Gores with a Wrapped Aprondress--Another View

Quite a while ago, I attempted to combine a wraparound Viking apron dress with gores, to give more room and a nice flare to the skirt.  My result was awkward looking, and based on how it came out, I decided that it was implausible, at best, that Viking women would have added gores to a wrapped dress.

Recently, however, I found a picture of a garment based on the same idea on the blog A Most Peculiar Mademoiselle, now revamped and renamed A Most Peculiar Seamstress.  You can see a picture of Sarah's dress here, although the accompanying post doesn't really discuss its construction; it mostly talks about what she did with the wrapped apron dress after it was vandalized by carpet beetles.

Sarah's dress does not look at all like mine; it is sleek and its hemline is beautifully even.  Of course, my wraparound dress was made from linen.  Sarah's dress was made from wool (which is why the carpet beetles were eager to eat it).  That would have made a considerable difference to the way the dress hung and draped.  I shall have to write to her and see if she can tell me more about her design.

At any rate, Sarah's successful design contradicts my original conclusion and leaves open the possibility that gored, wrapped apron dresses were worn by some Viking women.

Band and Cord for My Køstrup Project

The tablet-woven band and wool cord for the Køstrup apron dress that I am planning to make have arrived!  

I am very pleased with the quality of both band and cord, and also with the fact that the band and cord are a good match in color for each other (though the band looks much darker in my photographs).  The photographs are clickable to show the image larger and with more detail.

After I downloaded these pictures, it occurred to me that I had forgotten to include an item in them that would show the scale of the cord and band!  Perhaps some actual measurements will help.  From the beginning of the fringe on each end, the band measures 25.5 cm (about 10 inches) long and 1.8 cm (about 3/4ths of an inch) wide.  The cord looks as though it's a lighter blue than the band, but I think that is because it is plied from wool felt, and thus reflects light a little differently than the threads in the tablet-woven band.  

The fabric for the planned apron dress is a single-tone herringbone twill in a rose-red shade which should look lovely with the blue.  However, it will look visually different from the original Køstrup dress in at least two respects.  First, it will be in a twill weave (the Køstrup fragments are woven in tabby) and it will not be blue (the Køstrup fragments had been dyed blue).  But my primary objective is to demonstrate how I think the tablet woven band and the cords trimming it were fastened to the dress, and that should be easier to observe given that the dress itself will be a different color from the band.

A Køstrup Band!

In her paper on the Køstrup smokkr, Hilde Thunem mentions that she persuaded a friend to make a tablet-woven band for her Køstrup smokkr (i.e., apron dress) because she could not do one herself.    Nor can I; I do not know how to do brocaded tablet weaving, and I do not have the time and patience to acquire such skill at present.  

However, a week or two ago, I was delighted to discover that a seller on Etsy is selling reproductions of various Birka bands, and of the Køstrup one as well!  You can see the seller's Etsy store here, and one version of the Køstrup band is selling here.  I have already ordered that band for the Køstrup smokkr I'm planning to make.

Another Etsy vendor is selling a plied wool felt cord here; I will probably order that for my project as well.  

The Køstrup Dress: The Woven Band

Hilde's photograph of the surviving Køstrup band (used with permission)

For quite some time, I've been doing some thinking about modern reproductions of Viking age finds that are clearly associated with tortoise brooches, and (in all probability) with the smokkr or "apron dress", the sleeveless overdress that appears to be characteristic of Viking women's costume.  In doing so, I have been inspired by the work of independent researcher Hilde Thunem.

Hilde reads three of the languages in which many of the archaeological papers relating to Viking Age Scandinavian costume are written, namely, Norwegian, German, and English.  She has written several long, excellent papers of her own, summarizing that research and drawing her own conclusions from it.  Her paper on the smokkr may be read on the Internet here.

Hilde's conclusion seem to be based largely upon the analysis of Danish researchers Rasmussen and Lønborg, who did a detailed analysis of the Køstrup find.*  Based upon Hilde's summary in her essay (the Rasmussen and Lønborg work does not seem to be available in English), Rasmussen and Lønborg conclude that the band was fastened only to the front loops, and not to the top edge of the apron dress.  It is clear that the band was fastened to at least one of the front loops, because, as the photograph of the actual Køstrup band shows, one of the loops is still attached to that band.  But as Hilde notes, there is no consensus as to how the wool strings (also shown in the above photograph) were attached, and the extent that they were attached, to the tablet woven band and/or the smokkr itself.

Although it's clear from Hilde's comments about wearing her reconstructed dress that it's neither awkward nor impractical to sew a tablet-woven band just above the top edge, above the pleated section, something about the look of the finished result bothered me.  It bothered me because I couldn't figure out why a Viking woman might have designed her dress this way.

Top edge of Hilde's smokkr, showing band attachment (used with permission)

So I started thinking about Hilde's Køstrup smokkr design from a functional perspective. By that I mean I've been trying to think about each element of the dress's design and what purpose it serves.

For example, the straps and loops on the dress allow it to be fastened on the body without all the clumping and bunching of fabric that happens when you pin a strapless, tube-shaped peplos dress on the shoulders through several layers of cloth.

Similarly, the tortoise-shaped brooch is an improvement over the disk and cross-bow shaped brooches previously used because it can accommodate a number of straps for the dress and for hanging tools and accessories without sticking out awkwardly from the woman's body.  The smokkr design, coupled with tortoise brooches for fastening, also makes it easier to unpin and repin one shoulder in case the woman needs to pull the front of her dress down while remaining clothed (e.g., for breastfeeding purposes).**

Then I thought about the pleated area and the tablet-woven band above the pleated area at the top of the gown.  What purpose do those features serve?

Hilde's blue smokkr illustrates one possible, logical purpose of the pleats; they allow a close, attractive fit of the gown across the breasts while allowing for at least a bit more fullness around the torso, achieving what some of us call today a "figure skimming fit". The result is particularly flattering on a pregnant woman, as Hilde's own photographs of her dress (modeled while she was pregnant) indicate.  Moreover, there are at least two northern European finds from the late medieval period that use sections of small pleats in a similar manner, to create special shaping for a dress.  One is the Uvdal find from Norway, and another, which I learned about from Katrin Kania's blog, is a dress reconstruction based upon a pleated textile find from Turku, in Finland.  So it is not absurd to conclude, as Hilde did, that the pleated apron dress finds from Scandinavia represent early attempts to use pleated sections of fabric in women's dress design.

But why place the tablet woven band above the top edge of the dress?  It seems to me that placement of the band must be due, at least in part, to the pleats in the section of the dress that lies between the brooches.***

My Køstrup dress, made at a time when I had little information
about the band's attachment and size, and the size of the dress pleats.
(Photo by my husband, cropped by me)

When I made my version of the Køstrup dress over a decade ago, I didn't have very much information about the size of the pleats, or the length of the area they were supposed to cover, so I extended the pleated area from brooch to brooch, and made the pleats very deep--about an inch or so.  Then I stitched a piece of purchased trim (a substitute for the tablet woven band) right on top of the pleats, to help hold them in place.  Stitching the band down in this manner achieved that purpose, all right--but the top edge of my dress looks lumpy and weird, as the photograph to the left shows.

So it seems reasonable that the Køstrup band might have been fastened to the dress above the pleats to avoid mashing them down and crushing them.  And that's what Hilde did.  She sewed the tablet-woven band to the lower loops on the apron dress.  Her photos appear to indicate that the bottom of the band rests approximately a centimeter above the top edge of the dress.

But Hilde's reconstruction, unlike the band on the original Køstrup dress, does not have strings (thin cords, actually) sewn to the top and bottom of the tablet-woven band.  The presence of those strings in the original find is another detail I was unaware of until I read Hilde's paper about the Køstrup dress.  That fact may make Hilde's reconstruction less useful in understanding how the tablet-woven band was fastened to the original dress.

The existence of those strings suggests an alternative reason as to why we do not see evidence that the band was stitched to the apron dress.  The stitching may have passed into the very top edge of the pleats and just through the strings, or between the strings and the edges of the band, without entering the band at all.  Most of the wool string does not survive either--making it difficult to look for holes made by stitching thread to prove or disprove this hypothesis.  Hilde's essay notes that there are finds from Birka that are ornamented only with a string or cord sewn along the top edge (Grave Nos. 511, 563, 838, 954, 973, 1083, and 1084).  It might be useful to know what type of stitch was used to fasten the string to the edges of these Birka smokkrs.

Just as Nille Glaesel disagrees with Hilde about how the Køstrup pleats were formed and stabilized, she also has a different view from Hilde about how the tablet woven piece was fastened to the top edge of the Køstrup dress. Ms. Glaesel notes that Rasmussen and Lønborg suggest, in their research paper on the Køstrup find, that the top of the dress was finished by folding the top half-centimeter of the cloth to the reverse side and stitching it in place (page 4).  However, Ms. Glaesel observes that, in a Viking era fabric such as the 1/1 tabby of the Køstrup find, the warp was "hard spun" and prone to fray unless it was "secured" with a piece of another fabric.  Thus, she believes that a piece of another fabric--probably linen, for no such fabric survives--was fastened to the tablet-woven band, and the band was stitched to the top of the apron dress along the edge of the linen piece sewed to the band.  But Ms. Glaesel does not indicate where the wool strings fit into this view of the Køstrup smokkr's construction.  Moreover, if a linen strip was sewn  to the top edge of the smokkr to "secure" that edge from fraying, it would be more likely, not less likely, that stitch holes in the smokkr's top edge would be apparent, and they are not.  There is no fraying apparent on the top edge of the smokkr's pleats, which more strongly supports Rasumussen and Lønborg's view that the top edge of the fabric was folded over before the pleats were made.

I think the key to understanding the placement of the tablet woven piece on the Køstrup dress is knowing that there were strings positioned on both edges of the band.  Although the strings and band may well have been sewn to the loops first, as Hilde has done with the band on her dress, the fact that the strings were present may explain why there are no apparent stitch holes in the band itself, and suggests a different theory as to how and where the band may actually have been attached to the dress.

The maker of the Køstrup dress could have "secured" the band-with-attached-strings to the pleated top edge of the smokkr by tacking the lower string to the top edge of all, or just some, of the pleats. The sewing needle need not have pierced the string--it might have encircled the string and entered under neath a thread at the top edge of the fold of each pleat, where it would be hard to detect a hole.  Alternatively, the needle might have passed between the strands of the string (which the photographs clearly indicate was plied) in a way that would not leave a hole.  Either way, the string would then be tacked to the band, and another string tacked to the band's top edge. The way the strings have come loose from the original Køstrup band suggest that they were never sewn very tightly or with closely-spaced stitches, either of which would have been more likely to leave holes.****

In short, I believe that there likely was not a large visible space between the bottom of the band-and-strings-combination.  I think the strings were lightly tacked to the band, and the band-with-strings was, in turn, lightly tacked to the top edge of the smokkr and stitched more firmly to the front loops of the dress.  Though it is difficult to tell even from the excellent photograph Hilde has provided, it looks to me as though parts of the string can be seen on the lower left-side of the photograph, still tacked to the band.  If that is true and my own biases are not misleading me, that supports my view of how the band was fastened to the smokkr.

I think my rose-red herringbone wool smokkr project has found a mission.  I can make my own Køstrup smokkr using the same type of pattern Hilde used, but adding wool strings (assuming I can find or make suitable ones) and attaching the tablet-woven band in the way I've just suggested.

Apologies to anyone who saw this piece on my blog or on Google Plus several weeks ago, when I posted an incomplete version by accident and then removed it.


*      Rasmussen, L. and Lønborg, B. 1993. Dragtrester i grav ACQ, Køstrup. Fyndske minder, Odense Bys Museer Årbog. 

**    My own experiences with wearing peplos dresses with different kinds of brooches as well as apron dresses with tortoise brooches confirms the difference in convenience in pinning and re-pinning one's overdress. It is much easier to repin an apron dress, where the pins only need go through loops of cloth, than it is to repin a peplos, which requires one to pin one's brooches through two folded edges of cloth (front and back).  This convenience advantage remains even if one is wearing one or more bead strings with the brooches, provided you allow the strands to sink to the bottom of the brooch pin during the fastening process. 

***   I agree that the pleated section of the Køstrup smokkr was located in the center front of the dress, not under the arm or in an otherwise non-central position.  Because I am focusing on the question of how the tablet-woven band was attached, I do not discuss the evidence for the central location of the pleated section here.

**** It is an interesting question whether research has been done as to the extent to which stitch holes remain in fabric after the thread from the stitching has disappeared in the grave.   Such research might also help answer the question of how the Køstrup band was fastened to the smokkr.

A Random Thought About Viking Apron Dresses

Simple wool tube apron dress
(photo by my husband)

A pair of flat apron dresses,
wrapped in opposite directions
(photo by my husband)

A lined, wrapped, flat apron dress
(photo by my husband)

This afternoon, I had a random thought about Viking apron dresses--the sleeveless overdress associated with heavy bronze tortoise brooches that is associated with women's graves in Scandinavia during the Viking age. The purpose of this post is to clarify that thought and explain it.

As Hilde Thunem and others have observed, the surviving archaeological evidence at Kostrup shows that the Kostrup apron dress likely was a tube with a small section of pleating, probably located at the center front. The Hedeby fragment, believed to have been from an apron dress though this cannot be determined with certainty because it was not found in a grave, likely was part of a fitted garment. If that garment was an apron dress, it too would have been generally tube-shaped.

In her excellent general research article on apron dresses, Ms. Thunem summarizes a large number of textile finds that also appear to be from apron dresses. She mentions a number of textile finds in Norway that include pleated wool sections, similar to the pleated section on the Kostrup find.

Based upon these finds, Ms. Thunem and others have concluded that the apron dress, despite differences in design, generally had a tube shape throughout Scandinavia.  For that reason, she is comfortable with using the term smokkr to describe it.  Smokkr, a word used to describe a woman's clothing in one of the Norse sagas, is etymologically related to the verb that means "to creep through"--an apt name for a tube-shaped garment.

But if you examine all of the Scandinavian evidence in context, the overall picture is slightly different. Here is a brief summary of that evidence as I understand it.

• The textile finds that support the idea of a tube-shaped dress with pleats or a fitted dress of some kind come from Norway and Denmark, not Sweden.
• The Birka finds (from Sweden) believed to be part of an apron dress are not pleated, and do not show a seam or other evidence indicating that they might be part of a tube-shaped garment.
• The Pskov find (from Russia) that is believed to have been part of an apron dress (the folded textile fragments found wrapped around tortoise brooches) also does not appear to have had a seam.
• There are no finds in Norway or Denmark that resemble the Birka "apron dress" finds, which Agnes Geijer theorized were wrapped around the body instead of being sewn into a tube.

The thought I had this afternoon is that perhaps apron dress construction differed by region.  So far, the physical evidence amply supports Hilde Thunem's conclusion that apron dresses in Norway and Denmark were constructed in a general tube shape, a shape which evolved (possibly by becoming more fitted?) over time.

In contrast, the physical evidence suggests that Swedish apron dresses, and likely also the Pskov garment, were flat sheets furnished with small loops, which were wrapped around the body to form an overdress.   But this evidence does not necessarily contradict Ms. Thunem's conclusion that apron dresses were tube-shaped all over Scandinavia. Although a wrapped apron dress looks very different from a sewn-tube-shaped dress when they are not being worn, both types can look very similar in wear.  The photographs of three of my apron dresses, shown at the upper right, illustrate the point.

I also agree with Ms. Thunem that Flemming Bau's theory of open-fronted apron dresses is not well-supported by the evidence.  She correctly notes that Inga Hagg and Thor Ewing explain why the physical evidence Bau cites does not require, let alone compel, the conclusion that any of the finds to which Bau refers was an open-fronted overdress.

So although the apron dress may have been made in different ways in different places at different times during the Viking age, its basic appearance--that of a tube suspended from tortoise brooches--tended to remain the same.    Ms. Thunem notes that there may have been minor differences in appearance.  I agree, and I think such differences likely resulted from differences in construction, as I've suggested above.  Moreover, since images of women on Viking pendants and other period art do not clearly show the apron dress, they provide no reason either to argue for a particular construction or to refute the theory that all apron dresses appeared to be tube-shaped in wear.

If any of my readers know of Swedish finds that support the idea of a tube-shaped construction, or of any evidence that might bear upon apron dress construction that is not discussed by Hilde Thunem or referred to above, please let me know in the comments.

The Woman in Blue--Online!

I just learned from a post by Jenn Culler on one of the Viking era clothing groups on Facebook that the Northern Women's Arts Collaborative has put a substantial version of the clothing information about the "Lady in Blue" find on the Internet, in English.  Go here to see the page, complete with illustrations, for yourself.  

A second page, webbed by the same group, provides an excellent English language description of the Marled Maher's and Marianne Guckelsberger's project of recreating the apron dress in which the "Lady in Blue" was buried.  That page may be found here.

Links to other textile projects, some of which have relevance to the Viking period, can be found at the home page for the Northern Women's Arts Collaborative, here. Enjoy! 

The Køstrup Dress--The Pleats

A few years ago, Hilde Thunem published a web article about her examination of the surviving fragments from the Køstrup smokkr or apron dress, and updated her broader essay about Viking apron dresses to include a discussion of how she believes that dress was made, with pictures of an apron dress she made for herself based on her in-person analysis of the Køstrup fragments. 

Last year, I found a paper on the web by Nille Glaesel, who many people consider to be an expert on apron dress construction, about her theories of how the Køstrup smokkr was made.  Like Hilde Thunem, Ms. Glaesel has also had an opportunity to examine the Køstrup finds.  Unlike Ms. Thunem, Ms. Glaesel has significant experience, not just with sewing period clothing but also with weaving tablet-made bands and using a warp-weighted loom to make fabric.  Her experience leads her to some interesting conclusions that are different from Hilde's. (Because the paper is located in the files of a closed Facebook group, I am not comfortable with making it available for free download here. Interested readers of this blog may wish to seek and obtain admission to the group "Scholarly Discussion on Viking Age Clothing" to obtain a copy.)

In the meantime, I would like to summarize Ms. Glaesel's approach and conclusions here, as they provide excellent food for thought, not only about apron dress construction in general, but on how to make deductions based on archaeological finds.  Since I began writing this post, I have found descriptions of two other reconstructions of the Køstrup smokkr and have incorporated them into this discussion.

Ms. Glaesel titled her paper, "The Køstrup Apron Dress Interpreted by a Crafter".  As was true for Hilde Thunem, Ms. Glaesel's experience in making apron dresses has greatly influenced her conclusions about the construction of the original.  Unlike Hilde Thunem, Ms. Glaesel not only sews her own Viking clothing, but she also has experience with weaving cloth on a warp-weighted loom like the looms used by Viking women, and her experience in weaving cloth has significantly influenced her thoughts about the construction of the Køstrup smokkr.

Nille Glaesel's paper discusses several different issues that relate to how the Køstrup smokkr, but in this post I will only comment on what is perhaps the most obvious question, namely, how the pleats in the center front of the smokkr were created and secured.

The Smokkrs.   Hilde Thunem had some difficulty coming up with an effective method for securing the pleats on her Køstrup smokkr.  After an initial unsuccessful attempt to fix pleats in position by steaming, she ended up creating her pleats by drawing linen threads through the relevant section of fabric, and then anchoring them with stitches placed on the inside of the garment, perpendicular to the pleats (see Alternative 3 in the construction section of her paper).

In contrast, Ms. Glaesel believes that the pleating found in the Køstrup fragment was created while the dress fabric was still on the loom, by pulling certain threads in the woven fabric tight while the fabric was still on the loom and then steaming the fabric to set the pleats after the weaving was complete (page 5, see also page 21). Because she believes this is how the pleating is done, she also believes that the pleats ran the entire length of the dress from top to bottom, and that the pleated section was sewn into the dress after the pleating was completed--though she admits that she cannot tell whether there is evidence of a seam beside the pleated portions (page 6).

Jenn Culler, in making her own Køstrup reconstruction, mostly agrees with Hilde Thunem.  Like Nille Glaesel, Jenn is a weaver (though she used a modern loom, not a warp-weighted loom, to create the fabric for her smokkr). Jenn has said that she believes that the method of creating the pleats while the dress is on the loom is "far more tedious of a process than simply drawing the pleats on a thread after the garment is crafted."  She believes that stabilizing stitches made on the inside of the garment are plausible, even though stitch holes do not appear on the surviving pleated fragment, in part because "[s]titches added from behind could penetrate the web of the textile, without impaling individual weaving threads."*  The stabilizing stitches for Jenn's pleats are whip stitched on the inside of the garment.

Finally, Kristine Risberg took a somewhat different approach to making and stabilizing the pleats on her Køstrup smokkr.  Kristine, like Jenn, drew up the fabric into pleats with linen thread, which she left in place "because I don’t know if the pleating would hold should the thread be removed." However, she also chose to back the pleated area with a piece of linen--an approach Hilde originally tried but ultimately rejected.  It should be noted, however, that Kristine's approach resulted in pleats that are much wider than the pleats on the original Køstrup dress: 8mm wide, instead of 2-3 mm wide.

My Thoughts.

For my part, I think that the very narrowness of the original pleats is inconsistent with the idea that any kind of lining or backing was used for the pleated section.  If such a lining was used but dissolved in the grave, the resulting pleats would now appear wider and looser than they actually are, as Kristine's smokkr indicates.

I also think that it is likely that the pleats were formed by drawing threads through the pleated areas, and likely kept in place with stitches taken across the back side of the pleated area.  Why?  Because it seems likely to me that the time it would take to boil enough water to produce a suitable amount of steam, and the effort it would take to attempt to steam the pleated fabric above the open-fire-heated cauldrons used for cooking, would have made efforts to steam-set such pleats impractical.**  That would be particularly true if, as Nille Glaesel believes, the pleats extended all the way from the top of the apron dress to its bottom hem (an issue as to which there currently is no evidence whatsoever).  

I do not have difficulty believing that linen gathering and stabilizing stitches would have dissolved in the grave.  It is generally believed that linen undergarments, at least, were quite common in Viking times due to the presence of scraps preserved near metal grave goods and by the discovery of linen-processing tools.   Except for tiny scraps preserved by proximity to metal items, however, linen is not found in Scandinavian graves.  In addition, Hilde notes that there are gaps in the weave of the tablet-woven band at the top of the Køstrup dress, a feature best explained by the dissolution of linen or other vegetable fiber threads underground. 

As for Nille Glaesel's suggestion that the pleats were formed as the pleated strip was being woven,   I am inclined to believe this method of pleating viable (because Ms. Glaesel is the only one of the reconstructionists who has woven fabric for her apron dresses on a warp-weighted loom, the type used during the Viking age), but any argument that this was the method actually used on the Køstrup smokkr is refuted by the fact that the pleated area does not show seams on both sides of the pleated area.  I do not see how the weaving method  Ms. Glaesel proposes could be used to pleat only a portion of a larger sheet of fabric, and that is the only possibility that would be consistent both with pleating the fabric while it was on the loom and with the lack of seams on both sides of the pleated section.   In addition, as I said above, I do not think that it would be practical to set pleats in fabric with steam using Viking age technology, and Ms. Glaesel proposes this technique also.

So at this point, I believe that Jenn Culler's method of pleating and stabilizing the pleats is most consistent with the available evidence.*** Unfortunately, a definitive conclusion to these questions will not be possible unless another, better-preserved pleated apron dress find is located.

Nille Glaesel's paper also discusses the question of how the tablet-woven band found in the Køstrup grave was fastened to the top of the smokkr, but I will talk about that in another post.

*   See this blog for yet another reconstruction which uses construction techniques similar to Jenn Culler's.

** Volker Bach noted, in Compleat Anachronist No. 156 (Society for Creative Anachronism, Second Quarter 2012) that it is nearly impossible to reach a full rolling boil using the cooking technologies available in the Carolingian Era: 

"Carolingian cooks mostly used woodfires, and it is likely that the most common technique was boiling or simmering in clay pots. These would slowly have built up to a gentle heat. Cooking food at a rolling boil is almost impossible in them, and their results are best replicated by gently baking a cooking container or cooking on a gentle heat. ... Metal cookware was probably confined to larger households. ... Still, a cooking vessel suspended over a fire is not going to produce the concentrated heat of a modern stovetop unless it touches the flame directly." (p. 26).

In Daniel Serra and Hanna Tunberg's book, An Early Meal:  A Viking Age Cookbook and Cultural Odyssey (ChronoCopia Publishing AB 2013) the authors note that boiling in metal cauldrons over a wood fire was a common food preparation technique among the Vikings (p. 23) but they do not state or even suggest that a rolling boil was used.  Moreover, the authors state that most of the foods cooked would have been porridges and stews, and these are foods typically cooked (even today) by long simmering, not vigorous boiling.  The point is that boiling water hard enough, and for long enough, to produce sufficient steam to fix pleats in fabric, should not be assumed to have been a simple matter with Viking era technology.

*** No, I did not reach this conclusion because of my fondness for using whip stitching in sewing period clothing!  Also note that, despite her original attempts to steam-set the pleats in her smokkr and to stabilize the resulting pleats with a backing of linen, Hilde Thunem's final smokkr deals with the pleats in much the same way as Jenn Culler's--i.e., creating them with drawn threads and stabilizing them with stitches taken on the inside of the garment.

The Woman in Blue--A Final Note

It turns out that to purchase a copy of the National Museum of Iceland's 70-page exhibition volume about the "Woman in Blue" would cost approximately $78 USD. That's about $24 USD for the book's price, about $31 USD for postage to the US, and about $23 USD for customs charges! So I won't be buying the book any time soon, alas. 

For those of my readers who can't arrange a quick trip to Iceland to buy the book there, I figured I'd end the month of May, and my series of  "Woman in Blue" posts, with a shout out to the blog of Marled Mader. Marled and Marianne Guckelsberger worked together to make a reproduction of the apron dress worn by the Woman in Blue, based upon information available in the National Museum's book. They recorded their progress step by step on Marled's blog, Archäotechnik - textile Fläche. If you want to read each entry starting with the first one (there are 12 of them), go to this page and start with the link for "Teil 1" under the heading "Island-Projekt".   The last installment includes some marvelous pictures of the finished recreated dress.

As the title indicates, Archäotechnik - textile Fläche is written in German, but using Google Translate on each entry results in a translation that is mostly intelligible to an English speaker.  I think it's a very worthwhile read for those interested in the Viking apron dress and how it may have been made, and worn.

More About "The Woman in Blue"

In my last post, I drew my readers' attention to a Viking age burial in Iceland that was discovered in 1938 but has only recently been analyzed.

A reader of my blog, Marled, who with a colleague has been experimenting with weaving and then sewing a reproduction of the woman's apron dress (see the comments on my last post), mentioned to me that the National Museum of Iceland has, in conjunction with a related exhibition, published a book about the analysis of the woman's remains and grave goods.   So I started looking on the Internet for a way to obtain the book.

I did not find any sites selling the book (yet), but I did find something else of value:  a YouTube video recording, made in August 2015, of a symposium where members of the study team delivered oral presentations about their findings.  I've embedded it below. The first presentation is delivered in Icelandic, but the rest are in English; the English language presentations begin at approximately 23:45.

Unfortunately, the video is not of the highest quality. The filmed images are somewhat blurry, making the slides used by the presenters hard to read and making it nearly impossible to see details in any of the photographs.  The audio portion of the presentation, though clear, is marred by a distracting shushing sound that persists from beginning to end.  But the information in the symposium video makes it worth viewing despite these technical flaws.

Two of the English language presentations summarize: 1) the conclusions reached upon the basis of analysis of the woman's teeth and skeleton, and 2) conservation of the woman's jaw remains for future analysis.   Those topics, though interesting, are outside the scope of this blog.

However, the last English presentation is solidly within the scope of this blog. That is Michele Hayeur Smith's presentation, which starts at about 1:08:46. Ms. Smith's topic was the analysis of surviving textiles and jewelry of the woman.    Because readers can watch the video for themselves, a detailed summary of Hayeur Smith's talk would be superfluous, but a brief summary of the points of historical costuming interest may be useful.  That is especially true because Hayeur Smith, aware that most of her audience wasn't expert in the details of textile archaeology, spent a lot of time relating basic information (like weave types) and skimmed over some details of the finds.  

• A pair of tortoise brooches and a trefoil brooch were found in the grave.  The tortoise brooches are type P-52 and the trefoil is P-91.
• Four different types of fabrics were found in the woman's grave:  a scrap (believed by Hayeur Smith to have been a patch) in tabby weave identified by microscopy as linen; a 2/2 twill in wool, which Hayeur Smith believes to be an apron dress strap; a piece of tablet weaving; and a "wadmal" piece.  However, one of the presentation photographs looks as though it depicts diamond twill, not wadmal.
• Traces of the linen were also found inside one of the brooches, so Hayeur Smith believes that the woman's underdress was linen.
• The 2/2 twill and the diamond twill were found to contain indigotin, the dye substance in woad (and indigo) that produces blue. 
• The tablet woven band appears to have been a starting border; it is an integral part of the fabric fragment of which it is now a part, and was not sewn on.  
• The tablet woven band was not dyed; it appears to have been a natural cream color and brown.
• The thread from which the linen and twill were woven was Z-spun in both the warp and the weft.

Having listened to Hayeur Smith's talk, I am even more interested in the exhibition volume.  I also plan to listen more closely to the talk to see whether I can tease out more details that I missed, or pinpoint ambiguities to resolve.  If any of my readers obtain more information, please feel free to raise it in the comments.

The Woman in Blue

Recently, I stumbled across some articles about a new exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland. The exhibit relates to a grave, excavated in 1938, whose finds have recently been subjected to study using modern scientific methods. The exhibition is called "The Woman in Blue" is called that because textile finds from the grave show that the woman was wearing a blue apron dress when she was interred.  The best news article I've found discussing the study and its conclusions may be read on the Science News website, here. 

I am reporting on this study because it includes costume textile finds, though the news coverage gives very little information about them.  There is more discussion of the woman's jawbone and teeth, which were tested and have yielded interesting information about their owner.  According to the Science News article:

• The woman was between 17 and 25 years of age when she died;
• She was born around the year 900 CE;
• She was not born in Iceland, but came there either from southern Scandinavia or the British Isles (unsurprising, since Iceland was originally settled sometime between 871 and 930 CE, according to the article);
• The weaving techniques used to make her apron dress are consistent with those used in 9th-10th century CE Norway or (presumably contemporaneous) Celtic (Irish?) techniques.

The multi-national team that performed the study delivered a poster presentation on it at the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists on April 14, 2016.  A full citation of the presentation, listing the members and the institutions involved, may be seen here.  

According to Science News, there were tortoise brooches in the grave;  one of them ended up pressed against the woman's face, preserving bits of her skin.  That development that will greatly enhance analysis (DNA analysis is being performed on the remains now) to learn more about the woman and her origins, though it is not relevant to the costume aspects of the find.

I am hoping that the study members will eventually publish a research paper with more information about the textile finds.  Any information that might permit a tentative reconstruction of the woman's apron dress would greatly add to our knowledge of Viking age women's costume.

The Biggest "Damn Little" Ever

Okay, enough linky posts.  Time to finish writing something serious and post it.

Long-time readers of this blog know that, for many years, I have been fascinated by the subject of women's costume in Scandinavia during the Viking age, particularly the overdress/jumper/pinafore-like garment often referred to by English-speaking scholars of costume as the "apron dress."* Recently I've begun to take stock of how the available information about archaeological finds relating to apron dresses and the theories that information has spawned have changed over the past two decades.

I originally started making and wearing Viking "apron dresses" in the early 1990s.  One of my primary motives for doing so at the time was to get a better sense for what sorts of designs might plausibly have been used, and what sorts of designs were impractical or for other reasons unlikely.  At that time, I had heard of few of the archaeological reports on Viking age finds, and I did not have copies of the few reports I knew to be important.  Mostly, I had second or third-hand reports by other historical costume enthusiasts summarizing what the archaeological reports said.  What I was doing wasn't really "experimental archaeology" for reasons Katrin Kania discusses in this post (e.g., I didn't have a "key question" that I was testing, let alone one that could be answered by means of a repeatable experiment), but making all those apron dresses taught me a fair amount about sewing and provided me with a framework that would help me increase my understanding of the nature of the problem as I obtained increasing amounts of information about the archaeology relating to apron dresses.

However, since I became first interested in apron dresses, three things have happened that have greatly affected amateur research into apron dress design.

First, it has become much easier to obtain copies of archaeological reports, even quite rare ones, from the Internet.  Buying books published in other countries, learning about different theories and reports through web searches, and discussing ideas with other interested scholars everywhere has increased the available pool of information--and disinformation--about the "Viking apron dress" way beyond what was available to me, as someone who did amateur research in spare moments as a hobby, twenty years ago.

Second, the Internet has made it possible for other amateur reconstructionists like me to post pictures of the dresses they have created based on their understanding of the archaeological research. I did not realize what a great number of dress variations there are until I started Pinterest boards to collect pictures of other costumers' apron dresses and images showing other costumers' apron dress patterns.*  I began to do this not just to collect pretty pictures (though I greatly enjoy looking at pretty pictures of other people's costumes, authentic or not) but to see whether I could spot any trends in the reconstructions.

The only trend I spotted is that most of the currently viewable reconstructions on the Internet are clearly based upon published archaeological finds.  The two most common are fitted tube-style apron dresses, based upon the Hedeby harbor find, and a tube with pleats in the front, based upon the Køstrup find.  A smaller subcategory found nowadays includes open-fronted tube dresses with a hanging panel suspended over the opening, based upon an analysis of period art and, to some extent, the Birka archaeological evidence, by Flemming Bau. A few hardy souls have attempted to make reconstructions of a garment found wrapped around a pair of tortoise brooches in a grave located at Pskov in Russia.  I find this trend encouraging, since it seems to have made more eccentric attempts at amateur reconstruction of apron dress less common, and has increased the general level of knowledge about women's clothing in the Viking age in the SCA and reenactor communities.

In addition, a growing number of costumers have blogged, in detail and with photographs and other illustrations, detailed descriptions of how they made their own apron dresses and why they made the choices they made in designing them.  Some of the more thoughtful Internet articles/posts of this sort have been composed by Jenn Culler, Catrjin vanden Westhende, Margaret Sanborn, and Hilde Thunem.

Third, the mere fact that other reconstructions can be, and are, easily published on the Internet means that people feel freer not just to post their own creations, but to base new apron dresses upon other people's creations--whether or not those creations have any significant archaeological or other scholarly support.  Though more apron dresses are now based, however loosely, upon archaeological finds, there are still an awful lot of design variations, possibly more than pearl's list from several years ago** indicates, and the list continues to grow.

Does all of this mean that we now know all that there is to know about Viking apron dresses, if not women's clothing in the Viking age in general?  Far from it.  For a start, we have yet to discover a complete or nearly complete apron dress in a grave, as we have done with a Middle Byzantine shirt and a Roman era costume from Denmark.   As is clear from the articles I have cited in this post, all of the published archaeological textile finds that are believed to have come from Viking age apron dresses are fragmentary. Deducing what those finds can tell us about the clothing from which they came is how archaeologists have come up with the theoretical designs (fitted tube; pleated tube; open tube with front cloth) that have been promulgated in the scholarly literature thus far.   But we still lack confirmation that any or all of these theorized designs were actually worn by Scandinavian women during the Viking age.  (For example, the Hedeby fragment may have come from an undergown, or a sleeved overgarment, and not an apron dress; it was found with other fabric  remains that had apparently been used as ship caulking rags, not in association with tortoise brooches or even human female remains.)

Even assuming that at least the fitted tube and the pleated tube styles correctly represent actual garments that were worn, we still lack considerable information about where these styles were worn, and who wore them.  For example, the Køstrup find is not unique.  As Hilde Thunem notes in her article, at least one find of a finely pleated wool fabric that may have been part of an apron dress was made in Vangsnes in Norway.  The existence of that find raises all kinds of questions.  Were pleated apron dresses native to Norway, or was the woman in the Vangsnes grave someone who had moved north from Denmark?  Were pleated apron dresses rare, common, or in-between? Did apron dress styles change over time, and if so, was the pleated dress a late style (the Køstrup find is 10th century) or an early style that somehow survived?

And there are many other questions that cannot be answered on the basis of the known research. Here are some of the other unanswered questions that particularly strike me when I look at current apron dress recreations.

• Was the apron dress worn by all classes of women or only certain ones?  The characteristic brooches and loops have been found in graves with different quantities of grave goods though, arguably, not in the wealthiest graves.  However, the most famous wealthy grave without apron dress loops or brooches, the Oseberg find, appears to have been robbed in antiquity and may lack such evidence for that reason.
• Was the apron dress worn by children?  A lot of reenactors have assumed that they were, and I have seen pictures of some very clever brooch-free adaptations of apron dresses made by modern parents for toddlers, and even babies. Unfortunately, skeletal remains in Scandinavia are usually too fragmentary to make a study, like the one Penelope Walton-Rogers made of early Anglo-Saxon graves, to determine the typical age of 6th century Anglo-Saxon women wearing the peplos as an overdress, viable.***
• What colors were used for apron dresses?  To date, the only apron-dress finds of which I am aware as to which the color has been discerned by chemical testing or otherwise have been either dark blue or dark brown, even though apron dresses were made (often, if not exclusively) from wool, which can easily be dyed in a wide range of colors with Viking age technology.  

Hilde Thunem has remarked that "The answer to what we know about Viking clothing can be summed up in two words; 'damn little.' " Despite the results of patient professional analysis of the finds at Hedeby, Køstrup, and elsewhere, that remains as true today as it was in the 1990s.  There are simply too few actual textile finds upon which to base solid generalizations at this point in time, and that's a lack no amount of re-creation experiments inspired by the few finds we have can remedy.

So what can be done?  If we are going to learn more about what Viking women wore and what their clothes looked like, we need to do more than make pretty dresses based on the little information we have; we need to get more information, somehow.

One possibility is to compile data about actual archaeological finds and see whether any patterns emerge.  With the creation of Academia.edu and the possibility of ordering archaeological reports from major booksellers or directly from the publishers via the Internet, this type of analysis is open to every interested person.  Although I would personally regret seeing historical costume enthusiasts, SCA members, and reenactors stop making more different beautiful apron dresses, I think that everyone's time might be better served by better organizing some of the data we do have, so it can be analyzed for patterns that might give us more costume information.  For example, pearl prepared a table listing the various fabric loops found in the Birka graves, with information as to the fabric from which the loops were made (i.e., linen or wool) and, where possible, the fabric from which the garment beneath the brooches was made.  Her table can be found on, and downloaded from, this page.

All of us (including me!) should think about gathering similar information from the reports we have, and making it available on the Internet, for everyone to use in advancing our knowledge of Viking era costume.

======
*    Thor Ewing has suggested that the Vikings themselves might have used the term "smokkr" for the sleeveless overdress with loops that I am calling "apron dress"; this is a clothing term that comes from a Viking poem called the Rígsþula.  Ewing, Thor.  Viking Clothing 37-38 (Tempus Publishing Ltd. 2006).  The term is related to a verb meaning "to creep through", which is an apt description of an apron dress if the garment was tube-shaped, but not if it was a wrapped sheet (as Agnes Geijer suggested was the case with regard to apparent fragments found in some of the Birka graves).  Because we cannot yet rule out the possibility that some of the Birka fabric fragments may have come from an apron dress that was a wrapped sheet or pair of sheets (which one would not need to crawl or climb through), I am reluctant to adopt the term smokkr, at least at this point in time.

**    A few years ago, my friend pearl attempted to compile a comprehensive list of amateur apron dress reconstruction variants based upon the Hedeby fragment; her report may be found here.  (Log in for Dreamwidth required).

***   Professor Walton Rogers studied early Anglo-Saxon graves with paired shoulder brooches and concluded, based upon age estimates of skeletal remains in one region of Great Britain, concluded that the peplos was worn primarily by women "between menarche and menopause," i.e., by women of child-bearing age.  Rogers, Penelope Walton.  Cloth and Clothing in Anglo-Saxon England 178 (Council for British Archaeology 2007).  Unfortunately, Professor Walton Rogers could not expand this analysis to other regions because in other regions skeletal remains were too fragmentary for age-at-death estimates to be possible.

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).

HSM #9--A Progress Report

I spent this past weekend at the home of friends in Maryland, just hanging out, and managed to complete much of the work on my lined, wrapped apron dress.  All that I need to complete is sewing the silk strip across the top and adding the loops.  The prospects for completing it before Wednesday (the end of the month) are very good indeed.

EDIT (10/1/2015):  The prospects for completing the dress by the end of September were good, but not good enough.  I should have it done within the next few days, though.

Good Early Period Links

Even though I'm still dealing with more personal, professional, and household problems than doing costuming, I continue to trawl the Internet in my spare time for interesting information on historical costume (particularly Viking costume).  Recently, I've found some links that I'd like to share.

SCA member Álfrún ketta has a lot of good information on her blog, A Wandering Elf's Journey. Like me, she writes about early period clothing and books that address it. In particular, I recommend the following articles from her blog:

• Viking Textiles: A Deeper Look at Plaids, Stripes, and Checks. A summation of textile finds from the Viking age that are plaid, striped, or checked, with lots of pictures. The big news, other than how few of them there seem to be, is that the plaids, stripes and checks tend to be very subtle.
• Viking Embellishment and Embroidery. A three-article series on how the Vikings ornamented their clothes. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here. All three are illustrated with excellent photographs of existing finds.

I have also found some interesting early period studies on Academia.edu. 

• Rast-Eicher, Antoinette & Berghe, Ina Vanden.  Altrier (LUX): A fresh look at the textiles. A study of textiles in a cremation grave at Altrier, Luxembourg that are dated to the early La Tene period.  One appears to be silk, possibly the earliest silk found in Europe.  This is another article from NESAT XII (pp. 117-123).
• McConnell, Alexandra J. Re-Examining the Evidence:  A Study of Medieval Irish Women's Dress Between 750 and 900 CE. This claims to be a thesis submitted as part of the author's studies at Oregon State University, but it's only 33 pages long.   Make of it what you will.

Finally, I found a paper that Nille Glaesel wrote about her reconstruction of the Køstrup apron dress. She reaches some interesting conclusions, based upon her knowledge of use of the warp-weighted loom and her own reading of Hilde Thunem's paper about that dress.   I can't find the place I've downloaded it from; when I do, I'll post the link here.  I also intend to blog about my thoughts on Ms. Glaesel's paper soon. 

The Fabric Has Arrived!

From top to bottom; binding, dress, lining

The fabric that has arrived are the two fabrics I needed for my lined wrapped apron dress:  the chocolate brown wool and the (replacement) off-white mid-weight linen.  It's late, and I'm not up to adding the necessary photographs to show the wonderfulness of the combination of fabrics that I'm planning right now, but I should be able to get to that in a day or two.

Good view of the wool's weave but the color is off.

EDIT (9/1/2015): Here are a few quick pictures of the three fabrics I've obtained for the project: the wool for the outer layer of the apron dress, the linen for the lining, and the red silk for the top trim/binding.  

The wool is a mid-weight wool with a slightly napped finish, and the linen is Fabrics-store.com's best-selling middle-weight linen in an off-white color.  I bought the red silk several years ago.  It doesn't show up as well in the photographs, but it's a taffeta weave and supposedly is 100% silk in fiber content. The top photograph gives the best rendition of the colors of the fabrics and the best view of the linen's weave, and the bottom one best shows the weave of the wool.  Both pictures should be clickable for a better detail view.

Now I have suitable fabrics for the project!  Hopefully the construction will also go well.

Lining a Single-Wrapped Apron Dress

Since my last post, I received the linen that I had ordered for my September Historical Sew Monthly project, the linen-lined wool apron dress.  To my surprise and dismay, I discovered that the fabric in question contains spandex.  (At least, it has enough stretch that it would be hard for me to believe that it doesn't contain spandex.)  Given the color and fine weave of the cloth, it would make a lovely pair (maybe two pair?) of underpants, but using such a stretchy cloth would do nothing to tell me how lining a wool wrapped apron dress with period linen.  So I shall have to obtain some more appropriate linen elsewhere.  Perhaps I have a large enough piece of linen in my stash (or can piece one together) for this project after all; I should check.

In the meantime, this may be a good time to think about how I should construct the apron dress.   I don't mean details about the width or length of the dress.  As I said in my original post, the fragments in Birka grave 464 do not provide sufficient information about how long the dress must have been or even clearly rule out the possibility that the dress was shaped like a tube; it was my decision to see how a wrapped dress that did not violate the known details of the grave 464 find would behave in wear.  

However, that still leaves plenty of construction issues I need to decide.  All we really know about the grave 464 garment is: 1)a piece of silk was folded over the top edge of both the wool outer fabric and the linen inner fabric; 2) it had at least one short loop attached to the top edge; 3) a top corner of the wool, located about 4-5 cm from the outside edge of the tortoise brooch, was mitered, and; 4) the dress was at least hip length.  To give a better idea of the kinds of detail I have in mind, I should list the construction assumptions I'm prepared to make for this project (which include) issues that cannot be resolved on the basis of the find and size dimensions necessary to make it wearable by me), and issues that might be resolvable by closer scrutiny of the find:

Assumptions:

1.  Fabric Length and Width.    Based upon my prior experience with wrapped apron dress construction and my current budget constraints, I plan to use a single piece of wool about 60 inches by 36 inches, and a similarly-sized piece of linen, for this project.  

2.  Loop Fabric.  I prefer matching the loop fabric to the outer fabric, but if that turns out not to be possible (i.e., if it turns out I need every inch of the 60 inches to go around me properly), I'll use linen for the loops.  Use of linen loops on wool apron dresses is a well-established phenomenon among the Birka finds.

3.  Warp direction.  Based upon the plans above, I need the 60-inch side of the fabric to go horizontally around my body.  That likely places the warp horizontally and the selvages at top and bottom of the piece, with the maximum length of the garment being one yard (36 inches).  

Construction Issues:  

1.  Length of silk band.  A wrap-around apron dress is typically going to be at least 10 inches longer than the wearer's widest torso measurement.  Should the silk band wrap the entire top length?  Should it leave the mitered corners free?  It does not appear that the silk strip in grave 464 at Birka had silk lapped over the mitered corner.  I am inclined to have the band stop just short of the corners, because the way I would think to do it there would be no need of the silk there to join the linen to the wool.

2.   Double fold the silk?  In other words, would the edge of the silk be folded inward at the point where the band was stitched to the top of the apron dress on either the outside or the inside (as a modern piece of bias tape is often folded)?  I think it would make sense to do things this way, unless I find out that information from grave 464 dictates otherwise before I start sewing.

3.  Miter all corners?  It seems reasonable to do so.  I would place the linen and wool together, wrong sides touching, and miter the corners together that way.  This would also serve to protect the sides.

4.  Enclose linen in corners/sides?  Yes (see above).

Now that I've done more of the planning, I need to make certain I can lay my hands on enough linen to complete the plan.  I'll post again when I have the fabric lined up.

A Return To My Roots: HSM #9--Color Challenge Brown

The September challenge for the Historical Sew Monthly is simple:  make something that is brown in color.  I was having trouble deciding upon a suitable project for this challenge, when I had an idea based upon my roots--the Viking apron dress or smokkr.  Because so many people have made apron dresses (and posted pictures of them on the Internet) since I first became interested in the Vikings, I had begun to believe that there really aren't any research-related reasons to make new apron dresses any more.  However, I may have stumbled upon a project that might be educational, and enough fun to be worth doing.

Despite the number of different styles of apron dress that I have made, I have never attempted to make an apron dress that is lined.  The evidence in favor of lined apron dresses comes from Birka, particularly grave 464.  Hilde Thunem translates the description of the relevant part of the grave 464 textile find in her long article discussing the evidence for Viking apron dresses:

Attached to the remains of a linen loop (1-2) was a fragment of fine dark blue wool (6). The wool had a linen fragment (4) lying against its inside and a silk band (3) had been folded over the top of both fragments (like a bias tape). ...

The woman in this grave was probably wearing a blue woollen smokkr, lined with linen and decorated with a silk band along the top of the dress. A small fragment of linen from the serk (5) was lying on top of the loop, indicating that at least in this case the smokkr had been worn directly over the serk (fig. 464:6). The top of the silk band, and thus the top of the smokkr, reached about 2 cm up into the brooch. This means that the front loops of the smokkr was fairly short and would have been completely covered by the brooches. ...

The grave contains several other fragments of the dark blue wool. One that seems to have been torn off from the brooch fragment is folded along two sides, creating a corner about 4 cm outside of the edge of the brooch (464:5). It is unclear whether the vertical edge of this corner was hemmed or if it was fastened to another piece of the smokkr.

It seems clear that the silk piece covering the top edge (and it had to be the top edge, because a loop was also fastened to it) functioned partly to bind a piece of linen to the wool.  How big the piece of linen originally was remains a question (and Hilde Thunem notes that Agnes Geijer thought that the linen lining of the garment in grave 464 was only partial).  So I started thinking about the reasons why people choose to line garments.  Two substantial reasons occurred to me:  to make the garment warmer, or to stiffen or otherwise change the drape and behavior of the garment in some way.

Warmth may have been a factor, certainly, with any item of Viking clothing, but stiffening would only matter if the garment in question were not an untailored garment such as a peplos; peploses work best with soft drapey fabrics than with stiff ones.  For a wrap-around garment, increased stiffness might actually work better unless you're going for a form-fitting sarong type of garment.

The mitered corner was only 4 cm (not quite 2 inches) from the outside edge of the tortoise brooch; that is approximately the same place where the seam appears on the Køstrup apron dress fragment.  Whether that location means that any seam along the edge of the corner would end up running underneath the arm would depend upon the size of the wearer.  On me, 4 cm from the outside edge of my brooches would place the seam very close to my armpit.   However, if the corner edge was not part of a seam, mitering it (which I have never thought to do on any of my earlier wrapped apron dresses, for some reason) should tend to make the open edge stand upright up and not flop over when worn.  Front corners that do not flop make a wrap-around style apron dress look better, in my opinion. 

In any event, making a fully-lined apron dress would show me whether such an apron dress would be comfortable and easily wearable, which to me makes the construction of such an apron dress an interesting project.

I have some red silk that I can use for the top-edge binding.   I have just ordered a yard of cream-colored linen that should serve for the lining, and am planning to buy a yard of chocolate brown wool for the apron itself.  (The grave 464 find was dark blue, but other apron dresses have been found to be brown, and brown is the color for the September challenge.)  Both fabrics are about 60 inches wide; a yard of each would make a suitable single-wrapped dress that, on me, would be about mid-calf length.  All we know about about the length of the dress in grave 464 is that it was at least hip length (because scraps of the same wool were found underneath a work brooch located at about hip level), so a mid-calf length should be fine for this project.

Hopefully, I'll be able to complete this project before the end of September.  Wish me luck!