SCA: Side Quest: A New Hedeby Bag

This one’s just for fun, as I needed something to do over the weekend and had some fabric scraps lying around. 

The herringbone wool outer fabric was leftover from a larger project (Ivar’s klappenrock).  It’s a trapezoidal shape because I just wanted to try it out; it’s got a box bottom and sides; and it’s got a herringbone stitch over the seams in cotton weaving thread (same stitch pattern as you see on the “Leens Hat”).  

The lining is pale green linen from stash. The whole bag is hand sewn. My friend Waylan made the handles on his CNC router, and I finished and stained them. I love the handles - I’ve had them laser-cut before and I didn’t like the scorching thst happens on the edges. The CNC router leaves a nice clean-cut edge that just needs a little bit of sanding. 

The strap is tablet woven, an Oseberg-inspired design in black/brown/green (cotton thread). 

I really like how this one turned out. I wish it opened more at the top; but it’s a great size and will definitely hold all my stuff.  

I think I’m going to use the rest of that klappenrock fabric for a small hood. Back soon! 

SCA: Small Side Quests

While I waited for fabric to come in the mail the last couple of weeks, I made a few small things:  

1.  Wool Skjoldehamn hood

I had quite a bit of that green wool left over from my tunic dress. The problem is, the color isn’t one I can wear - that bright, yellow-y, acid-green makes me look like I’m suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, lol.  So I decided to try to overdye the fabric to a shade of green I can actually wear. 

This came out really well. It’s more of a Kermit-the-Frog green now, which is much nicer to my skin tone.  The fabric didn’t shrink or felt in the wash at all, either, thank goodness. 

And so here’s a Viking hood.  I hand-sewed the entire thing, because I really enjoy hand-sewing, and I like the look of it on this fabric in particular. I won’t put any woven trim on this hood, though I may make some whipcord ties for the hood part, like the original piece has. 

2. Matching (ish) Hedeby bag

I dyed another piece of the leftover fabric to make a new Hedeby bag out of.  For both pieces of wool, I used Rit dye’s “Pearl Gray” and “Teal” - for this bag, there’s a bit more of each, and a lot more teal than gray. It’s a little darker and a little cooler-toned than the hood. 

As always, I made the handles on my scroll saw out of red oak scraps that I have a million of. Instead of a tablet woven strap, this time I crocheted a quick cord. I may replace it with a woven strap eventually, but for now yarn will have to do. 

3. Hedeby "Coin Purse" 

In the process of making the bag above, I ended up making my first bag way too small for the handles I had already created, which were sized to fit the size bag I normally make (about 9" x 11").  I ended up cutting out a second bag which became the one pictured above; but in the meantime I decided to do something silly with the smaller bag.  I cut it down even smaller and sewed it up, then made a pair of wee handles for it, and made this tiny Hedeby bag just for fun: 

The finished mini-bag is about 4” across, including the handles.  It's not terribly useful for most things, it doesn’t even have a strap, it's mostly just for fun. I'm just hoping it will just make people laugh when they see it.  

4.  Ottoman pillbox hat

Because I was extremely bored the other night and got sucked into a 16th century Ottoman/Turkish rabbit hole online, I ended up making this little hat: 

I do absolutely plan to make an outfit to go with it someday if we ever have an Ottoman-themed event again.  For right now, I have this little hat as a jumping-off point. The fabric is from a small piece of blue and gold brocade I received in a prize basket in February; it’s lined with blue linen; and the trim around the bottom is a bit of scrap silk from a sari. 

Random stuff!  More soon. 

SCA: Laurels’ Prize Tourney

This weekend was Laurels’ Prize Tourney. It is not a tournament, nor is there any prize - that’s just what it’s called. What it is is a chance to show off your work and sit down with laurels and with other artisans who are interested in the same things and talk about it together. It’s a huge geek fest, and the time I went several years ago was SO much fun. 

This weekend’s event was no different. I met so many new people, and had so much fun talking about stuff I love to do, and about so much more. I learned new things, found new rabbit-holes to head down when I get some free time, and a new appreciation for where I’m at in my work and how far I have yet to go. 

I brought what I’m calling my “Vikings Are Still Cool” display - a little bit of some of the things I do which are Norse-garb-related.  I brought my red hand-sewn dress from Candlemas, the Oseberg loom that I built last year, a whole bunch of tablet weaving stuff, some of the Hedeby bags I love to make, some other sewing items, and some of the jewelry and glass beads that I’ve made. 

Some friends and I drove up together and rented an AirBNB for the weekend, rather than paying for a more expensive hotel room to share.  It was a great little house - I’d never been to an AirBNB before, so it was a new experience for me. 

What’s Next? 

The next SCA event for me is going to be Gulf Wars in March - a weeklong war between two kingdoms, hosted by a third kingdom and attended by several. 

Before then I’ve got to make myself a new serk and a new male tunic; and I’ve got to get started on my A&S project for Bjornsborg in April, as well. And I’ve taken on a weaving commission that I hope to have done in a couple of weeks, too. 

I also have a new regency dress that I’m hoping to get done somewhere in there - it’s high time I had a black mourning gown, I think. 

Lots of things! More on all that soon. 

SCA: Yet Another Hedeby/Birka Bag

You know how much I love these things. This one is all made from scraps - gray linen from a pair of pants I recently made, wooden slats from an old furniture project for the handles, a bit of red silk ribbon and cotton weaving thread from my stash. 

This one is a rectangle like my others, though I gave this one a box bottom so I’d have more space inside. The bag is lined in the same gray linen, and the whole thing is hand sewn. I used the Leens hat herringbone stitch on the seams and the box bottom for a bit of extra decoration. 

 

I made the blue woven band on the front of the bag, and the red and navy strap. The strap is a new pattern for me, and I love it. I used the same pattern for a belt recently, too. 

One of my favorite parts about this bag, though, is the handles - or, rather, how I made them. A friend recently picked up a scroll saw for me on her neighborhood online swap group - I was SO thrilled! A pair of these handles (this is the “sawtooth” Birka-style handle) would normally take me several days to make with hand tools, but with the scroll saw I got these done in AN HOUR. I can’t wait to make more of these things! 

SCA: Just Some Viking Stuff

In addition to spending two months whomping up a new Italian outfit for Candlemas, which was this past weekend, I also, in that space of time, made a TON of largesse items for a largesse competition that was supposed to be held at the event. 

I started working just before Thanksgiving, and finished about the middle of January; and I made the following items: 

thirteen Hedeby bags

1.  Hedeby bags!  

I love making these things, and I had plenty of supplies on hand, so I went for it. The handles are a simple, curvy Hedeby-style similar to the ones I usually make (based on the handles found at Hedeby and Birka), and they are made from 1/4" red oak flooring pieces that someone gave to me a few years ago. The handles were cut on my table saw and shaped with a hacksaw and electric sander; then stained with a walnut Minwax stain.  It took me about a week to produce all thirteen pairs of handles.  

The bags are hand sewn out of linen, because I had a lot of linen scraps on hand that were perfectly sized for this project. Some are lined, some are not, depending on the weight of the linen used. Each bag has a hand-stitched trim in a braided/herringbone stitch, examples of which were found on an apron dress fragment from Hedeby and on a hat from Denmark; some are bands across the front of the bag, some are stitched around the top edge, and some are covering the side seams. The handles are sewn onto the bag with matching thread (cotton embroidery floss).  Each bag, from sewing to decorating to handle attachment, took me about three hours.  

The bags's carrying straps are a combination of flat card-woven bands, and tubular card-woven cord bands made after a method I found described in this paper by L. Elena Hylton.  You use 4-6 cards with 4 holes threaded, and pass the weft thread/shuttle through one side of the warp only, looping under the warp to get back to the first side (instead of going right-to-left and then left-to-right as you do in "regular" card weaving).  This causes the weave to pull itself into a hollow round tube when you pull the weft tight, instead of creating a flat band. This method of weaving tubular cording is documentable to as early as the 1100s, according to Elena's research. I used 6 cards for my tubular straps, after I found 4 to make a square-profile band and I really wanted a rounder profile.  I also found that it's harder to weave this tubular band after switching the card's direction in order to untwist the threads - for some reason it just works better going "fowards" than going "backwards".  I'll have to practice it more. 

tubular strap

thirteen woven bands

2.  Tablet-woven trim

Something else I really, really enjoy doing.  I had a number of spools of cotton crochet thread on hand from another project, and so I used up my excess on thirteen 1.5-2 yard pieces of trim.  

There are five different designs, each very simple and no more than 10 cards each, and all are either period designs or based on period designs. Each one took me about 3 hours to make from warping to finishing. 

3. Lampworked glass beads 

I hadn't made glass beads for several months (due to it being summer, and about 120ºF inside my garage where my glass workshop is set up), and I needed the practice badly. I'm not very good at doing this - I'm still VERY much a beginner, so my beads aren't, like, awesome or anything - but they'll make nice additions to someone's Viking kit, I'm hoping.  

I made thirteen sets of 8 beads.  All of them are about 8mm in size; some are round, some drum-shaped with flat sides, and some are kind of round/oval with little bumps or dots on them - there are 2 of these "fancy" beads in each set, and 6 plain ones.  It took me about a month to make all the beads, working in 20-minute sessions of about 7 beads per session (not all of which turned out right).  

 

Guess What? 

For some reason, the competition didn’t happen at the event. I don’t know why it got scrubbed - I KNOW I read a whole post about it on the event page two months ago, but no one knew anything about it when I got there and asked about where to set up. Shoot! All that work...!  Not "for nothing" - after all, I'm now prepared to enter the next largesse competition, whenever that happens.  

Meanwhile, I learned a lot, and got a lot of good practice with woodworking and weaving. And glass bead making, although I'm kind of burnt out on glass beads for the time being and probably won't be doing any of that any time soon.  We'll see.  

dry run of display at home

SCA: A Woven Hedeby Bag

 Had enough Hedeby bags yet?  Me, either.  Here's one that's a bit different: 

This one is woven of yarn.  I saw one made of naalbinding a couple of months ago, and decided I needed one.  I do not naalbind - I've tried multiple times, but I just CANNOT get the trick of it.  It's infuriating.  

I do, however, crochet.  After looking into the various naalbinding stitches that have been identified from extant finds, I found that a herringbone/chevron crochet stitch (a modified half-double stitch) approximates the Mammen stitch from Finland fairly well - you can find more info about that stitch, and lots of other info about naalbinding here: https://www.en.neulakintaat.fi/30

Mammen stitch example pic from  https://www.en.neulakintaat.fi/30

The crochet herringbone stitch was a bit tricky to learn; I learned from watching this YouTube video.  Here's a closeup of what my herringbone stitch looks like, for comparison to the above picture of naalbinding.  It's very similar, I think enough to pass: 

crochet herringbone stitch

I made a rectangle of about 20", and folded it in half and sewed the sides closed to make a square-ish bag about 9.5-10".  (I used a single chain stitch on the inside/wrong side to sew up the sides from the inside, then turned it right-side out).

The bag was made from bright green acrylic yarn (Caron Simply Soft in "Pistachio"), because that's what I had on hand at the time I decided to try this project.  After the basic rectangle was made, I over-dyed the whole thing with a dark blue Rit dye made for synthetic materials, because the original green was a bit too loud and bright for me.  The resulting color is a darker, more muted green, and I really like it.  

I did not line the bag with fabric or anything, because the weave of the herringbone stitch was so thick and close that I didn't feel it needed a lining.  

I made the handles out of a very thin scrap oak plank.  This time, rather than a curvy Hedeby design, I used the pointy Birka handle design - because I wanted something a bit different, but also because I thought the zigzag shape of the handles would look neat with the zigzag-looking herringbone stitch.   After cutting, shaping, and sanding, I finished the handles by applying a thin dark brown Minwax stain ("Special Walnut") and a coat of Polycrylic to seal the handles.  

I am NOT happy with the handles at all.  I have so far cut out my handles with my jigsaw, but this oak plank was too thin to support the stress of being worked with such a heavy tool, so I used only hand tools - namely, an old, rusted, dull coping saw and hacksaw, neither of which did a good job.  I messed up cutting one end of one handle so badly that I had to cut the other handle to match it so the error wouldn't be quite as obvious, but this meant I didn't have room on the handles to drill holes for a carrying strap.  So we'll call this my Hedeby Clutch, LOL.  

Why a woven yarn bag?  Why not? No actual bags like this have survived; all we have are the wooden handles, and contemporary/earlier Sami bags of a similar design to guide our guesses as to what the bags  may have looked like.  They could have been fabric, yarn, leather, who knows?  This was just a fun little experiment for me.  

Mistakes in the handles aside, I like the way this project came out overall, and I'll definitely do it again.  Coronation is this weekend; now I have a new thing to show my friends when I go.  :) 

SCA: A Bag and A Hood, and the Last of the Herringbone Linen

 After the blue herringbone Hedeby bag, I still had some of that herringbone linen left over, and I had a set of walnut bag handles already made, so I decided to make one last Hedeby bag, and another Jorvik hood to go with it: 

This time I dyed the fabric a rich dark green. I dyed the pieces separately; the bag came out UNBELIEVABLY  DARK, but the color is gorgeous. The hood is a bit more believable.   

The bag is lined with linen I dyed the same color, and includes a phone pocket on the inside. Fabric straps attach the bag to the handles, which are the walnut handles I took off another bag which I didn’t like. The carrying strap is a three-strand braid (doubled) of some charcoal gray acrylic yarn I had in my stash. 

The hood is French seamed up the back and top, like the other ones I made recently; the front is cut on the selvage edge this time, the way the extant Jorvik hood was done.  The ties are just tubes of the same fabric.  I didn’t put a sit in the back of this one, honestly I just forgot because I was going too fast. 

So that’s all for the herringbone linen (or is it?) I got a lot of mileage out of that stuff.  I forget what the original yardage was, but from the piece I bought in January, I got: 

• a blue apron dress
• a gray (now dyed teal) shawl
• a blue Hedeby bag
• a green Hedeby bag 
• a Jorvik hood 

I'm already wishing I had more.  I'd love to find some diamond-twill linen to work with next; maybe I'll keep my eyes open for it the next time I can go to Gulf Wars.  

SCA: The 2,000th Hedeby Bag

 Just kidding, I only have four of them at this point.  I just feels like a lot, you know?  I have more Hedeby bags than I have days in a standard weekend event.  And I'm about to make a new one: 

Remember the herringbone linen? I still had some scraps left over, and so I decided to make a new Hedeby bag with it.  I actually have enough for two bags, but I'm focusing on this one for the moment, while I decide what to do with the second.  

I dyed the fabric this deep blue color (Rit's "evening blue" with a touch of "teal" to warm up the color a bit).  The lining fabric is linen, the last of the "agave" color from Fabric-Store.com, left over from a previous project.  

This time I made the handles from pine. I recently acquired a large bundle of small pieces of thin oak planks from a friend, which included ONE pine plank that just happened to be thick enough for these handles, and long enough to cut both from the same piece. As always, I cut the basic shape out with my jigsaw, and fine-tuned the shape with my drill, sandpaper and chisels.  I originally stained them with a dark walnut color, but it didn't take well on the soft pine, so I sanded it off and stained them instead with an ebony stain, and it came out much better.  

Instead of attaching ribbon or decorative fabric, this time I decided to sew on a strip of wool tablet-woven trim in the Oseberg design (same stuff I used on my blue herringbone apron dress, purchased from Etsy).  I used the remainder of the trim as a carrying strap. I also couched a length of teal acrylic yarn around the edges of the bag, using navy blue embroidery floss as thread - the yarn and floss coordinate with the colors of the trim pretty well, I think.  

I opted for fabric straps to attach the bag to the handles this time, instead of sewing the bag onto the handles with embroidery floss as I've done in the past.  I've always liked the look of fabric straps, and it was certainly faster and easier than the embroidery floss method.  At first I attached the straps to the outsides of the bag, but given the color of the linen, that looked too much like a blue jeans patch pocket, and so I took the top of the bag apart, put the straps inside, and closed it up again.     

So that's five bags, if you count the one with no handles which I hate and might have actually thrown away.  There's a green one coming up next.  :)

A New Hedeby Bag

 Are you tired of my Hedeby bags yet?  I'm not.  I used the scraps from my Agave Viking dress to make this new bag:  

I used the silk ribbon scraps from that agave dress to decorate the top of the front of this bag.  The inside has pockets on both sides this time.  

The handles came from this bag: 

I just never really fell in love with this bag;  I think I could make it MUCH nicer by using some olive wood handles and a red cord to string it up with.  But until I do that, this one's out of commission - and I used the walnut handles on the the new agave bag.  It just balances the colors better there.  

Meanwhile, I love the new bag, with its silk ribbon trim.  The strap is a whipcord I wove from green cotton yarn.  The handle attachment and the stitching around the edges are embroidery flosss, DMC 501 teal.  I like the color scheme on this one way better than the old one.  

Let There Be Wool!

This is a picture of me draped in a medium weight tabby wool.

I am allergic to wool.

OR AM I??

I’ve had a few people tell me over the years that I’m not allergic to wool, but rather to the chemicals used in the commercial processing of wool fabric.  To which my reaction has always been a polite “I’ll have to look into that, thanks for the tip” which really meant, “heck off, don’t gatekeep my allergies."

However, I came across a website a while back that went into the idea a bit more, and suggested a washing method that supposedly worked for the author. It sounded simple, so I wrote it down, thinking I’d try it one day if some random wool ever happened to me.  What's the worst that could happen, right?  It wouldn't work and I'd end up with an itchy rash for a day.

Finally, one day, some wool did happen to me.  The piece I’m wearing in the pic was given to me by a good friend, who had been about to donate it to the local craft resale shop because it had some moth holes in it.  I figured this would be a good piece to try out this washing method.

It’s very simple:

1. Soak the fabric in a sink full of cold water with vinegar (I used 3 cups) for thirty minutes 
2. Press the excess liquid out of the wool gently 
3. Wash in the washing machine (yes!) on delicate cycle in a mesh laundry bag
4. Hang dry 

That’s it.  And you know what?   IT WORKED.  I tested the fabric on my arms and hands before I tried this method, and of course, I reacted to it the way I normally do (rash, itching). After the wash I tested it again several times on my arms and hands, and then wore the fabric around like a scarf all evening with the fabric against my face, neck, and arms - I never had a single problem with the washed fabric, and still haven’t. 

It works!  I’m saved!  Now this is just one piece of fabric - it may or may not work on all wool pieces. But I’m encouraged, and I feel like a whole new world of costuming just opened up before me.  I can’t wait to try it again to see if I can repeat my results.  

Unfortunately, when I tried to dye the fabric, it came out like this.  Gorgeous shade of blue, but patchy and splotchy.  Here it is after re-dyeing with a darker color to cover up the mistake:

(dark photo is dark)

Before I dyed the shawl and hemmed it, I cut off about 14" from one edge, where all the moth holes were.  That was still a pretty large piece of fabric, and I decided to get a hood and a small bag out of it:

Here's the Dublin hood I made out of part of what was left.  It came out a Weird Green, I know - but the dye job is smooth and nice.  (It looks weird in the pic, I know - that's just the light from the window).  In this picture it still needs ties.  I'm on the fence about whether to weave some or just buy some twill tape.

Here's the second thing I got out of the remainder of the fabric:  Yet Another Hedeby Bag.  This actually replaces the green linen bag from this post, which was too flimsy and too small.  This bag is 1" around larger in every direction, and is much sturdier.  This time, I sewed in a box bottom.

Both the hood and the bag, and the edging on the shawl, are sewed entirely by hand, because I was bored and needed something to do. Quarantine makes people do weird stuff, you guys.

So, yay wool!  I'm so excited about this.  Like I said, I want to try again to see if this will work on different fabrics, but at the moment, I'm psyched about the fact that I got three articles of clothing out of one piece that I can wear and not worry about having a reaction to.  Three! I will, of course, update here when I test out this washing method again. 

Thanks, It Has Pockets!

Whew!  It's been a minute since I was here.  After BAM I took a much-needed rest, and then everything sort of stopped for the holidays, for everybody, I think. 

After making my blue linen apron dress and smock, I had a tiny bit of fabric left over - just enough to make a bag of some kind.  I also had a few things laying around I could use for a lining, so I threw this together:

The front and back are decorated with a bit of the silk from the sari quilt project, and at this point it was lined with the same blue and green sarong that lines the green Hedeby Birka bag I made in early November.

Should a bag like this have the decorative appliqué on the front?  There's no telling. We know that the Vikings did use appliqué, and we know they used strips of imported silk cloth in their clothing and household goods.  But no actual bag like this has ever been found - only the handles - so we don't know for sure if they decorated them or how.  I'm using my best judgment based on what I know, and I'm making it pretty because I like pretty.

But hang on, I thought.  This bag could be better:  what if this bag had pockets on the inside?  That would keep things from banging against my phone in there!  The sarong fabric was way too flimsy to support any sort of real weight in a pocket, so I took it out and replaced it with a linen lining - it started out white, I dyed it brown (with RIT):

Thanks, it has pockets!!

At BAM, during a lull in the activity one afternoon, I whip-stitched the lining to the blue outsides (pinned in the picture), and began making a braid to sew around the edge of the bag.  I hadn't been able to find any crochet thread in the right colors, so I grabbed some yarn in a teal and a green and proceeded to make a mess:

I hated this.  A teal and a green might've blended well with the muted blue of the bag, but not THIS teal and THIS green - this was just horrible.  And the yarn was way too thick for this application anyway.

Instead I wove a whipcord out of a thin, dark blue yarn I had in my stash and tacked it around the edges, and it was much better:

Now it was time to make the handles, and I was dreading it.  My jigsaw is just too big, too heavy, and too clunky to be safe working with little wood pieces like this - and I have such a hard time controlling that thing.  The previous two sets of bag handles were really hard for me.  This time, though, a friend let me use her scroll saw, and THAT was such an easy, precise process!  I loved working with it, and now plan to get one of my own someday.

For the attachment slots for each handle, I used a similar process as I used on the first bag:   I drilled a series of holes where each slot should be and then very carefully chipped the wood away  with a chisel.   Not as carefully as I should have done:  I split the wood on one of the handles and had to glue it back together.  Oops.

These handles are made of walnut wood (the wood started out as 3/8" x 3" x 25" thinstock;  finished handles are 9 1/4" x 1 5/16"). The handles found at Haithabu (Hedeby) were made from ash and maple.  They used what they had on hand - for me, that meant what was local and on sale, and that was walnut. After sanding these handles smooth, the only finishing they got was a coat of wood conditioner, and a very thin coating of polyurethane rubbed onto the wood with a soft rag, to protect the wood and preserve its color.

So there's my third Hedeby bag:  blue linen lined with brown linen, a scrap of sari silk as decoration, and walnut handles.   With POCKETS.  After my next event, I'll evaluate how the new bag holds up as compared to my other two.

Green Birka Bag

I love my brown Hedeby bag so much, but every time I use it I think it's just a bit too big.  I don't need to keep a lot in it - just my phone, my vape, my site token, and whatever little bits of things that happen to me during the event.  I figured I'd make a smaller one "someday"...until I realized I could make one now using scraps I already had.

The bag itself was made from a remnant of green linen that I had in my scrap pile.  It's lined with a bit of an old, torn, rayon sarong in similar greens (the same sarong I used to make the trim on the black apron dress).  I cut it to 8 x 9.5" with a 3/8" seam allowance included.  The bag and lining were sewn separately, then hand-stitched together around the top.  

My Lovely Assistant

The handles were my favorite part of this project.  They're made out of a bamboo serving tray that my roommate was throwing away (modeled by Rory, above).  I knocked the sides off the tray with a hammer, then cut the handles out of one of the long sides of the tray with my jigsaw.  The bamboo was easy to cut and sand, but didn't take stain very well - the finish came out looking a little on the rustic side. (But the handles were free, so I'm not complaining).  They're stained with a light coat of Walnut-colored stain and finished with two coats of Polyshades stain-and-seal in Espresso.

Inspiration: Birka handle, Swedish
National Maritime Museum

I attached the handles to the bag by sewing them on with thick, twisted embroidery floss, looped through the holes drilled across the bottom of the handles.  I have my doubts about how well the floss will hold up to being scraped across the edges of those holes all the time, but we'll see.

The cord strap is a whipcord woven out of dark purple crochet thread - it's actually the drawstring out of a pair of pants I made years ago which have long since bit the dust. The cord is long enough for me to wear this bag as a cross-body bag.  

Not bad for a free project, I think. I dig that every part of this project was basically salvaged from the trash.  And it came out so cute!  I love the way the colors in the fabrics and the wood work together.  I can't wait to try this bag out at BAM - I'll bring it and my larger brown one with me and see which I like better, size-wise.  This bag is the last pre-event project I had lined up, and I finished it last week with two and a half weeks to go. So...

What's Next? 

I have a Viking coat that needs a bit of fixing up.  I'll be back with that next.

About A Bag II: Hedeby Bag Refit

When the handle of my Hedeby bag broke at its first event, someone told me that back in the day, people wouldn't necessarily replace things when they broke, but repair them instead, in order to save resources and time and work - he cited several examples of repaired and patched wooden items that he'd seen in his studies.  The bag would have a story, he said, a life of its own, and he assured me I'd get A&S brownie points if I made period-appropriate repairs.

What I really wanted to do was replace the handles entirely, and do a better job at creating them in the first place.  Sadly, my efforts failed, and the new wood I was working with didn't survive the creation process - and I couldn't afford to get new wood to try a second replacement.

So:  repairs it is!  I don't know anything about period repair techniques, but I did the best I could with what I had:

The first step was to un-tape the broken handle and use a solvent (WD40) on a cotton swab to get the sticky residue off the wood.

By the way, you can click on these pics to make them bigger, to see detail.

Then I used a small paintbrush to apply a thin layer of wood glue to the broken edges, and pushed them back together again. I used clamps to hold it together while it dried, with scrap wood blocks to help keep even pressure on the cracks.

Next I made a tiny little scrap of wood to use at a patch, which I glued over the crack.  The patch is about 1.5" long x 1/2" wide x 2mm thick.  I'm hoping this will help hold the crack together.

I used a cotton swab to stain the patch to match the rest of handle and to fill in around the broken edges (Minwax's Jacobean, to match the original stain); and also to apply a tiny bit of polyurethane over the areas to seal them.

There! Two bag handles, ready to be pressed into service once more.  (The repaired handle is in the front;  you can see the original repairs to left side of the rear handle).

All that was left was to sew the handles back onto the bag. I used  embroidery floss to whip stitch the handles onto the bag, which is how I affixed them the first time.The repaired handle is in the back here.











I'm nervous about the strength of this repair - I've never done a repair like this, and the wood is so thin and weak to begin with, I just don't know if it'll hold or not.  I mean, it should: the original repair to the side of the other handle has held up just fine.  The way the bag opens puts a little pressure on the center of the front handle, but that one's held up just fine over the years - and I put the broken one in the back.   The broken handle broke because of a sharp blow, which, with any luck, won't happen again. Anyway, it's finished, and we'll see how it works at the upcoming event.

Have I mentioned that I ADORE this bag?  Hearts.  

What's Next? 

At the moment I'm painting a wooden chest, and I have a parasol I'd like to recover soon, too.