[ A rectangular piece of embroidery; the background is deep forest green, with two simple crossed trumpets in yellow. In blazon: Vert, two straight trumpets in saltire, bells in chief, Or. ]
So I’ve barely been able to really be _in_ the SCA in … a long while. It’s been five years since I lived close enough to a local group to be able to so much as go to fighter practice, & even before then, in Dragonsspine & Hartshorndale, I was too busy just surviving to be able to really be _involved_. I got to plenty of events, but always as a merchant. Not that merchants aren’t ever part of the community that makes up the SCA — most of us _are_ — but there’s still a gap there, especially when you’re the only one running the booth & can’t make it to classes. Or go watch the fencing. Or go to court to watch a friend get an award, especially when they put court up against the local version of Midnight Madness. & I’ve been missing all of that, a LOT.
So when it was announced that a friend would be getting her Pelican at Pennsic, & that a bunch of embroidery would need to be done, I JUMPED on that. I think I was the first one who asked, actually, which gave me my pick of what to embroider, so of COURSE I picked the heralds’ badge.
(& then it took me forEVer to actually get it done, because of Things & also I volunteered to sew a tunic for her as well, but I got it all done in time, if barely)
The SCA, despite the presence of merchants, runs on something much closer to a gift economy than on it does on anything like capitalism. I didn’t get paid for my work, either in money or in anything else. Eventually the energy I put into the embroidery (& the tunic) will make its way back around to me — & yes, that sounds pretty woo, but I mean it in a pretty literal sense here — & in the meantime, while I haven’t benefited financially, I’ve definitely gained some esteem in the eyes of those who know that I did the work (although that miiiight be a bit less than it would have been had I gotten everything done sooner!).
I really do prefer a gift economy — I’d love to be able to set up my booth & just leave it there, secure in the knowledge that people wouldn’t take more than was reasonable, & that I could, in turn, access the necessities of living as I needed them, & the small luxuries as I wanted them, within reason. But … here we are.
(I’m not looking for arguments about the perceived benefits and/or necessity of capitalism; take that somewhere else. I _will_ say that plenty of human societies have run just fine on gift economies, & if we’ve done it before, I don’t see why we can’t do it again)
