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Conbust is a science fiction convention at a women’s college (university) a little over an hour from where we live.
http://sophia.smith.edu/conbust/

My wife actually started doing this show while she was still doing demos for the Higgins museum after I had quit that group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgins_Armory_Museum

When Higgins finally closed, Phoenix Swords took over doing some of the shows there and one of the other Higgins offshoots does some of the other.

Every year we do our historical show and teach a class on some sort of historical sword fighting.
This year we were doing the sword and buckler from the 1300’s.

Not only is the oldest European sword fighting manual known, but it has images of a woman doing some of the sword fighting. So, that is particularly appropriate for a women’s college.
It’s not the first time we’ve taught it there. The advantage of a school based show is we know there is a totally different audience every 4 years…

Anyhow, we got there early and everyone was excited to be at school on a Saturday.

As there are blackboards, my wife made use of them.

We were supposed to be doing out things outside, but it was raining. So, we took over classroom on the third floor. Better rain than today’s snow, but I’m still glad we were indoors.

musesrealm came to the show with us. She not only acted as Vanna White, she talked some about her Roman reacting and took the majority of the photos you see here. So, thanks to her for coming out to the show!

We started off with our historical show.

I like these two photos of my wife and

blue_micha doing the George Silver material as I like to see what parts of them are still and moving. I think it says a lot about how many times they’ve done the demo to see how parts of their bodies are very still and some moving quite fast.

Can you tell my wife and I are still very happy about our purchase of these halberds last month?

Sadly I had a major costume malfunction where a lot of seam in my pants tore open at a critical time.
We had left our sewing kit at home, so I couldn’t sew them back up. I used safety pins to hold it together, but certain moves resulted in lots of pins being left on the floor…

Between shows we had folks drop by and ask questions. We got a lot of that.

Maybe leaving the swords on the floor drew them in?

Our second show was titled "You like swords, now what?"
So, we tried to go over all the different things you can do if you like swords. (It is certainly a lot more than just a performance group like ours.)

Our sword instructor from the Higgins was there. He was clearly impressed with our performance.

But, we did get him up and talking.

The last thing of the day was us teaching the class on the sword and buckler.
We didn’t have the folks in the class use the real swords and spiked bucklers. We had dowels and frisbees thanks to

morgan_lafaye. (Who made them for us, even if she wasn’t actually able to be at the show…)

The class seemed very popular. We had to divide it into three sections to give everyone a chance.