My controversial dress

For the weekend in Rosala (mentioned in the last post) I needed some warm new clothes for my self too. I chose to make another wool tunic or a dress that would fit on top of my old wool dress, since I had the opportunity to borrow a kaftan. In the last post I also said that with my new enthusiasm with viking garb, I've started to do my research better than before. Well, forget that. This dress is, ahem... very loosely based on anything and mostly speculative. So if you want to make authentic garb that is based on grave finds... look away!

The structure of the dress is not something very commonly seen on viking clothing. It has gores on the front and back reaching very high above the waistline. That is because I wanted the dress to be loose but not baggy. If you make the dress wider and more loose simply by cutting a wider panel for the body of the dress, you end up with a baggy and saggy garment that bulks up under your armpits. By shaping the dress with gores like this you get a nice, even graceful figure for the whole thing. 

There is also another reason for the high gore in the front. When I was pregnant with my second baby, I soon noticed that my old dress with gores starting from my hip level or even lower, was very quickly non-wearable because of my growing belly. I'm thinking that viking women must have been pregnant alot and it would have been hihgly impractical to make separate "maternity clothes". So, to me it makes sense to sew the normal clothes in a way that they could be worn while pregnant aswell. (Even though I'm not planning to be pregnant again!) I don't know of any viking age finds that would have this type of high gores. On the other hand, we know there were gores used, and to my understanding many of the fabric finds are such small fragments that we have no way of knowing how high the gores were. But I'm just speculating here.

Here I'm not wearing the other wool dress underneath. Spring came to Rosala on that sunday.

The reason why I wanted this dress to be loose, is that it's worn on top of several layers of clothes, it's designed to keep me warm in winter. When wearing several layers of handsewn garments on top of each other, things might get a little bulky especially in places where alot of seams cross each other. The worst place where this usually happens is under the armpit, and it can be really annoying! To avoid that, I decided to make the side gores very long, reaching past the armpit well into the sleeve. The high gore replaces the usual rectangular gusset in the armpit and is very comfortable to wear. This type of side gore was used in the Eura dress, a find from the finnish iron age, but not in a viking dress (at least that I know of).

The axe-picture is taken by Hedda, the beautiful coat is borrowed from Sahra. Six layers of wool plus a layer of linen on top of my arms there, it was a little stiff.

When it comes to the decoration of the dress... I only did it because it looks pretty, and because I thought that it was the right way of doing it, without doing any further research. Well, it turned out that there really was narrow strips of fabric (usually silk?) used to decorate the neckline and cuffs, but mine might unfortunately be too wide. Well, I thought what the heck, the dress is stretching all the limits anyhow so a little too wide deco isn't going to rock the boat. But then I used it for a weekend and realized that when wearing two wool dresses under a coat is thick and bulky enough, adding another layer of wool on the cuff makes it very uncomfortable and tight under a coat sleeve.  So I might end up taking the red fabric off from the sleeves. After all, it's a really pretty hand sewn dress made from good quality 100% herringbone wool from tippet.fi. It would be a shame if I ended up disliking it because of irritating cuffs.

Such a happy, happy weekend it was.

One question rose during the weekend. What did the vikings wear around their neck when it was really cold? A fox looks nice but is actually really impractical and not very warm. A cape does not cover the neck area, or if it does, it's impossible to actually do anything. I ended up making a simple rectangular scarf out of some wool fabric I had lying around, but I have no idea if it's period. Maybe something nalbinded, closed with a brooch? I think I've seen that somewhere.

 

It's alive!

Wow, it's been a while since I've updated this blog! Last post was made when our daughter was tiny, my husband had very short hair and I was clueles about what was going to happen. What happened very soon actually was happy news, a new baby was coming to rock our world. Aaaaand then I kinda lost intrest in making garb and sort of doing anything medieval. Except spending time with my sca family, that's what makes me tick. But garb seemed irrelevant. I would basically satisfy with anything that fits.

This sure was confusing, even the second time around.

Is there anything cuter than viking kids?

But now baby number one is five and baby number two is about to turn two... it's a boy, by the way. And suddenly our family has experienced a whole new era of garb making and reenacting in general. I've turned my back on my sewing machine and went back to my viking roots, sewing by hand and doing my research. I've even made a time jump of couple hundred years and started sewing a scary 14th century dress, which is still waiting for me to finish it though. 

Oh and I decided to change the language of this blog. It seems that a big part of the reenacting community are from around the world, and also most of the research has to be done in english. So it seems only natural to use english while writing about my own work.

Ok so enough babbling, let's talk about garb. It seems that I've never introduced most of the things that I've sewn for the hubs or my self... but I think I'll let that be and concentrate on the new stuff. 

This is the most recent tunic I made for my husband. It's completely hand sewn, the fabric is 100% wool tweed I bought from my favourite and trusted fabric vendor, tippet.fi. The pattern is very basic tunic with side gores and square gussets on the armpit. 

I have attached the ends of the tablet woven band by threading individual yarns inside the opposite end of the band.

Husband wanted some tablet woven band to decorate the tunic, but since that is something I can't do, we reached for the very talented Sahra from the blog Hibernaatiopesäke (the author of the book Applesies and fox noses).

The trick of this otherwise very basic t-tunic is the seam treatment I did for the side seams. This was a whole new skill for me and took some practise, but I think it turned out quite nice. I decided to use the vandyke stitch. I found some information about viking age seam treatments on this intresting article about viking age embroidery. I'm not entirely certain if just the vandyke stitch was the right one to choose, but I got the impression that seam treatment made with some type of loop stitch was fairly commonly used. The article mentions variants of the vandyke and ösen stitch being used, and I found a tutorial about the vandyke that I could understand... so that's what I went with. 

There was actually a really good reason for this tunic to be made. We had an awesome opportunity to spend the weekend with our sca family at the Rosala viking centre. The place is a very idyllic viking site with a chieftain hall and other reconstructed buildings. The weekend was truly magical and it did dangerously feed the flames of my new garb-making fever.