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.  :)

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.  

About A Bag

The Hedeby Bag that I made for the A&S table at the Quest for Valhalla event last weekend:

with documentation, whipcord spool, and sewing/embroidery samples

It went over pretty well.  And I REALLY love it, and can't wait to start using it. (We'll get to that in a minute).

The bag started with two ideas: (a) more embroidery practice, and (b) I wanted to try out a period seaming technique.  The embroidery is very simple, and uses only three stitches - chain, stem, and blanket (for the teeth on the green guy).

close up of the embroidery

The embroidery motif is an amalgam of time periods:  the stuff-inside-circles was inspired by an embroidered fragment from Oseberg (9th-10th century), but the faces inside my circles are from the Isle of Lewis Chessmen (12th century). Meanwhile, the bag itself, based on handles found at Hedeby and at Birka, is 11th century.  There's a little more leeway for "artistic license" and whimsy in some areas, and this was one of those; so this project is a bit all over the place, but the end result is still a Really Cool Thing. :)

The seam technique is one detailed by Mytte Fentz in her analysis of the shirt found at Viborg.  I really want to make a Viborg shirt for one of my clients (as soon as I can afford to buy the right fabric for it), but looking at the construction and piecing of the shirt, and at several recreations of it, I realize that although I could probably whomp out at least 60% of the shirt on the machine, it will be a much better piece if I sew it entirely by hand - and I've never made a garment entirely by hand.  There are three kinds of seams in the Viborg shirt.  Two of them are easy, but one I'd never seen before, and wanted to try out on something small, so I chose this bag.  I'm seriously impressed with the seam - it's really strong and flexible, which is exactly what you want in a garment that's going to see serious and regular wear.  (It's almost like the Vikings knew what they were doing, eh?)

Fentz's diagram of this particular type of seam.
Lining and outside, front and back, are all stitched
together at once, and the raw fabric edges are auto-
matically concealed between the lining and outside.

The seam edges are decorated by a "Viking whipcord" which I wove, and stitched on.  The documentability of whipcord is sketchy at best.  We have ample evidence of four-strand braids identical to what's produced by the SCA whipcording method, and several warp-weighted looms for weaving cloth, so we know they had the technology - but we've found no actual bobbins we can tie directly into the process of weaving whipcord.  So it's one of those "SCA-isms" that we accept because it's fun and also hey, maybe, right?  The strap of the bag is also a whipcord. 

Whipcording is meant to be a two-person activity; I usually
do it alone, with my cord suspended from a curtain rod in
a hallway doorway. 

Like.

The handles were pretty tricky, and nearly gave me a heart attack at one point.  I need glasses pretty badly, you guys - little details are starting to get away from me.  Little details like, oh, say, "Hey, this isn't solid wood, it's very thin plywood!"  which nearly cost me this entire project (mostly because I was so frustrated that at several points I nearly burned the entire thing and mailed the ashes to Sweden).

L-R:  tracing the design on my wood;  design cut out;  drilling holes for the slots where the bag would be attached

L-R:  shattered the wood while making the first slot, which is how I realized I had PLYWOOD. Argh.
Glueing the wood back together;  sanding it VERY VERY CAREFULLY.

Fortunately, it all worked out okay.  Once the handles were stained and then sewn to the bag, you couldn't even see where the break had occurred.

Yay!

I love the way this thing works.

Unfortunately, Friday night at the event (the competition was Saturday), I snapped one of the handles in half, right in the center.  I made a note on my documentation, and entered the bag anyway.  I'd already resigned myself to replacing the handles with thicker ones made of, you know, actual wood; but several people came to me at the event very excited about this opportunity to do some period, Viking-style repairs on the wood - because you wouldn't have simply thrown something away and replaced it back then, you'd fix it!  I'm kind of excited about the ideas I got; but I'm also on the fence about it.  The fact is, the wood is too thin for this application, and it's very flimsy.  I think I'll probably just replace them. I'm hoping I can scare up some nice pieces to use next week after payday.

Anyway, I freaking LOVE this bag, you guys.  And I'm really proud of it, warts and all. :)

Seriously. How can you not adore these
little guys?  <3

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Saving A Battered, Old Chair

THIS CHAIR has seen better days:

(all of these pics are halfway through sanding, to show just how much *crud* is in/on this wood)

Don't get me wrong, it's a good chair.  It's extremely well-made, sturdy, and not a joint is out of place, though it looks horrible.  What you're looking at is several years' worth of

• rain/water damage
• sun exposure/oxidation
• corroded varnish
• sweaty fighter butts (ewww)

Not only was the finish shot, but the wood was so swollen with weather and age in places that the chair wouldn't fully open OR close...rendering a really nice chair completely useless. 

I'll be honest, I was dreading the prospect of sanding allllll those pieces individually.  I guess the chair, or the Universe, or the Powers-That-Be heard me - because I could NOT get this thing apart to save my life.  I tried every tool at my disposal, got friends to help me, even tried to grind the hardware out, but it appears to have been made of naquadah-enhanced unobtanium, and sealed with black magic.  @_@  In the end I had to sand and stain this thing WHILE FULLY ASSEMBLED.  I'm here to tell you that was a bitch. 

BUT I got it done: 

(I could no longer feel my hands after this...and it still needed more sanding)

Here's the first coat of stain, applied very, very carefully, with a small brush and a lot of paper towels.  The chair is solid oak, and pretty well weathered and seasoned; still, I didn't want to chance the stain swelling the wood and undoing all the work I put into buffing down the seat pieces so that this thing would move properly again.  Rubbing stain into the wood with paper towels keeps too much stain from soaking in and swelling the wood, and it also gives you a LOT more control over the depth and amount of color.  

(oooh, aahhh)

After two more coats of stain, and several coats of spray poly-acrylic (for a low-tack, matte-sheen clearcoat, rather than a polyurethane which could stick in hot weather), it was finally done:

(The dark area of the back piece was severely stained, deep enough that I couldn't surface clean it out, or even sand it off the wood.  It's the same on the reverse of the piece; in fact, it's worse on the other side.  I have no idea what caused it, but, this was the best I could do with it). 

Sir John's and his lady Bridget's devices painted on the center of the back rest, in acrylic paint, and heavily clear-coated to prevent scratching.

Tada! 

A Wild Unemployment Appears! It Is Very Effective!*

Mmmmyeah, remember the hiatus?  Not so much!  It would seem that I have won the "free time" lottery - and boy am I already rocking out the backed up projects! (I still have a lot of house stuff to do, but now I don't have to prioritize so severely, and I'm working on the run-up to Bordermarch Autumn Melees/War of the Rams, which is in four days!)

Friday afternoon I went straight from the [ex]-office to my friend Star's house to work on stuff and help her do the same.  I spent the entire weekend just steamrolling through the pile, and, well, I haven't stopped since.  (And yeah, since I was halfway into moving my craft room, it's been a huge pain in the butt working across three rooms!)

While thinking about the weather this coming weekend for the event, and what clothing I already had that would keep me warm and reasonably dry, I decided to go full Italian for the entire event.  You never go full Italian!  Yes.  Yes, you do.  I find it exciting - this is the first time I've ever stayed in one "mode" for an entire event. Usually I'm all over the place (last event I had a Viking day, a 14th century day, a bliaut day, and then pretty much just wore all my clothes at once for an unexpected cold snap, lol).

And so, although I won't have many pics for you until after the event itself, here's a list of what I've gotten done since Friday so far: 

• Removed the silver ribbon trim from my black gamurra and replaced it with couched gold satin ribbon, and 
• Created a pair of simple early 1500s-era bag sleeves in gold linen with black ribbon ties, and a machine-embroidered motto along the edges (these two things because (a) I didn't have an Italian Caerleon livery, and because my 14th century CL livery is all too small for me!  D:  ) 
• created another pair of bag sleeves in a lovely deep blue swirly damask, to be worn with my brown gamurra
• finished one and created a second long, fabric sash to be worn over my belt
• cut and finished two new, very simple pouches to carry my things in, one of a lovely embroidered silk that I can't wait to show you
• made an exrta-long flannel chemise with extra-long sleeves, to be worn as a nightgown n the frigid eastern Ansteorra winter nights...which was a godawful beige color, so I also bleached it...and instead of simply whitening, it turned bright bubble-gum pink!!!  Dafuq??  Whatever . It's warm, that's all I care about. It's not like anyone is going to see it. 
• Assembled eight simple, canvas "pilgrim bags"/flat satchels, and that'll get its own blog entry next week after I've given them to their intended recipients 
• Figured out how to achieve a hair covering like this one out of veils and ribbons that I already possess

And finally, because I just cannot wait to show these off: 

!!!

Inspired by this photo, I drafted my own version, did a loooot of cutting out pieces ( I got to use a friend's rotary cutter, and I'd never used one before, and that is DEFINITELY going on my christmas list!), a loooot of edge-serging, and at one point in the assembly process made a really pretty squid.  And I finally got to use my gold (plastic) knot buttons that I bought at Gulf Wars three years ago!

I really wanted to get a photo of these over my silk chemise sleeves...but I can't find my silk chemise!  NOOOOOO!   I must locate it before the weekend. While this picture is just over a t-shirt, I did try it on over a cotton chemise, and the sleeve boofs (technical term??) blouse up nicely like they're supposed to over the proper undergarments.












So what's next this week?  A great-coat-thing like this one, of heavy embroidered cotton and fuzzy blanket lining, for warmth.  A whole bunch of small flags, already cut out, that need to be painted and them assembled.  A woodworking project (a simple and quick one, thankfully), for the event.

Once I'm finished there'll be a LOT of sorting and packing and loading of SUVs.

And in between is my BFF's birthday, and a celebratory movie and dinner.  Yay! :D







* For the record, I was laid off from my job, which is not doing so well in the present economy.  This is a GREAT thing for me, though - I've been stagnating there and have often thought of moving on.  Now I get to!


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A Wee Viking Trinket For A Friend

I'm working on outfit pics from the event over the past weekend (which was AWESOME), but until then, I give you this little bit of fun...

I saw this on Pinterest:

(via)

Which isn't remotely period, but it sure is cute - and I knew when I saw it that I had to make one for a dear friend.  So I glued together a pair of wooden door hanger signs from the hobby store, shaped, sanded and painted them, and ended up with this:

front

back, inspired in part by one of those little
ancient Viking chess pieces

tiny deer! 

Hee.  A cute little trinket for someone I hold dear.  And he was tickled by it, which was all I was after.  :) 

Back to work now. 

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Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky

I made a box for my friend, Simona!

It's not exactly heraldic, more...heraldy.  I've decided that's the new term. :)  Elements of her device worked into the box, without being the actual device itself. Heraldish.

It's made of pine plywood harvested from a large shipping crate that I picked up for free from the warehouse at the company where Simona's husband works.  I had a LOAD of fun knocking the crate apart with a big mallet...

for a while, anyway. 

I'm working on a smaller one for myself as well - should be done and up on the blog this time next week.



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The Big Black Box

I needed a six-panel chest.  You know the one, it's ubiquitous in the SCA.  It comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, finishes, and types of detail.  It's SO handy.

Enter this guy:  

This is a wooden toybox that my grandfather built for me when I was only a year old.  It's as old as me, and like me, it was showing a bit of wear.  It's been useful and beloved throughout it's thirty*COUGH* years, but lacking a hinged top made its use a bit limited.  Eventually it was relegated to storage, tucked on top of a shelf in my garage.

I was hesitant, at first, to refinish it at all (even though I hated the paint job - it's green/yellow on the other two sides), because it was my grandfather's work, I finally decided that I'd rather change it and use it and love it anew, than let it rot on top of a high shelf - and why not look at it like this: he put loving work into this thing, so why shouldn't I? This is as close as we would get to having worked on it together.

The paint was old enough to have been lead, possibly, so I did no sanding.  I spent weeks scraping and peeling and covering it with liquid and foam paint remover, before finally giving up once I realized that even where I'd gotten through the paint, it had long since soaked into the wood, and it would never be stain-able.  So I scraped it smooth, applied a wood conditioner to re-hydrate it, sealed some slightly separated joinery, and painted it inside and out.

From there, the rest was all fun.  I've been working on this guy all summer (you saw the background on the lid, and the smaller box which was kind of a dry run for this one).  Here's the finished product:

Black outside, and mint-green-blue inside (because that's
the color I had, hehe.  The top is stained because it was
cut from an old desktop, and was already finished.  

A close-up of the decorative mountings, which are
just jewelry plaques bent and nailed on with small tacks. 

The handles on the sides, which are simple drawer pulls,
backed with more jewelry plaques.   Not remotely period,
but, as with all facets of this project, I used materials
I already had on hand. 

On the outside of the lid is a mural that took me like three weeks to paint.
I absolutely love it, warts and all, from the derpy little deer to the appalling
mélange of artistic styles used  (this is a learning project, you guys).

See?   I do love how all the colors came out, though, and overall I'm quite
pleased with the finished chest. 

I do have to say that the sky is my favorite thing, though.  It doesn't show
well in these pics, but all of the gold is metallic.  Not leafing paint (my jar
of leafing paint is stuck shut!), but my trusty gold liquid paint pen. 

So, this is going to be my nightstand in my tent, and very likely full of underwear and socks, hehe.  Very few people will ever even see it, but that's okay with me.  I'm really pleased with it, and I want to keep it where I can see it all the time, and where it won't be damaged by the elements.

Next up, woodworking-wise, is another, smaller chest, that I'll be building from scratch; but with the first event of the season only weeks away, I need to lock myself in my sewing room for a while.
See you guys on the flipside.



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