SCA: 2026 Summer Project, Phase III (Jacket)

The third component of my summer project is the short jacket.  The thing is, the authors of the 2025 paper on the Bryndum grave G12 didn't actually specify exactly what type of garment it is or how it was constructed.  They say that it's a "short jacket" reaching to about the hip, and they say that it appears to have been tailored to the body based on the way some of the pattern pieces and seams are oriented - it's not just a straight rectangular cut.  But aside from that, details are scant. So, just like with the pleated serk, there's a lot of filling in the blanks based on what I know of other, similar garments (in my head I'm thinking of this as "substituting with frog DNA" like in Jurassic Park, lol).  

So, there are two types of outerwear jacket/coat known from 9th-century Norse graves: the klappenrock, which is a rectangular-cut short (hip or thigh length) jacket that has a cross-over wrap front which is secured by a belt.  This garment has only been found in a couple of graves, and all of men.  The other type is the caftan we know from Inga Hagg's analysis of the Birka graves, which she documented as having belonged to female graves, and which is a longer, open-fronted garment secured with a brooch or pin in the center front, very similar to the buttoned caftans we see in Slavic and Russian settings from the same time period. 

My adaptation is modeled after Hagg's "caftan" garment.  It's cut with curved armpit/sleeve seams instead of the square armpit gusset you see in rectangular construction, and with sides and back fitted to the body and then tapered outwards to form the "skirt" of the jacket that fits over the hips.  We have no guidance from the ATR article on how this jacket was constructed other than the note that it was likely tailored to the body, so I've done the best I can in fitting the pattern a bit more exactly than you get with rectangular construction.  

Where the Bryndum jacket is made of wool lined with linen, I've made my adaptation out of a heavy (9oz) linen with a lighter weight (5oz) lining.  (I started with a "medium" (9oz) weight wool fabric, but it was WAY too heavy for this application and it would have looked just awful, so I decided to start over with linen fabric instead, which just happens to be much better suited to the hot Ansteorran summers and to machine-washing anyway. After all, I DO actually want to be able to wear - and wash -  this outfit!)  

I have absolutely no idea how the Norse would have accomplished lining their wool garments;  I chose to flat-line my jacket, by first basting the lining pieces to the jacket pieces and then sewing the combined pieces together.  Why? Mostly because I just like the way the felled seams look on a flat-lined garment; we do have examples of this type of lining in newer garments from the 14th and 15th centuries, so at least it's "SCA period" if not specifically known from Norse finds. Because I was going to be removing the basting stitches as I went along, I used a cotton sewing thread to baste the lining/outer pieces together; the actual sewing is done with linen thread which just *almost* matches the blue fabric (it was as close as I could find). 

Stitches used are pretty basic:  running stitch (seams), back stitch (seam reinforcement every few inches), and whip stitch (to fell the seam allowances open). There's also a staggered running stitch which the ATR article discusses as relates to hemming the top of the apron dress, which I used to hem the edges and the sleeve cuffs of the jacket.  

So. That's my Bryndum jacket for the time being.  I'm keeping my ear to the ground on this one - I can't wait to read more papers on the find, and I hope there'll be much more detailed analysis on the whole outfit in the future.  

Oh, and yes, this is what the wooden display stand that I built in May was for.  I plan to display the serk and apron dress on my dress dummy, and this jacket on the wooden stand.  I'm going to need to get a wagon to cart all this stuff around!  

Next stop: the apron dress...

SCA: 2026 Summer Project, Progress Report

Things on my big summer project are proceeding apace.  In April I posted about a pleated serk I made; in May I built a wooden display stand for part of the project.  

This whole thing is about the woman's outfit found in grave G12 at Bryndum in Denmark in 2016 (which I posted about in December).   I'm...not "recreating" the outfit, but I'm adapting a version suited for rough SCA use - linen instead of wool, cotton weaving thread instead of wool and flax - all to make this thing able to stand up to harsh use and machine washing.  

Yes, I started out the project in wool, but the fabric I bought was too heavy, so I ordered some new linen fabric and started over a few weeks ago, and altered the direction my documentation was going to reflect the changes.  I'm MUCH happier with the way it's going now, and I think it's going to look fantastic when it's all done. 

At the moment I'm working on the "jacket" for the outfit, and when I'm not sewing, I'm weaving the bands which will become the straps for the apron dress (see the December blog post for details).  

Here's a pile of pattern pieces all basted together with the lining pieces, ready to be sewn together.  I'm sewing with waxed linen thread, although I did the basting with regular cotton machine thread since I was going to pull it out anyway and discard it as I sewed the seams.  

And here's a bit of the tablet weaving I'm working on for the straps. The pattern is "Mammen Mia" by L. Elewys von Finchingfield, who adapted the pattern off one of the motifs from a woven band found at Mammen from the 9-10th century.  Since I'm working in 8/4 cotton thread instead of thicker wool threads, the bands are a bit narrower than the extant examples, but since they'll be doubled and sewn together, they should be plenty strong (I'll get into that a bit more later when I do a post on just the tablet weaving).  I will say, though, that this is my first pattern with only two threads per card instead of four, and it is kicking my BUTT.  It's so slooowwww and tedious.  I'm really not enjoying it, LOL.  

Busy busy!  I should finish the jacket by the end of this week, and then I'll have pictures of the whole thing for you. After that I have to finish the weaving, and then sew a matching apron dress to complete the set.  

KAS is in two months, so I've got plenty of time to finish this outfit (and my documentation) - I'm looking forward to being so I can take a break, although I've already got the next three projects planned out and one started, hehe.  SO much to do, always!  

Where’s Hrefna?

Oops, sorry, everyone, it’s been a minute since I posted. Life got weird for a while there. 

I bought a new car and it’s been a nonstop barrage of small problems since day one. Everything is all fixed now, though, so it should be smooth sailing, er, driving, from here on out. 

I’ve had some medical issues, too - my asthma, which was almost gone, reared its ugly head again so we’re dealing with that. Had some skin cancer removed. Found out I have some other medical issues I didn’t know about, which I won’t bore you with here. 

It’s been a lot. 

However, I’m still working solidly on my big project. I don’t have any pics for you just yet, but I will in about a week if things continue to go well. 

I decided that the fabric I was working with, a medium-weight felted wool, was just too thick for what I was doing, so I scrapped the whole project and started over with some nice middle weight linen, which is a huge change and required some substantial rewriting of my documentation. The serk I made in April is great, but I’ve redone the smok and am working on a third piece right now. 

I’m also tablet weaving pretty much all my free time that I’m not sewing, although it’s going v e r y  s l o w l y. It’s a skip-hole weave, which I’ve never done before, and between fiddling with the cards to try to keep them aligned, and the fact that my left shoulder is hurting every time I start weaving, I’m only managing to do about 6-8” in a 45-minute session. Yeesh. It’s coming along, though. 

Anyway, I’m still here, still making stuff. I’ll have some progress pics for you here in the next week or so. 

SCA: Blue Velveteen Florentine Bodice

 I’m stopped on my A&S project for the time being until I can purchase some new fabric for part of it - which I would be doing today but for some unforseen automotive repairs that cropped up. Soon, though. 

Meanwhile, work proceeds apace on the 1520s aqua velveteen Florentine gown: 

I’ve got the bodice almost done now, and it fits, yay! I had to alter an old pattern to make this and I was not at all sure about the resizing I was doing, but apparently I did it correctly.  

The side back openings are safety pinned together for the time being so I can put it on without the lacings for fitting purposes; the next step is to trim up the bottom to the right length and then close it up. 

I laid the gold and teal trim over the bodice today for the first time to see how they look together - I think this is going to be beautiful! I have some gold lacing rings coming to me via SCA Express (a friend is bringing me some from her stash), and then I’ll be able to finish this thing and get started on the skirts and sleeves. 

Woohoo! 

SCA: 2026 Summer Project, Part II - Display Stand

Part of my next big A&S project is going to be displayed on my dressmakers dummy, but part of it needs its own stand. I thought briefly about purchasing a second dummy, or a mannequin torso or something, but then I realized that I had an 8’ long 2x4 in the garage that I could use to build a stand for free. 

Tada! Okay, so it’s very basic and it’s not going to win any beauty pageants.  But it’ll do what I need it to do.  

The stand is 20” wide at the shoulders - my shoulder measurement - and 25” tall, which is a little shorter than my waist-to-hip measurement. It should fit a jacket or shirt or something just fine. 

Here it is with the hood on it that I’ve been playing with since February: 

I’ve now finished the pleated serk (which I posted about here) and this stand - that’s two pieces of a five-piece project. I’m halfway through the third part of the project but it’s not going well - I’m considering scrapping the whole thing and starting over with different fabric, to be honest. 

More on that soon, I hope. 

SCA: Stuff and Things

I'm hard at work on my Kingdom A&S project, but it's going r e a l l y  s l o w l y so I don't have much to show for myself on part 2 just yet.  The wool material that I bought for it turned out to be much thicker than I was expecting, which is making sewing it much more difficult and lots slower than usual. I wish I had a lighter weight fabric, but it's paid for, so I'm pushing forward with what I've got.  Slowly. 

 

Meanwhile, I took a break to go to Queen's Champion this past weekend to help my friend Cris in the kitchen (he was in charge of doing the luncheon for the event).  I was craving an SCA event to go to, so I threw on my new blue tunic dress and hopped in the car to go help.  It was a lot of hard work, but it was fun, and the food was awesome. 

That’s me in the front/right slicing bread (photo by Mistress Osanna van der Linden)

Because I'm somehow not busy enough with my current A&S project, and because I'm a crazy person, I went ahead and started something new just for fun;  a new 1520s Florentine gown to wear to the next Italian shindig that happens.  I had a huge box of aqua-blue cotton velveteen Ikea curtains in my closet, and I decided to use it for this project - all I would need is a couple of yards of contrast fabric for some parts, and a selection of laces and trims and stuff that I could get for cheap from Etsy.  So far I've got a mock-up made and a new pattern drafted  to my satisfaction, but I haven't started the actual dress yet.  More on that soon…

I did already make the jewelry for it, because I was excited about the project and couldn't wait.  I do this a lot with jewelry - usually because while I'm waiting for costume parts to come in the mail, I just happen to already have the jewelry supplies on hand.  This time I made some new mother-of-pearl earrings, and a pearl chain necklace with freshwater pearls and a blue stone (I think it's just dyed calcite) in the center pendant:  

Hopefully I'll have more about that Italian gown and my A&S project for you in the next couple of weeks.  Ta!  

SCA: 2026 Summer Project, Part 1 (Pleated Serk)

 My big summer project (which I’m hoping will be my Kingdom A&S project) is not only begun, but partway finished: 

That needs ironing, sorry 

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making a pleated-neckline serk, and now I have  The serk took me 11 hours almost exactly; that’s including drafting the pattern and making a couple of mock-ups to test the fit in the shoulders.  

Pretty decent side gores (outside)

The whole thing is hand sewn, using linen thread the same color as the fabric (it’s a dyed fabric, but it’s a natural linen color).  

Gathering the neckline

The only exception is in the neckline, which I gathered using mercerized cotton sewing thread, because it slides through the fabric better than the linen thread  the blue cotton thread was removed once the neckline was completed. 

Neckline binding strip at the slit

The Pskov serk, on which I based my overall design for this project, has the front made in two panels cut along the selvedge, with the selvedge edge in the center so that the neckline slit doesn’t need to be hemmed. I…forgot to cut it that way. Oops. Rather than doing a tiny rolled hem here like I usually do, I opted to finish the slit with a thin (3/8”) bias strip to protect the edges against wear and tear.  I don’t know if this is necessarily a period-accurate technique - but the neckline binding strip is made in the same way, so they knew HOW to do it at any rate. 

Inside view

You know how I feel about armpit gussets…but this one came out fairly nicely, if I do say so myself. 

So now we move on to the next phase of this 4-part project: the smokkr/apron dress that goes over this pleated serk. It’ll be simple and straightforward - for once the smokkr is not the star of the show…but we’ll get to that in another post. 

SCA: Quick and Dirty "Peplos" for Quick and Dirty Work

Now that Bjornsborg's spring event is over, there's only one more event between me and the summer lull*, and that's Steppes Warlord.  Warlord is a fun event.  It's a HOT event. It's a FAR event - up in north Texas just east of Dallas, which is about a five-hour drive for me.  It's got all the usual fun and games that events have, but for me, it's WORK.  

I'm part of a group called the Ansteorran Longship Association, which is an SCA-adjacent (not actually SCA) group that builds Viking longships for fun.  Sadly, I live about three hours away from where all the boat-building action happens, so I don't get to be near the ships very often; but I do help out with the fundraisers as much as I can. 

Enter Steppes Warlord. Every year at Warlord, the ALA hosts a breakfast fundraiser where we make omelets by the hundreds on Saturday and Sunday at the event, and the proceeds go to - quite literally - keeping the boats (and the ALA) afloat.  It's four hours at a time for two mornings in a row, of extremely fast-paced kitchen work.  It's grueling, exhausting, and SO MUCH FUN.  I'm not a huge cook on my own, but I love working in a busy kitchen - usually prepping stuff in the back out of sight to help keep the front line going smoothly, which is what I do at Warlord.  I come out of it greasy, messy, covered with eggs, and thoroughly exhausted. 

Thankfully, Warlord has showers.  

The only problem is that working at the Longship breakfast is seriously dirty, sweaty, and hot.  I don't want to wear my regular garb to cook in, it just gets ruined; and more often than not sleeves and jewelry and things like that just get in the way.  It's also not safe - nobody wants your tortoise brooch falling into their omelet, right? Ew. 

So. Cleaning out my garb closet a couple of months ago I found one of those cotton tapestries that are so ubiquitous at renaissance festivals and which we all had at least 3 of back in our early 20s for some reason.  I decided that would be the perfect thing to make a simple peplos out of that I can cook in - it's tough cotton fabric with a busy pattern that will hide stains, it has no sleeves or jewelry to get in the way, and I can just wear it to the shower and back after the breakfast is over.  

I basically just folded it in half lengthwise, folded over the top, and stitched it together along the open side and at the shoulders.  In a "real" peplos the shoulders would be held together with brooches or fibulae; I sewed the shoulders closed instead so that I don't have to rely on jewelry alone just to keep this thing on while I'm running around cooking.  I can wear brooches or fibulae over the sewn parts and it'll look fine, so I'm pretty pleased with it.  

In fact, I liked the way this came out so much that I made a second one out of a blue sheet that someone gave me as part of a huge bag of sheeting and other fabrics that they were de-stashing recently.  

Tada!  Casual, easy garb for working in.  And it'll make a good shower dress for BAM and Gulf Wars, too.