A Theory About Spiral Tubes

About a week ago, I passed along a link to an article on EXARC.net about the historical use of tiny bronze spiral tubes as a clothing decoration.

My husband, who reads my blog posts via Google Plus even when they are extremely esoteric, found the idea of decorating one's clothing with woven-in metal bits prone to tarnish intriguing.  "How could you possibly clean them?" he asked me.

I observed that such ornamentation was almost certainly confined to one's best clothing, which would be seldom worn and carefully stored.  But he pointed out that likely over time the rings would tarnish badly, anyway, unless they were carefully cleaned from time to time, and they certainly could not be removed to do so.

For some reason, I remarked that spiral-ornamented garments were made from wool, and that perhaps the natural lanolin in the wool helped prevent tarnishing.

That's when my husband came out with the following theory.

Perhaps the owners of such spiral-laden garments buffed the spirals, from time-to-time, with lanolined wool fabric or fleece.  Such a coating would be much more likely to protect the tubes from tarnish, and would not damage the fabric to which they were affixed.

The beauty of this theory, to me, is that its plausibility could easily be tested.  Make a garment (or even ornament a sample piece of wool) with spiral tubes.  Brush the tubes with a lanolined cloth, and store.  Make a control garment, or sample, and store it separately, without touching the tubes with lanolin.  Check both at intervals (every 6 months, say, for a year or two), and see whether the lanolin makes a difference to the amount of tarnish on the tubes.

That sounds like a great idea for a short paper.  I should perform the experiment and write it up some time.

Spiral Tubes

From Katrin Kania's blog I recently learned that there is a good, publicly available (but short) article on EXARC.net about the use of tiny, spiral bronze tubes to decorate clothing.

In general, though the time frame when such ornaments were used varies widely by region, the countries that have used this technique are those around the Baltic Sea. The article itself may be found here.  

Although the text is brief and general, there are some wonderful photographs accompanying the article of surviving finds with spiral tube decoration, some of which I have not seen elsewhere. This article and its photos are particularly recommended to those interested in Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, or Finnish clothing of the early to late Middle Ages.

More Short Tutorials--Early Period

It's no secret to any of my readers that my favorite costume interests lie with the early period, which I think of as from the dawn of humanity until the high Middle Ages.  Today's crop of tutorials consists entirely of projects appropriate to early period costume.

• From Jenn Culler's blog there are two simple and fun projects.  
• First, a tutorial on how to make a peplos dress that hangs more appealingly than a pinned sheet of fabric (what's called a "bog dress" in the SCA). The technique is not documentably historical, but also cannot be ruled out on the basis of archaeological finds. 
• Second, there is a tutorial for making a Bronze Age Dress based upon a design suggested in this article by Karina Grömer, Lise Bender Jørgensen and Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer. The article discusses different ways to recreate the clothing of a woman buried in a Middle Bronze Age grave in Winklarn, Austria.  (Other potential reconstructions of the Winklarn woman's costume are suggested in the article, for those who might be interested.)
• From opusanglicanum there's a tutorial on how to stitch the acanthus motif from the Mammen find.   
• From Ragnvaeig's LiveJournal there's a tutorial on how to stitch the linked circles motif from the Oseberg ship find.
• And, finally, from Anna's blog, Anachronistic and Impulsive, there is good information on how to make ancient Roman garb for both men and women. Note too the current post where Anna seeks donations because she and her husband are in financial difficulty due to unexpected calls on their savings. 

All of these projects would be good to work on during a hot summer, if it is summer where you live.  Enjoy exploring them!

The Völva Costume--A Few Thoughts About The Cloak

Slowly, (especially since my spouse has a regular income again), I have begun to think about reviving long dormant costume projects.

I have been thinking about the cloak that I need to make for the völva costume.  My assumption, based upon other surviving garments of the same period and upon the description in Eric the Red's Saga (e.g., the fact that the völva's cloak has "straps") is that this cloak should be a semicircular cloak.  However, my last attempt to make a semicircular cloak, the Byzantine mantion I made some years ago, fits poorly and is hard to keep in position in wear.

I suspect, on the basis of the shapes of the surviving semicircular cloaks from the Viking age, that the fact that my mantion fits poorly does not mean its design is anachronistic.  Far from it; I'd bet that most semicircular cloaks in the early Middle Ages fit poorly, because a simple semi-circular design fails to take the protuberance of the shoulders into consideration.  It occurred to me that, if I want the cloak to be secure when simply tied on with long straps, I must do something about the shoulder problem. I would like to experiment with techniques that might make this cloak fit better, even if such techniques are not documentable to the Viking age.

One possibility would be to shape the relevant area of the cloak to my form with seams, stitched on the inside of the garment.  That could be worked out by pinning the seams first to check for fit.  I'm thinking that a few seams, radiating outward from (roughly) the center of the neck notch and reaching downward about 6 inches may work.  In that case, it might be possible to achieve a decent fit with  a simple circular neck-notch.

The idea would be to cut the neck notch and sew the fitting seams first.  Finishing the neck could be simple.  I am thinking of cutting a long piece of silk, a bit more than twice as wide as I want the "straps" to be.  The idea would be to use the strip to bind the neckline by placing the center of the silk strip against the back center of the neck notch, fold the fabric over each side of the neck notch, and stitch it down around the neckline. (Yes this will take some folding and tweaking, but might be worth it.)  Then stitch down the rest of the length of each strap, fold the edges inward and stitch together along the folds.  In other words, the silk strip would be fastened to the cloak all around the neckline, and the rest would serve as long straps.  That way, the straps would be unlikely to rip away from the cloak.  The sketch to the left above should give a better idea of what I mean.  (N.B.:  The two different pieces are not drawn to the same scale.)

This concept assumes, of course, that my piece of fabric is large enough to cut the cloak as a semicircle; I don't recall exactly how big it is.  If the fabric is not wide or long enough, it may make better sense to try to cut the cloak as a series of pie-shaped wedges and stitch them together to create a better-fitting shape.

If anyone has comments or thoughts about these ideas, please let me know in the comments.