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.