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.

Black Apron Dress: Another Makeover

After making over the blue apron dress, I decided to tackle my black one next.  This just happened to be my apron dress with the most work to take out:

I hated all of the embroidery - I felt like I did a good job at the time, based on my meager skill level five years ago, but now all I can see are the flaws, and it all looks so amateurish now.  The vine motif around the top of the dress (next to the ribbon)  is period but is inappropriate for an apron dress.  The other vine motif on the straps isn't even Scandinavian, it's English, and 13th century to boot.

The blue ribbon around the top of the dress IS a correct Viking device, but it's executed incorrectly and badly.  There were two blue ribbons around the bottom of the dress, too; and the side seams were also all embroidered.

I took all that work out.  All of it - I made the dress completely naked.  I didn't track the hours it took me to remove it all,  but I spent somewhere around 5 evenings carefully picking out all the stitching so as not to damage the fabric. Probably about 20 hours. 

To replace the embroidery across the top, I opted for a trick we know the Vikings did use in their embellishment of the tops of apron dresses:  stitching a strip of imported cloth, often silk, as trim around the top of the dress.  In this case, my "silk trim" is a soft rayon strip cut from an old sarong. I considered layering it with a silk ribbon underneath or something like that, but I really just loved the way the sarong fabric looked with the black on its own.  I fully intend to replace this strip with real silk if any real silk ever happens to me.

I also took apart the long, flat straps and made them into looped straps instead, which is correct for an apron dress based on loops we've found attached to brooches.  I also like they way they function better:  they're easier to use, and once they're affixed to the dress, don't require any adjustment. My straps came out a bit thicker than I wanted them, but that's okay - they look just fine and they work great. 

There:  all finished.  The new design is simpler, but I like it much better than all that ridiculous embroidery I had going on before.  I love that this dress is full length - I prefer a long apron dress. 

And I really love the green and black (the color shows better in the previous picture, sorry).  That came out better than I'd pictured.  I have a ton of the green rayon sarong scraps left, too - I may use them to line a new Hedeby bag I've been thinking about making.

What's Next?

I may play with the bag I just mentioned a bit;  I'm also working on some new cuffs for my Viking coat and a new underdress.