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.  :)

SCA: 1490s Florentine

 After refitting my two Florentine-cum-Venetian dresses, I still had my old red velvet court dress to figure out. Here it is in 2013 when I first made it: 

It still fits! I still had the original pomegranate-print linen sleeves, too, thankfully.  They were too tight, however, and originally I thought I'd just add a gusset under the arm to widen them, but then I thought, hey, I'm a bona fide Crazy Person, right?  Let's do something crazy! 

So, I cut them apart and re-shaped them as pieced sleeves a la 1490s Florence, to make them a little more accurate for the style of the dress (see below).  See the embroidered pouch on the far left?  It's the same fabric, but in 2013 I embroidered over the printed design to spice it up a bit, and I decided to do the same thing to these sleeves.  

Here they are finished: 

And here's the whole dress, updated and complete (click to make bigger): 

The dress isn't period accurate, I'm afraid.  A big thing with the laurels around here is to be able to explain THAT you know something is wrong, and WHY you chose to let it remain wrong.  Technically, the red velvet gown should be a giornea, open at the sides or the front to reveal a gamurra dress underneath.   However, I simply don't have the funds right now to make a whole new gamurra to wear under this dress, so I left it closed and used the matching sleeves and front panel to simulate the look of a separate under-dress.  I'm not a huge believer in the "10 foot rule", but it passes the 10' rule, and it looks cool, even if someone who really knows their Italian stuff would know right off the bat that this isn't right.  It bugs me, but it's what I've got.  I guess for making something old wearable again, I didn't do a half bad job.    

So now I'm all set for Baronial in October! At least, as far as things to wear goes.  I've been designated site decorator for the event, so I have a lot of work ahead of me making loads of flags and pennants and signs and ribbons and who knows what all.  I'll be busy with that for the next month and a half.  Meanwhile, I might even figure out what to do with my hair for the event.  And before Baronial, the annual fall Bjornsborg event is coming up early in October, so there's that to prepare for, too!  October is going to be busy.  

 

SCA: 1520s Venetian - Black Dress

 After completing the wine-colored linen Venetian dress, I set about making the same changes to my black silk Florentine dress: 

 

Once again, the silk fabric was badly faded, and needed a refresh.  I over-dyed the whole thing with Rit's black dye. 

 

 

I created some new bag sleeves for it, just like I did with the wine dress, cut from the skirt of an old sideless surcote that had seen better days, and dyed them at the same time as the dress so the black tones would match.  This fabric is linen, with a woven stripe pattern, which I find just neat as hell. 

 

There's two old 1490s Florentine dresses turned into 1520s Venetians for the price of a couple of bottles of fabric dye. Yay! 

 

The only thing I'm not sure of at this point is what to do with my head.  My hair is very short these days (I cut off like two feet of hair in May and am growing out my gray), and I prefer to keep it covered in the SCA.  With Viking all I have to do is throw on a kerchief or a Jorvik hood and I'm good to go.  But what will I do with these Venetian dresses?  I suppose I could just pop on a snood, but I want to do more than that.  Hmm.  Maybe some more research is in order.  

SCA: 1520s Venetian - Brown Dress

So, I'm a Viking pretty much full-time, but we have an Italian-themed event coming up in October, so I thought I'd drag out my old Florentine wardrobe and see if it still fit.  

Reader, it did not.  I'm a bit larger than I was when I made these outfits - ten years ago!  The corset, first of all, rides up over my belly into my armpits, so it's not workable at all. Thankfully, the two dresses fit well enough if I lace them wide open (they used to close in the front), and can be laced tightly enough that they're supportive, so I don't need the corset. All of my old sleeves are also too tight.  I wanted to replace them with bag sleeves, but between that idea and the fronts being laced wide, I was getting pretty far away from the 1490s Florentine style that these dresses were originally supposed to be. 

Enter Palma Vecchio and his contemporaries.  I found the following paintings online, from 1510s-1520s Venice: 

Cariani, 1520

Unknown, 1520s

These Venetian dresses are laced wide (tied, actually), and shown with baggy oversleeves.  That's exactly what I wanted!  Now I know it's actually a thing.  (Mind you, I have no actual research to back this up, just a few paintings to go off of). 

The first thing I did was to dye my old brown dress.  It was badly faded after all this time, and needed the color refreshed.  Rather than overdye it with brown (I hate Rit's browns), I combined a wine color with an eggplant color, just like I did with the cotehardie I dyed two years ago, and it came out beautifully: 

Then I created some bag sleeves for it out of a blue linen, dyed to match (eh, they mostly match. They’re a little lighter, but then the original color was very pale).  I had to improvise the pattern:  all I had to go on was a pin from Pinterest with a broken link; I couldn't find any 1520s Venetian sleeve patterns anywhere else.  I copied the shape as best I could, and the sleeves came out just fine. 

 

my version

 

The only problem I had with dyeing this dress is that for some reason I originally attached the skirt with dark gray thread. It didn’t show much against the brown linen, but now that it’s red, it stuck out like a sore thumb.  So, I took the skirt off and put it back on with thread that matches.  Not a huge deal, but kind of a pain in the butt. 

So now I have a new dress to wear to the event. I have a black one to re-work as well, and a court gown to fix up. I’ll show you those soon. 

SCA: Venetian Fan Makeover

Approximately 2 billion years ago, I made myself a little paper hand fan/face screen to go with my Italian outfits. I loved it…but it got loved to pieces. 

The paper is bent, tearing, fuzzy around the edges. The design, drawn in sharpie marker, is faded and crappy looking. The stick - a dowel with hot glue wrapped around it to simulate a turned piece of wood - was chipping off paint. Time to redo this thing. 

I spray painted the stick black, and then dry brushed on a couple of coats of brown and tan, to recreate the wood look. I sprayed it with Polycrylic after that, to protect the finish. 

For the flag, I cut a couple of pieces of damask-print scrapbook paper and glued them together back to back. Then I painted the edges and over some of the detail in the print with gold leaf paint, and attached the fan to the stick with embroidery floss coated in Mod Podge, like I did the first time. 

Brand new fan!  It matches exactly nothing I’m going to be wearing at Baronial, but I don’t care. All my other stuff is blue, this can be blue, too. 

Inspiration pics: 

Italian fans, 1500s

French face screen, 1600s

Woman In White, Titian, 1561

SCA: Three Jorvik Hoods

 In May, I cut off over two feet of hair and started growing out my gray. I’d dyed it for years, and it was looking pretty dry and worn. It’s healthy now, and a great shade of silver - but it’s too short for all the cool braids and updos I used to do to go with my costumes. 

So this week I made a trio of Jorvik* hoods to cover my short hair at events where I’m dressed as a Viking. I used scraps of old linen from past Viking projects, so the hoods will coordinate with whatever I’m wearing (my entire Viking wardrobe is in shades of blue so that I can mix and match and it will all coordinate).  

*The Jorvik hood is rounded at the top back and comes down past the chin; the Dublin hood is pointed and shorter. I had that backwards at first, until I looked it up this week.  

All are machine sewn with a French seam up the back/top. The hoods we’ve found in gravesites use the selvage edge as the front opening of the hood, but I didn’t have scrap pieces big enough to do that, so they’re hemmed by hand. The ties are fabric, instead of woven or braided cord. These took me about an hour each.  

Viking hair:  handled.  

SCA: Bits and Pieces For An Upcoming Event

 We have an Italian Carnival themed event coming up in October, and I’ve been refitting a couple of old Florentine dresses to wear to it. I realized the other day that I needed some jewelry and a mask for the event, too, so I dug out these old pieces: 

I made each of those necklaces about ten years ago, to go with Italian ren and gothic ensembles. I cleaned them up a bit, but since they’re made with brass and pewter (the pearls and garnets are real), I couldn’t get them really shiny and silver again.  Oh, well. They’re still pretty. 

I had a mask already made, but it was broken, having been crushed in a fabric box in storage.  I’ve actually made three masks, but something always happens to prevent me from wearing them, including a freaking TORNADO.  

Not to worry. I glued the mask back together and put the feathers back on it, and voila: 

There! Now I just have to get the actual dresses together. More on that later.