Aprondresses are very simple and very quick to make, depending on which pattern you choose.  The fit of the straps, however, can be something that drives people completely insane over time.  If you find that you are continually futzing with your straps, here are a few things you might want to look at to help troubleshoot the source of your problems.  Note that most people blame brooches, but they were historically large and heavy for the most part.  This often causes reenactors to initially choose brooches from other eras or locations to reduce size and weight, because they worry about them dragging the dress down, but a well fitted dress, with properly sized straps, make even the largest brooches feel nonexistant when worn.
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Many of the tips below will require you to test and re-test a garment and strap length.  If you want to quickly test out the length of the straps without having to remove them from the dress and re-attach, you can just add a few sturdy whipstitches to the loop end of the long strap to effectively shorten them.  (See diagram to the left.) This is also a great tip to use if you swap out between different sets of brooches that might have different pin lengths.

• Fabric: What fabric are your straps made from?  What fabric is the dress?  In archeological example, we see that often the straps do not match the dress, with linen straps and wool dresses sometimes found.  Linen is sturdy and, if it is quality linen, has little stretch.  (Some of the colored linen at Joanns, as well as that from some inexpensive vendors, is very short staple, meaning that the linen fibre is chopped up to bits and processed like cotton.  This will stretch more than other types of linen and might need some reinforcement.)  You can replace the current straps with stronger ones, or add a linen cord or heavier linen or even sturdy silk cloth core to the straps to help eliminate stretch.  On the "Viking Clothing (SCA-Style)" Facebook group, Astri Bryde recommends using the selvedge in the straps to help combat stretch.  I personally find that suggestion to be brilliant as most modern selvedges tend to be very sturdy. 
  
  If the dress itself is stretching (I have one wool dress that is somewhat loosely woven, and it stretches like crazy with heavy brooches), then add a bit of linen to the top of the dress itself inside, or even add a more sturdy tablet woven band or strip of silk to the outside to combat this stretch.  (A really stretchy cloth might require you to line the entire bust area with something more sturdy, but take it one step at a time when testing solutions.)

• Build: Everyone is built different.  Sometimes sloping shoulders or other things might mean that you need to angle the straps differently on your dresses.  You can change this angle by setting the straps closer together in the back than the front and testing that out.

 

• Are you using short front loops on the dress or are you pinning directly through the fabric of the garment?  Using loops allows you to strain your cloth less, and preserve it longer (constantly re-pinning through the cloth itself will both damage and stretch your precious aprondress textiles).

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• Construction of straps:  There are several ways historically to fold the cloth to create the straps.  My personal favorite is to fold the cloth in half lengthwise and press it, and then fold each of those ends in and press again and whip stitch the edge closed.  This looks like double fold bias tape, but is not cut on the bias (straps cut on the bias would be very, very stretchy).  Also, if you have the option to cut the straps on the grain, rather than across it, that might eliminate some issues.

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Are you going to Pennsic?  Have you registered?  If not, remember that the deadline is June 16, 2018!  Get your registrations in!:  ​https://www.cooperslake.com/prereg/account/index.php

I know I am a bit lax on the Pennsic posts this year, but things have mundanely been crazy, and add to that a new kitton addition to the house... well, I am swamped with life and am trying to play catch up here, and everywhere else as well.  If you need to see totally adorable pics of him, they can be found here:  https://themerryrosette.weebly.com/

But back to Pennsic.  My classes are officially all on 8/7.  I will be teaching my "Deeper Look at Textiles & Trim of Viking Age Dress" at noon (it is a 2 hour class) and that will be immediately followed by my Beyond the Aprondress class.  At this moment I am planning to also teach a "Basic Viking Clothing with No Regreats" class, that would discuss how I would approach crafting a Viking Age wardrobe based on what I know NOW (so that I could avoid my past mistakes).  The plan is tentatively to do this as a traveling class and I will teach several sessions on the same day in several private camps.  I will update this blog with information once I have it all set up.

I also want to toss out some links to my older articles, because they tend to be well received by new folks each year.

Tips for Enjoying your First (or Tenth) Pennsic:
 awanderingelf.weebly.com/blog-my-journey/tips-for-enjoying-your-first-or-tenth-pennsic
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Pennsic Prep list:
awanderingelf.weebly.com/blog-my-journey/pennsic-prep-and-my-list-for-newcomers

Dressing for the Weather:
awanderingelf.weebly.com/blog-my-journey/dressing-for-the-weather

What else do I totally love that has improved my Pennsic life?  A very silly LED light that charges from a USB source.  It was cheap so I got one to try out last year and discovered this one little light is enough to light my entire tent at night.  I only charged it once during War (my BF has been using his for various tasks since September, as well as a camping trip, and only just charged it last weekend).  And with the USB cord attached, I can charge it directly from my Goal Zero.

(This document is still in a draft stage, but I have had enough conversations about my interpretaion of this recently that I felt it ok to put forward my thoughts while I finalize the language of this piece.)

A number of Viking Age graves, particularly those from 10th Century Birka, contain fragments of finely pleated linen, presumed to be remnants of an under gown.  This type of cloth is frequently associated with Birka, where 52 graves were identified as containing linen serks, and of those 21 were showed evidence of having been finely pleated. (Thunem, Serk)  Birka was not the only location of such textiles, as there was a pleated linen shirt in Hedeby grave 5/1964. (Hägg, Textilien, 325).  Pleated linen shirts are also found in grave goods from sites in Russia, the best examples of which are Gnezdovo and Pskov.

Agnes Geijer, who did the original work with the Birka textiles, revised her thoughts on the local origin of linen garments to acknowledge Inga Hägg’s theories that not only the textiles, but likely the garments themselves were imported as ready made items from Kiev.  Geijer also notes that she believes it possible that unpleated serks at Birka might well just represent cloth from which the pleating has been washed out and that more of shirts might originally have born pleats.  (Geijer, Textile Finds, 88)

Grave 5/1964 from Hedeby had remains of a Slavic style pleated shirt outside of the wagon in the entombment.  Inga Hägg comments that “some fragments of pleated shirts found at Hedeby might be associated with the dress of women belonging to the Slavic aristocracy”. 

Many reconstructions I have seen rely on methods of pleating that become undone when the garment is washed.  Included in these are to use a needle and thread to draw the fabric into pleats that run the whole length of the body, but not using any strings to fix the pleats permanently (very time consuming to have to repeat each time) and the “broomstick” method that involves tightly binding or twisting the garment while wet and allowing it to dry, which causes creases to form in the garment (the pleats in this method do not seem that they would follow arc formed by the pleats in the Birka example, and again, the pleating is not permanent).  There have also been interesting methods of construction associated with some of these reconstructions, including those that rely on Eura dress patterning (an item I question with to begin with, because it makes little sense for me to base Finnish wool dress on a leather garment from many centuries prior).

My understanding of the the time involved in spinning and weaving, as well as other daily tasks in period, makes me consider it unlikely that these garments would have used methods that needed to be repeated every time the item was washed.  For my reconstruction, I choose to look for permanent methods of fixing the pleats. Because of the prevailing theories on the source of the garments, I also opt to look to the Slavic and Russian sources, to attempt to define the construction methods.

Textile Evidence: Birka

Remains of the pleated dresses at Birka tend to be fragments of textiles preserved because of their proximity of the large oval brooches in the grave.  Because textile finds were not always properly categorized at the time of the original Birka excavations, there is some question as to the position of the brooches in the grave (nor do we know which was right or left).  This leads to various interpretations of the garment because one cannot state for sure the direction of the pleats.  Another factor that can compound this mystery is the tendency of the brooches to shift as the body decomposes, which could pull the pleats out of their normal alignment.  Hilde Thunem notes in her research on the serk that the pleats tend to run parallel the the brooch needle and then bend to one side.  Without knowing which brooch is right or left, this could mean that the pleats fan out from a neckline or possibly run along the body and bend towards the arm.

There is one additional bit of evidence that can help aid in forming a reconstruction, and that is the and that is linen fragments that are preserved by metal objects laying along side the body in the grave.  Grave 1062 from Birka shows pleats running horizontally on the arm but bears no evidence of pleating within the brooches themselves.  (Hägg, Kvinnodräkten, 17)

The Birka linens average 38-51 threads to the inch with a balanced weave.

​Despite the fact that the pleats remaining in the Birka brooches are often difficult to read in older photographs, it appears that the pleats are regular and often form firm lines. They are the less ordered  “wrinkles” as you would see in a “broomstick skirt” type of pleating.

The graves at Birka, as mentioned before, have evidence of 21 possible pleated serks.  The chart below lists the graves, as well as the dates and possible evidence of the garment being closed in the front with a small brooch.  All of these graves contained oval brooches as well, but that is not meant to be a statement that the serk was always associated with that type of costume.  Rather, it is likely that we have as many fragments as we do because of their proximity to the brooches.  Information on small brooches is also added here, because it shows the presense of a neck slit and brooch closure for the garment (something unnecessary with the V-neck construction with Eura style garments).

Textile Evidence: Gnëzdovo (Burial Ц-301) and Pskov (Ц-06-CtB3IV)

The garments from these finds are both crafted of linen that have folds at the neck and a sewn on “cord” or bolster at the collar.  Pskov used that cord as a tie while there is no fastener noted in the other example.  The fragments of the Pskov garment are all dyed blue, while Gnëzdovo has varying qualities of cloth, as well as both blue and possibly undyed textile, as part of its construction. (Orfinskaya and Pushkina, Gnëzdovo, 45-48)

The Gnëzdovo garment is made in two sections, undyed coarse linen tabby for the top half and fine dyed blue linen for the lower portion.  For the neckline the cloth is folded, hemmed and gathered in relatively large folds.  The blue skirt is also pleated, using three rows of thread, with one addition.  There is a tapered piece of the garment that is theorized to be part of a tapered sleeve or a gore.  The cloth for the body of the garment was at least 70cm wide and the thread count is 8/8 threads per cm for the coarse cloth and 12/16 threads per cm for the fine blue cloth.  There is no neck closure found with this garment.  It is believe that the top of the dress was made of coarse cloth because it would not be seen under another garment (while the blue skirt would be).  The pleats on the top of the dress were coarse, but those on the skirt were more fine, and fixed in place with a number of threads.  (Orfinskaya, ATN, p45; Linen dress, 258)

The Pskov dress is dyed blue tabby linen with a thread count of 18/14 threads per cm.  It is believed that it was approximately 40cm wide, with the body being comprised of two panels of that width sewn together with a center front seam.  The neck is comprised of fine pleats fixed with a thread and bound with cloth.  It is tied closed at the neck (there is a central slit in the garment where two textile panels meet) with the cord that holds the pleats along the top. (Orfinskaya, ATN, p48; Zubkova, NESAT X, p299)

Iconic Evidence

In addition to textile remains, I have looked at some pictorial evidence that suggest the chosen elements of my recreation.  Long sleeves, often wumpled at the wrists, are seen in imagery from various Russian sources, including drinking vessels.  This is also a fashion that shows up repeatedly in Saxon illumination during the Viking Age as well.

One of the most interesting items that seems to show a dress with vertical pleats on the front, long tapered sleeves that fall into folds up the arm is the Revninge Figure found in eastern Denmark in 2014.  Though believed to be of Viking manufacture, the costume is strikingly like proposed recreations of Slavic costume that show a panova (poneva) skirt and pleated garment with long sleeves pushed up at the wrist to form folds.

My Interpretation

For my reconstruction, I worked with a tightly pleated neckline such as was seen in the Pskov fragment, as well as tapered sleeves found there.  Having the pleating drawn up by a thread (in my case, three, similar to the Gnëzdovo waist pleats) allows me to have a permanent pleating structure that does not need to be reset after the garment is washed.  My pleats are approximately 6mm deep and very compact (I tried to gauge the size and number of pleats in the Pskov fragment based on the scale in one of the articles).  At the moment, the neckband also serves as a tie, but I might eventually replace the tie with a small brooch (as that seems to be an available option based on the number of Birka graves that contain both a pleated serk and a small brooch at the neck).  This type of pleating conforms to direction alignment of some of the pleats found in brooches from Birka.

I opted for the overly long sleeves seen in Russian art and in the Revninge Figure.  This choice allows for creases to form up the arm that round around the arm, rather than running along the length of it, conforming with the evidence of Birka 1062.  Again, this type of creasing does not require continued effort on part of the wearer.  After washing the creases will fall out, but even wearing the garment for a short span of time will allow the creases to reform.

I opted, at this time, for the simplest pattern possible, that uses rectangular construction with little or no waste.  I based my garment on a diagram by D. Rushworth.  I did extend the length of the sleeves.  In my garment, the sleeves were cut as a rectangle the width I wanted, and then tapered after the fact.  When I attempt to craft another garment like this, I will cut out the sleeve shape and use the excess from either side to form gores for the body (and make it a bit less wide, with less tightly stacked pleating in the neckline).

On thing that bothers me a bit about some of the diagrams from Hagg’s work with the Birka pleated linen as that it appears that some of the pleats might have a more steep curve.  While my hypothetical garment conforms to the extant necklines, and some of the proposed paths for creasing, it does not fall in line with a few of the finds.  (Though I still wonder how much shifting of items in situ changed the orientation of the pleats as well, as I can see how it could make a curve more extreme.)

Putting on my dress actually helped clarify this for me, to some extent.  In the photos of me wearing the dress, I have it on with a wrap-style garment, rather than a more fitted one.  The looseness of the over dress allows the linen serk to hang without excessive shifting and bunching up under the arms.  Further, my garment is tailored to me.  The arm is wide enough to allow movement and the square underarm gusset is placed as high as I can with out it binding.  If this garment were made to be sold as is, that gusset might not sit as high.  This, plus wearing it under a dress that at least as the top hem being fairly fitted, can create bunching and wrinkles in the under arm and on the chest near it which might affect the direction of the creases.  I have not tested the pattern of the wrinkles to any extent, but I look forward to doing so in the future to see if they correspond at all to the diagrams from Birka.  

One additional consideration that I might implement into a future design is of “shoulder pieces” which can be seen in later Slavic and Russian shirt designs, and are thought to be possible on the garments from Pskov and Gnëzdovo.

References

Andersson, Eva. Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby (The Birka Project for Riksantikvarieambetet), 2003.

Bender Jørgensen, Lise.  Northern European Textiles until AD 1000, Aarhus University Press), 1992

Bender Jørgensen, Lise.  Prehistoric Scandinavian Textiles, (Det Kongelige Nordiske oldskriftselskab), 1986.

Blindheim, Charlotte, “Drakt og smykker”, Viking 11.

Geijer, Agnes.  Birka III, Die Textilefunde aus Den Grabern.  Uppsala,1938.

Geijer, Agnes.  “The Textile Finds from Birka,” Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe (Heinemann Educational Books), 1984.

Hägg, Inga.  Die Textilefunde aus der Siedlung und us den Gräbern von Haithabu (Karl Wachlotz Verlag). 1991.

Hägg, Inga.  Die Textilefunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu (Karl Wachlotz Verlag). 1984.

Hägg, Inga. Textilien und Tracht in Haithabu und Schleswig. Die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu 18 (Karl Wachlotz Verlag), 2016.

Hägg, Inga, “Kvinnodräkten i Birka: Livplaggens rekonstruktion på grundval av det arkeologiska materialet”, Uppsala: Archaeological Institute, 1974

Hägg, Inga.  “Viking Women’s Dress at Birka,” Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe (Heinemann Educational Books), 1984.

Hermitage Museum. “Ibn Fadlan’s Journey: Volga Route from Baghdad to Bulghar” , 2016.

Orfinskaya, Olga and Tamara Pushkina. ”10th century AD textiles from female burial Burial Ц-301 at Gnëzdovo, Russia”, Archaeological Textiles Newsletter 53, 2011.

Orfinskaya, Olga. “Льняное платье X века из погребения Ц-301 могильника Гнёздово” (Linen dress from the burial of Ts-301 burial ground Gnëzdovo).

Orfinskaya, Olga and Y. V. Stepanova. “On the Issue of Origins of Russian Dress with Shoulder Straps”.

Stabrova, M.A. Ancient Russian Costume, Nauka Publishers, 1997.

Thunem, Hilde. “Viking Women: Undedress”, 2014. http://urd.priv.no/viking/serk.html

Zubkova, E.S, Orinskaya, O.V, and Mikhailov, K.A. “Studies of the Textiles from the Excavation of Pskov in 2006,” NESAT X, 2009.

Zubkova, E.S, Orinskaya, O.V., and Likhachev, D.  “New Discovery of Viking Age Clothing from Pskon, Russia.”  (Notes and summary by Perer Beatson) http://members.ozemail.com.au/~chrisandpeter/sarafan/sarafan.htm

There are certain books that you just need in your collection.  Some of them cover only one topic, such as Birka III (the textiles volume of the Birka finds), often though, the best gems are single articles within a larger book.  The entire series of the NESAT books (North-European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles) is worth looking at if you have a chance.  If you are in the US, most of them are available via ILL, and several are still in print or available as a Kindle edition.  Every single one of them has a valuable article for the Viking Age (or ever several).  I believe some of the articles in the older volumes are starting to show up on sites like Academia.edu for free download, but I still recommend taking the time to look at the books for yourself as even some of the peripheral topics can help you get a good feel for a period or a practice.

I will concentrate on Volume 7 and 10 here, and will cover the other still-in-print volumes (11, 12 and 13) later this week, hopefully.  13 was just released, so I have not yet gotten that one myself, but I will include some information on it as well.  (I will eventually review all of the books, but am starting with these.)

While I typically include bibliographies with specific articles that I post here, I also maintain master bibliographies.  They can be found under the "More..." button at the top of this site.  There is one for Sheep & Wool and I just started one for my Migration Era research.  There is a third for Viking Age research, and I will post there a link for my master bibliography excel sheet once it is updated (it is taking me some time, because I never kept a master bibliography when I started my studies).

I mentioned in my previous library post that I am starting to look into textiles and costume before the Viking Age.  I quite excited about this project, not just because it is "new" but because I also love to see how textiles and textile production changes over time.  I learned a lot (and made a great deal of mistakes, mostly in terms of organization) with Viking Age research, so I am hoping to apply the methods that worked better for me this time around (and spend less time reverse-documenting).

My first step in this adventure was to sort through my sources.  While collecting material for Viking costume research, I also was pulling articles and books for earlier periods because they were of interest even then.  Some of the items, such as Lise Bender Jørgensen's Prehistoric Scandinavian Textiles, I have already read, but some were just stuffed in random folders on my many drives waiting to be explored.

I decided I want my first costume to represent approximately 500CE Norway. The focus of my reading will be 0-600CE and center around Scandinavia and northern Germany, with other areas (and slightly earlier and later dates), serving as peripheral finds.

After gathering items in, more or less, on place, I needed to sift through what appeared to be most important and decide where to start.  For this, I opted for the Jørgensen volume mentioned above, as well as her book Northern European Textiles.  I have read both volumes several times, so it was a matter of refreshing my memory on the details of the earlier material.

It also gives me a quick overview of the textiles available during that time.  I opted to make some charts (similar to those I have in this blog for the Viking Age) based on the data available in these books.
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I pulled out several books that I have in hard copy to decide what I need to read or re-read, and have selected Iconic Costumes, Textiles and Textile Production in Europe: From Prehistory to AD 400, Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials (and am keeping a copy of the new dating for some of the items with that one), the Cambridge History of Western Textiles and The Högom Find and Other Migration Period Textiles and Costume in Scandinavia.  I am also in the process of pulling out the most relevant articles from sources such as ATN and NESAT (an example being "Hammerum: the Find of the Century" from NESAT 11).

Over the next month I will be reading each of these items (and others) and taking notes as I go.  In an attempt to make myself less crazy later, I am adding them as I finish them to my master bibliography (which is annotated and allows me to place each work in a variety of sources).  For those that I have digitally, I am uploading them to my Mendeley account and highlighting and annotating them within the system.

Further, I keep an excel sheet of data points that I find interesting (this is how I managed all of my entries for my article on Viking Age plaids and stripes, as well as my notes on things like colored linen, or fine open weave wools that serve as head coverings).  You can see below an example of a book opened in Mendely and where I am adding a note, as well as how I tend to categorize things within a spreadsheet (so far this sheet has tabs for stitches, colored textiles, and interesting notes, and there will be more added as I find points of interest that I want to track).
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I also often keep a project planning powerpoint, where I can drop images that directly related to the item I want to make (in this case a costume).  In this case there is a slide with the timeframe and location, the textile information/charts I craft, and slides that cover relevant visual items, such as screenshots of the Hammerum girl's dress.

It might seem like much, but the repetition is what helps to sort the material out in my brain, and allows me to remember it.  (And, in the event I cannot, I can now also just run searches on Mendeley or my spreadsheet to find something.)

For this project I have taken one additional step, and that is to create a Migration Era study group on Facebook where others interested can join in on the research and exploration.  I hope that the group grows and that everyone enjoys delving in.

​If you want to follow along here, I will be using the Migration Era/Iron Age category for my posts!

Ulla Mannering, at the National Museum of Denmark, is one of the authors whose work I will go out of my way to track down.  Many of her works focus on the Viking Age, which is how I was introduced it to, but I also am just now starting down the Migration Era and Iron Age trail of research for Scandinavia, and I am attempting to absorb as much of her papers as I can on the topic as well.

I cannot recommend this book enough to people interested in either time period.  It is well-illustrated and covers many forms of iconography for the time (metalwork,  tapestries, etc.).  She analyzes the figures and interprets the costume arrangements in them.  By far of most interest to me, however, is the last portion of the book that discusses the textile evidence of the period.  There are great images of the extant garments as well as pertinent information about them.

I found this book mildly helpful with my Viking research, but it is exceptionally helpful now that I am looking at earlier periods and the transition between the eras.

I needed a date for one of the Danish bog finds (and it was not detailed very well in Hald's book).  I searched and hit this site that is a wealth of information, including dates for many items and a gallery that is positively incredible Byzantine and Egyptian textiles and garments.

Go poke around, I guarantee you wont regret it:  http://www.textile-dates.uni-bonn.de/findspot_list.phpwww.textile-dates.uni-bonn.de/findspot_list.php

I started using very fine wool for veils a few years back and absolutely love them (more than linen and far, far more than silk).  I buy appropriate cloth when I can find it but recently opted to buy a sheer wool scarf on Amazon that is absolutely beautiful, and very, very soft.  It is long enough that I could cut it in half to make two of my normal veils or I can leave it at this length for a Saxon style that needs to also drape around my shoulders.

The navy does not appear so in the photo online (first item on the left below), but in reality it is a nice, dark woad blue. 

I am delighted.  I want to get the red to try next and maybe even the white and attempt to dye it.

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​These also come in sheer, fine cashmere!

This book is fantastic.  I sadly missed my chance to buy it right before it went out of print (I had to choose between this volume and Heckett's book on the Dublin headcoverings), and I regretted not picking it up.  I did ILL and read the book, but that is not the same as having it in some form.  

If you are interested in Saxon costume, or early period costume, you really must download this book, which is now offered for free here:  http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-281-1/dissemination/pdf/RR145.pdf

​This book covers textiles, textile production, clothing, embellishment, and jewelry.  If you are interested in this time period, this book easily offers enough material to get you started.