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.