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!