SCA: The Hand-Sewn Viking Project, Part II: Red Apron Dress

 I decided to make myself a hand-sewn Norse “apron dress” to go with the white serk I made by hand back in August. There was a whole grand plan there in the beginning; but I kind of made the serk and then dropped the idea for a while. I don’t know why it’s red -  99% of my SCA wardrobe is in shades of blue, but for some reason I just needed a red one this time. I never wear red..?

Anyway, the fabric is linen, and all the weaving and decorative bits are in 8/2 cotton weaving thread. Aside from the material choices, this dress is as close to period as I can get it with my current knowledge, from the patterning to the stitches used to the decoration. 

Tablet woven trim 
and a red and yellow “Hedeby braid” over the seams

The Hedeby braid - diagram and close up photo of it in situ 

The Hedeby dress fragment - the braid is positioned over the seam on the left side of the piece 

I used a backstitch for the seams, finished the seam allowances with a whip stitch, and used the herringbone “Osenstitch” (Inga Hagg’s term) for the hem

A silk ribbon folded over the top edge of the dress, with tablet woven trim based on the Oseberg “narrow band” design

I made the dress ankle length this time, to see how a longer dress feels to wear - I like it much better than the calf-length apron dresses I normally make; I feel like it’s much more flattering. I also made the straps and loops verrrrry thin this time, just because I like a thinner strap. The whole project took me a little over a week to make, about 28 hours total, I think. 

I’m super pleased with the way this came out, and I plan to wear it at Candlemas in February. That’s a long time to wait! 

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Meanwhile, I have some A&S stuff to get cracking on for the new year, and I have another hand-sewn dress in the planning and scheming stages. More soon! 

SCA: BAM Shenanigans & Updating my Roman Outfit

War of the Rams ended up being a total bust for me. I hurt my back on the first day, and was basically stuck in a chair at camp the entire weekend - I didn’t get to go anywhere or do any of the activities, or even see people I’d been looking forward to seeing. I was pretty bummed about that. I didn’t even get any pictures. 

However, I did wear a blue jean  “cowboy viking” outfit on Friday that I made as a joke, and got a bunch of good laughs out of it. I don’t have a pic of me in it, but here it is on my mannequin: 

Isn’t that ridiculous? I wore it with cowboy boots and a red bandana over my hair. There were several double-takes, and a few people busted out laughing when they saw me, hehe. Silliness. 

I also bought this gorgeous new mug for myself while I was there. It’s a hand made and hand painted pottery in a loosely Greco-Roman design, and one of a kind - I couldn’t pass it up! 

Speaking of Roman, I found out that the Bjornsborg spring event this coming year will be Roman-themed, hooray! I love wearing Roman, and the weather then should be perfect for it.  I decided to upgrade my kit a bit this month, starting with a new sash to tie around my body (it's blue; the old one was dark gray and I didn’t like the way it went with the light blue chiton). 

This week I treated myself to a pdf booklet of Greek- and Roman- inspired tablet weaving patterns from Etsy (some traditional “Greek key” designs, and some patterns inspired by the geometric designs in floor mosaics and frescoes), and I made up this one in blue and white cotton: 

Once it was done, I sewed it onto the top edges of my linen chiton, to dress it up some. (Decorative trim on these things IS period,  but tablet weaving itself is NOT…but I’m not worried about that, I’m not going for exacting historical accuracy with my Roman, I just want something approximate and *pretty* to bang around in at the event).  

That’s all for now.  At the moment I’m working on two pieces: a new palla for my Roman outfit, and a hand-sewn Norse smokkr for an event in January. More on that soon! 

SCA: War of the Rams

 I’ve been away from the blog for a little while, sorry about that. My brother died, and then after Kingdom A&S I just didn’t have anything going on and I fell into kind of a funk there for a while. I’ve been to a couple of events in the past month, and had a decent enough time, but my heart hasn’t really been in it. 

At the moment I’m preparing for War of the Rams (formerly known as BAM), and I've been trying to keep busy to distract myself from life and keep my sights on good things in the future. 

I made over an old plain loose dress this week - dyed it and changed the edge binding, so that I’d have something casual to wear around camp at BAM: 

My male tunic blew a seam in the wash, which I discovered while I was affixing some new tablet woven trim to the neckline - it’s irreparable, unfortunately (or fortunately maybe, as I’d been planning to replace that tunic for months now anyway), so this wine-colored dress is what I’ll wear instead. 

I’ve also spent the last few weeks working up a bit of a joke  to bring out at the event which I’m hoping will get some laughs. More on that after I get back. 

For the time being I’m done with SCA stuff and BAM prep; the event is in a week and a half, and I’m working on redecorating my bedroom at the moment (sewing pillows and crocheting a throw blanket).  

More when I get back from the event - see you soon. 

SCA: Do Not Open Until September

 Something else that happened at KAS over the weekend: I gave a good friend of mine a birthday present: 

This is a Skjoldehamn style hood, made of linen, machine-sewn, with a thin tablet-woven band around the hood opening and bottom edge. 

My friend Ivar saw my blue and brown hood last fall and expressed a wish to have a similar one, so I made this blue and red one for him in June, and I’ve been dying to tell you about it ever since - but it was a surprise, so I couldn’t say anything yet. I haaaate keeping susprises a secret! 

Here’s a closer shot of the trim; it’s 
the Oseberg 12L1 pattern again

I’m just pleased that he loved it. More than that, the look on his face when he realized that I was giving him a birthday present was priceless.  Ha! 

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So there are TONS of events coming up in the next couple of months, and I’m working my butt off on new things, and I hope I’ll have lots of photos from the events for you. More soon! 

SCA: Ansteorra Kingdom A&S 2024

WHEW, Kingdom A&S is finally over.  I’ve been preparing my entry for the competition off and on all summer, and I was soooo nervous about going. But it went well, and I’m glad that I went. This was my first KAS in ten years, and only my second one ever! 

I entered a couple of tablet-woven bands, of course. I spent the summer researching two designs and then learning to do the one that was new to me, then doing test weaves and finally creating each one over and over again until I was happy with how they came out. 

The first band (top) is the Oseberg “narrow band” (12L1, Oseberg ship burial, 9th century), done in wool crewel thread. The original was made of silk, but silk is a little out of my budget, so I used wool since it’s a historically accurate alternative.  

The second band (bottom) is a pattern from Gaigovo Barrow no. 1 (Russia, 9th century), also done in wool, like the original band.  While the Oseberg band was easy to do, this one was a bit tricky: it’s a split deck pattern, which I’d never done before, and with the way the wool kept sticking together, it was kind of a huge pain in the butt.

And here’s a pic of my display on the table at the event, with all the largesse people left on the table for me: 

I have absolutely no idea how I actually scored - somehow I managed to make it home without my scoring sheets, and I have no idea how to get copies of them. But that’s okay: this competition, for me, was about stretching my boundaries and putting my art out there, and I feel great about having achieved both. I also got to sit down with both of my judges and my shadow judge, and talk about my entry and about weaving in general, and overall it was a very positive and encouraging experience. 

There was also music and dancing, catching up with old friends, and making new friends; and the whole day was just so much fun.  I’m really glad I went, and I’ll definitely do it again next year.  

SCA: Experiments In “Viking Wire Knitting”

 I learned a new thing! “Viking wire knitting” or “wire weaving” is a method of making chain out of thin metal wire that goes back to at least the 5th century as far as I’ve been able to figure out. It’s been hard to find real documentable research on the craft online; apparently it’s also called “trichinopoly” chain and there are examples of it from the 5-8th century in the British Museum as well as from the Spillings Hoard from Sweden. 

My first wire chain, made of 28ga silver coated brass wire. 

I made a piece long enough to get a bracelet and necklace out of, and finished them off with random bits from my jewelry making stash - the cone ends on the necklace are too big for the chain, but they’ll do for the time being. 

The chain is made by looping the wire around a wooden dowel, and then drawing the finished result through a draw plate, which I made out of a piece of scrap wood, until it’s the right diameter. I think I could have gotten mine thinner, but I was worried about breaking the flimsy brass wire. 

Mr. Darcy apparently thought we were making a cat toy. 

Hooray for learning new fun skills! I now have a silver bracelet and necklace to wear with my kit; and I can’t wait to try this again and try out different methods of looping the wire. My chain is a single knit, but you can do double or triple knit, and there are all kinds of colors and types of wire to play with. 

SCA: Wire Bead Separators

Here’s a silly little thing I did last night: wire bead hangers for my Viking “festoon” necklace strands (I hate the word festoon, but that’s what everybody calls it).  I was shopping for bead/necklace separators on Etsy, and then I thought…I bet I could make something for free. 

I wanted to be able to wear my strands singly or layered, depending on what I’m wearing, so I re-strung each strand and attach each end to a little metal ring. Each strand can now be hung on the wire hangers, one at a time, or in pairs or all three at once. 

I don’t know what kind of wire this is; I’ve had it in my jewerly kit forever. It’s flexible, but strong enough to hold up to the weight of all the beads, so that works. 

they’re not evenly matched, but that won’t show
once it’s all put together 

SCA: The Hand-Sewn Viking Project, Part II

The second part of my hand sewn Viking outfit project is the smokkr, or apron dress: 

I searched high and low for the right wool, learned a lot about fabrics I almost never use - and then I learned that it was going to be prohibitively expensive to use the wool I wanted for this dress.  So I ended up using a wool "stuff" fabric I had in my stash instead: it's a lightweight diagonal twill, and very smooth, almost like a suiting but not as slick or thin.  On the suggestion of a friend, I ran it through my washer and dryer a couple of times to felt the fabric a bit, which made it thicker and softer, and got rid of the little bit of sheen it started out with.  It’s not perfect, but it’s just fine for this project, which is basically a test-run for a more serious version of this dress that I might make next year. 

Anyway, the pattern for this  dress is the basic three-panel-and-three-gore pattern that the entire SCA uses, which, as near as I can tell, the pattern we use was designed by Carolyn Priest-Dorman (SCA name M. Thora Sharptooth, East Kingdom) in 1993 as a 9th-century Danish apron dress.  FWIU the pattern is based on a combination of viking artwork and on archeologists’ renderings of proposed designs for the garment which were based on grave evidence. 

I went a step further and created a pleated front for this dress, in the style of pieces found at sites like Køstrup and Kaupang.   The exact method the original owners of these garments used to pleat the fabric is not known; I had never pleated anything before so I used the simplest method I found, which was to baste the fabric, draw it together, and then whipstitch over the pleats to hold them in place.  It’s a little uneven, but I think not bad for a first try. 

I finished the top of the dress in two ways. Firstly, because I forgot to hem the top of the dress before I pleated the front, I ended up using a binding strip made of herringbone linen scraps that I had in my stash, which I dyed green.  I then applied a thin tablet woven band to the top edge of the dress between the two brooch loops over the bust. There is evidently some confusion over exactly how this was accomplished on the original Køstrup dress; the band was either suspended between the loops or it was attached to a vegetable diver fabric backing which has since rotted away leaving only the wool band in place. I opted to attach my band to the loops at the top, and whip stitched it to the top edge to help keep it in place. The band itself is cotton and was woven specifically for this project. 

For the shoulder straps and front loops, I used the same fabric as the body of the dress to create a thin double-folded tube, whipstitched closed on the side, following Inga Hagg's sketches of the loops found within the tortoise brooches at Birka: 

Hagg, 1974

I used period stitching methods on this whole dress, like I did for my serk. I used a backstitch for the primary construction seams, a running stitch to attach the linen binding at the top, flat-felled the seams and whip-stitched them in place, and then folded the lower hem and stitched it in place with a herringbone stitch (Inga Hagg's "Osenstitch"): 

Hagg, 1984

This dress has its problems, to be sure. I deviated from my inspiration pieces in areas like fabric choice, and in the use of an edge binding at the top. This was my first time hand sewing an apron dress, hand sewing on wool, and creating pleats/smocking.  Overall, though, I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, and I can’t wait to wear it with my new serk when the weather cools off a bit! The whole dress took approximately 21 hours to make, including the weaving. 

Whew! Next project!