SCA: Just Some Viking Stuff

In addition to spending two months whomping up a new Italian outfit for Candlemas, which was this past weekend, I also, in that space of time, made a TON of largesse items for a largesse competition that was supposed to be held at the event. 

I started working just before Thanksgiving, and finished about the middle of January; and I made the following items: 

thirteen Hedeby bags

1.  Hedeby bags!  

I love making these things, and I had plenty of supplies on hand, so I went for it. The handles are a simple, curvy Hedeby-style similar to the ones I usually make (based on the handles found at Hedeby and Birka), and they are made from 1/4" red oak flooring pieces that someone gave to me a few years ago. The handles were cut on my table saw and shaped with a hacksaw and electric sander; then stained with a walnut Minwax stain.  It took me about a week to produce all thirteen pairs of handles.  

The bags are hand sewn out of linen, because I had a lot of linen scraps on hand that were perfectly sized for this project. Some are lined, some are not, depending on the weight of the linen used. Each bag has a hand-stitched trim in a braided/herringbone stitch, examples of which were found on an apron dress fragment from Hedeby and on a hat from Denmark; some are bands across the front of the bag, some are stitched around the top edge, and some are covering the side seams. The handles are sewn onto the bag with matching thread (cotton embroidery floss).  Each bag, from sewing to decorating to handle attachment, took me about three hours.  

The bags's carrying straps are a combination of flat card-woven bands, and tubular card-woven cord bands made after a method I found described in this paper by L. Elena Hylton.  You use 4-6 cards with 4 holes threaded, and pass the weft thread/shuttle through one side of the warp only, looping under the warp to get back to the first side (instead of going right-to-left and then left-to-right as you do in "regular" card weaving).  This causes the weave to pull itself into a hollow round tube when you pull the weft tight, instead of creating a flat band. This method of weaving tubular cording is documentable to as early as the 1100s, according to Elena's research. I used 6 cards for my tubular straps, after I found 4 to make a square-profile band and I really wanted a rounder profile.  I also found that it's harder to weave this tubular band after switching the card's direction in order to untwist the threads - for some reason it just works better going "fowards" than going "backwards".  I'll have to practice it more. 

tubular strap

thirteen woven bands

2.  Tablet-woven trim

Something else I really, really enjoy doing.  I had a number of spools of cotton crochet thread on hand from another project, and so I used up my excess on thirteen 1.5-2 yard pieces of trim.  

There are five different designs, each very simple and no more than 10 cards each, and all are either period designs or based on period designs. Each one took me about 3 hours to make from warping to finishing. 

3. Lampworked glass beads 

I hadn't made glass beads for several months (due to it being summer, and about 120ºF inside my garage where my glass workshop is set up), and I needed the practice badly. I'm not very good at doing this - I'm still VERY much a beginner, so my beads aren't, like, awesome or anything - but they'll make nice additions to someone's Viking kit, I'm hoping.  

I made thirteen sets of 8 beads.  All of them are about 8mm in size; some are round, some drum-shaped with flat sides, and some are kind of round/oval with little bumps or dots on them - there are 2 of these "fancy" beads in each set, and 6 plain ones.  It took me about a month to make all the beads, working in 20-minute sessions of about 7 beads per session (not all of which turned out right).  

 

Guess What? 

For some reason, the competition didn’t happen at the event. I don’t know why it got scrubbed - I KNOW I read a whole post about it on the event page two months ago, but no one knew anything about it when I got there and asked about where to set up. Shoot! All that work...!  Not "for nothing" - after all, I'm now prepared to enter the next largesse competition, whenever that happens.  

Meanwhile, I learned a lot, and got a lot of good practice with woodworking and weaving. And glass bead making, although I'm kind of burnt out on glass beads for the time being and probably won't be doing any of that any time soon.  We'll see.  

dry run of display at home