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About the author
 Lara Baker-Olin is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a non-profit educational organization that studies and recreates pre-17th Century Western European culture.
Baroness Khalja Khorkhoi, OP, is a 9th Century Magyar, married to Olin Ulfredsson, a Rus Swede. They met when he stole her father's horses as part of a raiding expedition with the Rus Princes Askold and Dir. He was caught, and his punishment was to marry an opinionated, obstinate woman who never liked that custom of eating her dinner with her back to the men.
The past
My first event was the SCA 30 Year Celebration in Oregon in 1996. Thoroughly hooked after only a few hours - I feverishly began to sew really bad clothing that still resides in the depths of sewing room closet as I am reluctant to inflict them on anyone else.
My first persona was that of an early 12th Century Welsh woman by the name of Myfanwy Hairweaver | Myfanwy ferch Cynan | Mevanuy verch Kenan. That lasted for several years until I was asked to serve as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Groa I, whose court was central asian nomadic. At July Coronation, I hung out in a yurt for the first time. Once you go yurt, baby, you never go back.
Mevanuy eventually morphed into Khalja, a mongol in the time of Genghis Khan. Research suddenly became a whole lot easier as a new world of extant garments, portraiture evidence and primary source descriptions suddenly became available. Whoo hoo! Okay, not Elizabethan-easy, but way easier than 12th Century Welsh. I began to obsessively collect books on Mongol art and culture, which branched into books on Central Asian tribal art and culture.
 Not being terribly fond of the all meat diet of the Mongol horde, and with an obsessive need to justify the beautiful Norse bed in my nomad yurt, I found myself gradually migrating westward across the Steppes and further back in time until I finally landed in Kiev in the 870s.
The present
My interests rocket all over the place but seem to stay pretty consistent with the textile arts, mainly felting, weaving, sewing and embellishment. I will do things with wood, leather, and metal if I can't talk someone else into doing it for me. A new love is working with glass. I hope to have several projects up on the website involving lampworking in the future.
The music
This website was created primarily under the influence of Serious Kitchen, Stan Rogers and Niamh Parsons and a variety of other bands singing celtic songs, sea shanties or celtic sea shanty songs.
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