[SCA-AE] Reminder - Metalsmiths Symposium V in Frosted Hills - East Kingdom, Oct 27-29

[Haraldr Bassi (AE)]

Greetings,

I wanted to take a moment and remind people that Metalsmiths' Symposium
5 is coming very soon, on October 27th through the 29th. We still have
space available for on-board at the feast as well as lots of available
bunk space in extremely nicely appointed cabins (read heated with pairs
of indoor toilets and showers in each cabin). We have lots of classes
already, lots of smiths bringing their forge setups, but could always
use even more classes and smiths coming to play.

If you haven't yet signed up to offer a class, please take a moment to
visit the class sign up page, or send us an email at
mss5classes at drakkar.org and we can add your class for you.

The same goes for reservations, if you haven't yet sent in a
reservation, please drop us an email and follow up with a check if you
are looking for feast and bunk space. Even if you aren't looking for
feast or bunk space and are just planning to day trip, dropping our
reservations clerk an email at frosted.hills at verizon.net will help us in 
planning the accommodations for the day board.

I also wanted to let people know that we are printing some T shirts to
commemorate the occasion, and will have them available for sale at the
event. The link to the shirt image is at:
http://www.drakkar.org/metalsmith_shirt.jpg The Latin and translation is 
the front of the shirt, the backside is the 'tour' shirt lower portion 
of the image. They are available in sizes from Small to 4XL, and all but 
4XL is available in both the ash grey color as well as a blue. The 
shirts are being made by Renaissance Arts and Designs, the people who do 
the other Latin motto shirts at Pennsic and other major wars. The grey 
shirt I refer to is the same as all of the rest of their Latin motto 
shirts. The blue is the same color that they used for the illumination 
of the falconers if anyone happened to see them this summer.  Yes, we 
are getting shirts in two colors because not everyone likes grey or blue 
but almost everyone liked one or the other. Pricing is $15 each, two 
shirts for $25 or three shirts for $30 ($10ea for 3 or more). Please let 
me know if you want to pre-order a particular color and size in advance 
of the event.

In addition, we will be adding some other fund raising activities at the 
event, including some forms of auctions. We will have some items in  a 
Chinese auction format as well as other items in a silent auction
format. The proceeds will go towards helping us offset the extra costs
we incurred when we were forced to change to a much more expensive site. 
For those not familiar, the Chinese auction format will be using
numbered raffle tickets, which you can register with our sales people or 
write your contact info onto the ticket you drop into the bucket. You
then drop as many tickets as you want chances to win a particular lot
into the container for that item. One winner for each item will be
selected.

The other auction will be a silent auction, where there will be a sheet
for everyone to record their bids, outbidding the previous high bidder.
We will only be using the silent auction format for our higher ticket
items and will only accept bids in whole dollar increments. Both
auctions will be closing sometime during the feast, we will make
announcements before we close them down.

I do wish to warn people about one of the items we have available for
auction as it is rather heavy, though arrangements can be made to pick
it up at a later time. We will be auctioning off a Paragon High Fire
pottery kiln with Kiln sitter and manual controls, Paragon model A82B.
It's rather heavy and rather large as it has an internal capacity of 18"
wide by 21" or so tall, plus the firebrick and controls on the outside.
It will come with a stand and is wired for a 50 amp 120v/240V 4 wire
circuit and includes the socket. The kiln works, but would likely
perform much better with new electric elements installed (they commonly
expire over time and this kiln is almost 30 years old). It's not had a
lot of use over the years (less than 30 firings from what we can
recall), or we would have had to replace the elements long ago. These
retail new for a grand or more and replacement elements would likely be
about $165.

We will have other items in the auction, including hand made clay
casting crucibles based upon Byzantine and Museum of London artifacts as 
well as other interesting items.

If anyone has any items they would like to donate to the auctions please 
feel free to contact me at mss5 at drakkar.org. We are willing to accept 
donations of items that work within the theme, as well as items that may 
not be totally related to the theme of the event.

The event announcement is at:
http://www.eastkingdom.org/event-detail.html?eid=1273

The website to submit classes, or to see what classes are currently
being offered is:
http://ekmg.eastkingdom.org/scheduler/index.html?event=mss5

I look forward to welcoming you to the Symposium.
Haraldr