One Afternoon Tutorials--For the Hands

This month's collection of tutorials consists of quickly made items that are worn on the hands or arms.  I couldn't find any jewelry items I had not featured before, but there are still a surprising number of tutorials available.  The types of items they produce include mittens, gloves, mitts (i.e., sleeveless gloves), muffs, and cuffs.

As always, I have not tried out these tutorials, unless my description expressly says otherwise.  That being said, I read the tutorials and limit the ones I include to those that appear from my experience to be workable by a reasonably experienced sewer.  Just about all of these items are for historical items belonging to 18th century European clothing, but some may be adaptable to other periods.

Now, on to the tutorials!

• 18th century mitts.  This tutorial comes from the blog A Sartorial Statement.  It makes up a pair of 18th century mitts, which in this case are gloves made without fingers or any covering for the fingers where the shaft comes up the arm to the elbow.  They could be made from kidskin, wool, silk, lace, or almost any fabric, depending on whether the intended use is for formal dress or just to keep warm.  The Sartorial Statement's tutorial gives a technique for making mitts, more than an actual pattern; you will need to be guided by your own research to achieve the specific result you want.  For a more scientific approach that will help you make your own mitt pattern, see SewLoud's blog, here. 
• 18th century muffs.  In the 18th and 19th centuries, well-off women often kept their hands warm with muffs--a kind of cushion with a tunnel through the center into which the hands would be placed.  Koshka the Cat features both a muff (base) pattern and a muff cover pattern on her blog, The Fashionable Past.   That way, one can make only one muff base and have a coordinating muff for every outfit by making an array of different muff covers.  Again, your research will be necessary to come up with suitable fabrics and patterns.
• 17th century gloves.  This tutorial comes from Tammie Dupuis at The Renaissance Tailor,  The site has many other tutorials (she calls them "demonstrations" or "demos") as well.
• 18th century sleeve flounces. Eighteenth century gowns, particularly formal gowns, have a kind of ruffle along the ends of the sleeves; these are known as flounces.  Not sure what I mean?  This tutorial from The Fashionable Past will clear that up for you, and show you how to make them yourself.  
• 18th century cuffs.  Don't care for sleeve flounces?  Some 18th century gowns have pleated sleeves, and The Fashionable Past has a tutorial for those too.  You can find that tutorial here, also with helpful photographs.

Enjoy!

Another Pair of "Catskin" Mittens

While web surfing today, I found to my surprise that Susanna Broomé, the woman who runs the website and business, Viking Age Clothing, is making her own pair of "catskin" mittens based on her pattern for the Akranes mittens!  A picture of her work in progress can be seen here on her business's Facebook page.  In the accompanying post, Susanna makes it clear that she is basing the project on the völva's mittens described in the Saga of Eric the Red.  However, she is using white rabbit fur, not faux fur, to stand in for the "catskin" lining.

Meanwhile, I have gotten bogged down and have not progressed on my mittens; I'm trying to decide whether to recut some of my faux fur pieces and start over or just unpick stitches and proceed with what I have.  In the meantime, I have two related projects in mind that should be much simpler and that I'm likely to get to first.

Susanna is a much better seamstress than I, but I find it flattering, somehow, that she agrees that the Akranes mittens make a good starting point for the völva's mittens.

EDIT: (10/26/2018)  Susanna finished her mittens!  You can see a picture of them on her Facebook page here.  Looking at them makes me think that perhaps I should just buy enough black lambskin for the hood to make the outside layer of my mittens black, also.

Mitten Progress Report

Last night, I traced the pattern for the mittens on my faux fur, which will be the inside layer of the mittens.  

The good news is that I don't need to fell any of the seams on this project.  The leather outer layer will not ravel, and unfelled edges of the faux fur I'm using for the lining will not shed appreciably because they will be trapped inside the mitten itself when it's completed.  Also, though the directions say to use running stitch for the seams, I've been using whipstitch because the outside of the lining layer will not be visible once the mittens are complete.

The bad news is that I have had to rip the thumb free from the first mitten three times so far because I had not properly mated it to the rest of the mitten!  As near as I can tell, that's because I really should have sewn it on from the wrong side, even though the directions say to mate the thumb to the side piece right sides together; I still could have done that if I'd taken seriously the part about gathering the base of the thumb piece to fit.  the instructions say to sew the circular base of the thumb section to the side piece (which has a circular section) before sewing the two side pieces together, but I couldn't figure out how to fit the thumb base in correctly so long as the two side pieces were separate.

So tonight I sewed the other side piece partway on, and that did finally make it possible for me to get the thumb sewn in place. The poor thumb is somewhat twisted, probably because I didn't gather the  area of the side piece to fit the circular base of the thumb, as the directions require.  However, I may be able to fix that after the fact or may be bold enough to open some of the stitching and re-do it.    I will definitely gather the other side of the mitten so the two will fit together.

I also spent some time last night looking to see whether I have a needle for sewing leather.  The answer turns out to be that I have one but only for use with a sewing machine, not for sewing by hand.  So I will have to acquire one before I start the outer layer of the mittens.

New Project--The Völva's Mittens

Because I'm still more likely to complete a shorter project rather than a long one, I have been thinking about another short project to start working on since completing my Hedeby bag a few days ago.  

It occurred to me that a good project might be to make a pair of mittens for my völva outfit, using the pattern for the Icelandic mitten from Akranes that is found in the "Caps and Mittens" booklet (I have the previous edition, which was called "Smaller Garments") booklet sold by Susanna Broomé on her Facebook page and website, Viking Age Clothing.  I have found several blog posts by bloggers who have made their own copies of these mittens, here (scroll down for the English translation) and here. For more about the facts relating to the Akranes find, see my friend Rebecca's page, here.

The Akranes mitten was found on the Akranes penisula near Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1881 and, as the pictures on the various sites I have referenced show, has a flaring cuff and is long enough to cover the ends of the wearer's sleeves. It is a good design for someone who travels extensively in the wintertime, as the völva in Eric the Red's Saga is said to have done.

The völva's mittens are described as "catskin gloves, and they were white inside and shaggy," but what handcoverings survive from the Viking age are mittens, so far as I am aware. The Akranes mitten was sewn of heavy wool fabric, without a lining, but it uses a simple enough pattern that I think I can adapt it for the mittens of the völva's outfit.

Because I will not kill a cat for this project, or deal with vendors who have, I will be making a lined mitten, with white faux fur on the inside and leather on the outside.  I have a scrap of soft brown sueded leather that might serve for the outside of these mittens, and I have ordered some white faux fur from an EBay vendor.  I will need to hunt down a leather needle in my stash of sewing equipment, as well as an appropriate thimble, to do the handsewing for this project.

EDIT:  (7/5/2018)  The faux fur I'd ordered from EBay had such a minuscule pile that it did not look like fur, so I've sent it back for a refund.  I've ordered a different piece of faux fur from a different vendor that I hope will serve my purposes better.

Eura Mitten Reconstruction

Former Finnish President
Tarja Halonen

As my fellow fanatics about early northern European costume can tell you, one of the more interesting early archaeological finds is the grave of a woman buried in Eura in Finland, around the year 1000 C.E.  For reasons I do not presume to understand, the recreation of this woman's costume became very popular in Finland, almost rising to the level of a folk costume; former Finnish president Tarja Halonen was photographed wearing a reproduction of the Eura woman's costume as reconstructed by Finnish archaeologists (see photograph).

What many people may not know is that a scrap of fabric, made with the nalbinding or "needle binding" technique, was found among the other jewelry and textile finds in the Eura grave, at a position suggesting it was part of a pair of mittens stuck into the woman's belt. Today, I found this web site, in Swedish, showing a picture of the writer's own reconstruction of the Eura woman's mittens in red, yellow, and blue--the original colors. A short English translation appears on the site, as does a link to a Finnish language site containing a copy of a thesis, in Finnish, about the mittens. I wanted to share this little discovery because it's so easy to think of grave finds as consisting of formal, sober clothing. It's good to know that a cheerful pair of mittens was part of one of those finds.

I'm going to contact the blogger who made those mittens and if she agrees, I'll show a picture of her mittens here.  If not; go to her site and look at the picture there; it's a sight worth seeing.

A Little Detour Into Glove History

Recently, someone inquired on Yahoo's Norsefolk_2 list whether the Vikings were known to have worn gloves.

Someone on the Yahoo nalbinding list attempted to answer the question by  reporting that Thor Ewing, in his book Viking Clothing, that "the usual gloves found in Viking contexts had two 'fingers'"....

Although at least one saga refers to "catskin" gloves, I know of no Viking age finds of gloves or glove parts, so I eagerly went to my bookshelf to discover what Ewing's sources for such a statement might be. It turns out that the index of Viking Clothing contains only two references to "gloves." One merely mentions the "catskin glove" saga reference (from Eiríks saga Rauđa). The other passage is short, and it is my belief from its contents that the poster on the nalbinding list was simply paraphrasing it. Ewing's statement, which begins with useful references to gloves in the sagas, reads:

The term glófi is probably a late borrowing from Old English, and is used for a new style of costly decorated glove, similar to a medieval bishop's glove.  In Gull-Þhóris saga ch. 3, glófar enhance the description of a richly dressed man, while gold-adorned glófar occur in Njáls saga ch. 31, as well as in the saga romances Bósa saga ok Herrauđs (ch. 12) and Ӧrvar-Odds saga (ch. 19).  Archaeological evidence suggests that most ordinary gloves will have had just two finger compartments, each for two fingers, but the glófi clearly had four separate fingers, and in Bósa saga ok Herrauđs, Bósi even plays harp wearing glófar. (Viking Clothing, p. 122) (boldface emphasis mine).

This paragraph ends Ewing's two-paragraph section on Viking gloves (and the first paragraph consists primarily of additional saga references and discussion of words used in the sagas that may or may not refer to gloves). Conspicuous by its absence is any discussion of archaeological finds, or even "archaeological evidence" for Viking gloves, let alone of evidence that such gloves likely had only two finger compartments.

Inspired by frustration, I did a little digging for Viking glove finds on the Internet. I didn't find any. But I have found a very interesting website that has collected links to surviving medieval European gloves as well as medieval art depicting gloves. The page, which mostly shows the four-fingered type of glove, may be found here. One of the more interesting links is to this blog, which displays a photograph of the blogger's own reproduction of a medieval work glove with only two finger compartments and references the relevant miniature in the Luttrell Psalter. The blogger has her own collection of links to images of gloves and pictures of surviving gloves, which may be found here, but none of those gloves are Scandinavian, let alone attributable to the Viking age. Karen Larsdatter's medieval artifacts page also lacks any Viking era gloves, though she does have links to a number of photographs on the Historiska Museet's website showing a surprising number of leather mittens from Sweden that are dated to the medieval period. All of these leather handwear items have only a single compartment for all four fingers and are clearly mittens.

All of this is a useful warning not to take offhand remarks even in scholarly sources as evidence of hard facts.  But it also makes me wonder what "archaeological evidence" Mr. Ewing was thinking about when he wrote the language I quoted above.  If any of my readers have any information on this subject, please let me know, and I will share it here.  I have to admit that I find it hard to believe that Viking era Scandinavians did not use protective handwear, and the glove with two finger compartments (which I've also seen referred to as a "three-fingered mitten" seems like a plausible candidate.