I have awesome friends

The Dreamstress, in particular, is an enabler.  She keeps showing me pictures of things and encouraging me to make them.  Her latest suggestion is a necklace shaped like ouroboros, as seen in a 1801 fashion plate from Costume Parisien.

Close up of the snake's head.  This is made from nine or ten separate flat planes sewn together to make the head shape.

Here's the fashion plate in question.  Although the necklace is the focal point, the picture is small and not very detailed.  Even if you zoom in, all you can see is that the snake:

• Is green
• Appears to have a striped or spiral pattern on its body
• Has a detailed head with facial features sculpted in three dimensions

I've had to make my best guess at how the necklace might have been constructed and go from there.

The Rijksmuseum describes this as a gold necklace, but it's coloured green in the picture.  Perhaps it's supposed to be gold and emeralds, but it looks more like a beaded rope to me.  

I suspect what we see in the fashion plate is likely to be one of these:

Beaded snake made by an Ottoman prisoner of war during WWI.  It's made using a beaded crochet technique.

The snake is a good luck symbol in Turkey and some other Near Eastern countries, where beaded snakes seem to have been a traditional craft item.  During WWI, some POWs from the Ottoman Empire made beadwork items, including snakes like this one, to earn money.

In the early 19th century there was a lot of interest in Oriental art, which was novel and exotic to Western Europeans, and it wouldn’t be surprising for a fashionable Parisian lady to have a necklace made in the Ottoman Empire.  But this is just a hypothesis.  There are many ways to make a beaded snake, and the Costume Parisien illustration predates the WWI snake by over a hundred years.  In any case, I didn’t especially want to learn bead crochet.  I wanted something relaxing to do while binge watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race.  Thus, my necklace is a tubular net made with silk thread and there's no crochet involved at all.


HSM details

The challenge: Above the Belt.

Material: Tubular net made using glass seed beads.

Pattern:  N/A; I made it up as I went along.

Year:  1801.

Notions:  Silk thread, glass beads in sizes 12/0 and 6/0.

How historically accurate is it?  I believe the original necklace was probably made using different techniques.  My version resembles the necklace in the fashion plate, but it's not a replica of any specific object and it's not made using historical methods.

Hours to complete:  15 or so.

First worn: Not yet, but I plan to wear it out on the town!  This necklace is a great statement piece for 21st century wear.

Total cost: $47.50.  

A Herjolfsnes dress

A 14th century dress based on finds from Herjolfsnes, Greenland.

Years ago I tried 14th century tailoring and it did not go well.  But as I've discussed before, those Herjolfsnes patterns are very easy to work with, so I decided to try again and this time the result is a success.

For this project I've explored some of the details of Herjolfsnes clothing construction.  The wool is a fairly reasonable imitation of the kind of fabrics used in Greenland and medieval Scandinavia generally, where diamond or chevron twills with different coloured warp and weft threads seem to have been popular.  It’s not vaðmal, which is what the Greenland clothes tended to be made of, but it’s really, really nice.

My dress is sewn with linen thread, which is plausible, but doesn’t seem to have been typical in Greenland.  It may have been more common elsewhere; flax apparently did not grow in 14th century Greenland.  The Greenland clothes were sewn with wool thread, which is not available today, meaning I would have had to spin it myself.  No thank you.

Many of the seams on the Herjolfsnes garments were sewn from the outside.  I can confirm this is the easiest way to sew some of these seams, especially the gores and just below the waist where the dress flares out towards the hem.

Because this dress was never going to be an exact copy of the Herjolfsnes finds I decided to make it a long, fitted, fashionable one of the kind illustrated in European manuscripts, but not typical of the Greenland finds.  However, as far as possible, I tried to make it using the same construction techniques as the Greenland clothes.

A pocket slit just below the waist of the dress, as found on some of the Herjolfsnes garments.  In the 14th century, pocket slits allowed your purse to hang down inside your skirt, where it was harder for thieves to access.

This method of tailoring is an interesting process.  It requires very minimal equipment, and you can cut the whole gown using just scissors and a string to measure with if you need to.  This has obvious advantages in the medieval context, especially in isolated communities like Greenland.  I expected to be doing some math to get the pieces the right size, but no.  You don’t even have to use Pythagoras’ theorem for the gores; they are just rectangles cut in half diagonally.  Additionally, the gores’ width can be adjusted to make the best use of the amount of fabric you have available.  The whole process is very practical, and surprisingly easy.

I now suspect the popularity of diamond and chevron twills was not just an aesthetic choice.  Fabric with a striped pattern is very convenient when you're cutting it into rectangles along the grain.

Front skirt gore.  It's not so easy to see on the patterned fabric, but it has a cool little fish tail detail at the top.

It’s easy to see how this method of tailoring progressed from earlier, loose fitting gowns to the figure hugging styles of the 14th century.  Making these things fit snugly through the torso is not difficult, and doesn’t require any extra materials or equipment, though it’s probably helpful to have a friend who can assist.  Most of the Herjolfsnes garments were loose tunics without a defined waist, but a couple show evidence of having been fitted by pinching in the fabric at the waist along the side gores and then sewing it.  They were still loose enough to be pulled on over the head; none of the Herjolfsnes gowns are so tight they had to be laced up like some of the gowns worn on the mainland, but I found it is possible to get quite a tight fit without needing to add lacing.  Wool has a little bit of stretch.


HSM details

The challenge: Details.  This dress has lots of fun little details, such as fishtail gores, pocket slits, and pieced sleeves.

Material: 3.5 meters of herringbone wool.

Pattern:  I used the patterns found in Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns for reference, but this isn't a specific pattern.  Instead, I used the cutting method the 14th century Greenlanders used, along with my measurements, to make the dress.

Year:  Mid 14th century.

Notions:  Linen thread.

How historically accurate is it?  It's made in the same way as the Herjolfsnes finds, although the materials aren't exactly like those used in 14th century Greenland, and the cut is likely more typical of mainland European styles than what Greenlanders wore.

Hours to complete:  Probably 30-ish.

First worn: Several times to get the sleeves sitting right.  The trick here is to rotate the sleeve head relative to the armscye until it stops wrinkling around your biceps.  Have patience and don't panic, you'll get there.

Total cost: $84.  Not a cheap project, but I couldn't resist that wool. 

St Birgitta's cap

In the later medieval period, caps were an everyday clothing item for both men and women.  They kept people's hair clean and out of the way, stopped people's heads from getting sunburnt, and gave women something to pin their veils onto.  Like other utilitarian objects they don’t usually survive, but there is a 14^th century cap which has been preserved as a relic, because it’s said to have belonged to St Birgitta of Sweden.  It’s an interesting item, made from two halves joined together with knotwork and finished with an embroidered band.

YouTuber Morgan Donner has put together two excellent videos on how to make this cap.  She has a video specifically about how to do the knotwork:

...and a longer video, which takes you through the entire process of making the cap.

Thanks to Morgan's videos, I was able to replicate the cap.  There is also a very good tutorial from Cathrin Åhlén at Katafalk, complete with a pattern, which I found really useful.

My knotwork is made from 6 linen threads, each of which should be about 5 times the length of the knotwork.  I started at the back of the cap and left half of each thread as a tail while I did the herringbone rows.  Then I used the tails to weave around the herringbone stitches and thus complete the knot.  It’s annoying if one of the tails isn’t long enough, but not a huge problem because you can darn in another length of thread.  Small mistakes in the weaving aren’t obvious either.

I'm 98% sure this photo shows the place where I had to darn in another length of thread.

And this is the back of the cap showing where the knotwork starts.

I found that a strip of thermal-backed curtain fabric works really well as a backing to stabilize the two halves of the cap while you complete the knotwork.  However, you’ll need to be very careful that whatever you use to draw the grid on your curtain fabric isn’t going to rub off onto your cap, or use a washable fabric pen that won't matter if it rubs off.  I used a biro, and was not very happy to discover that even when dry it transferred itself to my cap.  Fortunately, Sard Wonder Soap lives up to its name.

In the comments on Morgan's video about making the cap, someone suggested it might have originally been made for a child, with the knotwork added later so it would fit an adult.  I also wonder whether it might have been a regional style.  The images of caps which don't appear to have embroidery come from other parts of Europe, and the design feels very Scandinavian to me.  It reminds me of the wire posements found at Birka and other places, and it's based on the number 6, which is a recurring pattern with ancient Scandinavian textiles.



HSM details

The Challenge:  Everyday.  Caps like this were part of the 14th century European woman's everyday wardrobe, although they weren't always embroidered.

Material: Part of a pillowcase that I'm reasonably certain is linen.

Pattern: Cathrin Åhlén's pattern, which is available on her blog.

Year:  14th century.

Notions:  Linen thread.

How historically accurate is it?  It's made from linen like the original, in the same way as the original, so far as I can tell.  While it's not an exact copy, I like to think it's pretty close.

Hours to complete:  Around 10.

First worn: around the house after photographing.

Total cost: Probably a dollar or so.  I got the pillowcase, along with another pillowcase and a sheet, for $6 at the Sallies. 

Minoan kilt reconstruction

Here it is: a Minoan kilt based on the ones shown in the procession fresco from Knossos.  It's decorated with embroidery in an effort to demonstrate that embroidery techniques can produce the kind of textiles shown in Bronze Age Aegean art.

Here's the fresco for comparison:

Knossos procession fresco Group C, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Kilts had cultural significance for the Minoans, and giving a young man his (first?) kilt was a Big Deal. It was such an important life event that it was recorded on seal stones.  Most kilts in Minoan and Mycenaean art are fairly plain, but the Knossos procession fresco shows an important cultural event, most likely a seasonal religious festival, and the people involved are wearing special clothes for the occasion.

Ornately decorated kilts may also have been reserved for specific members of society, though in theory anyone could own a kilt like this as long as someone in their social circle possessed the time and technical skills needed to make one.  One of the things this project taught me is that making a kilt this way is not particularly difficult, it's just time consuming.

I embroidered the kilt before I cut it out, then finished the edges by simply turning them under and stitching them down, which may or may not be something the Minoans would have done.  It would also be possible to line the kilt, or even just leave the edges raw since fulled wool doesn't fray.

Fabric edge folded under and stitched with linen thread.

Close up of the kilt.  Pictured: plied cord used to tie it round the waist and traces of chalk left from drawing the embroidery design.  The plied cord is conjectural, but was a common method of fastening clothes in the Bronze Age Aegean.

Here's what it looks like laid out flat.

The kilts in the procession fresco are a little unusual.  As far as I'm aware that tapered border at the bottom doesn't occur anywhere else in Minoan art; decorative borders are common, but not tapering to points at each end.  Additionally, all the kilts in the procession fresco are made in the same colours (blue with yellow stripes or yellow with blue stripes), with the same overall design and decorative features.  If the trade delegation shown in Rekhmire's tomb is anything to go by, Minoan clothing was normally much less uniform than this, even for important occasions.  This suggests the procession fresco kilts were a specific style of garment related to the event shown in the fresco, and potentially even made specially for this event.

Where exactly does all this get us?  Sure, this is a garment the Minoans could have made, but is it a garment they're likely to have made?  Unfortunately there isn't enough evidence to answer that question conclusively.  I can say this reconstruction is consistent with what we know about the Knossos textile industry, and solves an important problem with making the procession fresco kilts - specifically, the fact that the tapered stripes at the bottom would be extremely challenging to weave even for an experienced weaver using sophisticated techniques.  So this is a plausible interpretation, but not a definitive one.

Important public service announcement: if you think you might like to make an embroidered wool kilt, I strongly recommend  using a dust mask.  Yes, a dust mask, like you would use for sanding down a surface before painting.  You may laugh, but trust me, your sinuses will thank you for it.  The wool constantly sheds tiny fibers that will do unspeakable things to your nasal membranes.

HSM details

The Challenge:  Specific to a Time (of day or year).  The men pictured on the Knossos procession fresco were participating in a festival, which would have happened at a specific time of the year.  The similar colour and design of their kilts, which appears to have been unusual, suggests they may have been made specifically for the event shown in the fresco.

Material: Half a meter of fulled tabby wool.

Pattern: Based on Dr. Bernice Jones' research.

Year: 1470 - 1315 BCE.

Notions:  Wool yarn for embroidery, linen thread, plied linen cord.

How historically accurate is it?  The purpose of this reconstruction was to demonstrate that embroidery techniques can produce textiles consistent with those shown in Minoan art.  But we don’t have enough information about the textiles shown on the Knossos frescoes to know for sure how they were made and this is one of several possible interpretations.

Hours to complete:  I lost count, but I think somewhere around 60-70.

First worn:  Round the house after I finished hemming it.

Total cost: $45.

Finished shaft grave helmet

Here it is folks, the shaft grave helmet is all done.  Sorry it's taken me so long to get this post up; life gets in the way sometimes.

This helmet was much easier to make than my last beehive helmet, and definitely faster, mainly because this time I had a better idea of what I was doing.  Otherwise it's fundamentally the same thing as my Phaistos helmet; the differences in shape and style are largely superficial although, as I'll explain, I do think the shaft grave style would offer better head protection.

So how historically accurate is it?  That depends on how correct our understanding of beehive helmets is, which we don't know for sure.  Unfortunately we don't have any surviving Mycenaean helmets to study, so any reconstruction necessarily involves some conjecture.  Based on art, literature, and archaeological finds it is possible to make deductions about how Mycenaean helmets were made and what materials they were made from, and I like to think this is a reasonable reconstruction based on the evidence available.

Here's what the shaft grave helmet looks like when worn:

Selfies are acceptable for research and/or educational purposes.

As you can see there's a lot of bulk in the helmet to cushion my skull in the event of an enemy hitting me over the head with a blunt object, or firing a sling stone at me.  Even at the lower edge of the helmet, which is its thinnest point, there's a good inch and a quarter (30mm) of padding and tough leather.

Although my shaft grave helmet is the same basic construction as the Phaistos helmet, I think it would do a slightly better better job of protecting the wearer's skull because of the extra padding.  Helmets made this way are naturally thinner around the lower edge, and placing curved pieces of leather stuffed with linen around the lower edge is one way to increase the level of protection the helmet provides in this area.

This is the internal structure of my Phaistos helmet.  You can clearly see how the thick bundle of leather strips at the top gives more protection than the lower rim, which is just one layer of leather.  Adding extra padding around this area makes sense.

A monochrome Delphos, colonial style

Leimomi of The Dreamstress spent the first two weeks of July living in 1916 (well, as close as it's possible to get).  If you haven't read her blog posts about it you should; go ahead, I'll wait.  On the 16th Leimomi was kind enough to invite a few of us Wellingtonians to a ladies' afternoon tea in 1916.

This meant I needed clothing suitable for 1916.

The obvious solution was the Delphos dress, created by Mariano Fortuny in 1909.  The Delphos has a number of attractive features from my perspective.  It's quick and easy to make.  It does not require any pattern drafting or fitting.  It does not require period underwear.  In fact it was meant to be worn with no underwear, which is still a bit risque a hundred years on and must have been downright scandalous in 1916, but it also works well with 2016 underwear.

By happy coincidence this month's Historical Sew Monthly theme is Monochrome, and I have some pleated black cotton in my stash, as well as white glass beads.  The original Delphos dresses were available in "black, gold, and the tones of old Venetian dyes", so black is quite appropriate for a 1916 Delphos.  In fact monochrome became rather fashionable during WWI, in response to dye shortages.

Monochrome Delphos in black cotton with white glass beads.

This isn't a very convincing replica of a real Delphos, because the fabric is quite different.  Delphos dresses were made of silk, whereas this is cotton.  However, it is entirely plausible that a kiwi woman who couldn't get a real Delphos would make an imitation like this one.  It's a very kiwi thing to do.  In the 19th and 20th centuries many things weren't available here in the colonies, and fashion-forward New Zealanders often had to improvise.  Eve Ebbet's book In True Colonial Fashion contains a particularly memorable account of a woman who made a bustle pad by stuffing her skirts with straw.  Unfortunately, the wind blew her skirt open and the straw was revealed.

The Delphos is a very simple thing, and very easy to make.  Fortuny patented the design, and the patent diagram shows how it was constructed.

Patent diagram for the original Delphos.

Item F on the diagram is a gathering cord under the arm, and this is the key to getting the sleeves to sit right.  There's also a gathering cord at the neck, which strengthens the neckline and allows it to be adjusted.


The Challenge: Monochrome.

Fabric: 3 meters of crinkled black cotton.

Pattern: There isn't one.  It's a tube.

Year:  Early 19-teens through 1920s.

Notions: Cords made from black crochet cotton, white glass beads, and a belt made from grosgrain ribbon with two thread buttons.

How historically accurate is it?  As a Delphos replica, 50% at best, but as an example of colonial ingenuity it's probably a  bit better.  The construction is certainly feasible for 1916 and is based on photos of Delphos dresses as well as the patent diagram.

Hours to complete: About 8.  The side seams are machined, but everything else is hand stitched; because of the way the dress is constructed, it really needs to be hand stitched.

First worn:  On the 16th of July, to Leimomi's afternoon tea in 1916.  It's a great dress and I want to make another one, in a shorter length.  The long, slightly-more-than-floor-length skirt is period, but it is also impractical.

Total cost:  I suspect the fabric cost something like $8/meter (everything came from stash and it's been there a while), and I have no idea what I paid for the beads.  So, maybe somewhere around $40.

A 14th century annular brooch

This is just a tiny project, but it's cute.  Yes, that is a full-size brooch.  These medieval annular brooches were generally very small.

Brooches like this have been found in London and York, and could be made in a variety of different metals; this one is brass and is based on a 14th century brooch from London.  The design is growing on me.  When I first saw it I thought it looked interesting, but the more I look at it, the more I like it.  It reminds me of a little wreath.


The Challenge: Re-do.  This is a re-run of both Challenge 3: Stashbusting, and Challenge 7: Accessorize.

Fabric: N/A.

Pattern: This tutorial, brought to my attention by Cathy Raymond.  Thanks Cathy!

Year: 1350 to 1400 CE.

Notions: Brass wire, pliers, a whetstone to sharpen the pin.

How historically accurate is it?  A good 90%, I think.  It's constructed like the medieval originals and there is a brooch like this from London which is made of brass.  I suspect the exact composition of my wire is different from medieval brass, but that's just being pedantic.

Hours to complete: Less than one.

First worn:  Not yet, I've only just finished it.

Total cost:  That brass wire has been sitting in my drawer for years and the brooch only used a small quantity, so probably less than a dollar.

A small project for November

This month's HSM challenge is Silver Screen - make something inspired by a costume from a movie or TV show.  My original plan for this challenge was to make an Egyptian bead dress (a historicized version of a costume Theda Bara wore in Cleopatra), but in order to get that done in time for the deadline I would have to have started sometime around July.  I didn't.  So I've had to scale back my ambitions and find a less time-consuming project.

The idea of taking something blatantly, egregiously unhistorical and turning it into something actually attested in the archaeological record really appeals to me, and that was always what I wanted to do for this challenge, but as I say I ran out of time.  Then one day I was flicking through my copy of The Viking Way while I waited for some code to compile, and I came across the Hedeby masks.  And I remembered that episode of Vikings, where the French emperor Charles and his daughter Gisla have those outstandingly unhistorical masks.

Vikings gets a lot of flak generally for its historical inaccuracy, and for good reasons.  I understand the process and the considerations involved, but I find Vikings hard to watch because it departs so far from reality.  As far as those masks go I'm not aware of any historical reality behind them and I have no idea why the writers chose to give the characters masks*, but the vikings did have masks and I thought a historically accurate viking era mask would be a fun little thing to make.  As always with Vikings, the reality is much more interesting, and much stranger, than the TV show.  In reality, viking masks looked more like this:

Reconstruction of a 10th century viking mask made from felt.

This mask is based on a 10th century one from Hedeby.  The original appears to represent a sheep and I tried to make mine look like a sheep too, but I should probably point out here that we do not know for sure the Hedeby mask was meant to be a sheep.  It's a bit ragged now and may have been bent a bit out of shape, but it certainly looks like a sheep.  Here is the original Hedeby mask:

From page 172 of The Viking Way by Neil Price.

The masks found at Hedeby were probably used in rituals relating to the god Odin.  It's a standing joke in archaeological circles that any object whose purpose isn't immediately apparent must be a ritual artifact, but in this case we can be reasonably confident the masks were associated with worship of Odin.  There's a good discussion of this in The Viking Way, and we actually have a 10th century description from Constantine VII of a dance that involved animal skins and masks.

The original Hedeby mask has a fuzzy nap, made by brushing the surface of the felt with some kind of a stiff brush.  My version also has a nap made by brushing the felt surface in the direction the sheep's fur should go.

The Challenge: Silver Screen.

Fabric: A piece of felt 25 cm by 25 cm, which I made from the wool I had left over from my Borum Eshøj belt.  It's easy enough to make felt from yarn if the yarn is thick and made from real wool; you simply un-spin the yarn and felt the resulting strips of un-spun fiber.

Pattern: The Viking Answer Lady provides a gridded diagram of the Hedeby sheep mask.  I played around with it to make a pattern that takes into account the shape of the surviving fabric and is bilaterally symmetrical, as the mask would have been originally.

Year: Somewhere around the 10th century.

Notions: Linen thread to sew up the nose and help shape the head.

How historically accurate is it?  I think it's very accurate.  Maybe even 90% as the pattern is directly based on a 10th century artifact.  The felt I made is wool, but it may not be exactly like wool used in the viking age.  I'm not sure about that.

I made the felt with soap and a sushi mat, which of course isn't the authentic viking way.  I don't know how they made felt, but I do know how cloth was fulled in the middle ages and I therefore suspect the felting process involved urine.  There's a limit to how far I'm prepared to go in the pursuit of historical accuracy.

Hours to complete: Two, including making the felt and messing around with the pattern.

First worn:  I tried to take some photos of me wearing the mask, but this was not a success as it turns out the eye holes on the original aren't quite in the right place for me to see out of them.

Total cost:  Effectively $0 since the wool was left over from a previous project.  This piece of felt would have used a couple of dollars' worth at most.


*If this was Fargo or perhaps Game of Thrones I would be inclined to think the masks had a symbolic significance, but Vikings is not that clever.

Brocaded tablet weaving pattern

Here are the patterns for the strip of brocaded tablet weaving I made recently.  Feel free to use them however you like.  Note that these are brocade patterns; they don't have anything to do with the way the tablets are threaded and could be used for any type of brocade.  My ground weave was just a plain four-hole structure with all the holes threaded in the same colour, which is how the original from Birka was made.

This interlace design is copied from band 2 from Birka grave 824.

The numbers refer to tablets.  By way of a recap, here's what the pattern looks like made up:

This is the pattern for the rune design:

As before, the numbers along the top indicate tablets, but this is a brocade pattern.  It doesn't show how tablets should be threaded.  Each row corresponds to a shed - i.e. a quarter turn of the tablets.

My October project

I've been looking forward to October's HSM challenge, but October hasn't been a good month for me and I've only just got the project completed.  October's challenge is Sewing Secrets:

"Hide something in your sewing, whether it is an almost invisible mend, a secret pocket, a false fastening or front, or a concealed message (such as a political or moral allegiance)."

The brocaded tablet woven bands from Birka were between 6 and 15 mm wide, my version is about 13 mm.

This is an adaptation of a brocaded tablet woven band from Birka.  What are its secrets?  For starters green and gold are the colours of my alma mater, Victoria University of Wellington.  The pattern also includes a runic cipher, a kind of magic inscription meant to bring good luck.  For this challenge, I wanted to explore the concepts of runic codes, and magic in viking age textiles.  In the viking world there was a strong association between textiles and magic, and their literature contains plenty of references to textiles with magical properties.

This diagram shows the rune symbol I used and how it works.  It combines the letters G and A, which are the initials for gibu áuja, or "good luck" in Old Norse.  I wove the runes in groups of four in a decorative pattern.

I chose this symbol mostly because it's very easy to work it into the kind of pattern we see a lot in Norse tablet weaving.  Norse tablet weaving designs used geometric patterns composed of straight lines and 45 degree angles, which is the type of design tablet weaving is naturally inclined to produce.

Magic and religion in the ancient world interest me, because to understand what these concepts meant to the people who believed in them we have to think about how they viewed the world.  Our ancestors weren't stupid or gullible, but they did have a worldview that is in some ways quite alien to us.  We think of the supernatural as something separate from the natural world, but to people in pre-industrial cultures it was just another aspect of the natural world*.

The word "rune" means a secret or mystery, so runes are certainly an appropriate subject for this challenge.  They were often written in code or using ciphers that combine more than one letter.  Sometimes inscriptions that make no sense at first glance are encrypted, or are magical formulae, but not all runic inscriptions were magical.  Many were written for very mundane reasons and sometimes the runes were encrypted just for fun.  This runic code from Bergen is too good not to share!  The men’s beards contain a coded message.  The beards indicate each letter's position in the alphabet, so for example the third beard from left is th, and the next one is á.

Photo: Aslak Liestøl, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

Anyway, we’re getting a bit off track.  My project is, shall we say, speculative.  I'm not aware of any Viking textiles with runes woven into them.   As a technique, tablet weaving lends itself well to incorporating complex designs like lettering, and there are some examples of Anglo-Saxon tablet weaving incorporating writing in the early medieval period.  I'm referring here to the cingulum of Bishop Witgarius and St Cuthbert's maniple.  The inscriptions on these items aren't actually spiritual; they record the names of the women who made and donated the garments.  This use of text to secure bragging rights is common in viking runic inscriptions too, but of course just because Anglo-Saxons did it doesn't mean Scandinavians did it and my runes aren't a signature.

There doesn't seem to be any reason why textiles with runes couldn't exist, but with no hard evidence to go on it definitely falls into the "you can't prove they didn't" category.  That said, runic inscriptions have been found on a wide variety of viking objects, so I say why not?

The Challenge: Sewing Secrets.

Fabric: About 30 cm of brocaded tablet woven band.

Pattern: My own, based on a design from Birka.

Year: If it were at all historically accurate I think it would be early viking age, since the runes are an older style of writing.

Notions: I couldn't afford to use real silk and gold like the Birka bands, so I used synthetic gold thread and mercerized cotton.  To me mercerized cotton looks more like silk than viscose thread, which is unnaturally shiny and has a synthetic look that I don't particularly like.

How historically accurate is it?  Um.  As I've discussed above it's a fun concept, but can't actually be documented for the period.  And the materials aren't accurate either, so maybe 25% at best.

Hours to complete: Not sure sorry.  I've been doing a bit here and a bit there since August and lost count.

First worn:  N/A.

Total cost:  I already had the imitation gold thread, and I seem to remember I paid about $5 for the ball of crochet cotton.

*If you want a good, intellectually-satisfying-but-also-entertaining discussion of why our ancestors believed some of the things they did, I recommend the Tony Robinson series Gods and Monsters.  For an in-depth discussion of magic in the Viking age, try Dr Neil Price's The Viking Way.  Hard to get hold of unfortunately, but worth the effort.  For a really detailed look at rune magic I suggest Stephen Flowers' doctoral dissertation Runes and Magic.

My mantua now has a petticoat

This isn't the most exciting or glamorous project,  but I'm really happy to have it done just the same.  The mantua I made back in May looks so much better with a petticoat underneath, and it's a nice petticoat made of fine brown wool in a herringbone weave.   It's an attractive fabric in its own right, but it doesn't overpower the blue mantua.  This photo gives a better indication of what the brown wool looks like:

Yes, that's a pocket slit.  The V&A tells me tie on pockets were already in use in the 17th century when the first mantuas started to appear.

As with the mantua, I used construction techniques that were used in the 17th century.  All the seams are handsewn with linen thread, using a combination of running stitch and whipstitch.


The Challenge: Brown.

Fabric: 1.9 meters of lovely herringbone twill wool.

Pattern: This tutorial from the American Duchess.  Her Grace's pattern is more 18th than 17th century, but I used it anyway because it gives the right shape to go with a mantua. All the pictures of mantuas show petticoats with quite deep knife pleats, so that's what I've done.

Year: Late 17th to early 18th century.

Notions: Linen thread and cotton tape to tie the petticoat.

How historically accurate is it?  I think the pattern is reasonably historically accurate, but since I'm not all that familiar with this time period it's hard for me to estimate how accurate this project is.  Wool was certainly a period fabric and brown is a pretty common colour in all time periods.  Cotton tapes probably aren't accurate; in the 17th and 18th centuries they would have been linen.

Hours to complete: About 8.

First worn:  To check the length.

Total cost:  I've had this wool for a long time, so don't remember what I paid for it.  I would guess somewhere between $15 and $20 per meter.

Heirlooms and Heritage

August's HSM challenge is Heirlooms and Heritage.   Since I'm mostly interested in very early periods, I've chosen to focus on the heritage side of the coin and celebrate my Danish ancestors by recreating the belt from Borum Eshøj.  There are other similar belts from Egtved and Trindhøj, so it's not unreasonable to think my ancestors in Sjæland might have worn belts like these.

The belt is a warp faced tabby, with the warp ends finished off as decorative tassels.  Structurally it's quite simple, but it uses different coloured wools spun in different ways for decoration.  This kind of decoration is typical of Scandinavian Bronze Age textiles.  They don't seem to have used dyes, but sheep's wool does naturally come in a range of colours and this colour variation was used to create multi-coloured fabric.  Shadow stripes made from a combination of S spun and Z spun yarns were also popular, and some items were embroidered.  In short, textile decoration in Scandinavia at this time focused on texture and subtle colour variations, rather than the bright colours that were popular in the Aegean.

My reproduction belt.

The shadow stripe I tried to make didn't come out as well as I hoped.  It is there, but you have to look hard to see it. I think the primary reason is that the S spun yarn I used was very loosely spun, so once it is woven you can't easily see the direction of the spinning.  The shadow stripe is easier to see in the middle section of yarn, which is the yarn I spun myself and is spun a lot more tightly, but the stripe doesn't come through so well with the loosely spun commercial yarn.

The yellow line shows the direction of the shadow stripe.  You can see it when you know what you're looking for, but it isn't very clear.

I had a problem with finishing off the ends too.  I couldn't quite figure out from photos how the original was done, and had to improvise a bit.  I wouldn't say the result is bad - it works and I like the way it looks, but it's not a good reproduction of the original.  That may not be too much of a problem because all the Bronze Age Scandinavian belts that have survived are a bit different in terms of design and construction.   Still, it annoys me.

On the whole though I'm happy with my belt.  It looks nice, it was fun to make, and it's a fairly good representation of some of the decorative techniques used in Bronze Age Denmark.


The Challenge: Heirlooms and Heritage.

Fabric: The belt contains something like 120 meters of woolen yarn in two slightly different colours.  The original Borum Eshøj belt was made with undyed wool, but a lighter coloured fleece was used for the middle section of the warp.

Pattern: N/A.  It's a simple warp faced tabby so doesn't require a pattern.

Year: Around 1,350 BCE.

Notions: N/A.

How historically accurate is it?  I think maybe 80% as a reproduction of the Borum Eshøj belt.  As a generic Bronze Age Scandinavian belt it may be a little more accurate, since they weren't all exactly the same.

Hours to complete: About 18, including spinning.

First worn:  Not yet.

Total cost:  $23 for two balls of wool.

Loom setup for the Borum Eshøj project

You know what's great about warp-weighted looms?  You don't need any equipment at all.  You just need a couple of sticks and something to weight the ends with.

I've now finished setting up the loom for my Bronze Age belt.  As I said previously, I re-spun some of the warp threads to get a combination of S-spun and Z-spun threads.  Now they're all ready to go.  Today,  we're going to look at a quick and easy way to make loom weights, and how you can produce a piece of weaving that is longer than the height of your loom.

Warp weighted loom all ready to go.

The belt from Borum Eshøj is a warp-faced tabby weave, which I find is fairly easy to make on a warp weighted loom.   In general, however,  a warp weighted loom is trickier to work with than something like a table loom.  This project is not too bad because it's a narrow band and uses sturdy yarn, but it does require a certain level of manual dexterity.

As you can see, the warp threads are arranged in groups, and each group is attached to its own weight.  There's a group of homespun threads in the center, and a group of commercially manufactured threads either side.

In Ancient Textiles: Production, Crafts and Society, Marie-Louise Nosch noted that the Borum Eshøj belt's warp threads are divided into groups of 8 like rune staves (the runic alphabet is made up of groups of eight letters, called staves), and she wonders if this was intended to have magical significance.   In Viking Age Scandinavia the number eight did have magical or supernatural connotations.  It occurs in Viking magic inscriptions relatively regularly, and there are also references in the sagas to textiles with magical properties woven into them.  It's likely that number magic was one way of doing this.  This is an interesting idea, but the belt from Borum Eshøj predates the earliest known runic inscriptions by some 1500 years so I don't know how likely it is.  I guess it's possible.  Stephen Flowers*, who is a leading authority on Viking runic magic, believes that the Vikings' magic practices belong to a very old tradition that was in place well before the runic alphabet (and that, esteemed readers, is a little preview of my October project).

Anyway, I did the warp in groups of 8 like the original, because why not?

Let's talk about loom weights.  Loom weights provide tension for the warp threads while you're weaving, and if the warp is made of wool it will stretch slightly.  This is good, it helps keep your weaving nice and tight.  Different yarns need different weights, and there is a bit of trial and error involved in figuring out how much weight you need.  I find commercial yarns intended for knitting are very stretchy and need heavier weights.  The yarns that I spun are spun more tightly and less inclined to stretch, so a lighter weight is fine.  The homespun threads are the ones in the middle, and they only need a 150 gram weight.  A 250 gram coffee mug worked well for the commercial yarn, but I didn't want my coffee mugs bashing together and chipping, so I've used dried lentils weighed out into plastic bags.  Feel free to use other things besides lentils, the sky's the limit here.  Anything that can be conveniently weighed out into small bags will get the job done.

In the ancient world loom weights were made of clay or stone because these were cheap and readily available.   Today,  dried lentils (or rice, or corn kernels) are cheap and readily available, and the benefit of using them is that you can adjust the amount of weight you use very easily and precisely.

Now that we've covered off loom weights, what happens if the piece of cloth you want to make is longer than your loom is tall?  For reasons that should be fairly obvious,  the height of a warp weighted loom is limited by the height of the weaver.  It's still possible to make a longer piece of cloth on the loom, if you roll it up around a bar at the top.  Take a look at this picture of Penelope weaving her tapestry:

Image found here.

You can see that she has a big roll of finished cloth rolled up around the beam at the top of her loom.

This next photo shows how I dealt with the warp ends.  You can see I've tied a knot in the bundle of warp threads, part way down their length.  The weight hangs from this knot.  When I want to weave the rest of the warp, I'll untie the knots, wrap the belt around the header bar to pull it up, and reattach the weight further down the warp threads.  I can repeat this process as many times as I need to, until I reach the end of the warp.

*For everything you ever wanted to know about runes and the magical properties Vikings ascribed to them, read Stephen Flowers' doctoral dissertation Runes and Magic.  

What my Bronze Age ancestors wore

The next HSM challenge theme is Heirlooms and Heritage.  I've approached this challenge by looking at the types of garments my Bronze Age ancestors wore.  Up to 1875, my father's family* lived in Denmark.  Dad's family came from Møn, where they were farmers as far back as there are Danish census records available.  I can't find any records of my ancestors prior to the 17th century, but Møn has been inhabited since the Palaeolithic.  It has a lot of funerary monuments from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age and although people were highly mobile at that time, it makes sense to think dad's ancestors were in around that general area.

I have a couple of bronze items on my to-do list, but didn't want to make them for this challenge because I have no way of knowing what socio-economic status my ancestors had.  I settled on reconstructing the Borum Eshøj belt.   Belts are a utilitarian item that everybody uses, regardless of their location or social status, and the belt from Borum Eshøj is a very interesting textile.  It's not a unique item - the Egtved Girl had a similar belt, as did the man from Trindhøj - so while I'll never know for sure if my ancestors wore belts like these it does seem reasonably plausible.

Photo found here.

The first question was what wool to use.  New Zealand produces lots of lovely wool, but over the centuries selective breeding has resulted in sheep whose wool is very different to the kind of wool used in Bronze Age Denmark.  Back then, sheep had a double coat consisting of longer, waterproof guard hairs and shorter, fluffier insulating hairs.  The long hairs made stronger yarn, but the shorter hairs made warmer woollier yarn.  So I went looking to see if Bronze Age type sheep were still around, and I found that they are, more or less.  Bronze Age European wool was a lot like Soay wool.  Soay sheep are a primitive breed which retain the characteristics of their Bronze Age ancestors.  However, I couldn't find a source of suitable Soay wool.  Faroese sheep would also be a possibility, but all the Faroese wool I found online was blended with Merino and other things.  If I want a Merino blend I can save myself some money and get a perfectly nice local one, which is what I ended up doing.

I bought fairly chunky yarn in natural fleece colours, so they would look as much like the original as possible.  Borum Eshøj textiles were not dyed and are quite coarse with 3 - 5 threads per cm, but this does not mean they were unsophisticated. The Borum Eshøj belt encorporates both S and Z spun yarn, to create a zig-zag effect in the weave.  The technical term is a shadow stripe, and it was a popular way to decorate textiles in Bronze Age Europe (see NESAT X).  All my wool is commercially made S spun yarn, but the idea of making the belt without that cool shadow stripe really irritated me.

Did you know that if you're careful, you can pick apart commercially produced yarn and re-spin it so that it is Z spun?  I re-spun some of my wool into Z yarn, because apparently I don't know what's good for me.

On the left S spun commercial yarn, on the right my new Z spun yarn.

*I don't know as much about my ancestry on my mother's side.  Given that mum's family is from England, it's a good bet some of her Bronze Age ancestors lived in Denmark too.

A 13,000 year old fashion statement

I finished the Natufian headband, and have had an opportunity to take photos.  Ornaments made from shells were used in the palaeolithic Levant from at least 92,000 years BP and were a characteristic feature of Natufian culture, but we don't know exactly what they signified.  A headband like this one might have carried information about the wearer's social status, or the shells might have functioned as a type of currency.

Fortunately we do know what the headband looked like, so I've been able to reconstruct it.

Since I don't look even remotely Middle Eastern, you will have to use your imagination a bit.

Although this is a reconstruction of a palaeolithic accessory, I think there's something surprisingly modern about it.  It makes me look like a Californian hippy, and I can easily picture a Californian hippy wearing it*.

This is where the two ends of the headband join up.

I think the way I've joined the thread ends looks quite attractive, but I have no idea how historically accurate it is.  I've knotted the warp ends together and pushed them back through the beads to make them tidy, which seems like a logical thing to do, but the original fibers have rotted away so there's no evidence of how it was really done.

The Challenge: Accessorize.

Fabric: 57cm strip of weft twined fabric, with rows of beads strung on the warp threads.

Pattern: N/A.  I did consult diagrams of surviving Natufian textiles, but I don't think that really counts as a pattern.

Year: 14,000 to 13,000 BP (or 12,000 to 11,000 BCE).

Notions: Dentalium shell beads.

How historically accurate is it?  This piece is about as accurate as it's possible to get when reconstructing anything from this time period.  Any reconstruction of an item from so long ago is necessarily conjectural, because no complete items survive and we just don't know how they were made.  As I discussed in my last post, we're lucky even to know what this headband looked like.  However, I have been careful to use materials available to the Natufians, and to make the textile using techniques attested in the archeological record.

Hours to complete: 6 hours.  Warp twined textiles take a long time to make, especially when the process also involves sorting dentalium shells into groups of roughly equal length and threading them onto the warp threads.

First worn:  For photos.

Total cost:  I can't remember how much the dentalium shells cost, but I'd guess it was around $15 to $20.  The thread just came off my big spool of linen.


*Why California?  Because it is extremely cold here right now and I am daydreaming about a holiday in the Napa Valley.

Deciphering a palaeolithic textile

For  HSM challenge 7 I'm reconstructing a headband found at El Wad in what is now Israel.  The headband was buried with its owner, who came from the Natufian culture and lived in the El Wad area during the palaeolithic.  In this blog post I'll talk about the process I'm using to reconstruct the headband, and why I think it's likely the original headband was made this way.

The headband was decorated with rows of beads made from dentalium shells.  Dentalium shell beads are a characteristic feature of the Natufian culture, and are very common in Natufian burials and settlement sites.  In some cases it's impossible to tell how the Natufians used their shells.  It's not always clear whether the shells were made into jewelry or attached to people's clothes, but we have a good idea about what this particular headband looked like because a lot of the shell beads are still in place, stuck to the owner's skull:

Image found here.

It makes sense to assume the shells were attached to some type of fabric band, but this has rotted away so a bit of detective work is necessary to determine what type of fabric it might have been, and how the shells might have been attached.

The El Wad burials have been dated between 14,000 and 13,000 years BP (remember, radiocarbon dating gives dates as BP or "before present", which means before 1 January 1950).  At this time, the Natufians hadn't yet discovered weaving as we know it today.  Woven textiles don't start to appear until later in the neolithic around 6000 BCE.  Instead, they made twined linen textiles like this:

Image from C. Giner, 2012, Textiles from the Pre-pottery Neolithic Site of Tell Halula (Euphrates Valley, Syria), available here.

I've made a swatch of twined cloth based on Natufian examples before, which I blogged about here.  It's easy enough to make, just very time consuming.  Woven cloth is much quicker to manufacture, which is why twined cloth gradually fell out of favour after weaving was invented.

Attaching the shells to this fabric could have been done in a couple of different ways. They could either have been sewn onto the fabric, or they could have been threaded directly onto the warp threads of the fabric.  As I discussed in my last post, it looks to me as though the shells were threaded directly onto the warp threads of the fabric, with twined weft threads in between each row of shells.  The original has a distinct gap between each row of shells, and the shells sit in very straight, even lines which suggests to me they were woven into the cloth.  The beads' holes all line up exactly.

This photo shows how I've threaded dentalium shells onto my warp threads, and then twined weft threads between each row of shells.   I haven't used a loom for this process, because I found I don't really need to.  The shells tend to keep the warp threads where they need to be, and once the weft threads are in place the fabric is pretty sturdy.  One advantage of twined cloth is that it doesn't fray or unravel.

I can't say for sure if this is how the original was constructed, but this method does produce a headband that looks like the original, and is consistent with what we know about Natufian textile manufacture.  The thread is linen, which seems to be what the Natufians used to make their textiles.  The surviving scraps of fabric are linen, so I think it's reasonable to assume the El Wad headband was made using linen thread.  This thread isn't processed and spun by hand the authentic palaeolithic way, of course, but you can't have everything.

Here's another photo of the partly completed headband:

As you can see, my reconstruction has neat rows of shells with a small gap between each row, just like the original.  The weft thread ends get tucked into the shells and trimmed, and once the headband reaches the right length I'll knot the warp ends together to form a circle.