Hellooooooooo beefriends! Long time no post. I have been busily working on a new doll (and a new horse, who still needs hair after I painted him yesterday), so I haven't been making videos. Allow me to introduce you to Laeg!
"Laeg" is pronounced like "lay," imagine that that "g" is silent
Laeg macRiangabair is really a real person from the Ulster Cycle of Irish history/myth. He was CuChulainn's charioteer. He's also the best-surviving-description of anyone from that time period that I know of, so I'm working on a real description, here. :D Red hair, green eyes, freckles, beard, and gold discs in his hair.
His hair took a while to sew in, not because I was painting it this time, but just because there is so much of it. I used almost the full skein!
His pants are sewn with a plaid fabric; his white shirt I made with a loom knitter and I tried a different technique this time (cough because I totally forgot to make arm holes cough), so I ended up attaching the sleeves and crocheting the collar, which ended up with a much lower neckline (I mean, I could have kept crocheting up if I wanted to), but at least now I have a new technique up my sleeve for different shirt collars for them. :)
His tunic is black fabric (also seen in: Morrigan's skirt and Lugh's pants) and vintage buttons. I have a button stash that includes several metal ones that I bought at an antique store years ago and they are awesome. I think they are brass. I tried hooking them around with ribbon though, rather than make button holes, because historians say people didn't use buttons that long ago (the Ulster Cycle traditionally is set in the 1st century CE, but there's a window of 100 years where it's like "somewhere around here, we're not really sure," so give or take 2000 years ago).
His gold torc (the necklace type jewelry) and the gold discs in his hair, I made out of clay and painted with gold paint. I attached the discs to his hair with earring hoops. And I drew on his freckles (which are pretty subtle) with a Le Plume paint marker!
Tools of the trade:
The wide end of that loom knitter I use for the body, and the smaller end I use for the sleeves
So now he has happily joined the rest of the faerie fam and soon his stallion, the Black of Sanglain, will join them too once I get his hair done (the gray mare is known as the Gray of Macha). Yep, they're real too in the stories and they pull his chariot. Story time!
So horse traders had shown up at Emain Macha (the city where he lived), and these two ostensibly wild horses just joined the herd going in and the traders were like, "Cool, more horses for free." Well, they wouldn't let anyone ride them - including Laeg's brother Id, who was also a charioteer - except Laeg. So, his father bought them for him (he was young at the time, probably a teenager). His chariot is special too because CuChulainn was prone to jumping in and out of the chariot in battle (a move known as "the salmon leap" so imagine him flipping himself over like a salmon jumping out of the water) and he had smashed several chariots doing that move, so the pair of them had a special, sturdy chariot made that could withstand that, because otherwise Celtic chariots were really lightweight constructions. The Romans actually took a bunch of chariot construction ideas from the Celts because their chariots were just better (and ya know, Rome was the ultimate example of "we're gonna take ideas from every culture we conquer and cobble it together and call it ours").
Morrigan's raven is flying above her head on the top of a bottle if you can tell, but the angle is a little odd, lol
So between Laeg's magick horses that just showed up and wouldn't let anyone else ride them except him, and the fact that he was just fine standing next to CuChulainn in the chariot, who (caveat: depending on the version you are reading) would LIGHT ON FIRE in his battle fury, while other people would get burned by it, and the fact that Laeg went to the Otherworld (the story differs depending on what version again, but he's always there), in my UPG Laeg is the son of Epona (the horse Goddess). That's how I wrote him in my novel. :)
So YAY, another faerie doll complete! :) The magick continues. :D
