Certain thoughts keep coming up....

[femkes_follies]

So I pose a question:

If you could design a Kingdom-wide A&S competition from the ground up, what would it be like?

Comments

[florentinescot.livejournal.com]

put a *maximum* on documentation. I think it's indimidating as hell for new folks to see a damn 3" notebook of documentation with comments by the judges for "insufficient documentation." And I know that it's a common Undergraduate Flaw -- when you don't know what to say, you say Absolutely EVERYTHING that you can find to say.

Don't penalize folks for making an exact reproduction -- but, more importantly, don't penalize them if it's not! I've seen both. So what if this gown isn't an exact copy of one in a portrait -- look at all the paintings that Bronzino did that year -- see you got elements of all of them!

My baronial madrigal group got dinged one year because they didn't have a copy of the original piece of music. Puh-leeze!

As an embroidery geek -- I'm frustrated when I see folks get penalized for using cotton embroidery floss (because the silk is so blasted expensive). Hello?

I do know that Mistress Serena just re-did the A&S rules for Meridies. Want me to send you a link? Basically, it's a 2-part event now. The Formal Competition and a Faire. (If you enter an item in the Faire, you can't later enter it in the Formal Competition, though. We've got a rule that something can only be entered at Kingdom Level *once* -- I might change that. You can't enter it again if you win -- or if you get above a certain score ....)

[landverhuizer.livejournal.com]

Speaking as someone who has judged on various occasions, nobody really wishes to read 20 pages of documentation either... I find it nearly impossible to give needed x-amount of pages worth of documentation proper attention under a time constraint. I would love to see reasonable sized maximums!

I think substituting ingredients or other items is quite fine, so long as the competitor is able to demonstrate knowledge of the proper items. For example, I won't lead on anything people are going to touch... I'm not about to use abortifacients in food and yes, cost is going to matter into things as well! However, I will point out what should have been used, what I used and the differences/compromises between them.