My name is Mistress Victoria Thrakesina. I married into a noble Byzantine family, which has wide interests in the cloth trade and prides itself on the quality of it’s products. As part of my familial duties I spin, weave and dye, because understanding how things are made helps ensure that our cloth is of the highest possible quality. However I am also interested in learning as much as possible about the various fibre arts – you never know when something becomes fashionable and therefore profitable to the family.
Mundanely, I am a novice spinner, dabbling dyer and weave as often as I can find time (which is nowhere near enough!). Fibre arts are critical to the SCA as the cloth trade and things associated with it were a major part of the economy of the medieval world. Learning about the processes involved in the fibre trade and how labour intensive they are is a real eye opener, and highlights how casually we treat cloth and clothing today. I love learning about new processes, and will do whatever I can to help other people with either tools or information necessary to learn the various fibre crafts. And I love seeing the amazing things that people make – people in this Guild do awesome things!