HSM Challenge #2--Another Blue Apron Dress

My blue fabric

The February challenge for the Historical Sew Monthly is very simple--make something blue.

It has long been my intention to make the apron dress portion of my early Norwegian outfit from blue fabric, and I have some lovely blue wool that I bought years ago for the purpose.  The fabric in question is the same fabric I photographed my Roman necklace on, but the flash made the fabric look much lighter in shade than it really is.  The color is hard to describe.  It's too light to be a navy or a royal blue, and it doesn't have the green tinge of a teal.  However, it's not at all pastel, either. The photograph to the left (taken with the white wool for the shift I have yet to make for the same project) is pretty close to the true color.  I've used a up-sized piece of the above photograph for the background to this webpage.

There is no evidence that 7th or 8th century Norwegian overdresses had loops for brooches, so this project can be very simple.  All I'll need to do is measure a wide enough piece of my fabric to make a nicely draping peplos, sew it into a tube, hem the bottom and top, and voilà!  Another overdress.

I have never tried using tortoise brooches to fasten a peplos-style overdress.  It will definitely take some experimentation to locate the brooches in such a way that the dress will lie properly and look nice without loops, but I'm eager to try, especially since sewing such a dress should be pretty easy. I'm also thinking about purchasing another set of tortoise brooches, since early tortoise brooches were both smaller than their Viking era equivalents (about 2 inches/5 cm long) and very simply decorated or even plain.  Any suggestions as to where I can get such a pair of brooches cheap?

EDIT (2/4/2015):  This will be even easier than I thought--if it works at all. It turns out that I bought barely enough cloth (it was an Etsy bargain; the person was selling a vintage piece of a particular size, and that's what I bought) to go around my body comfortably while extending at least as far as my calves.  So the only choice I  have  now is how narrow to make the seam.  However, the best way to use the fabric would have me sewing selvage to selvage, so I can make the seam narrow without running the risk of having the cloth ravel.  

A Happy Frob

The brooch and beads, on the white wool for the shift.

I'd meant to spend January making the "foundation" garment for my early Norwegian and völva outfits--a long, white wool tunic.  January started busy, but I figured that I'd have plenty of time to start the project on Martin Luther King Day weekend (i.e., the weekend of the third Monday of January, which this year was January 17-19; MLK Day is a national holiday in the U.S.).

Unfortunately, I got sick on the evening of January 17, with chills and fever, and my improvement was very slow.  Part of the problem for my doctor was figuring out what illness I had.  Was it influenza, or strep throat, or both?   I ended up taking antiviral medication until the strep throat culture test came back, finally, on Friday.  It was positive, so now I'm finally taking antibiotics. The net result is that I've gotten very little done over the past week, and am rapidly running out of January time in which to start (let alone complete) the tunic.

So I'll work on the tunic later (possibly for the Historical Sew Monthly challenge "Re-Do"). Yesterday, I cheered myself up by finishing a small frob that is to be part of the Norwegian costume. As the photograph shows, this consists of a large brooch that is a reproduction of one of the Bornholm grave brooches, with a swag of beads to hang from it.  It was surprisingly hard to figure out how to determine the length of the swag so it would lie flat, and probably I'll have to redo it at some point.  However, I managed to obtain a good combination of generic glass pony beads and pre-Viking age reproduction beads appropriate to the 8th century CE (the period of my planned costume), and just looking at the result makes me happy.

Note:  The reconstruction drawings show the original brooch as carrying five strands of beads, but that struck me as too cumbersome to wear (although, in retrospect, it might have been easier to string).  I still have plenty of pony beads left, so I might reconfigure the set to have five strands when I find an appropriate bead spreader.

The Wool Shift

Wool fabric for my shift

My new job is turning out to be sufficiently time-consuming and exhausting that I may not get to start, let alone finish, my pink sprang net by March 1. However, I do intend to make such a project, and write about it, whether or not I manage to finish it for an HSF challenge.

In the meantime,. I'm going to tee up the next HSF project.  My project for the fourth HSF challenge "Under It All" will be a white wool "shift" to wear as the basic layer for my planned Vendel costume and, hopefully, to also serve as the basic layer for my proposed recreation of the völva's costume from the Saga of Eric the Red (Challenge #6).  

There is nothing elaborate about this proposed garment.  It will be a simple, long tunic, with a keyhole neckline and sleeves down to the wrists, probably ankle or instep length.   The pattern will be much like Cynthia Virtue's pattern for medieval tunics, but with fewer gores.   I will use a similar seam treatment to the one I chose for my himation, which works even better on wool; I may also sew the seam allowances down since, in theory, this garment is to be worn next to my body.  A photograph of the chosen fabric appears to the left.   The actual color is lighter--a much paler, warm cream color than that shown here, but in the same general color range.

The only decision I need to make before cutting is whether I prewash the fabric first.  I customarily prewash fabric for garments I expect to clean by throwing them in the washing machine, but I wear my wool garments so seldom (and so carefully) that I do not need to wash them; I air, or spot-clean, or (very rarely) take them to a dry cleaner.  

I don't recall how much of the white wool I purchased.  From eyeballing the fabric, I seem to have about 2 1/2 yards; just barely enough for an ankle or instep length garment, but only if there is no fabric shrinkage, or very little fabric shrinkage.  As I see it, there are three different ways I can proceed:

1.   Do not prewash the fabric, and resign myself to minimal cleaning/dry cleaning of a white garment, for as long as I have it.
2.   Prewash and dry the fabric exactly the way I treat most other washable garments, namely, wash in cold water and then put it in the dryer until dry.  This works fine for linen and cotton, but would probably result in major felting and shrinkage of wool.  (My ancient dryer has two primary settings; air tumble forever without drying anything, and hot).
3.   Prewash the fabric in cold water, but hang it up to dry--and prepare myself to do this with the finished garment.  This may or may not prevent felting (and I'm not terribly worried if the fabric does felt somewhat), but should eliminate the majority of the shrinkage.

Listing the arguments like this makes the correct choice obvious, in my opinion.  I will prewash the fabric in cold water (on the "delicate" setting) and let it dry on its own, even though I'm still a bit nervous about washing "regular" wool.  I'll just have to see how that works out.

Useful Knowledge From Nørre Sandegård Vest

In my last post on the problems of researching Vendel costume, I mentioned a book about certain grave finds at a place called Nørre Sandegård Vest. Here is the citation (courtesy of pearl's LiveJournal):

Jørgensen, L. & Nørgård Jørgensen, A. 1997. Nørre Sandegård Vest: a cemetery from the 6th-8th centuries on Bornholm. Det Kongelige Nordiska Oldskriftselskab. Köpenhamn.

Equally piqued by the possibility of  obtaining more information, but possessing access to university libraries that is far superior to mine, the plucky pearl located a copy of this book and, like the good friend she is, sent me copies of the sections on jewelry and textile finds.  In that 25-page excerpt, there was a gold mine's worth of facts that have completely changed my way of thinking about the subject of women's costume in Scandinavia during the Vendel period.  

The disc-on-bow brooches of which I was previously aware were 5th or 6th century finds, mostly from Gotland (an island off the coast of Sweden) and Anglo-Saxon England of the same period. Nørre Sandegård Vest is located on Bornholm, an island in the Baltic Sea that is considered part of Denmark but located quite close to southern Sweden (though still west of Gotland).  What makes Nørre Sandegård Vest ("NSV", for the rest of this post) fascinating, and useful, from a costume history perspective is that it contains a number of different women's graves, from different time periods, and the graves contained enough jewelry to preserve a number of textile fragments--approximately 300 of them. In fact, if Ulla Mannering, the author of the section on textiles in the Jørgensen book cited above is correct (and I have no reason to believe that she is not), the lion's share of known textile finds from the Vendel period came from the graves at NSV.

There are a number of conclusions Ms. Mannering and the author of the jewelry section drew from the NSV grave finds, particularly from Ms. Mannering's study of the NSV textiles.  Some of these conclusions have stunning implications, not just for Vendel period women's costume, but for Viking era women's costume as well. Let me summarize some of them briefly (not necessarily in order in importance):

1. Apron dresses mostly *were* dark blue or brown. Ms. Mannering found a number of wool diamond twill fragments in the graves, which have characteristics substantially like the wool diamond twill fragments found at Birka--in fact, she refers to them as the "Birka type". Some graves had a different of fine diamond twill  than the Birka type, while a third type had a fine wool tabby in the apron dress layer.  Ms. Mannering had these diamond twill fragments tested for indigotin and other substances indicative of period dyes, and discovered that virtually all of them contained indigotin--indicating that they once had been dyed blue. Moreover, the tests confirmed that a number of them had been overdyed with brown dyes, which likely was a way of making them a much darker blue--navy, or close to black. One interesting specimen had been overdyed in orange, which Ms. Mannering believes would have made it look purple.  The few specimens that were not blue apparently had been dyed brown. This suggests, at least to me, that blue or brown apron dresses were traditional and had been traditional for hundreds of years before the Viking era.   A few of the tested textile samples showed traces of other dye colors, but none of the diamond twills did so.

2. Underdresses were of undyed or brown linen, with keyhole necklines. As Erika Svensson reported in her thesis, Ms. Mannering concludes that the diamond twill apron dresses at NSV were worn over linen underdresses. However, this hypothesis is not based solely on brooch-pin size, as I had assumed from the  comment in Ms. Svensson's thesis. Ms. Mannering found quite a number of linen textile fragments in the graves also, and they turned out to be either undyed or, if dyed, had been dyed with a brown pigment.

 Jørgensen et al., Fig. 46 (beginning of chronology)

 Jørgensen  et al., p. 59, Fig. 46 (end of chronology)

3. Disc-on-bow brooches were in use only during part of the Vendel Period. Most of the NSV graves are from the Vendel period, but few of them contain disc-on-bow brooches. Many of the graves contain pairs of stickpins, and there are a variety of other brooch combinations and types. When considered together with some of the other Vendel period Danish finds, it is possible to group the brooch collections by approximate time period--suggesting that different assortments were fashionable during different parts of the Vendel and late Roman periods. Granted, a relatively small number of graves have been involved in the authors' assembly of this chronology (about 20 or so I believe), but it at least represents a hypothetical chronology against with future finds can be compared.

The chart to the left, taken from the Jørgensen book, summarizes the authors' conclusions as to this chronological analysis. I have rearranged the chart as it appears in the book so that the brooch phases fall into chronological order, starting at the far left and proceeding forward in time as one reads rightwards. (All dates given on the chart, are years C.E.). The chart indicates that the disc-on-bow brooch fashion is found in an approximately 200-year time span and was proceeded and followed by different combinations of brooches.The type of brooch in favor after the disc-on-bow brooches recede from the archaeological record is a kind of rectangular plate brooch, which comes in small and large sizes. Some finds have three of them, a large one, positioned at the neck, that held a multi-strand loop of beads as well as fastening a neckline, and two smaller ones holding up the overdress--the job that would eventually be relegated to tortoise brooches. The chronologically last finds, like the grave Ms. Svensson mentions in her thesis, features three tortoise brooches--one at the neck, and two holding up the overdress. The chart (as well as a second chart showing the graves of NSV and what jewelry was found in each) suggests that most of the evolutionary phases of the brooch set included at least one pair of stickpins.

So a new possibility for my costume may be to select a slightly later time period and create a three-rectangular-plate brooch costume instead of a disc-on-bow brooch costume. Although I don't know what any of the rectangular plate brooches look like, there is a largish brooch sold by Raymond's Quiet Press and small ones sold by a seller on Etsy that might do until I find out more about the actual brooches found. I'm still thinking about what kind of Vendel costume I want to construct, and whether I want to learn more about the design of the rectangular plate brooches found at NSV before I go ahead and buy even more brooches than I have now. 

4. More support for pearl's theory of how shawls really were worn. As I mentioned above, quite a few of the NSV graves contained long stickpins. Like Erika Svensson, Ms. Mannering believes that these stickpins were used to fasten shawls to the woman's other clothing. As they above chart indicates, they appear in graves together with the disc-on-bow brooches, as well as part of ensembles involving different brooch types.

This supports, after a fashion, pearl's theory as to how triangular shawls could match, when worn, the perfectly triangular appearance shown in pendants, guldgubbar figures and other forms of Vendel and Viking era art. pearl's suggestion was that the long points of the triangle were folded over and perhaps sewn down in wear. However, if shawls were pinned to the shoulders with stickpins, instead of being held entirely by a disc-on-bow brooch, it would be simple to fold the corners under and pin the shawl through the folds and onto the rest of the costume, without needing to permanently sew anything.

Fig. 106, Viking Age Ringed Pins from Dublin

One may wonder just how well skinny stickpins would hold a substantial shawl. Ms. Mannering has a suggested answer to this question. She notes that small iron rings also appear in the graves. Accordingly, she suggests that each stickpin may have had one of these loops tied to it with a thong or cord.  The pin would be stuck through the cloth, and then the ring would be looped over the end of the pin, securing it. This would work a bit like the ring-headed pins that turn up in male Viking graves, mostly in Dublin near the end of the Viking age--the sketch to the right, from Thomas Fanning's book on Viking ring-headed pins (Fanning, Thomas. Viking Age Ringed Pins From Dublin p. 125 (Royal Irish Academy 1984), illustrates the principle nicely.

If stickpins-plus-rings were stable enough to hold a shawl, that fact addresses my main problem with the idea that shawls were pinned on solely with a large disc-on-bow brooch, namely, how did women avoid being strangled by their own brooches? Folding the shawl into the correct shape and then pinning the fold in place, even if the disc-on-bow brooch also partly supported the shawl, may answer this question; the re-contouring of the shawl with the stick pins into a shape that would make it look more triangular in wear may also have made it possible to support the shawl on the body more comfortably at the neck with the disc-on-bow or other neckline brooch. (I thought that Ms. Mannering said the stickpins fastened the shawl to the rest of the costume, but the jewelry section expressly says otherwise; see quote below.) I think I will obtain a suitable pair of stickpins and experiment.

5. No tablet weaving. This was a surprise to me, and possibly was to Ms. Mannering as well. What does appear in the graves is cord, and it appears in quantities great enough to indicate that it was used as fringe on some of the garments worn by the women in the graves--perhaps on shawls, for example.  So much for my idea of using my Norwegian Snartnemo band to decorate a Vendel find based on the graves at NSV!  The absence of evidence of tablet-woven bands at NSV, however, is interesting in its own right, even if it throws a monkey-wrench into my planned costume design. :-)

6.  Were Vendel and Viking era costume so different?  So what do the authors of the Jørgensen book think Vendel women's costume looked like? This quotation from the jewelry section suggests that it did not look that different from Viking era costume, except for the jewelry:

Nørre Sandegård Vest shows that through the course of the Late Germanic Iron Age [i.e., I think this term is equivalent to "Vendel"  or perhaps "Migration Period"] "there is a continuous replacement of the female brooch-types. It is clear, however, that the basic set of a neck brooch and 2 breast brooches emerges in this period that that this is manifestly linked to Viking period costume. Only the widespread use of dress pins in the Late Germanic Iron Age distinguishes the combinations of dress accessories of the two periods. .... There is much that indicates that the forerunner of the Viking-period pinafore dress was introduced at this date, as Mannering's textiles studies also imply. (pp. 58-59)

The text proceeds to describe a costume with three basic elements that is very like the elements proposed to be represented by the finds at Birka, though the possibility of additional items being present in the richer graves is expressly emphasized:

Colour analyses show that an often blue twill pinafore dress was fastened below the arms with the aid of the two brooches that sat upon the chest straps of the dress. ...The underdress was of linen and had a slit at the neck to which a de luxe brooch was fastened. The third element of costume was a woollen shawl or cape. The large number of dress pins in the graves, which were not fastened to the pinafore dress or the underdress, were probably used to fasten this shawl. ... This three-part costume is the basic model at Nørre Sandegård Vest. Several of the rich graves, however, contain more types of textile; grave 9, for instance, had no less than 7 different types. ... It is clear that the costumes could consist of more than the three basic elements just described, although the small size of the textile fragments unfortunately prevents any closer identification of these and their function.(p. 59)

This summary ignores Ms. Mannering's suggestion that, in at least some of the graves, the third garment might be an open-fronted robe or caftan. Although the fragments of textiles found in graves throughout Scandinavia for both the Vendel and Viking periods are very small and there is no definitive evidence of such caftans, there is better evidence that they were worn by high-born Frankish women--and the Franks were the dominant power of northern Europe at the time. Moreover, the caftan was also adopted during the Migration Period in the Kentish section of England. Perhaps Inga Hägg was correct in concluding that some of the Birka women wore caftans.  Maybe those caftans were the last manifestations of a very old European fashion. As more information about northern European burials between 500 and 1000 C.E. becomes available, it may become possible to confirm this theory.  I hope so. 

Finally, none of this precludes the possibility that some women wore shawls *over* caftans (the way some wealthy older women wear big shawls or ruanas over winter coats even today). The Frankish Queen Bathilde wore both a caftan AND a shawl to her grave--and the shawl still bears the remains of fringe--reminiscent of the NSV graves.

EDIT: Please note the following correction to my remarks about what garments Queen Bathilde was buried in, courtesy of pearl: "The Frankish finds aren't all from the same person (only that particular source says so)- the coat belonged to Bathilde, but the cloak is associated with Abbess Bertille." e.g., http://www.baladeenpaysbriard.com/article-2801271.html

My Vendel Costume--Barking Up The Wrong Tree?

Thanks to pearl's research-fu, I have obtained some additional information about Vendel period costume.  Unfortunately, the end result of that increase in information is to increase my doubts about how I should proceed and, specifically, what items of costume I should make, and how they should look.  I apologize in advance if this post sounds a bit disjointed, but I'm writing it, in part, to clarify my thoughts, as well as to get feedback from you, my readers, as to what I should do next.

Reconstruction sketch from Erika Svensson's thesis

One of the new pieces of information I have obtained is the following thesis:

Svensson, Erika. 2005. "Spännande djur i vendeltida Uppåkra: En komparativ kontextuell analys av ovala och djurformade skålfibulor från Uppåkra" (Lund University).

Among other information, Ms. Svensson's thesis contains the sketch on the left, which is a reconstruction of a woman's costume from the Vendel era based upon finds from a grave in Norway located at Nørre Sandegård Vest.

What is the problem? you may ask. It's this. My original conception of Vendel costume was based upon the many finds of disc-on-bow brooches, which all date to the Vendel period. But many of those finds are from Gotland or other parts of Sweden, while the Snartemo band that inspired my costume in the first place is a Norwegian find. I had assumed that the disc-on-bow brooch was generally common throughout Scandinavia during the Vendel period, but this may well not be the case, and it appears that there was no such brooch in the Nørre Sandegård Vest find.

In addition, there are other reasons why the Nørre Sandegård Vest find would be a more appealing one for me to replicate. For one thing, I would not need to sew an underdress.  Ms. Svensson claims that, in this find, the brooch pins were inserted into the dress, and the fineness of the brooch pins found shows that the underdress had to have been made from linen, not wool. I already have several linen underdresses, one with a keyhole neckline, that I could use for such a costume. 

A second reason is that I would not need a large disc-on-bow brooch for a Nørre Sandegård Vest costume either! A small round tortoise (?) brooch and a pair of slightly larger tortoise-shaped brooches would be all I would need. Absent detailed information on the brooch designs, I could make do with plain bronze brooches with added bosses from The Treasury. Although period brooches were cast, not hammered, there were some plain ones found during the Vendel Period, and I could get the hammered ones cheaply. I would also need a few short strands of suitable beads with spreaders, but again spreaders are easy to come by--much easier than disc-on-bow brooches.

As for the shawl, the above sketch indicates that it was pinned to the straps of an apron dress with straight pins. I'm not sure that I believe that to be credible, but then I know almost nothing about the Nørre Sandegård Vest. In any event, finding suitable straight pins (The Treasury sells some of these, also) and pinning a shawl in this manner would be simple and relatively cheap to do.

Lastly, the sketch above assumes a slightly fitted apron dress. However, I greatly doubt that the find supports anything other than a dress with straps, somewhat like my blue tube-shaped dress.

So now I am now interesting in finding more information about the Nørre Sandegård Vest find, in order to decide exactly what sort of costume I want to make, and ornament with the Snartnemo band I've been given. At pearl's suggestion I've tracked down and read the following article:

Malmius, Anita.  "Cremation grave textiles: Examples from Vendel upper class in the Vendel and Viking Periods" Jonas 13 (October 2002).

Unfortunately for me, the finds Ms. Malmius discusses in her Jonas article are male graves.  Interestingly, these finds are of wool, mostly 2/2 twill, not linen.  But that could be due to a number of factors--including the possibility that cremation may destroy linen fabric while preserving traces of wool.

So it seems to me that coming up with a plausibly Vendel costume would require a greater level of research intensity.  I'm still wrestling with whether I'm prepared for that as yet, though it still looks as though my white wool and blue wool (both 2/2 twill) are good choices for the project.

Vendel Project Update

After months of dithering about fabric choices, I finally have fabric for both the underdress and the overdress of my planned Vendel outfit. The white fabric will be for the underdress and the blue fabric for the overdress. Both are 100% wool. I will wear one of my wool shawls (both brown) with the outfit--hopefully pinned with a disc-on-bow brooch, if I can get one.

Here is a picture of the two fabrics together. The blue is a little less bright than shown, but the color is otherwise pretty accurate. Click on the image to get a large close-up that really shows the weave of the blue fabric. Now I have to decide where to go next--tunic cutting or tablet weaving.

A Vendel Brooch!

It appears that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has at least one Vendel period disc-on-bow brooch that may have been made in Norway.  It is about 20 cm long and looks as though it contained enameled plates, though those are now missing.  Information about this brooch can be found here.  But there seem to be more examples found in Gotland (or at least more examples of which there is information on the Internet) than in Norway. Still, this information provides food for thought.

Another Vendel Update

Today, Amalie's band arrived. Except for the edges (which will be hidden, given the way I plan to stitch it onto the tunic I will make) I think it's beautiful.

I have decided to go with an off-white wool for the tunic and, more tentatively, with a dark blue for the overdress. The white wool is on its way to me. I haven't ordered the dark blue yet, partly because of financial considerations and partly because I may yet find information that supports a different color choice. I do want a dark color because, if I were going to wash the white wool, I would have needed to order more than 2 yards and I wanted to limit the amount of fabric I needed for the tunic to 2 yards to minimize the cost of the costume. So I do not plan to wash this tunic but intend to allow the overdress to serve as protection for all of that whiteness. 

There will be more updates as I make more progress.

Vendel Garb Update

While I wait for Amalie's Snartemo band to reach me from New Zealand, I have been considering an appropriate tunic pattern for a Vendel-period Norwegian outfit, starting with the tunic.  I've concluded that it should have a simple round neck, without a slit (because no brooches seem to have been found that would be suitable to close such a slit, in that period).  Based on that information, I figure that I can make the tunic from as little as 2 yards of wool flannel, provided that it's 60 inches wide.  My current idea is to go with off-white wool, which an EBay vendor is selling here for a good price.

In addition, I will clearly need some kind of overdress, and a shawl.  Both are simple--likely my overdress will be a simple peplos.  I'm thinking of dark blue herringbone wool, such as that sold here (it's the color at the very bottom of the picture) by The Wool Connection; at 60 inches wide, I can get by with only one yard. And I know where to find plain, smallish tortoise brooches. But as I learned from pearl during her discussion of shawls, I will also need a button or disc-on-bow brooch to fasten the shawl, and I know of no vendor that sells such an item.

I could save up to commission one from a vendor, I suppose (Raymond's Quiet Press will do such commissions, for example), but to do that I need to have a better idea of how big such brooches really were. This article by Johan Callmer makes them appear to be huge! Even if I stick with a design from early in the Vendel period (when such brooches were smaller), it appears that I'd still need a brooch that was at least 4 or 5 inches (roughly 10-14 cm) long. Is that right? It's certainly going to make it expensive, even if I don't opt for any enameling.

So now I'm hunting down articles about disc-on-bow brooches, partly to see if I can find one that identifies the size of any relevant brooch finds and partly to learn more about them in general. Any information that my readers might have would, as always, be appreciated.

New Project--Vendel Garb!

Amalie, who is responsible for the wonderful blog Adventures in Tablet Weaving, recently wove a band based on Snartemo V as part of a demonstration of use of continuous warp technique. The band did not meet her exacting standards, and she said in her blog:

I don't really know what I'm going to do with this band. It has quite a few mistakes in it in the section I did first. I don't know if it's known what the Snartemo V fragments or any of the related finds were used for. If anyone out there can convince me that they're making 7th century Norwegian Viking garb, you can have it.

Since my tablet weaving is nowhere near as skillful as hers, I commented on Amalie's blog, saying that though I've never made 7th century Norwegian garb before, I've made plenty of Viking era garb, and I'd be willing to take a crack at making a 7th century outfit if I had the band. So she agreed to send it to me! (Thanks again, Amalie!)

Now I'm looking forward to seeing a wonderful band, woven of wool in a period design, and thinking about what to do with it.  The band is about 60 cm long, enough to trim the neckline and sleeves of a tunic, so I will make a wool tunic (I think it needs to be wool, since the band is wool)  as the foundation of my outfit.  For the past few days, I've been thinking about what color of wool I should use for the tunic. I can buy periwinkle blue wool flannel (a web company I've patronized has some on sale right now) but that color doesn't seem appropriate. I see this tunic as a best tunic for a noble of not quite royal quality, so in my opinion a deep or vibrant color is called for. I can also get yellow or deep orange wool flannel on sale, but I don't look good in yellow and orange also doesn't seem right (especially because the band has true red in it.) I have some dark blue wool that I've been saving for my (proposed) Birka outfit, but I don't want the two tunics to be of the same fabric even if I have enough of the blue for both. I can also obtain light gray flannel, but am wondering whether that color would be special enough for this project.  Maybe it would be a reasonable compromise.

In addition to the tunic, I think there is justification for an overdress.  Martin Rundkvist's article indicates that tortoise-shaped brooches were already worn in the Vendel period, though they tended to be smaller and either plain or featured incised decoration, often in the form of a crouching animal. His article does not say whether any textile fragments (loops or otherwise) were associated with any of the Vendel era brooches, but I can contact him through his blog and see whether he will answer that question for me. If no loops or fragments were found, I could wear the new tunic with a simple peplos and fasten that peplos with featureless tortoise brooches--I know of two metal workers who sell such items. That, with simple turnshoes (my existing ones are sufficiently generic that they would do) and a shawl (ditto) would complete the costume.

Yes, I know that I have a ton of non-progressing projects already, but this idea is more exciting! I will of course report on my progress.

EDIT:  I have since learned that a sword was found in Snartemo grave V, suggesting that the bits of tablet weaving found in that grave belonged to a man's clothing.  No matter.  It seems likely that high-ranking women used similar bands on their clothing.