Yesterday, one of my dearest, oldest friends was elevated to the Order of the Laurel. For you non-SCA folks, that is the highest honour on can achieve in the arts, and it ups one’s ‘rank’ in the society to a Peerage. So it is really a big deal. One of the things you get, in our Kingdom anyway, is a coat or cloak with the badge of the order worked into it to show off your new position, and Emer asked me to make her a coat for the occasion.

Now, Emer is a bit of a rockstar. She writes amazing, powerful music and performs it beautifully. You may know some of her songs and not even realize it – Heather Dale has sung Emer’s music, and there is even a funny story about a church choir that was singing one of her songs and thought it actually was traditional music. She is an Irish bard, and when the “bard spirit” comes upon her it is breathtaking. She is a powerful force, and a beautiful person.

So I had to make a coat worthy of this amazing woman! We went for a Viking style coat, because they are warm and practical, but also because (much to Emer’s constant annoyance) there is VERY little historical record of what the ancient Irish wore. We know they had tunics, we know they had black wool, we know they wore clothes but there is nothing extant and very little written about those things. A Brat, while cool, wasn’t going to be as versatile as a coat, nor did it lend itself to laurel heraldry. So we chose the coat, but I knew I wanted to “Irish it up” as much as I could to suit her persona.

That meant embroidery. In The Tain, there is a section where all the Chieftains and their men are coming to join for battle, and the poet actually breaks the narrative and spends three pages describing the colours and embroidery on their tunics. So obviously smearing embroidery all over the thing was the way to go to show Emer’s rank and privilege.

Em’s heraldry is foxes, red and white. So I designed a knot-work motif of tangled foxes, wrapped around a laurel wreath, and put that around the hem. That was the big job, and I think it turned out well. Then I put some bands of embroidery down the fronts and on the sleeves, both to fill the space and to evoke the armbands and jewellery she’d be wearing underneath. Her partner provided a gorgeous wool twill for the project, and another friend dyed silk for me to work with. (Embroidery with silk does not suck as much as embroidery with cotton! I learned a thing!)

I did blanket-stitching around all the edges with white silk over a red cord, and then we capped the whole deal by adding a fox-fur collar and cuff-linings that had been salvaged off an old fur coat. The end result is a (warm!) coat that I think really speaks of Emer and her personality – and will look great beside a campfire on a chilly evening!