Mi Contra Fa

Nalbinding socks - heels

I spent a few hours yesterday trying to get sock heels to work.  I like York stitch in the round; in flatwork, not so much.

I've been trying the old-style heel, where you make a sort of curved, narrowing trapezoid under the foot, then make its mirror, joining the slanty edges to the slanty edges of the first trapezoid.  When I tried this on some (too?) small samples, it wasn't really happening.  The best I got was to make the double-trapezoid all one piece, then go back and stitch the slanty edges together. Eh.

Thinking back on it, part of my problem may have been that the underfoot section wasn't curving up.  I kept pushing it flat, as if it all went under the foot, but that's not how it works. It curves up the foot on either side.  But the other part of my problem is increasing and re-joining properly.  And I'm terrified of ruining the socks I've put so many hours in.

Although I suppose I can just cut off a bad heel and try again?

Yes! I'll switch to the blue yarn for the heels.  If it doesn't work out, I hack off everything blue and try again.  Oh, I feel much better now.

Bog Shirt

There's a simple pattern handweavers like to use to make shirts, because it's zero-waste.  It's explained over here, and it's based on a Bronze Age Danish bog find.

I've struggled to explain the form of the Kentish overcoat to myself. If you use the standard period T-tunic construction, then you make a gown and slit it up the front.  That seems... weird.  Not impossible - in fashion, so little is impossible - but definitely weird, when in general the watchwords in early costuming are "save fabric."

I remembered this pattern today.  The two edges that fold in under the arms are selvage. You'd want to cut a slit from the neck through to meet them, but that's it.  

The few pictures I've seen of people wearing this have not been very impressive - very boxy. Not surprising, as it has absolutely no tailoring - no gores, nothing to shape it.  I may try drafting this up out of crap fabric and see how it works.

Pleated (?) undergown

Feeding my caftan obsession...

Sources for Anglo-Saxon women's clothing in the conversion period is scanty.  There's some good stuff, but you're in the awkward period when they were starting to bury folks in Christian shrouds, but before a lot of manuscript illuminations are getting made.  One source Gale Owen-Crocker points to is the Genoels-Elderen ivories, which have a scene of the Visitation.  I don't want to yank the photographer's picture, but here's a link to a really good shot.  Mary and Elizabeth are wearing open-fronted long jackets with decorated edges and bands on the arms (or the jackets are short-sleeved, and also decorated gown sleeves are showing - you really can't tell).  They have on long rectangular (I think?) veils, open at the neck, which look like they may be worn over a coif of some kind. They wear narrow belts over their jackets.

The current focus of my interest, though, are the undergowns, which are gathered or pleated across the front.  I'm not sure if this is an actual fashion feature, or an artistic tradition - earlier Mediterranean models for this image show more Classical-style drapery with lots of folds.  On the other hand, this is pretty detailed and tallies well with Ottonian fashions (as far as the placement of decorative bands on the arms and such goes).  

I poked around the Internet a little bit, reading up on pleat types.  Cartridge pleats or simple gathering seems like the most likely thing for early stuff.  All the knife pleats and box pleats seem to be 15th or 16th century.

I have some heavy white linen I've been saving for an undergown, and I tried cartridge pleating a section of it.  The result was not that great.  The folds in the ivory seem pretty big, and the cartridge pleats went in pretty small.  And then they poufed out immediately, so that there wasn't much of a "fold" look going down the cloth.  Also, not sure if a pleated/gathered front will be a good look on a short fat lady.

Alternatively, it might work better on a finer or lighter fabric.

Addendum: I looked at some of the other figures on the ivory and have two thoughts:

1. Everyone has folds and pleats, even Jesus' tunic. It may just be an artistic way of denoting "loose fabric."
2. Mary in the Annunciation panel seems to have a lot in common with Book of Kells Mary from a few weeks ago.  Same hood-sort of looking thing.  Should consider a closer comparison later.

Oatcakes

One thing I learned reading up on early food is that wheat isn't so easy to grow in northern Europe, and especially in the British Isles.  Oats and barley were the major cereal crops.  Yes, there was wheat, and as far as re-enacting upper class people go, it's probably accurate to have it.  But I got interested in oatcakes.

I assume Ye Olde Peasant Oatcake would be a thick oat porridge, baked or fried.  Not very exciting.  I may make it sometime, just to see, but I was actually hungry today and a fried oatcake sounded like something that wouldn't be too terribly hard to do.  I liked this recipe for the author's attempts to figure out what a traditional oatcake would be like, working back from several old cookbooks.  I ended up using this one, though, as my jumping-off point, modified by what I had in the house and my unwillingness to fire up the oven for two lousy oatcakes.  I did use rolled oats, because I figured they'd fry easier than steel-cut, but steel-cut would be better from an authenticity standpoint.  

• 3/4 c. rolled oats (would like to try steel-cut)
• 1/2 c. all-purpose wheat flour (would like to try oat flour)
• ~1 Tb or 4 tsp brown sugar (about 1/3 of a 1/4 c. measure) (not early period but sounded tasty)
• Dash salt
• Pinch baking powder (totally not period)
• Cinnamon to taste (also not period but sounded tasty)
• 1/4 stick salted butter, cold, diced
• Enough cream to moisten to dough (water would probably be more appropriate)
• Butter for frying

I mixed all the dry ingredients, then squooshed in the butter.  When it was crumbly, I added cream until it stuck together in a dough.  (I had cream left over from the SENEA dinner and I've been trying to use it up.)  I separated the dough into two halves, rolled each into a ball, and flattened to about 1/4" thick.  I heated the butter in a small frying pan until water sizzled, then fried the cakes, about 5 min on the first side and 4 min on the second.

The first cake was still a bit doughy in the middle, so I flattened the other one to about 1/8", which helped.  

They were a little salty, I think from the salted butter I used to fry.  (I didn't have unsalted around.)  But none of this prevented me from eating the first one and part of the second.  Pretty good warm; we'll see how they are cold.  I'm sure all the fat helped.

Reducing the fat content and the sugar would make these blander but more healthful.  Eaten with something else, they might make a good cracker-ish sort of thing.

 

Nalbinding sock update

My second sock is now the same size as my first sock.  My ball of yarn is noticeably smaller than it was.  I did end up re-starting the sock for the third time, but that is thankfully the time that it worked.

So, a tip for starting 'in the round' - add stitches to your starting slipknot until you can just bend the line of stitches around into a circle that lays flat. 

An issue: on both pieces, I think, I've got places where the stitches are spaced wider, and places where they are closer together.  I think this is because of the way they bunched up initially when I tightened the starting slipknot.  I did try to correct for that on the second sock; either it didn't work or something else is the cause of the spacing.  It's not obvious on the appearance of the sock itself, I think - I notice when I'm adding rows.

A few more rows on each, and it's time to (dum dum DUMMM) add the heels.  I should probably do some test pieces.  I don't think the method of construction for the Coppergate sock is online, but it's early, so I could use the flat trapezoidal method Heel Type B.  (Ms. Lewins actually calls it out as a potential Coppergate technique, hm.)  Tatsume linked me a video on doing flat nalbinding without having to use a bunch of stitches to turn.  I'm hoping that will help.

Update: Picture!

And I don't know if I ever posted the completed mittens:

Test Kitchen: Custard and Apples

This and the oxymel are my contributions (along with a sauce for meat) to a potluck next week.  The Storvik Early Northern European Adhocracy is celebrating our one-year anniversary with a dinner.  I got drinks and dessert.

"Carolingian Foodways" (Compleat Anachronist 156) contains several hypothetical or conjectural recipes. One of them is baked apples or pears.  One of the author's sources - it may have been Benedictine rules - mentioned a basket of fresh fruit as a good ending to a meal. The author suggests that monks were encouraged to eat foods plain and raw, and that non-monks might have done different things with their fruit. Certainly the Romans stewed enough apricots and such.

But baked apples without cinnamon (!) seemed so... sad.  Now I suppose I could go and do apples with honey and cream, maybe some raisins, and that actually sounds pretty good now that I type it out.  But I got it into my head to do a custard.  There's a Carolingian copy of Apicius, see, and he's got a simple custard recipe.  Milk, eggs, honey.  It's finished with white pepper, but that's easy enough to omit.  (This redaction contains cumin, too, but it's the only one to do so. Cumin? I know the Romans liked to mix their sweets and savories, but I don't think I've ever seen cumin in a dessert. Those tend to be honey, eggs, almonds, and milk or white bread-based.) This recipe (which is copied with volumetric units over here) calls for half milk, half cream, which seems sensible.  Last night, though, I made this recipe, because it only needed milk, and that's what I had in the house.  Inspired by this, I cored an apple (a Honeycrisp that was around) and plunked it in a corner of the baking pan.

Pro Tip: Add the honey to the milk in a thin stream, whisking the entire time. No problem with honey lumping in the bottom of the bowl.

It wasn't bad, but it didn't quite hang together.  The apple got soft-ish but was still pretty firm after 40min at 300 F.  The custard is, to a modern palate, very plain.  There's no vanilla, no cinnamon, just creamy, sweet, and slightly eggy.  Eating it with the apple should have given some additional flavor, but... I don't know. I had the impression I was eating custard and an apple, not a dish "baked apple in custard."  Possibly the apple should be softer?  

Or I am just over-reaching.  Maybe I should do baked fruits or custard.

Oxymel

I don't seem to have noted this earlier... hm. Well, imagine my surprise upon perusing Bald's Leech Book and coming across a recipe for oxymel!  Two parts honey, one part vinegar, one part water, then boil down to 1/3 or 1/4 the total.  That's our SCA standard sekanjamin, without the mint.  It's given as a medicinal syrup, not a beverage, but hey.

Anelda Falconbridge of the East posted her documentation in re-creating the Leech Book's oxymel.  A transliteration and translation (from the 1800s) of the book is available online.

I've bought wildflower honey (made in the USA but not specifically local to me) and Pompeian red wine vinegar.  I went to a fancy oil-and-vinegar shop at the Columbia Mall, but they did not have anything so basic as plain red wine vinegar! I had been hoping to get something actually fermented - you know, like the apple cider vinegars sold "with the mother."  But Pompeian was singled out as being an exceptionally good-tasting vinegar for the price in a taste test by the Washington Post, so I went with that.

I suppose apple cider vinegar could be an option?  A real quick look only turns up a recipe by the British Museum for kids which specifies a wine vinegar. A quick look around the Internet turns up a lot of claims that Hippocrates recommended apple cider vinegar as a health aid.  No idea if that's actually true.  Certainly they had wine in Anglo-Saxon England, but my impression is that it would have been rarer, mostly imported stuff.  Maybe apple cider vinegar would be more likely?

Earrings

Earrings are rare, but not unknown, in Anglo-Saxon contexts.  I think one of my grave catalogues has a few beads on a ring that's identified as an earring.  And I just saw this pretty thing from 6th century Cambridgeshire go up for auction:

6th cen. earring found in Cambridgeshire, UK

Within a week of my seeing that, the Met Museum Store catalog shows up in my mailbox, and there's a  new item:

Met Museum Store's Ostrogothic earrings

I think I found my Christmas present.  From the ad copy:

This appealing design is modeled on a pair of gold earrings with garnets in the Met's collection, originally made in the fifth–sixth century A.D. They were once worn by an Ostrogoth, one of several Germanic tribes that the ancient Romans considered barbarians. This type of earring was derived from late Roman jewelry and was adopted in the 400s by eastern Germanic women. Its simple sophistication made it the most popular earring style on the continent up to the seventh century.

 

And as long as I'm schilling for the Met (disclaimer: I'm not an affiliate or anything, I've just gotten some great swag from there), here's another pair of earrings  based on a northern French find:

Met Museum Store's Frankish earrings

They're being sold as "Byzantine;" I'm assuming these would be Frankish versions of the Empire's latest fashions, or else imports.  Also, caveat emptor - I don't have a picture of the original find, and "based on" in catalog-speak can mean anything from "close copy" to "shares a similar motif, if you squint."