About Racaire

I am an embroidery geek (since about 2001), living in Vienna / Austria / Europe - a member of the SCA Kingdom Drachenwald, (since 28. July 2004) and the guild head of the Dragon's Needle Embroidery Guild (since 24. September 2007). I don't think that my life is interesting, but some people tend to say that my embroidery is...

SCA-Awards I received till now:

• AoA-Award (July 2005 - event: Hunting Season / Austria)
• Panache (October 2006 - event: Crown Tourney / Austria)

During my childhood I loved to read books about the medieval times, like the "Nibelungensage", "Artussage", ... - about Parzival, Lanzelot and other great knights and their adventures. During the secondary school I read the "Lord of the Ring" trilogy and I used to play MERS (MERP - Middle Earth Role Playing) for several years.

The first time I got to know about medieval markets was about 2000 / 2001 in Kaltenberg, Germany - I enjoyed the colors, the beautiful dresses, the tournament, ... and decided that I wanted to do something similar. I really hated handicrafts at school but I decided to sew my very first dress - I bought some linen fabric and because I had no sewing machine, I sewed my very first dress by hand according to a pattern which I found in a magazine called "Karfunkel" - I have to admit that the pattern didn't work but with some adjustments it was quite nice and wearable. As soon as the dress was finished, I thought it could need some nice extra decoration on it and tried to do embroidery for the very first time - I still love to wear this dress, you can find the result here: Dress 1 "Red" - I enjoyed working at the embroidery so much, that I also started to embroider other things...

About 2004 I got to know about the SCA and joined the society. I learned the Refilsaum and the Klosterstich technique and started to learn more and more period embroidery techniques and still think that there are plenty embroidery techniques outside which I still have to discover...