So, you are thinking about entering an A&S competition.
Great! Where do you start? Well, that's a great question.

The goal of an A&S competition is not to compete against others, but yourself, in a manner. A faire gives you the opportunity to document your work and get feedback from judges. Your judge list will be comprised of Laurels and OVO members, and sometimes also "Shadow" judges who are watching and learning the process but not giving feedback.

First of all, it's all about the research and documentation. While you can enter an Open without documentation, it is a MUST for a Regional faire. So, if you want to make a project you can document, it's wise to do a little research FIRST. It's never fun to get started only to realize after the fact that maybe that's not something they did within our time period. If it's after 1601, it's too late. If you can find it documented within period, great! It is also helpful to do this research before making your project because you may discover techniques or materials you weren't aware of.

Sources. You need to use good sources. Primary sources are great! What's that mean? Books that were actually written in-period. This is not to say that modern books written about medieval topics are off the table. But the author needs to have credible sources, references, and information. If you find that the author has no sources, well... their material just might be questionable, so you'd better research it deeper before using it as truth. Sources like Wikipedia are not academic resources, and any University will tell you the same. (I'm not going to tell you that I've never gotten a general idea from it though, then gone and found actual, reliable sources to back up that idea and use it as a launch point. :) (NEVER source Wikipedia! It's a fallible source of information which is often lacking sources, and can be edited by anyone.) If you find a secondary source, that means it's a non-period source referencing a period source. That's also fine! Sometimes you can't get that primary source.

Documenting.  How do you reference all those great sources in your paper?  Pick a style and go with it.  Just be consistent. Footnotes, MLA, APA, whatever you want.
Try these: http://www.citationmachine.net to generate citations you can add to you paper.
And the Purdue Owl https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/

Obtaining sources to use for reference. You don't have to go out and spend a lot of money to get a reference library for your project. A lot of people in the field may have resources or have suggestions to point you at, so do not be afraid to ask. You can also get some really surprising, hard to find materials through inter-library loan, so check into that if you have access to a University library.  You also don't want to go out and purchase a whole bunch of books that you later discover really aren't so great after all.  Search and ask around within SCA communities for what's hot and what's not!

Making your project. If in period they did it a certain way, this is the way you want to do it for your project.  (If the herbal recipe says they bruised the leaf in the mortar with a pestle, don't chop it up on your cutting board.)  This isn't to say that you need to cook in a copper cauldron like they might have, for a cooking project, for example. That's not very economical and you may not even have some of the same implementations in other cases. Though you should observe material specifics.  If they used a certain metal, that's what you want to use, or a reasonable substitute.  Ask a mentor before substituting because they can tell you if maybe the real deal isn't as hard to obtain as you thought. Or maybe it is and there's a common substitute. Maybe there's another name for something you just didn't know. Maybe somebody in the know about your project's area, like a Laurel, has done this before and knows where to get it cheap.  You never know!  It's always great to ask around first. Sometimes it's worth it to spend what it costs to do the project right. You're only going to be doing it once. Buy those fish air bladders and make that fish glue yourself (unless maybe you know someone who happens to have them lying around, haha.  SCA'ers just might.....!).

In cooking especially, you should always look up terms to be sure they mean what you think they mean.  You may find that what we use for a measurement now is totally different from what they did back then!  They may say to use good water. What's that mean? Check it out before you start. By the way, the Oxford English dictionary is a wonderful resource for looking up the origins of words to see what they mean.  http://www.oed.com/

Writing down your steps. Describe what you did.  Don't write it like a recipe, telling people instructions.  (First you add a cup of this, and then a spoon of that.)  Instead, tell what *YOU* did to re-create this project.  (First I folded the paper in half, and then I tore it.)

Read the documentation forms first and get a feel for what they're going to be grading you on.
Don't be afraid of your score! Don't think of a 10/20 as a bad score, by any means! It's not the same as a 50/100 on a mundane test. There are 5 categories which you'll see when you review the form. There are 5 possible points in each category. If you make a simple project (example, a tart, or a plain herbal oil) you know you're not going to score high on complexity. And that's ok! You know what you're entering, and what to anticipate on things like this, if you study up a little before you enter. You can always build later, like a comparison project on tarts from different times or places... or the way different spices used affected the outcome of the flavor... or something like that.

Remember that A&S is a building process!  You want to get some good constructive info to help guide you towards making it better and better.  The Faire circuit ENDS with Kingdom A&S.  You can enter your project many times before you get there, having taking all the advice and worked to improve your project to make it more period and learned a lot along the way, and by then it will show. Kingdom A&S is the final destination, so you can't enter the same project again once it's been there. Start elsewhere and work your way there.  Maybe you would start in Menier or Iris Faire, move on to Magna Faire, then Gulf Wars, before landing at KAS just for an example.

We are all here to learn and grow and share, so the feedback you get is not a harsh score to cut you down with a red pen like your college professor.  Nay, I say - the Laurels are here to teach and guide you, and tell you things you can do to keep getting better and better!  Please don't think of it as criticism. Your judges also love to talk about the topics that interest them, just as the topics interest you, obviously, since you made a project about it!  So seek them out and ask questions. Get clarification if you're not sure.  They should leave their contact info or names on that form and that's for a reason, so you can get additional guidance. Education and recreation is what it's all about, after all.
And if someone does grade you in a manner that you feel is harsh or unjust or flat out mean, please talk to someone else about it! It shouldn't ever be like that, so don't be afraid of this being what the scoring process is all about.  IT REALLY ISN'T.  :)  The goal is supposed to be to help you learn.

Find a mentor, and enter the Stella Nova!  This faire is designed for the novice!  You can find out more at the Kingdom A&S Website at: http://www.artsandsciences.meridies.org/

Yours in Service,
THLady Aranwen of Willow Ford
Apprentice to Mistress Alianore la Cuisinare