Vigil Planning for Matthias - Part 3

In this post, I give credit where credit is due as I talk about the AMAZING banners that were made for the vigil and the awesome people who contributed.

Research - Countess Marguerite
We reached out to Meggie as our local "person who knows stuff about silk painting stuff" and she put together a fantastic Pintrest board of information of how silk dyeing works, what to use, etc.  The coolest thing though was she did the research for period Austrian/German banners!

https://www.pinterest.com/dervishspin/silk-painting/

I want to call attention to this manuscript since this was the main source we used for the banner:

Schwenkles!

Kind of weird nerdy fact - the middle orange banner has a Moor's head on there. Apparently that was a common "thing" to find in Germany on various coats of arms. See also Pope Benedict XVI's papal coat of arms as well which contains the "Moor of Freising" which is specific to Archdioses of Munich and Freising. I found out that nugget when I was going down a rabbit hole of researching the Holy See and papal coats of arms a while ago.

The "Oklahoma" shape of the banners is smack dab in the correct time period for Matthias' persona and is something we hadn't seen done with other banners. Meggie's idea of the motto banner to go with it is from the unicorn illumination in the same Pintrest board. She told us of her research about how unicorns were a very appropriate for the time period and for Germany in general. It's too much to share here, but ask her the next time you see her!

Latin phrase - Lady Tullia Tranquilla
Darostur's resident Latin expert (and mundanely a Latin teacher), Tullia very patiently listened to my ideas for mottos and translated/conjugated the various forms of how that would be expressed in proper Latin.  We settles on trying to capture the essence of "It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for" and went from there in translations.  She settled on her favorite being "Necesse est ut silentes spectes"


Unicorn Banner - Don Llewellyn Walsh
This section needs to first be prefaced with terrible unicorn sketches that I did for Thyra in coming up with what the banner sets should look like. Behold!

Graze upon their grace and splendor! (and goat toes)

Llewellyn was talented enough to turn that up there into this beautiful banner below.

Llewellyn and his lady posing with their awesome banner creation.

Motto Banner - Lady Fortune St. Keyne

Fortune came through in perhaps the hottest span of days possible leading up to GNEW to produce the motto banner.  Thyra provided the font for the motto and Fortune wrangled unruly silk, braved WTF humidity, and came through with a lovely piece of work.

Final piece is below, tied onto a borrowed spear in honor of the source document. (Yes that's me carrying the spear).

Photo courtesy of Astrid Sigrun Ulfkelsdottir (mka Jamie Driggers).

Seriously, I cannot thank this team of people enough.  They took some crazy ideas.  Made them appropriate to period, got things done on time, and rocked the hell out of this project.  You are all awesome.