Paths Less Traveled

It's the middle of Summer where I am, so I figured it was time for something completely different.

Here are links to some very interesting websites containing information about historical clothing that is off the beaten track of ancient Rome/migration period/medieval England and France/Renaissance etc. costume.  Most of the historical periods covered by the websites below are hard for the beginning researcher to find information about. They should help people wanting to explore truly different areas of clothing history, and at the very least they are interesting to read!

1.  Clothing in the Netherlands, 1480-1610:    Between the two of them, Margaret and Karinne show the rest of us how people in the Netherlands dressed between the late 15th and early 17th centuries. I first met Karinne through the now-defunct MedCos forums, and her skills have, if anything, improved since then. Go here to explore Margaret and Karinne's creations and research.

2.  Sarmatian Costume:  Here's an interesting alternative to all those Elizabethans, Vikings, and Romans:  a Sarmatian persona!  The Sarmatians are a Central Asian people who migrated into Southern Russia and the Balkans and settled there between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.   Jess Miller-Camp's blog, Sarmatian in the SCA, has interesting information about her research into Sarmatian culture, including her work on Sarmatian costume.  You can find the blog here.

3.  Middle Byzantine:  You may be familiar with Timothy Dawson's Middle Byzantine site, Levantia, but Anna, of Anachronistic and Impulsive, covers much of the same costuming ground from a somewhat different perspective.  The blog's home page is here.  As a side note:   Do not miss her post about making ancient Mesopotamian costumes for herself and her spouse!

4.  Medieval Korea:  This information about how a 16th century CE Gisaeng might have dressed is available due to the research skills of Rebecca Lucas LeGet.  Find it here.

5,  Medieval Japan:  There are a number of pages out there on medieval Japanese costume, but this one is fairly detailed and well-organized--for men's costume.  There are places for information about women's costume, but they have not been written yet.  You'll find the index here.

Enjoy the extra reading, and have a good summer (or winter, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere).

Sewing For Byzantium--The Final Adjustment to the Himation

New portion--view from right side (hem at bottom)

I have finally completed the necessary lengthening of the himation to be period-appropriate, and can now consider it truly completed.  Because it's late here and my husband, who doubles as my fashion photographer, is busy, I will add photographs to this post later today.

The technique I used for lengthening the tunic involved unpicking and unfolding the hem, piecing together an approximately 7-inch-wide (18 cm) strip of my leftover green linen that was long enough to go around the entire bottom of the garment, and sewing that strip to the bottom edge, using the same technique of whipstitching folded edges together that I had used on the seams.  Then I hemmed the new bottom edge with a double-foldover hem.

The himation lengthening is my project for HSF 2014 Challenge #1--Make Do and Mend.  The HSF statistics for this project are as follows:

Fabric:   The last scraps of the same linen used to make the himation in the first place.  I had a strip about two-and-a-half feet long and 7 inches wide left of that linen (76 cm x 18 cm) and a much shorter, second scrap of similar width.  I pieced the two together and sewed the result onto the bottom of the existing himation.

Finally long enough!

New portion--view from wrong side (hem at bottom)

Pattern: None needed, though the technique is my own, so far as I know.  Still, the Byzantines probably would have used a similar method if they needed to substantially lengthen a garment after it was completed.  There is art showing the period equivalent of exotic dancers wearing a long dress with a broad ruffle on the bottom.  Such a ruffle would have had to have been sewn on to the dress somehow, and that stitching would need to be sturdy if a woman was wearing it regularly for dance performances.

Year: Still Middle Byzantine, i.e., 10th-12th century C.E.

Notions: Londonderry brand linen thread in Persian green, 80/3.

How historically accurate is it?  Hard to say (until we excavate a garment lengthened in this manner), but existing evidence shows that folk in the Middle Ages were not averse to piecing fabric to achieve the effect they wanted.  (See also my ruffle comment, above).  So perhaps 70-80%.

Hours to complete:  2-3 hours--I didn't keep track very closely.   Some of the time was spent in ironing the piece to make it possible to shove sections that were too narrowly folded to come close enough together to be stitched into an enclosed seam.

First worn:  Not really applicable, since I've worn the garment for photographs after I originally finished it.

Total cost: $0, since all the work was done with materials purchased to make the garment originally.

Now, on to HSF Challenge #2--Innovation, and Yet Another Apron Dress!

EDIT:  [1/26/2014]:  Added a picture of me wearing the lengthened himation to this post.

Sewing For Byzantium--The Himation Scrutinized

Entire outfit

The himation with shirt

Here is the promised photograph of my himation with the other components of my Middle Byzantine outfit, thanks to my husband's willingness to wield the camera for me. (I will post one of them on the HSF 2013 Challenge #23 page as well.)

Given the incredible difficulty I had making myself focus on this project, it came out very well.  The side slit at the neck closure sometimes gaps open, a little, but I can pin that, and the neckline is a bit high and impinges upon the shirt collar, but I think that will even out as I wear it.

But the himation has one problem that cannot be ignored.  It is way too short.  Even unbelted, a bit of the shirt's calf-length hem shows, as well as the foot to the ankle.  In his writing about Middle Byzantine costume, Timothy Dawson stresses that clothing was unusually modest, and hemlines, even for lower-class women, were very long.  He says that ground length is appropriate, and even if I choose to err on the side of slight shortness for practicality's sake, this tunic should, at the very least, be instep length, not ankle-length--even when belted.  (I didn't have the nerve to see what belting it would do at its present length.) That means it needs at least another 5 or 6 inches of length.

On the bright side, I have quite a few large scraps of the green linen left.  I can cut a suitably-sized strip of the fabric, sew it to the present hem, and hem the new bottom, to lengthen the tunic.  Yes, that's going to be a lot more seam/hem sewing, but it fits in, thematically, with the first HSF Challenge of 2014: Make Do and Mend, and (fortunately, since it's already the 12th and the Challenge deadline is the 15th) that shouldn't take long to do.

So it looks as though I have more work still to do on this project before I can go back and teach myself enough embroidery to ornament the neckline and sleeves.  On the other hand, it's providing the perfect springboard for me to leap into HSF 2014!

Sewing for Byzantium--A Different View of the Himation

The himation, inside-out.

Close up of side seam and hem.

Now my himation is truly done, and here's a new photograph to prove it. 

The difference here, of course, is that we are now looking at the himation inside-out, with the seams visible.

I've also included a close-up photograph of a part of one of the seams, to help explain how I did it.

What I did was to take the pieces I wanted to join, wrong-sides facing me, and fold each edge over, onto the wrong side of the fabric, by about 1 cm.  Then I whipstitched the pieces together by putting the needle through the edge of each fold.  

To "finish" each seam, I simply folded the raw edges inward, toward the stitched seam, and whip stitched the two portions of the remaining seam allowances together so that all of the raw edges were enclosed.  This isn't really a flat-felled seam, though it wouldn't be hard to make it one (by sewing the joined pair of raw edges down).  It has the virtue that it all can be, and was, done with my favorite stitch--whip stitch! 

The hem was done, as Heather Rose Jones describes in her guide to Archaeological Sewing, with a hem finish typically found on linen garments--i.e., the raw edge was turned twice and hem stitched.

I've tried the himation on, and it fits beautifully, except that it's too short!  It looks as though I'm going to have to add fabric at the hem to bring it to the correct length. I'll explain more when I post photographs showing the himation in wear.

EDIT:  (12/15/2013)  I thought I remembered seeing a historical reference indicating that the type of seam treatment I used on the himation was used somewhere during the medieval period. I found the reference, and although it is not identical to what I did, it is similar. This chart, which I located again via Pinterest, shows stitch types that were found on fabric fragments from Hedeby. Number 10 is close to what I did, except on 10 the initial seam appears to have been sewn with running stitch. 12 appears to use a whipstitch on the folded fabric edges to create the actual seam, but the seam allowances are sewn onto the inner surface of the garment instead of to each other as I have done. Hedeby is not Byzantium, but the existence of so many different ways to make a seam with enclosed raw edges during the 10th century (contemporary with the Middle Byzantine period) suggests that my approach to the seaming of the himation was not necessarily anachronistic.

Sewing for Byzantium: The Himation is Done!

The himation

Finally!  It's done.

Actually, it's not *quite* done. I still need to complete the seam finishing so nothing ravels, and I intend to perpetrate embroidery around the neckline and sleeve-ends at some point. But I may well be able to do the seam finishing tomorrow night, and even now it's wearable. I photographed it on a hanger purely because my husband wanted to go to bed early and I didn't feel like putting on the other garments that go with it (the mantion, savanion, and shirt) for photographs.  I'll do that sometime this week.

Here are the official statistics, as required by the Historical Sew Fortnightly rules:

The Challenge:  #24--Re-do. (i.e., re-do a previous challenge).  As I've said way too many times now previously, my himation qualifies for a number of the previous challenges.  This time, I'm going to list all of the ones for which I think it qualifies:

• #2 UFO. This is the last necessary component for my Middle Byzantine outfit and I'd been meaning to do it for years now.
• #5 Peasants and Pioneers. The outfit of which this is one of the most important parts is essentially rich peasant's clothing.
• #8 By the Sea.  Byzantium (later called Constantinople and now called Istanbul) was a seaport, and many of the Byzantine Empire's provinces were coastal.  
• #10 Squares, Rectangles, and Triangles.  All early medieval garments are composed of squares, rectangles, and triangles, and this one is no exception.
• #14 Eastern Influence.  The Byzantine Empire was an Eastern power, compared to the rest of Europe, of course.
• #17 Robes and Robings.  The neckline and sleeve-ends are trimmed with robings, and one could arguably consider the tunic itself to be a robe.
• #21  Colour Challenge Green.  Very.
• #23 Generosity and Gratitude.  I owe a debt of gratitude first to Peter Beatson, whose page on how to make a Manazan shirt inspired me to start making a Middle Byzantine outfit in the first place, but also to Timothy Dawson, whose research, both in print and on the Levantia website, gave me the information to finish it.

Fabric:   Nearly 3 yards of 100% linen, medium weight, in apple green, purchased from fabrics-store.com.  Scraps of the same type of linen in dark blue, from the same source.

Pattern: My own, adapted from Peter Beatson's Manazan shirt pattern and Timothy Dawson's sketches and research.

Year: It is rarely possible to pin down Early Period clothing to a particular year.  My design is Middle Byzantine, i.e., 10th-12th century CE.

Notions: Linen thread, in several different (and not particularly matching) shades of green, 80/3.  Silk thread in dark blue from Gutterman's (for sewing the blue linen around the neck and sleeve-ends). 

How historically accurate is it?  The pattern is as accurate as present research can make it.  It is completely hand-sewn, and at least some of the construction stitches I chose are accurate though I haven't checked very closely.  The colors would be plausible for wool, and the blue was possible on linen (it's pretty close to the blue of the linen apron-dress loop found in the 10th century Pskov grave).  However, I can't document that the particular green I chose for the body of the dress could have been achieved on linen during that period, and there's always the issue of whether linen was used for clothing other than undergarments in period.  So let's say 70%-80%, though that might be wildly optimistic on my part. 

Hours to complete:  5 hours, spread out over almost as many months.

First worn:  Not yet! Hopefully tomorrow or Tuesday for photographs, including photographs of the entire Middle Byzantine outfit.  

Total cost:  Hard to say because most of the costs were incurred years ago and the blue silk thread was originally bought for another project anyway.  If you added up the original cost of the linen thread and the cloth used, it probably comes to no more than $30 USD.

Final Sprint For HSF Challenge #24?

The deadline for the next Historical Sew Fortnightly challenge for this year, "Re-do", is December 2.  My intention is to have my himation complete--or at least completely wearable--for that challenge.  So where do I stand?  Can I make it?  Maybe.

Floss colors to embroider the himation.

Last night, I made significant progress on my himation.  The neckline is done, complete with button-and-loop closure and blue linen trim.  Now I only need to close the seams up the sleeves, finish the seams inside, and hem the tunic.  (In a pinch, I'll finish enough of the seams to do the hem, and complete that job later.)  Granted, I don't expect to be able to add more ornamentation to the tunic by December 2, but at least the tunic would be fit to wear by then.

Cross pommee

Even so, time is going to be tight.  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which is a significant family holiday here in the US.  I will likely be spending a large chunk of it with my husband's family eating way too much turkey and pie.  I have a meeting Friday morning, and plans to spend the rest of the day at our favorite board gaming store, where there will be an all-day session of board gaming, and I'm committed to meetings most of Saturday.  So that will leave Sunday to finish the tunic proper before the deadline.  Doable?  Probably--unless I screw something up.  

Speaking of ornamentation, I did some looking today and confirmed that cotton crochet thread, even if braided, will not give the look I want.  So I'm going to go with embroidery after all.  To the left is a picture of the colors of DMC cotton embroidery floss I bought--an off-white simply labeled "ecru", a pale blue (DMC #827) and a deep bluish red (DMC #815).

My current thought is to do stem stitch along the side of the blue linen where I originally planned to couch some cord.  On the neckline, I will stem-stitch circles with the ecru floss, to which I will add crosses worked in the pale blue and highlighted with the red.   The crosses would be shaped much like the cross pommee in heraldry, with a red ball at each point of the cross and in the center (shown on the right, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).  I found a good video on Mary Corbet's Needle and Thread site that demonstrates how to do stem stitch; hopefully I can follow it well enough not to become frustrated. 

It sounds like a workable idea to me, but no plan, whether for sewing or battle, long survives contact with the enemy.  I'll just have to forge ahead and see how it all turns out.

EDIT:  (11/28/2013)  I have a himation.  It still needs finishing (hemming, seam finishing, and, at some point, embellishment) but it's a complete garment.  I expect to be able to hem it, and perhaps finish the seams by Monday.

Byzantine Textile Decoration

After my last post about my himation project, I did a bit of digging for information about how Byzantines other than royals and courtiers might have decorated their clothing.  

As I'd expected, other than the Levantia site with which I'm familiar I found almost nothing on the Internet that was relevant.  Then I managed to get my hands on this short article from a back issue of Archaeological Textiles Newsletter:

Linscheid, Petra. Early Byzantine Textiles from Amorium, Anatolia. Archaeological Textiles Newsletter, No. 32, page 17.

"Early Byzantine", when it appears in the academic literature, usually means somewhere between the 3rd and 7th centuries CE, which is not the period of concern for my himation project.  To my delight, Ms. Linscheid's article discusses a textile find that can be dated to a particular event in 838 CE--placing it at the early end of the Middle Byzantine period, and making it relevant for my purposes.

According to the article, the town of Amorium was the capital of a Byzantine province and thus an important location.  It was besieged by the Arabs in 838, and the textiles about which Ms. Linscheid writes date to that event. 

Thread--direction of spin/ply*

The find in question consists of numerous carbonized fragments, none of which was larger than a postage stamp.  Because they were carbonized (perhaps by a fire that ignited or was set during the siege) it is impossible to ascertain the color of the original fabrics, but details of weave and thread twist are ascertainable.  The fragments represent pieces of at least 21 different textiles, all but one of which were made from Z-plied, S-spun thread.

Of particular interest to me, given that I'm still trying to decide how to ornament my himation once it is completed, were the article's comments on evidence for ornamentation of the detected textiles:

If and how the textiles were decorated, is still an open question.  On one of the coarser, balanced tabbies, a curved line of twining or embroidery was observed.  Further study is required before one can tell whether this is a decorative or constructional feature. 

In addition, traces on the same fragment of what might be brocading will be analyzed more thoroughly.  Five examples of non-woven techniques were recorded:  two loose three-strand braids, similar to the example of braided fringe, and three twisted cords.  (page 18).

Drawing of embroidery from Oseberg ship textile.**

This evidence, slight though it is, suggests some options for decorating the himation.   A few years ago, I taught myself (with a lot of advice from my commenters!) how to make a three-strand fingerloop braid in order to trim my Hedeby apron dress.  Maybe I could reverse-couch a strand of fingerloop braiding, or plied cord, along the bottom edge of the blue linen collar strip (and along both edges of the strips on the sleeves) and couch a line of loops like the looped embroidery found in the Oseberg ship (pictured on the right).   I could manage, I think, to satin-stitch a small cross inside each loop, probably with a color that contrasts with the color of the cord.

I found a site called The Bead Center, based in New York City, that sells a beautiful, twined linen cord in many different colors, but they will only ship if you order $50 USD worth of products, and I don't get to NYC very often.  I have some crochet cotton in my stash.  Unfortunately, it's rather thin, and none of the colors--black, wine, and turquoise--look all that promising.  The turquoise might work from a design perspective, but I'd rather have a color that's more obviously period.  Maybe my local Jo-Ann's will have a thicker crochet cotton that will serve, and I can get a skein of embroidery floss there as well.

Meanwhile, I have sewn my blue linen around the collar and down one-side of the slit on the left side of the neckline.  All I need to do is sew the linen on the other side of the slit, attach a button and loop, and the neckline will be done!  If I can track down suitable cord, I might even be able to trim the tunic by December 2 also.

EDIT:  I should never make any statements here without checking a source, ever.  It appears that during the 9th and 10th centuries, at least in northern Europe, stem stitch and split stitch were used in embroidery, not satin stitch. See this article and also this article. At least couching (sewing threads of different types down onto a fabric as decoration) is period!

*    Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.
**  Drawing by Tone Strenger.  Image found in "The Textiles Found On The Oseberg Ship," by Anne Stine Instad, translation webbed here.

The Himation: A Quick Update

With November 18 (the latest Historical Sew Fortnightly I'm hoping to make) fast approaching, I figured that it's time for another update on my Byzantine tunic (himation) project.

The tunic-in-progress is still essentially a flat piece (though the gores and sleeves are sewn onto it) because I got bogged down in trying to sew my blue linen strips around the neckline.  Part of the problem is that I cut the strips on the straight of grain because I did not have enough blue linen left to cut them on the bias, but another part is the inevitable consequence of trying to fit a broad strip along a sharply curved neckline.  In the end, some tucks (and a non-period steam iron) will be involved, but I will make it work.  At this point, I've gotten the trim about three-quarters of the way around the neck and have sewn it on the sleeve-ends as well.

I have given up on adding the purchased trim to the tunic, not because I can't find it (though in fact I haven't found it yet), but because although the colors of the trim and linen work together, the textures would be all wrong.  The purchased trim is very stiff and tightly woven, and has a very slight sheen.  Texture-wise, it's everything the linen is not, and that would create the wrong effect for the tunic.

So, for now, I'm going to stick with using the blue linen alone as trim.  Later, if I can think of a suitable motif, I might consider adding embroidery even though I haven't dabbled in embroidery for almost four decades now.  The recreated himation on the Levantia web site that inspired this project has a simple embroidered design based upon crosses inside of circles (you can see it in this photograph), but I'm not at all confident of being able to make the crosses or circles symmetrical enough to look good.  If anyone has any alternative suggestions, please comment on this post.  

There's also a question of what kind of thread I should use.  I'd use wool, except I want the dress to remain washable.  That argues for a commercial embroidery floss, or for linen embroidery thread.  I don't have either of those things and I need to keep costs down.  Suggestions on this issue would also be greatly appreciated.

Himation Update

If I'm going to complete my himation (an ankle-length tunic, discussed in earlier posts) for the Historical Sew Fortnightly "Colour Challenge Green," it has to be done by Monday, October 21. Although I'm making good progress, I don't think I'll finish that quickly.  

At this point, I've sewn the basic seams that fasten the sleeves to the body piece, and have one of the two side gores sewn onto the body piece on one side.  To complete the basic construction, I need to sew the gore that's already attached to the other side of the body piece, sew in the second gore, and close up the sleeves.  However, I have not yet cut the neckline, let alone trimmed it or added a bead and loop to close it; I'll probably do that before I sew the other side of the first gore, because until I do that the work-in-progress is still a flat piece of cloth, and it's easier to work on the neckline while the garment is still a flat piece. Then, after the neckline is completed and the body and sleeves are closed up, I'll need to finish the seams inside and hem it.  

I still haven't decided whether to add any of my store-bought trim to the top of the blue linen strips (actually, I still have to find it).  

Unless I spend all of my available time between now and Monday on sewing, I won't finish in time for Colour Challenge Green.  However, the "Generosity and Gratitude" (i.e., gratitude for on-line resources you have used) challenge, due November 18, is very realistic.  I expect to finish well before then, and will have photographs of the himation and the completed Middle Byzantine outfit.

Finally Joining the Historical Sew Fortnightly

So after months of waffling, I am finally going to take part in the Dreamstress's Historical Sew Fortnightly.

As the Dreamstress explains in the post I link to above, the purpose of the HSF is to provide more incentive for historical costumers to sew by setting a series of historical (i.e., 1938 CE, or earlier) costuming challenges for the year, one every two weeks. One can choose to work on a challenge many weeks in advance, or try to do them all, or something in-between.

Which challenge am I doing? That's hard to say. I know what garment I'm making for the challenge--my long-planned Byzantine himation.   However, there are quite a number of ways I can fit that project into the remaining HSF challenges.   My hope is to get it done by October 21 for Challenge #21: Colour Challenge Green--since the linen from which I'm making it is boldly and lusciously apple green. However, if I miss the 21st, I could finish it under the auspices of Challenge #23: Generosity and Gratitude (due November 18), since my idea, as well as much of the information, for making it in the first place came from Peter Beatson's page on the Manazan shirt (since there's no point in making underwear if you're not going to make an outfit to wear on top of it) and Timothy Dawson's Levantia site (which triggered my interest in Middle Byzantine clothing).

If I blow the November 18 deadline, there's still Challenge #24: Re-Do (due December 2). This is the one where you can do, or re-do, a prior challenge. My himation, which solidly meets the criteria for Challenges #21 and #23 at least, would fit in handily. However, the himation project meets several prior challenges too, such as # 8, By the Sea (it's a Byzantine tunic, and Byzantium a/k/a Constantinople a/k/a Istanbul was, and is, a seaport); #11, Squares, Rectangles and Triangles (which is an excellent description of the himation pattern); and #17, Robes and Robings (because the himation is arguably a robe, and it will be trimmed with broad strips of linen, which arguably are robings).

As of today, I have finished cutting out my pattern pieces, so all I have to do is stitch them together and add my trim.   Most of the stitching I will be using will be whip stitches, which I can do quickly, so I should be able to complete it to at least a wearable condition by December 2.  Wish me luck!

Sewing For Byzantium: Starting the Himation

Fabric for tunic and trim

Tonight, I finally started making the himation, or overtunic, for my Middle Byzantine costume.  It will be a much simpler garment than the shirt, because it will have only a simple round neck with a long slit, and no collar.

I ripped a piece that will be the right size for the body and confirmed that I have enough remaining for gores and sleeves.  I have also torn strips of my remaining dark blue linen from the fitted wrapped apron dress project that I will piece together to form the basic trim.  The photograph below gives an idea of how the green linen that I'm using for the tunic itself will look with the dark blue.  [I can't seem to download the photograph tonight, so I'll have to add it to this post tomorrow.]

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the purchased trim I was planning to use on top of the dark blue strips, but because I will be sewing the tunic by hand I should have plenty of time to look for it.

EDIT: (7/2/2013) I have just succeeded in downloading my photograph from the other night (using my Nexus 7, not my desktop machine).  Here it is.  The fabric colors are a bit deeper and richer in reality.

More Byzantine Jewelry

Just the other day, I learned about another book on Byzantine jewelry:

Spier, Jeffrey. Byzantium and the West: Jewelry in the First Millennium. Paul Holberton Publishing; 1st edition (November 2012).

This book is an exhibition catalog from a private, high-end gallery in New York City, Les Enluminures, which is owned by Sandra Hindman.  Ms. Hindman wrote the preface to the book. Les Enluminures also displays images of the artifacts it displays on line at its website (see the link in the last sentence) and by video. Two videos narrated by Hindman which display jewelry from the exhibition may be viewed above and below.   The book itself, though expensive in hard copy, can be viewed or downloaded for free from the Les Enluminures website.  (In addition, author Jeffrey Spier has downloaded a copy of the book onto Academia.edu; if you are a member of that site, you can read or download a copy of it there.  If you seek out Spier's works on Academia.edu, do not miss his articles on later-period medieval jewelry.)

Byzantium and the West lacks the kind of in-depth scholarship found in the British Museum's publication Intelligible Beauty. However, it makes up for that fact by containing plenty of large, clear, color photographs of the jewels discussed and by clear text that gives a lay reader a better idea of the context in which the jewels were created and worn.  It is especially good at reminding the reader that "Byzantine" fashion influenced all of Europe and that it can be difficult to distinguish "Byzantine" fashion from what wealthy people living west of the lands held by that Empire were wearing during the same time periods.

The Byzantium exhibition catalogued in Byzantium and the West features pieces from approximately the 3rd through the 7th centuries C.E., with the primary emphasis placed on the 6th and 7th centuries.  With one exception (an approximately 1.5 inch or 39 mm circular gold brooch set with glass stones and covered in filigree), none of those pieces are brooches; most of them are rings.   Moreover, Spier's writings on later-period jewels concentrate on rings and amulets, not on brooches.  Perhaps that's not surprising.  For all I know, most of the brooches that would be relevant to the wealthy Middle Byzantine peasant costume I hope to recreate are in museums in Turkey that don't publish archaeological reports in English and that I will never get to visit in person.  At any rate, I will have to continue looking for information on brooches as I work on my himation.

Manazan Revision

Some of my readers may recall that my planned Byzantine outfit arose from my recreation of an undergarment, the Manazan shirt, which is on display in the Karaman Museum in Turkey.  My shirt--or, more precisely, shift--was based upon a pattern designed by Peter Beatson based upon examination of photographs of the find, a drawing of which can be seen here.

This week, Beatson published an alteration to his original pattern, which now appears at the very beginning of his article describing his proposed reconstruction. He reports that the photographs of the shirt that he had originally examined gave a misleading impression. A more recent photograph taken from a different angle reveals that the shirt was cut open down the front, from collar to hem, apparently to remove it from the mummified body of its wearer, and was carelessly replaced upon the body later without repairing the cut. The position of the cut gave the impression that the placket-like piece of fabric that covers the collar slit was trapezoidal, with a diagonal slice taken off the side that opens. However, Beatson suggests that it seems more likely in light of the position and effect of the cut that the piece was simply an ordinary rectangle mutilated by the cut used to remove the shirt from the body, as shown in the revised reconstruction.

Beatson also comments on how the museum's decision to cut the shirt and replace it may confuse people as to the gender of the garment's wearer. As currently displayed on the body, the corpse's arms are inside the shirt, but the garment still appears too large for the wearer.  It is also far too short for a woman's garment, though the body is claimed by the museum to be that of a 17-year-old girl.  Beatson suggests that the shirt may have been a man's tunic that was reused as a shroud, which might explain why a girl's corpse was wearing a tunic much too big for it but fails to explain why she was not buried in something that covered more of her body.

For my part, I don't feel the need to make a new Manazan shirt, even though it looks as though the pattern I used was slightly wrong.  But I felt it was worthwhile to draw attention to Peter Beatson's error because it illustrates several hazards in reconstructing garments from archaeological finds.

The first hazard is that is can be easy to get a re-creation of a garment from an archaeological find wrong, simply by making a wrong assumption.  In this case, the wrong assumption was that the front of the garment was still intact, leading to Beatson's erroneous deduction that the placket-piece was a rectangle with a diagonal slice removed from it. 

The second hazard is in assuming that museums always get things right. Not true. In this case, the Karaman Museum mutilated an incredibly valuable find--a 10th century garment that was almost completely intact--and then compounded the problem by replacing it carelessly on the body in a way that tended to obscure what they had done.

The final hazard I suppose can be called complacency, or perhaps failing to re-check one's own assumptions. The photograph that led Beatson to correct his pattern comes from a recent book by Timothy Dawson,  Byzantine Infantryman: Eastern Roman Empire c. 900-1204 (Osprey Warrior 118). Osprey: Oxford 2007.  I own a copy of the book, and had read it--and never bothered to take a close look at the photograph in question.  

So the lesson to take away from the Saga of the Shirt is that it pays to periodically check assumptions--those of your sources as well as your own--when you are attempting to reconstruct clothing from early periods with few surviving finds. 

"Intelligible Beauty" On Line!

The British Museum has put the essays in the book, Intelligible Beauty, on line for free download here. I blogged about it previously here and here.

If you are interested in Byzantine jewelry, this is a great source for essays reflecting the latest research, complete with clear, full-color photographs of surviving examples.  It almost makes me regret having bought my dead-tree copy, even though I got it at a greatly discounted price.  Thanks to Katherine of Yahoo's 12thcenturygarb list for the pointer.

Return to Byzantium--The Tunic

I've been thinking about resuming work on my Middle Byzantine costume. The remaining component I need is to make the green overtunic, or himation (though it turns out that different names were used for such garments in period; see below) to wear with my collared, Manazan-style shirt.

Diagram from Timothy Dawson*, modified to show my planned design

The main problem I foresaw with making the overtunic was applying the trim. Although I am really happy with the design of the trim I selected, that trim is composed of synthetic fibers and is very stiff in texture. Making the trim conform to the curve around the neckline attractively is likely to be impossible.

Recently, I had an idea for solving this problem.

I have a number of scraps of dark blue linen available from my fitted wraparound apron dress project. It occurred to me that I could piece together enough of the scraps to make a strip long enough to go around the neckline and sleeves, and down the opening slit of the himation. If I make this strip wide enough (perhaps three or four inches wide), I could just run a piece of the store-bought trim down the center of the strip around the sleeves, and down the slit at the neckline. The part of the neckline that curves would be ornamented only with the blue linen, which should be easy to conform smoothly to the curve.

This idea was inspired indirectly by an article in the following book, which I obtained through interlibrary loan:

Garland, Lynda, Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200 (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2006).

This book contains an article by Timothy Dawson, author of the Levantia website, about women's costume in the Middle Byzantine period. His photographs of reconstructed costumes on the Levantia site inspired my Byzantine costume in the first place, and I have wanted to read Professor Dawson's article in the Garland book* for quite a while. It is fortunate that I finally obtained the book before proceeding with the tunic, because the Dawson article contained several relevant pieces of information of which I'd previously been unaware.

First, it's by no means clear that I should be calling the garment I have in mind a himation.  Apparently Middle Byzantine clothing terminology, particularly for women's clothing, is far from unambiguous. Terms for an outer tunic include himation, esophorion, roukhon, hypokamision, while delmatikion (from dalmatica), refers most often to the type of tunic with wide-ended hanging sleeves.  Dawson's essay in the Garland book uses esophorion most often for an overtunic with narrow wrist-length sleeves.

Second, it is Professor Dawson's hypothesis that the Manazan tunic belonged to a male. He bases this conclusion--reasonably, in my opinion--upon its shortness (given that it was apparently worn as outerwear) and upon the shortness of the slit giving access to the neckhole.   Eva Andersson has made a 12th century outfit with a similar slit for a similar purpose, since she was nursing her infant at the time; pictures of her outfit and her description of how she made it can be found here.

Third, part of the support for Professor Dawson's hypothesis that the Manazan shirt belonged to a male is that the neckslit associated was very short; it was only big enough to allow the head to pass through. He maintains, quite reasonably, that in an age where all but the highest-ranking people owned few changes of clothing, all women's gowns needed to be able to accommodate a pregnancy and the nursing period that would inevitably follow. Professor Dawson observes that these constraints dictated that women's gowns be relatively loose in the body, with very long neckslits to accommodate breast feeding infants. The sketch above, which comes from Professor Dawson's essay in the Garland book, shows the three types of neckline slit that he believes were likely to have been used for women's garments, namely: (1) a slit along the left shoulder; (2) a deep slit down the center; and (3) a deep slit down the left front of the body. These locations are marked on the diagram as "A", "B", and "C" respectively.

I don't intend to re-make my Manazan-style shirt now, partly because I still want to be able to continue to wear it after all of the hand-stitching it took to make and partly because, as an undergarment, its neckslit won't be seen when the shirt is worn under another tunic and I am old enough not to need to accommodate pregnancy or nursing activities. But I can make my esophorion consistent with Dawson's ideas, as his research contains the best information presently available to me on the subject.

I originally thought to place the slit for the neckline along the left shoulder. That would still be consistent with Professor Dawson's ideas, but gives me less ability to display the trim I purchased for decoration, particularly if I don't place the trim along the neckline curve as well as beside the slit. On the other hand, use of a long slit down the front of the tunic will showcase the trim nicely.  I think the left-side option labeled "C" is the most attractive option, so I will adopt it instead of the on-the-shoulder placement.   On the diagram above, I have highlighted the places on the tunic that I will ornament. The light blue highlighting represents the blue linen I will use, while the dark lines represent placement of my store-bought trim.

The Dawson sketch suggests that the long neckline slits extended down to, if not past, the waistline. I don't see why such a long slit would be necessary. Even if I needed to accommodate nursing a baby while wearing the tunic, a slit that ended an inch or two above my waist would be more than ample to allow me to pull my breast free (if duplicated on both shift and tunic, that is) and would be less likely to gape when the top of the slit is fastened closed.  I have already found a bead to use to close the slit at neck level.

I expect to be out of town for a week starting November 7, but hopefully I can begin cutting and sewing either this weekend or soon after my return.  If I run into further design issues, I expect to blog about them.  Watch this space for new developments!




* Dawson, Timothy. "Propriety, Practicality and Pleasure: the Parameters of Women's Dress in Byzantium, A.D. 1000-1200", in Garland, Lynda, Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200, pp. 41-75 (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2006).

Intelligible Beauty

The copy of Intelligible Beauty:  Recent Research Into Byzantine Jewelry that I ordered came today.  

As advertised, it contains a number of essays on issues relating to Byzantine jewelry.  Happily, most of the essays are illustrated with a wealth of excellent, color photographs.  The articles appear mostly to be split between Early Byzantine and Middle Byzantine topics, though there is at least one that discusses Late Byzantine artifacts.

I have not had time to sit down and concentrate on reading any of the essays as yet, but I have paged through the book several times, looking for pictures of brooches.  There are surprisingly few.  There are dozens of pictures of rings (mostly gold ones, some with jewels), earrings (mostly gold, with enamel and sometimes pearls), bracelets (mostly gold, with elaborate openwork), buckles and belt ends (some gold, but others of humble copper alloys), and temple rings (a form of ornament favored by the Rus). But pictures of brooches are rare.  I have only seen pictures of a few gold brooches in the book.  On the other hand, all of the brooches are circular, with a central gem or boss and ornaments spaced symmetrically around the edge--like the image of Christ's ancestor by the Winchester scribe, or the brooch from Raymond's Quiet Press. 

I am not sorry that I purchased the book, even though it may not be as useful as I had hoped in determining suitable brooch designs for a wealthy Middle Byzantine era peasant.  It contains many lovely photographs of interesting jewels that I had never seen before, and discusses jewelry trends from different areas of the Empire:, such as Sicily, Africa, the lands of the Rus.  And as I read, I probably will discover at least a few topics interesting enough to discuss in this blog.

Byzantine Brooch Designs

Although I've been too preoccupied with domestic concerns to do a lot of sewing lately, I have been continuing to track down information relevant to the various projects I've started when I can. 

One of those projects is my Middle Byzantine outfit.  I have completed the headdress, shift, and cloak.  Right now, I'm trying to find out what types of brooches a respectable lower class woman might wear to fasten her cloak.  I didn't find much useful information about this subject on the Internet.  This page was the most useful page I found; it shows two different examples of bronze enameled brooches which look as though they might have been purchased and worn by ordinary people.  However, without more information about where these brooches were found it's hard to say how appropriate it might be to use brooches of these shapes and appearance in my lower-class costume. 

Birka Traders used to sell a Byzantine brooch of the correct time period that is based on a Danish find.  It might have served, (even though it was smaller than I expected) but I wasn't prepared to pay $60 AUS for a brooch I would only be wearing with one costume.  It was a very attractive piece, though; you can see it here.

Qui Fuit Her

My other Internet searches for such items unearthed designs in gold and precious stones--clearly not suitable.  In the hopes of finding a broader variety of jewelry finds to examine, I recently purchased a copy of the museum catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of Middle Byzantine art, called "The Glory of Byzantium--A.D. 843-1261." 

The Glory of Byzantium" includes a lot of examples of jewelry, icons, ivory carvings, miniature paintings, mosaics and textiles.  Unfortunately for me, most of the jewelry items are not only gold, but they are either earrings or temple rings--nothing to fasten a cloak with!  I have found a painting with an interesting image.  That painting is one of three "Ancestors of Christ" found in a convent in Spain (the Convent of Santa Maria, in Sigena), and attributed to the same English artist who did the Winchester Psalter, and it is called "Her" (because the inscription below it reads "Qui Fuit Her").  A scan of the image appears to the left of this paragraph.  As you can see, it shows a figure wearing a cloak, clasped at the neck with a small brooch.  That brooch features a central pearl, with a ring of red enamel around it, and eight other pearls of equal size around the edge. (See image on the left, below.)

Norman brooch from RQP

"Her", portion showing brooch

This brooch looks a bit like a bronze brooch with a modest amount of enameling that is sold by Raymond's Quiet Press as a "Norman" brooch (see right; thanks to Raymond for permission to use the photograph here).  Unfortunately, the RQP web site doesn't say what the provenance of this design might be, and I have not  seen an artifact that resembles it.

If the Norman attribution of the RQP design is correct, it is at least contemporaneous with the Middle Byzantine period.   I probably will purchase the RQP brooch, but in the meantime I am still hoping to obtain more information about Byzantine brooches to see whether I can confirm the appropriateness of the design with a costume that would have been worn in the Near East of the period.  To that end, I have succeeded in locating a copy of "Intelligible Beauty" (a recent work of essays about Byzantine jewelry) in my price range, and have ordered it.  Perhaps that that work will provide me with additional examples of typical period designs that were used by people other than society's elite.

Byzantine Medical Costume

I was looking for photographs of Middle Byzantine brooches for the costume I'm planning when I came across an interesting website called Maestra Anya's Big Blog of Medieval Miscellany. One of the older posts was about physicians' costume in Byzantium. It includes pictures from period illuminated manuscripts. Apparently physicians in Byzantium, at least during the late medieval period, customarily wore blue, or blue-green robes. I find this sort of detail fascinating. Maestra Anya's blog includes posts about other interesting items and facts; I recommend that any reader interested in the Middle Ages check it out.

EDIT:  to correct my misstatement about the time period from which the illustrations featured in Maestra Anya's post originate.

Article on Eleventh Century Brooches

During a somewhat random search, I turned up the following article about 11th century cloisonné brooches found in England: Buckton, David. "Late 10th- and 11th-century cloisonné enamel brooches," Medieval Archaeology, vol. 30, pp. 8-18 (1986). A copy is available for free download here.

The brooches Mr. Buckton discusses and describes in the article are all very similar. They are small round copper brooches, each about 1 inch (25 mm) in diameter, and they are decorated with enamel in a number of variations of quadrefoil and cross designs, done primarily in dark blue, light blue, light green, and white translucent enamels.   One of Mr. Buckton's sketches, showing several of the designs found on the English brooches is reproduced to the right of this paragraph. His conclusion about the origin of the designs and the design style in particular caught my attention:

The upsurge of enamelling represented by the English finds, unless it is to be regarded as an isolated phenomenon, has to be seen in the context of what was happening elsewhere. There was a hiatus in enamel production in continental Europe between the 860s and the 960s or 970s, and the subsequent renascence in the reigns of the first two German emperors, with their dynastic ties to Byzantium (and, incidentally, to England), saw the production of a great quantity of high-quality cloisonné enamel, under strong Byzantine influence and, probably, using Byzantine raw materials--imported gold solidi and glass mosaic tesserae. (Page 15) (emphasis mine).

Mr. Buckton goes on to suggest that not only were the material of the brooches suggestive of Byzantine influence--the motifs on the brooches were as well:

While rosette and other flower patterns are notoriously difficult to pin down, the double step motif found in the cloisonné enamel [brooch] from Dunstable and, in a less precise form, in the centrepiece of the brooch from Kent and in the fragment from Billingsgate* is practically a Leitmotiv of Middle Byzantine or Ottonian cloisonné enamel, starting with the reliquary of the True Cross made in Constantinople, probably between 973 and 982, the cathedral treasury at Essen.** Even though the motif had a longer tradition in other media, its appearance in English cloisonné enamel is difficult to relate to anything other than Byzantine or Ottonian enamel of the last third of the 10th century and the first half of the 11th. (Page 16) (emphasis mine)

These comments caught my eye because they suggest that similar brooches, bearing similar enameled motifs, were also available in Byzantium during the late 10th-early 11th centuries. Granted, that fact would not answer my question about the most appropriate brooch style to wear with my mantion (since the English enameled brooches are all too small to hold a heavy cloak). But it does suggest possible design motifs for such a brooch. And it makes me more interested in obtaining a copy of Intelligible Beauty and see whether it references similar brooch motifs.

EDIT (Feb. 5, 2012):  I have learned from a reader that the Archaeology Data Service link above to the article no longer works.  If I can find a new link to the article that is free I will replace the link above.

EDIT:  It is still possible to get the article online from Archaeology Data Service. Follow this link; it will take you to a page where they will ask you to accept their terms of use. After you do, it will take you to their index page, where you can select the volume of Medieval Archaeology from 1-50 that you want, and ultimately the article.


* The Dunstable and Billingsgate designs referred to in this quote are, I believe, numbers 13 and 14 in the illustration that appears with this post.

** I think this is a picture of the True Cross reliquary to which Buckton referred. Unfortunately, the photograph does not show the enameled panel near the foot of the cross (which has a similar color scheme to the one Buckton describes in the English brooch finds) very well.

Behold! A Mantion!

Several days ago, I finally completed the mantion, or cloak, that is a part of my planned Middle Byzantine costume, but I wanted to wait to post about it until I had photographs. Finally, this weekend, I wore it with the other completed portions of the costume at a science fiction convention, and my husband, Tigger, took the pictures that appear with this post.

The gold tunic I am wearing in the pictures is the same machine-sewn tunic I wore for the pictures of my wool Hedeby apron dress.  It has a keyhole neckline, which is wrong for the costume (Byzantine artwork shows women wearing simple round necked tunics over their collared shifts; such tunics usually had a shoulder slit closed with a small round button). I'm wearing the gold tunic because it was handy, I have yet to start the himation that will be the final component of this costume, and I didn't want to wear the cloak over the Manazan undershirt alone.  The belt is an inkle-woven belt in a "Greek key" pattern that I bought years ago.  The brooch is a reproduction of a Viking design that my husband bought for me in a museum shop in Sweden; I'm using it because it's the right size and shape for the purpose, and I still haven't decided where or how to obtain a brooch with a more period-appropriate design.

Before letting my husband take the rearview picture, I asked him if the veil on my savanion was straight.  He said, "Reasonably."  Against my better judgment, I let him take the picture anyway, without checking.  I thought of asking him to straighten it first, but then figured that if he thought it was already straight, doing that might not make a significant difference. 

In the last photo, I am standing somewhat crookedly--one of my legs is about a quarter of an inch shorter than the other, so I tend to tilt sideways if I'm tired unless I really concentrate on standing straight and place my feet carefully. The photograph represents the cloak's colors pretty well; it really is that blue, though I'm surprised that it photographed so well in a dimly-lit hotel room at night.

Now I truly have no more excuses; I have to cut my pretty green linen and proceed with the himation.  I think it will look much better with the blue mantion than the gold tunic does.