A Few Good Links

Though there are several long blog posts I'm working on, I have not succeeded in getting them close enough to completion before the end of November.  So in lieu of my own content, here are a few links to interesting free resources.

• A complete PDF copy of the book Things from the Town, which describes and discusses the artifacts discovered at the Kaupang site from 1998–2003. It is available for free download from the University of Oslo's website, here.  The permanent link to the free download page can be found here.  I've scanned the contents and there appear to be plenty of jewelry finds, though no textile finds, discussed in the book.
• Back in 2010, I posted a link to a paper by Susanne Thedéen called "Immortal Maidens: The Visual Significance of the Colour White in Girls’ Graves on Viking-Age Gotland. I just learned that the entire volume in which it appears, called Making Sense of Things: Archaeologies of Sensory Perception, Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 53 (2010), can be downloaded here. Though only the "Immortal Maidens" paper appears to have any bearing upon costume, the rest of the papers look interesting and, I suspect, are very much worth reading.
• A paper by Barbara Yorke called "'‘The Weight of Necklaces’: some insights into wearing of women’s jewellery from Middle Saxon written sources", which concludes, among other things, that the wearing of jewelry by nuns in England vastly predates Chaucer.  The paper can be found here. 

I'm hoping that December will be a month in which I can work on more costume-related projects and more reading about historic costume.  

HSM #9--The Lined, Wrapped Apron Dress Complete

Bottom corner, from the inside

Front view

Although it has taken me an additional month just to get the silk strip and loops sewn onto to the top of my lined, wrapped apron dress, the dress is finally complete. Here it is!  I have included close-ups of the corners and of the top edge both from the right side and wrong side, despite my less than stellar hand work, for those of my readers who want a better idea of exactly how it was made.  (I hope to replace the shots of me wearing the dress with clearer ones shortly.)

I realized, in the end, that I do not have enough information about the Grave 464 find that inspired this project to know exactly how the lining might have been secured, or even whether the entire dress was lined (though I think this was likely, if the dress truly was a wrapped-sheet type of dress). So I proceeded in a manner that would solidly fasten the wool and linen together without leaving raw edges, and covered the raw edge of the wool at the top with a pieced strip of my silk. The result gives the general idea of what a lined wrapped apron dress would be like in wear, but hardly qualifies even as an attempt to make a dress that is consistent with the fragments in Birka Grave 464.  

So here is how I made the dress.  

Small loop, from the inside

First, I laid the linen on top of the wool, wrong sides together, matching the fabric edge to edge as best I could. That meant matching the selvages on one side, and cutting a strip off of the other side, partly to attempt to (roughly) even out the differences in the fabric size, and partly to obtain a strip of fabric from which to make the loops.  Wool apron dresses with linen loops are common at Birka, but I had less of the linen than I did of the wool, so I didn't wish to cut the linen.  (If I had been concerned about cutting my piece of wool, I would have used scraps of linen from my stash for the loops; fortunately, my wool piece was large enough that I could spare a bit of it for the loops.  I like having matching wool loops better, and at least one period apron dress find has matching wool loops.)  The top was chosen so that the longer side would wrap around me; in other words, the fabric was aligned so that the dress would be about 36 inches long from top to bottom.

Next, I folded the top corner diagonally on the top and side to square it off (see picture), double folded the wool over the linen to enclose any raw edge, and stitched the two together using a whipstitch.  I continued this process along the bottom and other side, folding the corners but not cutting them (see pictures) as is common with modern mitering technique.

Finally, I cut two pieces of my silk, each about 3 1/2 inches wide and stitched them together end-to-end to make a strip long enough to cover the entire top edge of the dress. I folded all four sides of the strip to hide the raw edges.

And that is where I ran into a problem.

Because the linen and wool pieces aren't quite the same size, I had to figure out how to stitch the silk onto the top of the dress without (1) allowing any of the raw edge of the linen to show, and; (2) without having the line of the silk across the front of the dress look crooked or uneven.

What I ended up doing was a three-step process. First, I whip stitched the folded edge of the silk onto the linen lining, about 1 cm beneath the top edge of the linen.  Then I whip stitched the top edge of the linen to the wool, as close to the top edge of the wool as possible.  Finally, I folded the rest of the silk strip forward, over the top edge of the wool (with the raw edge of the silk tucked underneath) and stitched the silk onto the front of the dress, adjusting the visible width of the strip as necessary.

Left side view

Right side view

The most obvious difference between this dress and my wrapped, unlined, linen apron dresses, is that this dress is noticeably heavier than the other apron dresses I've made, except maybe for the Hedeby-style dress I made from heavy cotton denim. It's surprisingly warm and it hangs well--even better than my pure linen apron dresses.  Moreover, the way the dress wraps across the front conceals the fact that the line of the silk trim is (still, despite adjusting) uneven.  The unevenness in the hem caused by the fact that this is a wrapped garment shows, very slightly, at the bottom center, but is less conspicuous than the unevenness of hem that shows when I wear the wrapped linen apron dresses I have made.

Overall, I'm happy with the way the dress came out. Though I don't have enough information to guess how close I might have come to the way such a garment could have been made during the Viking period, let alone how the garment in Birka Grave 464 really was made, the project shows that a lined apron dress would have been wearable and comfortable.  As to whether one considers it attractive, it's not particularly sexy to modern eyes, but it has a clean dignity to it that is reminiscent at least some of the images of women in Viking period art.

HSM Challenge #9--Color Challenge Brown

Fabric:  A yard of very dark brown mid-weight wool, about 58 inches wide; a yard of cream-colored mid-weight linen, about 57 inches wide; and strips cut from a quarter-yard of silk taffeta.  The silk I had previously bought for another project, but the wool and linen were newly acquired.  

Pattern:  None needed.  The dress is based upon Agnes Geijer's theory that at least some apron dresses may have just consisted of a flat piece of fabric with loops sewn to the top edge that is wrapped around the body and fastened with pins.  (Perhaps older women wore wrapped apron dresses while younger women wore more fitted ones resembling reenactors' dresses based upon the Hedeby find?)  To the extent my limited information about the fragments found in Grave 464 at Birka, I tried to make the finished garment consistent with that information.    

Year:  The Viking age.  I think Grave 464 is one of the earlier Birka finds (9th century C.E.) though I'm not certain of that, and I don't know the extent to which anyone has attempted to date the finds in that particular grave.

Notions:   Dark brown, 100% silk Gutermann thread for stitching the wool and linen together along the sides, and some dark red 100% silk Gutermann thread for stitching the silk band in place.   Both were from my stash.

How historically accurate is it?   Not as accurate as I'd like it to be.  I don't really know whether the silk was folded at its outside edges where it attaches to the wool.  I suspect, though, that the silk actually found in Grave 464 was heavier and less prone to raveling than mine, and thus would not have required the foldovers on the edges of the silk that I needed to make on my silk.  Also, my wool and linen fabric pieces were slightly different in size and I didn't want to cut into the wool (which was the larger of the two) very much because I wanted to make sure there would be enough width that the dress would wrap around me comfortably.  As a result, in some places the linen and wool do not meet at the top, so the silk strip covers both but doesn't enclose them at the fold the way the original apparently did.  Because of this, I had to stitch the wool and linen together *before* folding the silk over both, and I know of no evidence that that was done on the original.   In addition, I don't know whether the corners of the dress were mitered in the modern fashion or only folded over to square them up, and I used silk thread, while the original was probably sewn with linen or wool.   So I don't rate the historical accuracy higher than about 50%, at best.

Hours to complete:  I didn't keep track very closely, but I think about 6-7 hours, spread over several non-consecutive days.

First worn:  To determine the correct placement for the loops.  When making an apron dress, I typically pin all the loops to the top of the dress with safety pins and try the dress on to determine whether the placement is appropriate before stitching them in place, and that's what I did here as well. The first real wearing was for the photographs accompanying this post.

Total cost:  About $45.00 USD (not counting the cost of the spandex-containing linen I'd bought to use for the project originally and had to replace).

EDIT (12/2/2015):  I forgot to mention that I did not spread the fabric out on a table to do the matching or any of the sewing.  I merely held the linen and wool in front of me, matched edges as best I could, and folded and stitched from there, so it *is* possible to do that.  (I did spread the partly-finished garment briefly on a bed to figure out how and where to place the silk strip, though).

Why Knowledge of Historical Clothing Matters

While searching the Internet for articles on textiles and archaeology, I found a very interesting article on LiveScience.com from late 2011.

The article claims that a clothing detail discovered via archaeological textile remains answered, at least in general terms, the question of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls (a number of early manuscripts, some of which are copies of portions of the Bible.  

According to the article, it turns out that approximately 200 textile fragments were also found in the Qumran caves in Israel, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.   Study of the fragments indicates that at least some of the fragments were originally part of items of clothing.

All of the fragments were plain, undecorated, undyed (and in some cases bleached) linen.  That is unusual because, during the era to which the finds are dated (between the 3rd century BCE and 70 CE) most clothing in what is now Israel was made from wool, not linen, and similar textile finds from the same region and period were often dyed in bright colors or otherwise decorated.

The archaeological team believes that the proximity of so much linen near the scrolls themselves indicate that the scrolls were produced by the Essenes, an order of monks who lived near the caves. Literary evidence indicates that the Essenes believed in cleanliness, dressed in white, and preferred to keep their skin dry, all of which suggest that they wore linen.

Unsurprisingly, some scholars disagree with this theory about where the linen fragments came from. However, whether the Essene origin of the linen, and the scrolls, is correct, the research indicates that clothing evidence is important.  Evidence of what was historically worn by a people is important, not simply to show how people lived in the past, but to confirm or refute evidence as to what people lived in a certain place, or did certain things--such as writing the Dead Sea Scrolls.   It is part of the physical evidence that allows us check and confirm our understanding of history.