Procrastination (Viking Jewelry)

About three months ago - four? - I purchased a small string of round, cobalt blue glass beads at a craft store.  It took me a while to get to it, but I finally worked them into my Viking necklace.  I even had enough beads this time to make a third string to add on:

In case you're curious, here's what they looked like before, as of last November:

I'm really wishing I had an SCA event to go to, you guys.  It's been way too long - since Candlemas.  I missed a couple of events after that, and then everything was shut down and events got canceled - even Gulf Wars, and now I hear Pennsic has been canceled, too.  I miss my friends, and I miss dressing up and going camping.   I know we all do.  Hang in there, buddies, this will be over before you know it.

At least now I have a "new" necklace to show off when I get back in the game.  And I'll have new shoes, too!  I ordered a pair of Viking shoes from Bohemond this week, and I can't wait to see them in person.  (Don't you just love ordering things online?  It's like getting presents in the mail).

See you all soon!

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.

Playing With Fire

Guess what I did last night?  I attended our local Flameworks Guild and learned how to make lampwork glass beads!  It was a lot more challenging than I expected it to be, and a little bit scary, having fire and molten glass so close to my face;  but I'm definitely hooked, and I can't wait til next time.  Here are the beads I made last night:

Aren't they ridiculous?  I guess they're not too terrible, for a first try.  I may actually add the two burgundy/purple ones to my Viking necklaces.  I actually don't like orange much, but the glass was free, and it was my first time - these are just first tries, they don't have to be fancy and wonderful (my skills so far don't remotely support fancy and wonderful anyway).  Next time - in January - I'll bring a few supplies of my own, including some blue glass, so that I can work on something that will go with my existing necklaces and my wardrobe.

Yay!  I can't wait to do this again!

Post-BAM

I managed to get a picture of me at the event, so you don't have to look at my outfits on hangers and try to imagine what I actually look like:

photo taken by my friend Simona

The weather at BAM was fairly all-inclusive, except that it wasn't hot.  But it did rain off and on the entire first day, with a little storm that night;  the next three days were chilly but beautiful, and the nights were coldcoldcoldcold.  I think Friday night was 37º.  Yikes.  I need to re-think my bedding situation, because I was NOT warm enough at night.  An air mattress in that weather needs to be insulated with something, otherwise you're just lying on a giant ziploc bag of cold air. 

Overall I had a ton of fun, though I didn't do a whole lot - mostly I stayed in camp and puttered around the house, cleaning and sewing and watching the family dog and the kids.  I did take the bag of sari strips that I had left over around and gave a bunch away, then put the remainder of the bag into the swap meet that was going on on Saturday.  (I still have half the quilt left to harvest, so there'll be another bag). 

I attended the vigil of a good friend of mine who was recently made a Laurel, at which there was a spectacular bardic circle and an inflatable walking squid (if you've never seen a giant squid lounging around in a camp chair with a beer in one hand you've missed out, I can tell you); and I walked around shopping in the middle of the night and visiting various parties, which I hadn't gotten to do in years. So fun! 

So, What's Next?  

Well, I have to replace the trim on my brown dress, because it snapped and shredded itself at the event.  I have another dress refit I need to start working on soon.  I'm working on another Hedeby bag, and it's coming along VERY slowly. 

Upcoming events are baronial Yule in December and Candlemas on the 2nd of February.   I haven't quite decided yet, but I think I MIGHT be able to swing Gulf Wars in March.  I don't know yet - a lot of pieces will have to fall into place perfectly for it to happen, so we'll see.   For right now I'll focus on the brown dress and the refit, and we'll worry about war when we get closer to it. 

For right now, my things are put away and my laundry's done, and I'm going to get through the next two days of ye olde day job before Thanksgiving and worry about all the rest after the holiday is over.  I can taste the cheesecake already...

A Case to Put It Into

The last thing I did over the weekend was fix up a small wooden box to use as a jewelry box for all my Viking jewelry.  A lot of it is big and clunky (brass brooches, arm bands) and doesn't fit into the soft cloth jewelry pouch I've been using anymore. 

So I purchased a $4 wooden box and some adhesive-backed felt sheets and made a new jewelry box:

For right now all I had time to do was stain this box and clearcoat it, but I want to paint it one day - maybe a Jelling dragon design, or a Jormungandr (Midgard Serpent) - so I made sure to make this as smooth and clean as possible, so that painting on it will be easy when I get to it.  

I have to say, I'm loving the adhesive-backed felt sheets I found for this project.  I never had any idea they CAME with adhesive backing - I've always used plain felt fabric or velveteen in boxes, and adhered them to the wood with messy spray adhesive.  This was GREAT!

And I love my little box.  It was such a ridiculously simple project, but I love it all the same.  And there's room in there to grow my jewelry collection, too - more beads!  Must collect all the beads.




Okay, so BAM starts tomorrow!  See you fine folks on the flip side - and some of you I'll see there!

Jewelry Redo

I re-strung my Viking beads over the weekend. Nothing fancy happened, but I made these changes:

•  I removed the wood beads and the "rockier" stone beads (jasper, agate)

•  I added more red glass beads and some clear ones

•  Tried to keep only glass beads and glass look-alikes (like clear green fluorite)

•  I graduated the beads so that the larger beads are in the center of each necklace and the smaller beads are towards the ends

•  Instead of making one big necklace loop which is looped around my brooches, I made two distinct necklaces and affixed them to a pair of metal hoops which hang from my brooches like distributors.



Here's what it looked like before, when it was one big necklace:

BEFORE

And here's what it looks like now, with the hoop distributors:  

AFTER 

The necklace hangs longer, and the two strands lie more smoothly this way.  I can also clip my little raven pendant off to one side instead of hanging it from the necklace itself.  Not shown is a small pair of scissors and a large needle charm I put on a chain to hang from one of my brooches as well.  

In the future I'd really like to bring in more cobalt blue glass, and more lampwork beads.  In December I'll be attending my very first Flameworks Guild meeting, where I'll learn to make my very own glass lampwork beads!  I'm so excited.  I'm hoping to come away from that class with enough [blue] beads to replace the metal spacer beads I'm still using, but we'll see.  

What's Next? 

Yea, and a case to put it into...

Adventures In Dyeing: A Dublin Hood

It's days until BAM and I'm spinning my wheels.  I'm out of projects, and I needed something to do.  I thought, I've only got the one Dublin hood, why not make another one?  But the only scraps I had left that were big enough to get a hood out of were white.  There's nothing wrong with  white linen, but I wanted color. Boom:  weekend project.

Looks gross;  smells like SANGRIA mmm

Fortunately, I also had some frozen blueberries, a pomegranate, and a large jar of hibiscus flower tea.  That's right, no RIT dye for me this time - this is my very first foray into dyeing with natural materials.  It's something that's fascinated me for years, but I've never had the time or the space to get into it.  For this hood, though, I didn't need much space - only a pot on my stovetop - and I already had the materials.

I soaked the hood in vinegar, simmered the plant material in water for about 30 minutes, added 1 cup of salt as a fixative, and then simmered the dyebath with the hood in it for about an hour, then left the hood in the dyebath while the water cooled down.

Tada!  I have no idea what color this is.  Light red?  Dark pink?  Almost-magenta?  Does it have purplish areas in it or not?  If the color even? I can't tell - it's even in some lights, and in some others, not so much.  I'm not terribly likely to wear this color, but this was a really fun experiment.  I definitely want to learn more about plant dyeing when I get back from BAM.


AN UPDATE:  I very rarely do this, but this one was weird.  Two years later, in 2022, I pulled this raspberry-colored hood out of storage to get ready to go to an event, and it had faded to nearly white.  I don't know what happened to the color - I didn't store it in sun or heat or any moisture or anything.  It just faded, very badly.  I have no idea why.  

The Sari Quilt

So I had this huge silk quilt.  The front was made from dozens of pieces cut from the edge banding on silk saris from India.  The border around the front was made from a deep purple dupioni silk.  The backing was made from a royal purple rayon challis.   It was GORGEOUS.  It had been given to me by someone who'd received it as a gift many years before and didn't want it anymore. It was also something I was never, ever going to use - my cats would destroy it, and it was really hot. 

After having kept it in storage for years, I looked more critically at the quilt: on closer inspection, the quilt was badly worn around the edges, some of the sari pieces were fraying, it was discolored in several places, there were bleach stains on the back, and the inside was lined with an open-cell polyurethane sheet which was crusty and starting to melt with age.  

So I choked back my revulsion to destroying a beautiful piece of art, and cut all the sari silk and the dupioni free of the quilt so that it could be salvaged for other applications.  Since we know that Viking apron dresses were often finished with trim made of strips of imported silk and other fine fabrics (Hilde Thunem's paper on apron dresses, see Inga Hagg references/biblio and Birka finds), I opted to use a few of the pieces from this quilt on my naked apron dresses and smocks:  

Here's a bit of navy blue sari silk with pink and blue on the top edge of my brown linen/cotton dress.  And yes, I picked out all that embroidery on the brown dress.  It killed me - I'd just done it in September and I did a really good job, but it was incorrect for the dress and the time period and I just couldn't look at it anymore.  

Here's a lovely gold and teal on the "bayou" blue smock sleeves. (Bonus cat).  

.  

Here's a bit of the same navy and gold with blue and pink that's on my brown dress, on the "bayou" blue apron dress.   

And two extras: 

A bit of gold and silver on the sleeves of my white smock. This fabric actually came from an old lightweight curtain panel I had in my stash, and I was really pleased with the way it looked on my white smock,  It was this look that convinced me to try out some of the sari fabric on my clothes.  (I'm NOT pleased with the zigzag stitch I used to put the trim on - I'll be picking that out and using a less obvious stitch as soon as I get back from BAM).  

 This isn't from the quilt either, but I did find a bit of trim in my stash that works with the color on my "bluebonnet" blue apron dress (the one I just made over in October).  I really love the way it looks with the teal rayon ribbon at the top.  

And finally, lest you think the orange cat (Rory Williams) is my only sewing friend, meet Rabi and Gypsy:  two brothers who also like helping me with my sewing, usually by sleeping in my chair or sitting on my lap to keep me warm while I work.

What's Next?

Technically I'm out of stuff to do before BAM, but I do have a couple of small projects I'm playing with that might be done before I leave - I'll show you if I get them done, if not, I'll see you after the war!