Modern medieval

Happy New Year!   I hope you had a wonderful break over the holidays.

One of the things I did on my holidays was to take a look at medieval tailoring using the garments from Herjolfsnes described in Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns, and finds such as the Moselund tunic.  The main purpose of this exercise was to explore how medieval sleeves were constructed.  And then I tested the fit of my sleeve pattern by making a modern shirt, because why not?

I love how it's possible to make such a modern-looking garment with an 800 year old pattern.

Overall, I really like Medieval Garments Reconstructed, and I think it works well as an introduction to medieval tailoring.  It has patterns for a number of different garments and a detailed discussion of how they were constructed.  The patterns are easy to use and a great way to get a feel for medieval clothing construction.

By the end of the 11th century (probably earlier, considering some of the 10th century finds from Hedeby) the basic principles of medieval European tailoring were already well established.  Construction was based around rectangular lengths of fabric, with triangular gores for skirt shaping.  Sleeve heads had shallower curves and followed the shape of the arm more accurately than is usual in modern sewing patterns.

Where pattern pieces were cut on the bias, such as for skirt gores, they were usually sewn to a piece cut on the grain.  Even shoulder seams were made this way.  The back piece was cut straight across, parallel to the fabric weft, while the front piece sloped down towards the arm like a modern shoulder seam.  This may have been done to create stronger seams which were less likely to stretch out of shape.

The yellow lines in this photo show the seams on my shirt.  The red line shows where a sleeve gusset would go if my pattern had one.  Many, but not all, of the Herjolfsnes garments had sleeve gussets, which meant the sleeve could be cut from a narrower piece of fabric.

Unlike modern patterns, where the sleeve seam is usually placed underneath the arm, the seam on a medieval sleeve was located at the back of the arm.  This allowed medieval tailors to make sleeves which closely followed the shape of the arm without constricting the wearer's movement.

Despite all these differences between medieval and modern patterns, my experimentation resulted in a very modern-looking T-shirt, and all it really took to achieve this result was to use an obviously modern fabric.  Even if I had made it up as a dress with a long, gored skirt like the Herjolfsnes examples, it still wouldn't look obviously medieval.  I think the lesson here is that in some ways the fashion aesthetic of the Middle Ages was similar to our current 21st century aesthetic.

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.