and place in history.

The other class I'm considering is "How to Share Your Joy: Tips for Teaching an SCA audience". My husband and I were discussing some of the classes we took at East Kingdom University yesterday. And he remarked that I should consider teaching a class for teachers- I'm an educator by trade, having done informal museum education while an undergrad, and then teaching formally in public schools over the past decade. My recent graduate school experience has trained me to be a facilitator for adult educators- a "teacher of teachers". So I think that class may be worthwhile as well. It's not an attempt to criticize- we have many, many knowledgeable people in the SCA. But not everyone is trained to think about HOW they are communicating and interpreting for their audience. Something as simple as "Know what your objective is. Know what you want students to understand when they walk out the door", could really help people create strong lessons that leave everyone with a positive feeling about the interaction.

Reflections

I taught a class on Late 16th/Early 17th C. English Polychrome embroidery. Here are the class notes: Polychrome Class Notes.

I feel like the class went very well- my goal to was to "root" polychrome embroidery in it's historical time and place, as well as to communicate what I see when I look at the embroidery.

Too often, I think that when "mistakes" are made, it's a matter of interpretation. The scale is off from the historical examples, the colors or use of white space are off, and this is something I tried to communicate. And it's also something I only truly understood after thousands of hours of looking at the same pictures, revisiting them again and again.

It's such a tricky thing. Because each extant piece was made by a person, there are bound to be variations. Nothing is true all the time, and we can always find exceptions and anomalies. What I try to communicate is what I see to be the most common- what I see again and again when I view extant examples. Sure, anyone can find the one random example, but I prefer to go with the things I see consistently, and can document to more than one item. It just feels more "right" to do that. It doesn't mean, however, that I know everything. I frequently feel a sense of panic over just how much I don't know. I learn new things all the time, and one of the reasons I love teaching is because I have the opportunity to learn from my students. I'm sharing what I see- but each person brings their own eye to it, so what I see may be different from what you see, and that's awesome. :)

I'm teaching this class again at East Kingdom University on 8/25, and I'm also teaching a class on 16th C. English Monochrome Embroidery. This one makes me a bit more nervous- I'm trying to do an overview of a century of a style of embroidery, and a style that I believe to be often misinterpreted. I may take on the sacred cow of counted reversible blackwork, and it will be interesting on a couple of levels. #1 is that is may not be as sacred a cow as I think it is, and #2, it's possible that my own confirmation bias may be playing into it. That's one of the most challenging things, I think. Am I honestly seeing what I think I'm seeing, or am I merely finding examples that confirm what I expect to find? I don't think it's confirmation bias, because I developed my theories from observation of the extant pieces, instead of looking for extant pieces to fit my theory. But it's still important to be mindful of the dangers.

I hope you've enjoyed this little glimpse into my thought process. :D Here's a progress pic from my shift: