Heraldry Articles and Upcoming Classes at Sergeantry Trials

Greetings everyone,

Along with the research that I do, I am the submissions herald of Avacal.  Just recently (yesterday), the Society College of Arms just accepted Avacal’s heraldic title for my position, White Wyvern Herald.  So I now have a cool name for my position.

Finding a SCA name or designing a device or badge can be exciting and interesting; or frustrating and daunting.  It all depends on how much help you get.  Our Avacal College of Heralds have been helping people from our newest of members, to our sergeant candidates (who must have their name and device in the submission process) to some of our long standing peers.

I wrote a few articles on how to find an acceptable sca name and how to design a sca device or badge as beginning articles to start the process.  I’m planning on teaching two classes on this at Sergeantry Trials and will work with people to start their submissions.  For $10/item, you have your name, device, badge registered!

For those who already have name, you can also register up to six (6) names with one being your primary name.  This is for alternative personas and household names.  You may also jointly own a household name with someone else.

Same thing with heraldry.  Although you may only have one (1) device, you may register up to six (6) pieces of heraldry (the rest have to be badges).

Seek out our heralds, ask for help, and join the cool club who has been registering.  Want to know who has?  We have a great Avacal Roll of Arms which lists everyone in the Kingdom registrations!  Take a look and decide to register and let us heralds help.

Welcome!

Greetings everyone and welcome to Arwyn’s cupboard.  My goal for this blog is to share my thoughts, my writing process and my research and how it turns into the final written document.  Sometimes, I will tell where I am in my process for a particular paper.  Sometimes, I will share some of my past work.  Come with me on a journey and we will all learn.

Specifically, I hope that I will be able to share my challenges.  Most people don’t know that writing was something I struggled with significantly in high school and in the first few years of university.  I took one of my major weaknesses and converted it into a strength not only for the SCA but also for my professional career.  I discovered that the framework of a scientific paper or report allows me to express myself better than writing a normal English position essay.  So you will find my work tends to be in this format.

I have discovered that I have lots of research done and now need to start sharing it  – not just once per year for Avacal Kingdom A&S.  Recently at Silverwolf, I created an academic poster for my paper, Major Spice Usage Selection in Late 16th Century English Meat Recipes (1591 to 1597) Compared to Evolutionary Choices to Reduce Common Foodborne Pathogens and Their Gastrointestinal (GI) Symptoms.  I found it a great way to explain to a wider audience and got lots of comments that people learned something new.  I never thought of using this format in SCA until Kataryna Tkach, OL suggested that I do it.  Historically, I had only seen it used at technical conferences and wasn’t sure how it would work in the SCA.  The result was awesome!

Lots of on-resources exist on how to create an academic poster and include powerpoint layouts for simple fill-in the blank forms to make creation easy.  What I discovered is that you need less words and much more pictures to demonstrate your points.  It was almost as hard as writing the paper.  Whether you use it before you write your documentation or paper, or vice versa, I like the process.  I found that I simplified the research down just the major points.

So that’s it for now.