SCA: The Køstrup Dress (Part III, Glass Beads)

This is the third post in a three-part series about creating the outfit from Grave ACQ in Kostrup, Denmark.  Part one, about the tablet weaving, can be found here; part two about sewing the dress, was posted here.  

The body in grave ACQ was found with 8 beads: 2 rock crystal (quartz), and 6 glass.  I wanted to make an exact copy of the beads in the find for my outfit, and I had most of the glass already in my possession (although I did have to go buy a couple of new rods for a couple of the beads).  

 

 

photo by Matthew Delveaux

This photo, from Matthew Delveaux's blog Text and Trowel, shows the ACQ beads as found:  (clockwise from left) a dark purple bead that looks almost black, a red round bead, an orange round bead, a small white bead with red figures on it, a round rock crystal bead, a square  green bead, another rock crystal bead, and a white barrel-shaped bead in the center.  

I already had some of the beads I needed in my stash:  I had two deep purple beads (the very first beads I ever made!), and the red round beads.  I also had a quantity of clear quartz beads that I had purchased from the craft store many years ago.

The other beads I had to make specifically for this project: the green square, the orange round, and the two white beads.  My local glass store had the colors I needed; they'd just moved to a new location and their lampworking stuff wasn't even unpacked yet, but the store manager very kindly offered to go dig out what I needed since it was only a few pieces.  

 

 

 

Here are the 6 beads I made, together with the quartz beads.  It took me very little time to make these – I think I average about 5-8 minutes per bead for the plain round ones. The white one with the red streaks took me a little longer, since I’m honestly not all that great at laying glass on top of glass and it took me several attempts.

I already had two purple beads, two red, and two quartz; so I decided to make two of everything else so that I’d have a set of beads to put on my dress, and a second set to place on my display table for people to inspect more closely.   

 

ATTACHING THEM TO THE DRESS

The beads found in grave ACQ were loose, for the most part: there was a wool thread in some of them, but it wasn't attached to the dress, and there was a linen thread in some of them which also wasn’t attached to the dress.  So we're not sure exactly (a) how the beads were attached to the outfit, or (b) in what order the beads were strung on the thread.  So I just did what felt right to me. 

Hilde Thunem puts her string of glass beads at the top of the brooches on this dress so that the string of beads doesn't cover the band of tablet weaving, the same way as Charlotte Rimstad showed in her illustration.  I thought that was a pretty good interpretation of how these beads might've been used, so I attempted to do the same thing: 

 

The problem is, I couldn’t figure out how to get the beads to stay up there.  If I put the strings on the brooch pins, they would slide down and cover up the tablet weaving I worked so hard on.  To get them to stay I had to wrap the strings around and underneath the brooches, but I don’t know if the strings will stay in place when actually wearing the outfit. I may have to resort to pinning the string in place under the brooches.  

So, with that, my linen Kostrup dress interpretation is all finished! I'm super happy with the way it came out, especially the tablet weaving, which was a LOT of work.  I think the dress took me about 14 hours to complete and assemble; the table weaving took me about 7 hours, and the beads about 2 hours (it only takes maybe 5-7 minutes per bead, but I’m out of practice and I had to make several of each kind to get it right).

Thankfully, I got this thing done on time.  I had the worst procrastination issues with this outfit, which I usually work very hard to avoid.  I've done the "sewing in the car on the way to the event" thing to get projects finished, and it's not fun, so I usually plan way ahead and try to get A&S projects done at least two weeks before the event so that I have time to polish my documentation and put finishing touches on my table displays.  This time, I misjudged the time I had left to work very badly and almost didn't make it - the event is in like a week and a half! Whew.  

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So what's next?  REST.  I have two big projects planned for this summer, and a few small "side quest" things in between...but for now, I'm going to go to Bjornsborg next weekend and have FUN, and then I'm going to come home and NOT work on anything for a couple of weeks!  

SCA: Plans Of Many Things

 I’ve spent the last couple of months weaving my ass off for a tablet weaving display at LPT…and it turns out I’m not going. I’m severely disappointed, but something has come up which will keep me from going this weekend, and it can’t be helped. Oh, well - Life Happens, right? 

Meanwhile, I’ve finished the sewing on my Kostrup dress (see previous post), and I’m going to be working on the glass beads for it next. 

I also just ordered fabric for my next big A&S project, which is a secret for now. :) 

Bjornsborg’s spring event is in two weeks, and I wouldn’t miss that one for the world. I can’t wait! 

At the moment I have “nothing” to do (except those beads, which will have to happen over the weekend when I have time), and so I’m going to start working on some little stuff around the sewing room - organizing the books, putting some decorative stitching into a hood I made last year, maybe making some new Hedeby bags, that kind of thing. 

I did just finish weaving a bunch of Stars of Merit. The Star of Merit is Ansteorra’s grant-level service award.

More soon! 

SCA: The Køstrup Dress (Part II, Pleating & Sewing)

In this post I'll talk about actually sewing - and pleating - my Kostrup dress.  This is part two of a three-part post (first part on the tablet weaving is here).  

The original dress is known from small fragments of the top of the dress, as found attached to a a pair of bronze brooches.  Only one of the two brooches was attached to the pleated fragment, leading to some indecision over whether the pleating was placed in the center front of the dress, or on the side between the brooch and the armpit as Henriette Wielandt (original analysis, 1980) suggested.  Most people I've seen make impressions of this dress place the pleats in the front, which is what I've done. 

We don't know exactly how the pleating was achieved.  No trace of the threads used to create the pleating exist, so we're not even sure exactly how it was done - were the pleats stitched in place with fibers that have long since disintegrated, or were the pleats woven into the fabric, or pressed in with steam, or something else?  We don’t know for sure. 

 

Finished pleats

In my first attempt at this dress I did the pleating first and then hemmed the top and applied a band of fabric trim and some tablet weaving, which smashed the pleating completely flat, destroying all the work I did on it and making it look like flattened knife-edge pleats, so the whole thing looked completely wrong when it was done.  (It was also made of wool "stuff", which is the wrong fabric for this time period and it just looked weird).  So I never wore it, and in the end I finally decided to rip it all apart, use the pattern pieces to develop the pattern I used for this new iteration of the Køstrup dress, and will eventually re-use the wool stuff for another project. 

Anyway, this time, I did the pleating the way it was done on the extant piece (inspiration from and props to Hilde Thunem's work):  I hemmed the top of the dress by folding the edge over and stitching it down with a whip stitch, and THEN I did the pleating next, so that the finished edge of the dress ends up being part of the pleated section. This is essentially a very simple form of smocking . 

Stitching the pleats down

 

I’m not a huge smocking person really - in fact, this is only the second time I've done this - so I just kind of winged it, and I don’t know what this method/technique is actually called.  I made eight rows of basting stitches along the top edge of the fabric 3mm below the hemmed edge, each stitch and space between about 3mm; and then drew the stitching together to create the pleats.  After that I stitched the pleats in place by whip-stitching them closed on the back side, and whip-stitching each pleat to its neighbor on the back as well, so that all the pleats help hold each other in place.  This worked well on the first iteration of this dress for the most part, and I like the results here, too. 

Gathering the basting stitches 

After the pleating was done, the rest of the dress was sewn by hand in the same way that I sew all of my other apron dresses - the pattern is three rectangular panels and three triangular gores, with long loop straps at the back and short loops at the front for the brooches to grab onto.  The lower hem is folded, pressed, and secured with a herringbone stitch like all of my other smokkrs (which is based on Inga Hagg’s research at Birka and Hedeby).  

I should note that I did alter the fiber content of this dress from the original.  The fragments from ACQ were made of wool, and my dress is linen.  I chose to use linen this time because, as much as I love a nice wool, I wanted to WEAR this dress, not save it away for the one day a year that it’s cold enough to wear wool here – and also, I wanted to be able to put it through the washing machine when it needs it. 

As discussed in my last post, the tablet-woven band is not sewn onto the fabric of the dress along its length.  Instead, it is mounted between the loops at the front of the dress so that the band sort of "floats" above the pleated front, like this drawing of Charlotte Rimstad’s:

My version looks like this, so far: 

Tada

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And now for the last component of this outfit:  the beads! More soon... 

SCA: The Køstrup Dress (Part I: Tablet Weaving)

For my next A&S piece, I've decided to create my own version of a dress I've admired for a long time: the "Køstrup  dress" - the one that's pleated in the front.  I've done one before, but I wasn't terribly happy with the way it turned out - the fabric was the wrong type, and I didn't like the way I did the trim at the top of the dress.  So I'm starting from scratch and making a new one this time around. 

Charlotte Rimstad, 1988

The original band from grave ACQ was originally assumed to be a brocaded weave, but that might not be true.  There's some experimental/anectotal evidence that it might actually a soumak design, which is a bit different.  In brocade tablet weaving, the thread for the brocaded design is passed through the warp above the band from side to side, which creates a flat design on top of the woven band.  In soumak, the decorative thread is passed on a needle up from underneath the warp, around the warp threads, and back down to the bottom, which creates a little “bump” on top of the warp, and then the design on top of the band is created by the arrangement of these little bumps.  It was tricky to learn, and while it ended up being easy to do, it was a very, very slow process. 

Beginning the process

A note about the fiber content:  the warp and the soumak design on the original band was made of wool.  Since I was substituting my fabric – using linen instead of wool – I also decided to substitute my weaving threads and used cotton weaving thread instead of wool.  I did this for two reasons: I did not have any wool thread thin enough for this project on hand, and also because I wanted to be able to run this dress through the washing machine if it needed it, and cotton weaving holds up fairly well in the machine if you’re careful with it. 

Also, about the colors:  the original band was made of dark blue wool, but we don’t know what colors the designs on top were, because a detailed color analysis has not been done on every part of the band.  So, I just chose colors that I thought looked nice with the blue background (red, light blue, green, and yellow).   

I wove this band on an inkle loom, because that’s easiest for me to manage.  I also made a slight change to the band when I warped it up. According to the instructions I used (this, from Etsy seller Alija Mega), and other sources (Shelagh Lewins, Peter Collingwood), the original band from ACQ was done with a 2-hole warp, where two threads are passed through the tablets instead of the usual four. 

I opted instead to make the background weave a 4-hole warp instead of a 2-hole warp.  I did this for two reasons:  (1) Mega says in her instruction booklet that you can do it either way, but that the 2-hole warp makes for a lighter, more flexible band in the end. Since this band is attached to the dress only at its ends (as opposed to sewing the band to the fabric of the dress along its long edge), I actually wanted a sturdier, less flexible band, so that it would stay in place.  Also, (2), I find 2-hole warp to be ridiculously difficult to manage, and since I was trying a new technique to begin with, I didn't want to compound the potential for error and frustration by ALSO using a warping technique I know I already hate doing.  So, for sanity's sake, and also ease of wear, I chose to use a 4-hole warp on this project.  

So, I needed a band about 9” long to go across the front of my dress.  I wove about 2" of plain unadorned blue at the beginning and end of  7" of pattern, so that I would have a plain end to wrap around the loops on the dress.  I did this twice, in fact - I made a band of about 23", including the blue end sections, and cut it in half:  one end to use on the dress, and the other end to place on my display table so that people could pick it up and examine it more closely than they could examine it on the completed dress.  

Finished band(s)

 

This band is going to be attached to the dress by wrapping the excess at either end of the band around the loops on the front of the dress and sewing them in place.  The band is NOT sewn to the top of the dress along its length, it’s only attached at the ends (see Charlotte Rimstad’s drawing, first picture above). 

Weaving in the ends

The back of the band appears quite messy, with the threads passing back and forth all over the place, and loose ends hanging out. In the end I took a small tapestry needle and wove the loose ends into the back of the band to secure them and cut the excess off flush with the band so that they wouldn't show on the dress. 

I’m really pleased with the way the finished product came out.  It was tricky at first, and tedious, but the soumak method was pretty simple once I got the hang of it, and I’m glad I decided to try to learn how to do this. It was ridiculously slow compared to regular tablet weaving - this 23” long piece took me just under five and a half hours to make. 

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I'm busy sewing the dress itself right now, so the next post will be about that.  More soon! 

SCA: New Viking Stuff! (ATR Article)

 In 2016, a burial site in Bryndum, Denmark began excavation and study, which among other things contained the grave (G12) of a woman with several layers of textiles buried with her.  The December 2025 issue of the Archeological Textile Review journal contains an article ("The Bryndum Burial Ground in Denmark: News on Viking Age Women's Clothing") which details these textiles.  

The outfit the woman was wearing is unique in several ways.  Firstly, she was covered by a "duvet" of dark gray (undyed) wool stuffed with straw and possibly down - which is not unique, but beneath this layer, she was dressed in: 

• a pleated, undyed linen serk (pleated serks are so cool and I've always wanted to make one) 
• a smokkr/apron dress made of wool which was dyed a deep, dark blue with tablet woven straps! 
• a dark gray jacket- or coat-like garment made of wool and lined with linen, which shows cutting and seaming which indicates that the garment may have been cut and tailored to the body

All of that is super cool, but the thing that blew my mind was the tablet woven straps on the smokkr. Most of the smokkr fragments we've found have been in the form of loops and little sections of the top of the garment which were preserved by the metal in the brooches the loops were attached to.  But THIS dress not only HAS straps - the straps are TABLET WOVEN BANDS.  This is the first instance that's been discovered of tablet weaving being used in this way in the Viking age, according to the journal article.  

Tablet woven straps! Stripes! Pleated serk!  I'm so excited about this - and I think now I need to make a new outfit for myself after this grave find.  I want to know more about how this coat/jacket thing was constructed, too.  

Anyway, I just thought this was cool and wanted to share it with you.  

For the time being, I'm hard at work on my current A&S project, and I need to finish that before I get into a new outfit based on this find.  More news on that as I progress (I know, I know, I haven't talked about it at all yet, but it's coming!) 

 

SCA: Just Loom Stuff

 I read somewhere that "she who dies with the most looms wins," LOL.  I don't know if I'll ever have the MOST, but now I have FOUR and I'm working on building two more:  

Homemade Inkle loom

This was my first inkle loom, which I built out of 1x3" pine with oak dowels, back in 2019.  It's a bit unwieldy to use because it's so big (3’ long!), and the sliding tension bar with the butterfly nut lock is not all that great - it hurts my fingers to use, and I can never get the tension exactly where I want it.  It makes about 4y of trim when fully warped. This loom worked for me for a few years, but I like my new inkle loom better: 

Hand-me-down Inkle loom

This inkle loom I got from a friend who was moving out of the country, earlier this year.  It’s much smaller, but when fully warped it makes about 4y of band. The tensioning bar on it is sooo much easier to use than my big inkle loom, and it's much more reliable as far as getting the warp to the right tension.  The only problem with it is that some of the pegs are so close together that I can't get my fingers around them to untwist the warp threads, and I don't know what to do about that.  I tried removing one of them with a small saw...but none of my saws are small enough to fit into the space between the pegs, either! Argh.  There's also a spot on the frame where someone repaired [something?] with HUGE lag bolts and nuts, and the bolts stick out and poke me in the leg while I'm trying to weave with this thing in my lap.  

Oseberg loom, A&S April 2024

This is the miniature version of the Oseberg upright loom that I built in YEAR.  The warp is tied to the frame uprights with a leather thong, and it's incredibly easy to move the warp around and untwist the threads - you just remove the thong, untwist, and tie it back up again.  The whole thing breaks down into three pieces, so it's easy to transport and travel with.  There are a couple of problems with this one: firstly, this loom is so lightweight that I have to clamp it to a table in order to use it, and the only table I have that I can use is my dining room table. That's the second problem - at my dining room table I have to stand next to the loom and weave from the side next to the loom, which hurts my shoulder and my hip.  I think a full-sized version of this might take care of both of these issues.  

Beka rigid heddle loom

A friend recently gave me this Beka 4” rigid heddle loom, and I spent some time this past weekend figuring out how to warp it up and weave on it. This is NOT a loom for tablet weaving - it’s meant to be used with a rigid heddle, not cards. I thought I’d try it out for card weaving, but I very quickly realized that dealing with twist in the warp would be such a huge pain in the ass (removing the warp from the backboard, untwisting, putting the board back on) that it’s basically just no good for card weaving. Lesson learned! I do plan to get a rigid heddle and try this thing the way it’s meant to be used at some point in the future. 

Pieces for full-sized upright loom

This is the first loom I'm in the process of building.  It's an upright loom like the Oseberg, but more in the early Medieval style which you see in paintings. The white upright posts are stair banisters (newel posts? I'm not sure of the terminology), and the feet and stretcher bar(s) are made out of 1x2" sticks of maple.  I started working on this in my teacher’s workshop at War of the Rams, and brought it home with me to finish building.  When finished it will warp and weave the same way as my mini Oseberg loom, and I'm hoping it'll be a bit easier to sit at since it's bigger.  

I'm also hoping to build myself a new inkle loom this spring to replace my existing two inkle looms, both of which have problems, but I'm nowhere near there yet.  I have lots of sewing and weaving to get done, and stuff around the house, before I'll have time to build a new loom.  

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I'm planning to bring my tablet weaving and some of my looms to Laurel's Prize Tourney*  this year as a "body of work" type display.  I have TONS of weaving I want to get done before then, and not enough time to do everything I want, so we'll see how it ends up looking.  

*Laurel's Prize Tourney is NOT a tournament or a competition, and there's no "prize".  Apparently it used to  be a competition many years ago and the name was just never changed, or something.  What it IS, though, is basically a show-and-tell event where you just bring whatever you're working on - a project, or a body of work, or something you're in the middle of that you might want help with or advice about - and you get to speak with various Laurels who stop by to visit with you and see your stuff, and you get to geek out with other artists all day and see everyone's amazing work, and it's a totally AWESOME event.  It can be very stressful - after all, LPT is all about putting yourself out there where everyone can see you, and it can be intimidating trying to make a good impression on people - but it's also VERY fun.  

 

SCA: 2025 Recap Post

 Here's a quick look back at all the large projects I've made for the SCA in 2025 (not counting small stuff like bags, miscellaneous weaving, things like that):  

FEBRUARY: 

1.  A red linen Viking outfit for the A&S Competition at Bryn Gwlad's Candlemas event (I won), which I also took to show off at Laurel's Prize Tourney (it's not a tourney/competition and there is no prize, long story): 

the A&S display

2.  A blue linen tunic for my male Viking kit, with tablet woven trim: 

MARCH 

While I spent most of the spring working on my project for Kingdom A&S, I did manage to complete part of it, which I entered at Bjornsborg's A&S competition in March: 

JUNE

Still working on the project for Kingdom A&S!  With the leftover fabric from that project, I made a rectangular cloak to wear with my male kit: 

JULY

1.  The Kingdom A&S project is finally finished!  

2. I also whipped up a quick Viking outfit in Sprezzatura household colors, which has become one of my favorite things to wear (even though the sleeves are way too long, oops): 

 

3.  I also made myself a Skjoldehamn hood out of some green wool that was leftover from the Kingdom A&S project. It's not finished - it's sewn together, but not decorated or anything like that. Not yet, anyway.  

NOVEMBER

Last month I made a klappenrock coat for my friend Ivar, out of some wool that someone gave to him: 

And that's it for this year!  I did lots of other small things - bags, bits of weaving, little hats, that kind of thing.  But these are all the major SCA-related pieces I made during the year. I feel like this is somehow...not enough? Is that a thing?  I don't know.  

I can't wait to see what 2026 holds! I'm already started on a couple of A&S pieces for the spring - show you soon as I have some measurable progress to report.  

SCA: A Klappenrock for Ivar Hersir

My good friend Ivar was given a piece of gorgeous wool several years ago that he’d always wanted to have made into a coat, so I volunteered my services. He and I sat down at the last event and took some measurements and discussed styles, and he basically gave me free rein to “do what I do,” hehe. 

It’s lovely fabric, a medium-weight wool of about 4y.  It looks dark gray from a distance, but up close it’s made up of black, light gray, and dark blue threads in a herringbone twill striped pattern, with a thin stripe of brown every few inches. 

I made it into a klappenrock - the tunic-length coat with an angled front that wraps over in the front, for male Vikings. I don't know a whole lot about the archeology behind this style; it’s described by Inga Hagg from her studies on the finds at Hedeby (10-11th century).  I've seen the klappenrock in the SCA, although not often, and usually made out of linen. 

The pattern I drew up was pretty simple - it basically looks like the drawing above. Nothing fancy, no gores or gussets, just angled front and back pieces. I didn't have an Ivar available for fittings, as he lives two hours away from me, but I had him bring me the fabric as well as a tunic of his that he liked and which fit him well, and used that as a jumping-off point for sizing and shaping the coat.  I did take measurements of him as well, when he delivered the fabric to me at the Bjornsborg fall event a couple of weeks ago.  

Sewing this coat was also very simple.  I did the seams on the machine to save myself some time, and then hand-finished all the seam allowances for a period look.  I couched a length of brown wool yarn along the seam allowances edges with a herringbone stitch to help protect them from fraying: 

I used a herringbone stitch in black thread for all the seam allowances and for all the hemming on the open edges. 

Very often you see these coats with a contrast guarding around the edges, and I didn't do that (I had no extra fabric with which to make one), but I did finish the front edges and sleeve cuffs with a band of tablet-woven trim which I made.  

The pattern for the woven trim is  Ladoga 2b, which is a Rus design from Staraya Ladoga barrow in Russia; in blue and white with a red and black border.  I made about 3.3 yards to go around the neckline and front opening, and another yard or so for the sleeve cuffs. 

And that's it.  This was a great "quick" project (the coat itself took about five hours to make, and the woven trim took me about a week or so weaving in my spare time).   His excellency absolutely loves it.  Success! 

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It's going to be a while before I post again.  We just finished up Bordermarch's event War of the Rams, and so events are over until February, for me - but I have a LOT to do over the winter, both for the SCA and with projects around the house. 

I'm working on a new outfit for A&S in the spring, a new hood, and a LOT of tablet weaving - including building two new looms.  I'll try to post about the stuff I'm making as I go along.