Award and Worth

I've been tagged by Jessie over at Some Things I Have Made for the One Lovely Blog Award!  She had just found my blog and tagged me, which is very sweet and came on sort of the perfect day (it's been a rough couple of weeks).

So, I am supposed to give five facts about myself and tag someone else, so here goes:

1. My undergraduate degree is in early modern British history, with a minor in costuming.  Pretty much Ren Faire.  
2. I have two dogs and an evil cat.  The beagle is a step-dog, smelly and dumb as a box of rocks.  The Chihuahua is scary smart and eats literally everything.  Socks, shoes, mulch, wasabi, whatever, she eats it.  The cat is just mean and we all live in fear.  She also licks plastic bags, which is the most annoying things ever.   
3. I love baking.  Love it.  Sadly, the hubs is not so into the fresh baked goodness and sees no point in home-baked bread.  I can't get my head around that one at all, but it puts a major crimp in my baking activities.  I can only eat so much bread on my own.
4. Before I moved to Virginia and went to law school, I worked in software testing in the San Francisco area for about seven years.  Breaking stuff for a living was sort of fun, having the engineers fear me was the bomb.
5. I am dyslexic.  This has made many things I have chosen to do in life more challenging, like law school, and probably blogging, but I love to read and write so I've done what I can to adapt.  Just don't even ask me to sound out a word, that drives me nuts.

I'm passing this along to Katie Jacobs, a costuming blog with a later period focus that I usually do these days, but she does lovely work and is very inspiring and to Arachne's Blog which focuses primarily on historical textile arts. 

On a totally random aside, I came across The House of Worth on Flickr, which if you are at all interested in 19th century clothing, Worth, or just pretty cloths in general you simply must check out.  There are some truly drool-worthy gowns and very good quality images in the collection.

Wrap front gowns?

I've been battling a nasty summer cold (no fun in a heat wave in Virginia) and haven't been overly productive since I got back from my trip to California.  I have been reading though.  While out at my parents house I found 4(!!) boxes of books from my undergrad days, mostly on Medieval and early modern history.  I picked out enough to fill two large flat rate boxes and shipped them home so they would be waiting for me when I got back.

One of the books I shipped is on the history of private life in the middle ages.  It's quite interesting, if you are into academic reading and social history (which I am).  But what got me really excited was the picture on the cover.  I can't find a citation for the cover image anywhere for some reason.  What you see here is a small version of the cover.  Amazon has a larger, though lower quality scan of the cover here Any ideas where this image comes from?  What's interesting to me is the two ladies in the back who appear to be wearing wrap front gowns.  The image to the right, a 15th century miniature by Jean Bourdichon seems to show a artisan's wife in a similar style dress (of course her arm is covering the bit of her gown that I really want to see, but she's also holding a distaff I'm ok with that).

We also have this image by my old friend Gerard David, which shows Mary Magdelan (in the cloak) wearing what might be a wrap front gown:

Unfortunately the clearest image I've found so far of this type of dress is the book cover I can't find any attribution for, but I'm intrigued.  The ladies in the book cover look like attendants, the artisans wife is clearly at work, so perhaps this is some kind of working overgown?     If I can find some more information about this style of dress, it would be a fun project.  I don't think I've seen anyone wearing a wrapped gown like this.

Vacation Report

I'm back from vacation in Southern California!  I don't recommend air travel, Disneyland, or the Getty on a gimpy leg necessitating being pushed around like a luggage cart but it was still a good trip.  My fabric haul was mostly quilt related, so not really applicable to this blog, but I did get to visit the Getty Villa, which has a wonderful collection of Greek and Roman art, great for my collection of source material on Roman clothing!  Yay!  Of course, they also have lots of images on line but there's something about seeing the pieces in person and in life-size that makes all the difference.  Plus you can take pictures close up of whatever details you want and from odd angles. 

I haven't uploaded my pictures yet, so these are all from the Getty's website, but will give you some idea of what's in the collection and what I found particularily inspiring:

 

A Portrait of a Woman as a Cybele is quite large and striking.  I like how she has her palla draped leaving one arm bare, and the crown/diadem on her head (though that might be what sets her apart as a cybele).  Something about her pose in the gallery was quite relaxing and natural.  She just seemed comfortable, sitting there with her little critters.

Leda and the Swan not cloths, but her hair is pretty and for some reason I just love this piece.  It's not huge in person, but strikingly beautiful and amazingly well preserved.  Probably my most favorite sculpture in the villa.

Faustina the Elder another way to wear a palla, this time much more modestly.  In person, it looked like the palla was tucked into the belt of her tunica somehow, which made me feel vindicated as I have done that myself to control the inside end of palla.  I also like the hair piled up on top of her head.

Muse what you can't see from the museum's picture is that she's got her hair in a ponytail!  The gallery this statue was in had several other muse's in it and at least one other was also working the ponytail look, which made me very happy.  They both looked to have hair that hung to just below the shoulders, maybe the middle of the shoulder blades at the longest.  Very cool on several levels, though again since it's a muse and no a portrait it's hard to say if a normal person would ever wear her hair that way.

Roman Necklace this was probably my most favorite piece of jewelry in the collection, it looks like something you could get today in a better jewelry store.  They actually had a reproduction of it in the museum store ($250, which isn't really bad at all).  They have a pretty good collection of jewelry and such, which you can look at here.  Lots of rings, but there are some of lovely necklaces and burial diadems as well.

Waffle Towels

I managed to finished the waffle towels just in time to get them washed (to bring up the waffle weave texture and pre-shrink them)  and photographed before I had to get everything packed and ready to go for the surprise visit to California for my mom's birthday.  The actual surprise will be at lunch time today, then we're going on a boat to watch the fireworks from the water.  One of the nice things about being born on the 4th of July is everyone makes a big fuss about your birthday!

Anyway, here are the towels.  I used cottolin from Webs, working at 24 ends per inch.  This was my first experiment working with an actual pattern (which I modified a little bit of course!) and working with stripes of color.  I did change the stripes, adding more colors.  The original pattern would have just had the outside red stripe and one less cell of waffle in between.  I wanted to add more colors to go with her kitchen so I added the yellow and brown.  Once I get everything on the loom I realized it would have looked better with brown in between each stripe, not just in the middle, and that the whole striped section should have been placed another couple of cells in from the edge, but oh well.  Next time. 

The other interesting (?) feature of the towels is the hem.  The pattern called for a one inch band of tabby weave at each end of each towel to make the hem.  Which is all well and good and sounds just fine, until I realized that waffle weave draws in more on the loom than tabby does, and also shrinks up a huge amount more than tabby does.  This is what gives it the fun waffle texture.  So the band of tabby ends up making a weird wavy shape and sort of deforming the whole shape of the towel, which is pretty obvious in the pictures but not as bad when you see them in person.  Very annoying.  Next time I do this pattern I think I will leave off the tabby hem.  Or possibly double up the weft somehow so it draws in a bit rather than fanning out.

In other news, both of the supportive gowns I was working on for myself are totally done.  Yay!  I still need to get pictures, but that will have to wait till I am back home and I can get someone to photograph me in them.  I'm not going to be able to go to Pennsic after all so there won't be any event action shots for quite awhile (probably post-surgery).  I'm very happy will how they turned out and my ability to fit the things on myself. 

I also fixed my green hose, it turns out the major issue was having cut the foot portion on the bias.  One of the extant hose that I had based the pattern on was done this way but it turned out not to work well with the combination of my foot and fabric choice.  Turning the pattern piece back to the straight of the grain and taking the toe in a bit help tremendously.  Now I know I can be a lot more aggressive in my fitting of the hose and it will still be fine.  In fact it will fit better if I fit it more snugly to begin with.

The fundraiser project is going well (pictures, again, will be coming after I get home next week).  I'm doing more fitted gowns.  By all reports the client is very happy.  The supportive undergown is nearly done, I just have to finish the hem and sew in the eyelets.  There will be buttons and button holes down the sleeves, but the client is casting the buttons herself so that is going to have to wait till she has done the buttons.  I've brought that with me so I can hopefully get the eyelets done while I'm visiting with my parents this week. The overgown is cut out (except for the sleeves) and should go together pretty quickly.  That will be a button-front gown with modest trumpet sleeves, again with hand-cast buttons.  I've still got to do hose and a shift, which should go pretty quickly, then it's all done!  I'm hoping I can get her to wear a veil at least for pictures, even though that's not really her thing.  It will complete the whole thing so nicely.

It looks like my next project will also be a commission, this time Italian.  I'm  in research mode, trying to decide how long I think the various parts will take and how best to construct things so the client will (a) be comfortable (b) be supported in the gown and (c) be able to get dressed on her own, all the while looking like she stepped out of a portrait.  It looks like the gowns she likes close either down the side or in back, which makes putting on the supportive layer yourself next door to impossible.  So I'm thinking and plotting and coming up with options. 

Lacing points

A quick post to ask for some collective advice on lacing points or chapes...I need some for the end of my nice fingerlooped cords I've done for my new kirltes and don't have any.  I'm not sure where to get the thin craft metal to make them myself (I live in a craft store back-water, it's tragic) and the only place the I've found that sells them online domestically is Historic Enterprises and they were out of stock the other day when I checked (plus I'm not sure those are good ones?  They don't have pre-drilled sewing holes so that's a problem).

Anyway, I'm guessing I should be able to find some at Pennsic, but in the mean time, what to do so I can lace myself up?  Any thoughts or ideas?  Here's what I have so far:

• Heat shrink tubing - actually had a little left over in my corset supply stash and it worked ok, except that one pulled off already.  I think this is fine as long as your eyelet to point ratio is not to snug.  It also won't shrink to a very sharp point which is sort of an issue for that one inevitable smaller-than-planned eyelet.
• Thread wrap (any maybe nail polish) - this worked with just thread on a soutach lace I have, so far it seems like the best option, though I wonder if it would be sturdy enough on a fingerlooped cord
• Lots of glue - might not hold together well over several lacings
• Tape - won't hold up in the wash
• Something else?

I know these aren't period, I just need to be able to lace the gown and tuck the end of the lace into the dress so I can get to the merchants and find what I need, so it's a stop-gap.

Does anyone know of any other online resources for getting these things?  I need some pretty small ones for the blue banded gown, the eyelets are small.  I did come across some European sites with nice selections but they didn't give diameter measurements, and the prices were kind of high so I'm not sure that's the best solution.

Some updates

What I week...I got some sort of Summer Plague and have been on antibiotics and generally miserable for the last week.  No fun at all.  I did manage to make it up to the William and Mary library last week as planned to get my alumni library card sorted out (yay for university library check out privileges!) and pick up some of the books I need for my 30 Year research before getting laid out by the Plague.  It's been slow going getting my notes taken on the books, but I'm finally starting to feel better so I should be able to get caught up over the next few days.

The blue banded kirtle is done done done and looks pretty good.  I even finished a new shift to wear with it.  I'll need at least one more shift to be ready for Pennsic, with the new one I only have two with long sleeves and that won't get me too far.  I decided to go ahead and modify the pattern to make a seamless straight-front kirtle as well, which is almost done.  Modifying the pattern wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, it turned out to pretty fiddly to fit myself but I think now I have the general idea figured out.  Fitting the gown itself was much easier than dealing with the pattern.  The whole sewing of the dress has been slow going, probably because I've been sick, but all I have left to do is the sleeves, hem, hand-finishing of the seams and the eyelets.

I did all my pattern work for both dresses in cotton muslin, as that's what I had on hand, and ended up having to take the actual linen dress in a whole lot.  Like over an inch.  I've been taking patterns off muslins for a long time so I'm sure I didn't make that big a mistake in copying off the pattern and adding seam allowances.  The only explanation I can come up with is that linen stretches a lot more than the muslin does.  Or at least this linen does.  Oh well, I suppose taking in the pattern would be a mistake, if I ever make a gown out of less stretchy fabric.

Once I get the straight front gown done, I have two more gowns to do as part of a fundraiser for our local barony (along with some underthings to go with them) before I can get back to my Pennsic sewing.  In the mean time, I've got to warp up some dishtowels for my mom's birthday present.  I'm going to do a waffle weave, not period as far as I know but I think she will like them. 

I've managed to get a few other small things done, fixing my green kermit hose and making the fingerlooped cords for my kirtles (and learning two new patterns too).  The cloak is cut out, and I've decided to finish at least the front and neck edges with a narrow silk facing like those seen in the MOL book, which I have cut out and ready to sew on.  That should stabilize the lettuce edge and curved bit around the neck.  The bottom hem I will just turn up and stitch.

So, lots to do!  Now to get better, these afternoon naps are really not helping with getting stuff done.

Research tips

When I was working on my undergraduate history degree my thesis adviser gave me lots of good advice.  In addition to "Alcohol lubricates the brain" the other tidbit that has stuck with me and proved to be invaluable is "serendipity is your most valuable research tool."  She was right then, I found many of my most helpful source material shelved next to the book I was actually looking for, and it's still true now in the internet age.  A case in point...

Back in collage when I was active in the SCA the first time around (in Berkeley) I came across a picture of a tomb brass in a book of a lady in a funny loose gown with buttons all down the front, a silly hat, and a little dog.  This gown fascinated me and seemed terribly comfortable for camping, so I worked with one of the local Laurels to come up with a plausible period method of drafting the pattern and made the dress.  Soon after that I stopped playing and put the dress away.  When I became active again, I pulled the dress out, but was unwilling to wear such an odd style without having the documentation for it to hand.  I just couldn't remember where I had seen the picture, who it was of, or any details about it, nor could I find it in any of my own books.  None of the research geeks in my new group had any ideas either when I tried to describe it, so I stuffed the dress away and moved on.

I was surfing around last night looking for images of cloaks and mantles, specifically 14th and 15th century cloaks and mantles, and I came across this site on 14th century ladies fashion, mostly from tomb monuments and brasses.  Scrolling down the page, what do I happen upon but Lady Maylns, from Chinnor Church in Oxfordshir!  The very same tomb brass that inspired my weird gown!  Yay!  So now I can wear my funny loose over gown with all the buttons again, and have yet another excuse to make a frilled veil. 

Score another one for serendipity. 

More mantels

The kirtle being pretty much done (I have a few eyelets to finish yet, oh how I hates the eyelets), I've started looking at mantles.  I've got my half circle mantle cut out, and decided to do a little bit of shaping through the shoulders, just to make the thing sit better and stay on.  The pictures of women in mantles don't show a lot of bunching or folding in the back that you get if you don't shape the neck and shoulder (like what happens on a priest's cope), so I think it's a plausible thing to do.

Anyway, I'm in picture collecting made thing to decide how to treat the hems.  I don't want to do heavy embroidery as that seems to be a more ecclesiastical thing, and I also don't really want to do a full lining as the wool is quit heavy and the lining would just make the whole thing unbearable.  I'm leaning towards a wide interior facing of some sort, or maybe just a narrow edge binding in silk or really smooth linen.  So far, the narrow binding seems like a more plausible finish than the facing, though the facing would give me a buffer between the back of my neck and the wool of the cloak, not that wool bothers me much.

First, we have Gerard David's Marriage at Cana.  This picture makes me happy for a couple of reasons - there is a mantle on the bride, yes, AND Raymond's Quiet Press has a lovely reproduction of her cloak clasp, so that's a bonus.  But the lady in the front with the funny white hood (yay for a white hood!  The white hood is fun too) has a paternoster in her belt, and the seated woman facing her has a Perugia style towel used a lap napkin and a nifty circlet on her head - all things I'm working on in one way or another.  Plus there's some fun silly hat action going.  But back to the mantle.  It's clearly lines in white, but it sort of looks like the white lining is coming around the red fabric of the body and binding the edge a bit, which suggests the binding idea might be on the right track.

The funeral brass of Joan Skerne shows a similar style mantle with a similar style closure (and another spiff hat), but there's not enough detail on the brass to tell how the edge of the mantle was finished.  There really isn't enough detail any of the brasses I've been able to find to tell how the edge might have been finished, except to rule out major embroidery.  So I tent to think women wore simpler mantles.  It certaily makes scence to me that the sort of things that have survived, namely church vestments and the odd ceremonial rode, would be rather on the exceptional side and not the kind of thing one would wear every day, even if one was wealthy.  The way the mantle hangs on Joan suggests to me that it is at least somewhat shaped through the shoulders though - there is certainly neck shaping.  The cone neck you would end up with without shaping the neck would really get in the way of the hats and veils fashionable at the time.

We then have another guy from the Manesse Codex, who is a man but is wearing a cloak with a contrast lining and what appears to be some sort of contrast binding or trim a the edge.  It's a little to hard to tell if this is artistic license, done so you can see the folds of the cloth, or actually a bit of detail thrown in for good measure.   The fellow in the fur lined cloak also seems to have a bit of a white edging on his, which might just be the fur lining but could be some kind of binding/edging.  The detail isn't great in these manuscripts though so sometimes it's hard to tell what the artist is or is not getting at.  I've got to do a bit more digging around but from the what I can remember of the other painting I have seen, there's nothing much that's conclusive one way or the other.  I thought I saw something that looked pretty clearly like a line of trim or cord on outside of the mantle, just inside from the edge of the front opening, but I can't find the painting just now (figures).  

Doing something to the edge is definitely necessary, both to protect the wool from wear and to stabilize it.  It may be thick and well-fulled but it still wants to stretch itself all out of shape and a bit of something less mooshy will help the front edge keep it's shape and hang neatly without going all lettucy on me.  I just want to make sure it's as authentic a finish as it can be, somewhere in the back of my head I harbor not-so-secret thoughts about doing more serious reenacting one of these days (the kind with actual authenticity standards) and I don't want to have to re-do my whole kit if I can avoid it.  Plus, authenticity is fun!

Banded kirtle

Here is the banded kirtle (or so I've decided to call it) so far.  As was pointed out, the front should dip down a little bit to more closely match at least the air filter hat picture, and probably also the Descent from the Cross gown as well, though that one is at an odd angle so it's harder to tell.  I went with a square neck for this as that will work better under the gown this will eventually go under, and it also seemed a little easier to focus on one point of wierdness at a time (in this case the banding and the sleeve thing). The next iteration of this gown will have the dipped/sweetheart neck, now that I think I have the banding figured out.

You can see on the front that the line from the facing and strap is extending right into the underarm, giving the effect of a raglan seam.  The sleeve is a normal sleeve shape, the trick to the raglan line is lining up the strap with the top facing bit and the armscye just right.  To make that work the front neckline has to be high enough but as it turns out once the girls are lifted up and well-supported the neckline will end up in the right place.

The back did not line up with the top facing quite as well - I need to shift it down to get it to line up right but by the time I realized it was not right fixing it would have been far more trouble than I can go through without extra fabric to re-cut anything if I need to.  I think if I think more about how I put the sleeve and facings and shoulder bands together I could avoid this issue next time, but again you can see where the raglan line is coming from.  It's just the shoulder strap.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this has come out.  I still need to do the eyelets down the front and fingerloop a lacing cord, then once I can lace the whole thing up I can level the hem and finish it up.  The strap thing was fairly easy to work out and fit on myself, though it would have been easier to do some of the tweaking in back with an extra set of hands (duh).  One nice thing about this particular design is that you can get a really wide neck and still have useful and secure shoulder straps.  Even with the sleeves in and the skirt on, nothing is shifting around or slipping off and I still have a nice wide, open neckline, which will be nice with later houppelands and early Burgundian styles.

Medieval flashers

One of the things on my list to do before surgery in Septermber (and really, I need to get this done before Pennsic) is make a cloak.  So I was duitifully looking up pictures of ladies matles last night in between eylets, and came across the following page from the Manesse Codex:

If you look closely, you can totally see through the men's tunics. Good thing he seems to have all his proper under things on.

I wonder if they were being presented in a state of semi-undress, or if they really did wear semi-sheer tunics?  Either way, I'm not letting my husband see this one, he doesn't need to get any more strange ideas for hot events.

Supportive kirtle, attempt 1

In a fit of stubborn productivity, I managed to get my supportive kirtle fitted on myself!  I think I got the sleeve/shoulder strap thing sorted out too.  As you can see from the pictures, I need to rotate the sleeve cap back a little bit and add a little bit of width at the bicep (my poor chubby arms), but other than than I am happy with how everything is looking.  And I can move my arm!  Yay!  This is a huge step up from the last (somewhat) supportive dress I did which had numerous sleeve problems.  It's very hard to get and out of that dress.  This one should be much better.

The diagonal stitching line at the neck edge is where the strap attaches and where the facing will be at top neck edge.  So far, the plan is to attach the facing directly to the bodice.  That should work better than having it stick up from the main body of the bodice, and be easier to put together.  Plus it will serve to reinforce the edge a bit, which is all for the good. A  little more structural integrity at that top edge will help hold the girls in place, not that they are trying to escape or anything  but I'm planning to cook and do work in this gown so the sturdier the better.

My only real issue the whole thing is that I'm still not getting the raglan-ish line under the arm.  I think this might be because my neckline is lower than it should be, but the painting don't seem to be a whole lot higher than I have this in relation to the bust line.  Maybe I need to get the bust higher up for that to work?  The general idea that the underarm seam is somehow extending into the facing seam does seem to play out, if you look at the picture above, the problem is just where the neckline is, which is putting the facing seam lower down.  The back looks right anyway (I couldn't get a good picture of that with me in it).

As far as actually putting the whole thing together goes, I think I will sew the sleeve into the underarm then attach the shoulder straps and facings.  That's going to involve more handsewing in that area than I wanted to do, but it will look neater in the end.  The whole thing is now cut out, complete with trapezoidal skirt pieces and lining.  The plan is get the interior seams on the bodice machine stitched today, tweak the fit, and flat fell the seams by hand before I attach the skirt.  I'll probably just machine french seam the skirt, flat felling seems like overkill.

More kirtle fun

I think I've got the pattern for my supporting kirtle sorted out (all by myself too! yay! And no free-range boobs!) I've decided to give the funky shoulder strap thing I posted about a couple of weeks ago a try, as this is an interesting problem and I really do like the look of the facing/strap/whatever around the neck opening.

I came across this picture which threw a bit of a wrench into things though:

The detail is taken from the Braque Family Triptych, another van der Weyden, dated about 1450.  If you look closely at the shoulder area, it looks like she's working the raglan sleeve seam again, but also a shoulder seam running down the top of the sleeve of the kirlte.  Which is weird.  This funny top seam doesn't extent into the shoulder strap section as far as I can tell, so it might just be some strange piecing in the sleeve?  But there's a bit of white shift poking out, so maybe the kirtle is sleeveless and the seam is the shoulder seam and the strap is just a facing?

As far as the shoulder strap idea goes, that's working out pretty well so far.  I'm actually getting something fairly close to the raglan type line at the underarm, where the armscye scoops up to the strap.  It's not as pronounced on my pattern but if I were to raise to neckline up a bit it would be (or at least it could be if I fiddle with things a bit, I'll take some pictures later once I have things as point where it's descent). 

I'm trying to decide what the best way to attach the facing at the top of the bodice to the strap and the main body of the bodice is - so far the bodice has a smooth line across the top until it dips down for the armscye.  I think the easiest way to attach the straps so it looks neat and like the pictures would be to make up the top facing bit with the straps attached to that and sew them on to the top of the bodice as a single piece to finish the neck, then attach the sleeve.  Or, put another way, treat the band at the top of the bodice as an actual facing and not as an extension of the bodice.  It might be easier to put the sleeve in first, then sew in the facing and the shoulder band.  Huh.  Now I've confused myself. 

Largess Napkins

I'm not quite sure what possessed me to volunteer to do this but I've decided to weave a pair of napkins for the Pennsic largess basket this year.  I think I was partly inspired by our kingdom having gotten Caid, which is where I went to my very first ever SCA event back when I was still a wide-eyed high school kid.  So it's a little bit nostalgic, and really, how many napkins do I need? 

The napkins are being woven in cottolin, as I had some and it looks nice and is easy to take care of, in natural and a weird sort of light grass green that I'm really not fond of by itself.  It's working up very nicely though.  I'm still surprised by what colors do when you weave with them.  The draft is the rosette twill from Northern European Textiles (which can be found here).  I'll be writing up more extensive documentation on the draft when I'm done, as this is part of my A&S 50 list too, but so far it's going very well.  I managed to get the loom threaded without any mistakes, and my first attempt at using a floating selvedge is going pretty well (if a little slowly at first).

Here's the start of my actual weaving:
The slight lumpiness in the closeup seems to be resolving itself as I'm weaving, I didn't have my warp under quite enough tension when I started weaving and the result is what you see.  The bit I have woven since I took these pictures is much more even and smooth.  I think once everything comes off the loom and gets washed it will even out just fine.  I have found that I need to be much more careful when I am weaving this as the pattern and colors show mistakes very clearly, and since I'm presenting these to foreign royalty and all we can't have too many obvious errors.  As I did with the elevation towel, I made my warp long enough that I should be able to pick the better of 3 or 4 napkins once I am done though.

It turns out this weave is quite similar to the diamond patterned background used on several of the Perugia towels, so this is turning out to be good practice for my next big project.  Warping up the fine linen for that still scares me a little bit, but I think I can manage.  I just have to find some good movies to watch on the laptop while I'm threading and I'll be fine.

Finished Roman!

I wore the new Roman for half a day at Sapphire last weekend, but it got a proper first-day-out this weekend at our local Baronial Birthday event.  I still need to make a tunica interior, and I think I am going to turn the Pink-Palla-of-Doom I wore at Sapphire with a silk palla.  The smaller silk veil I wore this weekend was much more comfortable and moved better.  Plus I don't look like Hello Kitty Roman Matron.

Overall the gown did very well.  I had some problems with my mamillare (the bust band that keeps the girls from going all free-range on me, like chickens).  I found this page today, which is from a class at Pennsic a couple of years ago, and I think I've been wrapping it backwards.  This morning I decided to test out the start in front method and so far it working much better.  The girls can't get out the top of the band and nothing seems to be shifting downwards, which was the problem over the weekend.  Yay!

For the stolla, I want to get some better hardware for the straps.  The current version just has purchased trim sewn on, some of the artwork looks like there is jewelry of some kind holding the gown together at the shoulders.  One looks like large round buttons or small brooches, which would be a nice option and give me different ways of wearing the stolla since I could pin the pleats however I wanted that day.  The Pink Palla of Doom is going to become a tunica I think, which I could wear as a stolla if I wanted to go the Hello Kitty route.  Once I make a couple of tunica interiors I will have pretty decent Roman wardrobe for those hot humid events!

A&S 50 16: Learn Naalbinding: Oslo Stitch

Nalebinding (or naalbinding) is an ancient form of needlework related to and often mistaken for knitting and crochet. It is worked with a single needle and short sections of yarn which are stitched into looped to form a stretchy, dense fabric quit similar to knitting. Nalbinding was in use in Bronze Age Europe and was used by the Viking to make shoe liners, short socks and mittens.

Several variants of Nalbinding stitches are known to have been used in Viking Age Europe, the simplest of them being the Oslo stitch (so called for an eleventh century mitten worked in this stitch found in the Oslo excavations). This seems to have been a fairly common stitch and at least three extant mittens have been found worked in this manner. As this stitch is fairly simple, was commonly used, and I knew someone who could teach it me, I elected to learn this stitch first.

I had attempted to teach myself Nalbinding from a book and various text and illustration based instructions several years prior to this with very little success. My second attempt with a live instructor was more successful and after a few bumps I was able to produce a passable tube of nalbound fabric. After some problems with maintaining even tension, I was able to start on my first sock.

Viking age socks were more like shoe liners than modern socks, coming up only to the ankle. These would have provided an extra layer of warmth and padding over cloth stockings of some sort and under leather shoes. Surviving socks seem to have been constructed from the toe up, unlike my socks which I worked from the top down to simplify the starting row. I plan to work future socks in the more historically accurate toe-up manner once I am more comfortable with the techniques involved.

Sources:
Walton, Penelope. Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fiber from 16-22 Coppergate. York Archeological Trust 1989.

Hald, Margrethe. Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials: A Comparative Study of Costume and Iron Age Textiles, trans. Jean Olsen. Archaeological-Historical Series Vol. XXI. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark, 1980.

Schmitt, Larry.Lessons in Nalbinding: Mittens, Mittens, Mittens! Lawrence W. Schmitt, 1997

Schmitt, Larry.Lessons in Nalbinding: Scarves, Wimples and More. Lawrence W. Schmitt, 1999.

Priest-Dorman, Carolyn. Nalebinding Techniques in the Viking Age. (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/nalebind.html) Last accessed June 2, 2011.

Lewins, Shelagh. Nalbinding Socks: Methods of Construction (http://www.shelaghlewins.com/reenactment/naalbinding/sock_construction.htm) Last accessed June 2, 2011.

For instruction on the actual stitch, YouTube is a great resource! Just do a search for “nalbinding” and you will find lots of helpful instructional videos, one of which will explain in a way that works for you. I found the videos available from http://www.youtube.com/user/senshisteph to be helpful with Oslo stitch but there are many others.

Weekend report

This weekend I went to Sapphire Joust, a notoriously hot and humid event near Richmond.  Overall, it was fun, though my hip and leg gave me a lot of trouble and I ended up packing out earlier on Sunday than I had planned too.  Oh well, could have been worse.  I did some good shopping, talked with friends, and won the Arts and Sciences competition I had knit the Monmouth cap and mittens for!  yay!  The prize was a really gorgeous spindle, which was perfect for a "Best use of Raw Wool" competition.  This was the last competition I had as Baronial Champion, and it was nice to go out with a successful one.  I've posted a link to the documentation to the right, and will be writing up the pattern for the mitten in the next week or so.  The hat pattern, as I mentioned in my last post, needs some work, so that will be coming as soon as I get it worked out to my satisfaction.

I wore the green hose all day on Saturday, with mundane clogs, and they worked pretty well.  I need to re-cut the feet and take them in a little bit through the leg and ankle to meet with my own particular standards (which are a little OCD, I will admit), but they are comfortable and look pretty good as is.  Bias cutting the foot was definitely a mistake.  this might have worked in wool, but it make for way too much stretching in the linen, and lots of strange bunching around the ball of my foot.  Luckily it all sort of bunched up in a way that was not a problem in my shoe, but I can do better than that.

The blue houppeland was a big hit and looked great, even after a car trip and less than ideal storage in my tent.  And it was comfortable.  I wore it for late-afternoon court on Saturday, sitting in the sun and was quite comfortable.  The hood made for a very nice sun-shade when I flipped the brim forward, though I apparently looked a little bit like a Sith apprentice or something.

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures, but I will be trotting my new Roman out next weekend for our local birthday event and will hopefully get some pictures of that then.  If I am feeling ambitions I may change into the houppland for feast and for court, but we shall see.

Now I must buckle down and finish the brick stitch bag for Pennsic, and get some more undies made so that if I am able to go (more on that later, I'm going in for hip surgery so that may get in the way of camping plans) I will have enough clothes.  And get my stuff for 30 Year done (definitely not going to that as my surgery is slated for the week before, but my entries will be there without me)

Monmouth Cap and MOL Mittens

Here they are in their glory!  I will post the documentation as soon as it gets a once over from a fresh set of eyes.  This is my entry for this weekend's raw wool challenge.  I spun the wool quite awhile ago, and just did the dying (my latest experiments with madder which I posted about recently).

I like that the hat and mittens are more functional and less fashionable, things an ordinary working person might have had.  Or a kid out for a romp in the snow.  In this case, an over-sized kid, but certainly not the little lordling I'm usually trying to dress.  The mittens are ambidextrous too, which just goes to show that Elizabeth Zimmerman's suggestion to knit mittens in sets of 3's might have been around for a good long while.  We have this one because a kid dropped it in a field after all.

Now I should just have time to get to activities night tonight and get myself packed up for the weekend in the morning without a huge rush!  Or at least not any more than the usual amount of rush.  Thankfully the doctors appointment that was scheduled for tomorrow late in the afternoon got moved to yesterday, so I am free to leave whenever I am ready and will be able to beat some of the traffic.  As long as I get there in time to set the tent up in daylight I will be doing ok.

Knitting frustration

A quick post to say that my project for this weekend's event (hah, nothing like the last minute you say?) is, in typical form, not going well.  The mitten portion is done and looks wonderful, the hat is giving me grief.  I was going to do a flat cap and got halfway done with the crown (those buggers take For.Ev.Er. to knit BTW) when I realized I wasn't going to have enough yarn to finish no matter what I did.  Gah.  So, I frogged the whole thing yesterday and started on a Monmouth cap.  Still a hat, still a different gauge than the patterns out there so it's not a too-easy knitting part of the project, and I should be able to get it done pretty fast and not run out of yarn this time.

It's also still boring as hell to knit, like most period European knit (except the Sion bags), and means I have to start over on my hat portion of the documentation.  Sigh.  I can do this, right?  It's not a huge A&S event, I don't need a 20 page opus or anything and there's the spinning and dying and wool processing part to talk about and that none of that has changed.  Just the knitting.

Did I mention it was boring to knit?  Just round after round of boring old stockinette.  Sure, there's some vaguely interesting construction with the brim but I've done that sort of thing before so it's rather lost it's glamor and besides which, that's hardly enough to make a vast expanse of stockinette interesting.  It would probably be soothing and mindless if I didn't have to worry about writing up the documentation as well.

Finished ave beads

Somehow or another I've got the hang of this lampworking thing well enough to finish the ave beads for my paternoster project!  I ended up being able to produce enough 7-9mm beads for a Seraphic rosary, or Franciscan Crown, which has seven decades (72 beads in all once you add the bit at the end).  Yay!

I'm super excited about this for a couple of reasons.  First of all, it's a really interesting form of paternoster and one of the few that can be documented to a specific time period.  Franciscan historians date it to 1422 (see http://www.shrinesf.org/rosary.htm), when a young friar had a vision of the Virgin.  Second, the focus is on the joys of the Mary rather than the more common (at least today) sorrows or wounds that you tend to see in "special" forms of the devotion (though if you do the standard 15 mysteries only 5 of those are sorrowful).  I'm all about some extra joy right now, so I find this particular form of the prayer really appealing.  Lastly, I really like St. Francis.  My grandmother, who was a huge force in my early life had a particular affinity for St. Francis and when I visited Assisi in high school I found the experience particularly moving.  I wasn't even Catholic yet, but I found it to be one of the most peaceful and prayerful places I've ever visited.  The brothers that we met there were some of the kindest, warmest people I have had the honor to met.

When I set out to make the beads for a paternoster I was really hoping I would be able to do a Franciscan Crown, but I wasn't sure if the actual glass working was going to go well.  I took the time to practice, and didn't try to do anything more ambitious that 72 simple beads that are more or less the same size (which is, I hope, ambition enough for my eventual judges), but so far it's looking really good.  Here you can see everything laid out, waiting for the gauds.  I found that if I sorted the decades into similar sizes you notice the variations in size much less.

The plan is to find some nice 12mm (or so) silver beads for the gauds, and order a cross or some other medal from The Rosary Workshop.  Hearts were quite popular and they have a couple of suitable sacred hearts that should be about the right size.  I'd like to avoid a tassel, though if I don't find a cross or something else that goes well with whatever gauds I end up with that's what I'll use.  I had planned to tablet weave the cord for the beads, as something similar is shown in one of the MOL books, but the hole in the beads is a little too small so I'll thread them on a heavy linen cord.

More fun with fire

The lampworking thing is sort of addictive! I've been practicing, with an aim towards producing uniform, round beads so that I can eventually make a paternoster. I think I'm ready to start working with the actual glass I want to use, it seems that each color rod behaves a little differently, which makes sense since different metals and minerals are used to make the colors and each one melts and burns at a different temperature. They also seem to wind onto the mandrels a little differently. If I was good at this, I would be working all the glass at the coolest possible temperatures but I've got to figure out what that is for the glass I want to work as I am not good at this yet.

Anyway, the result of my practice is, as you see, a lovely Viking-ish bead swag! With some dangley bits of things that went terribly wrong but I could not bear to throw away.

 And some close ups:
The stacked beads in the center are the first beads my husband and I made (he made the silvery blue one and I made the red one).  I'm pretty pleased with the clear one with red spots and the amber one with a black stripe, my first attempts at embellishing.  The whole thing has been a learning process but it's fun and oddly relaxing.