Mi Contra Fa

Continental Celtic-Inspired Beaded Necklace

A few years ago, I saw some news articles on an Iron Age burial from Switzerland.  A high-status woman was buried in a tree-trunk coffin with some beautiful grave goods, including a bead swag with glass and amber beads:

I loved it, I coveted it, I decided to make something like it.

Step 1: Decide on the form

I don’t often wear peplos gowns with two brooches and a bead swag.  Since I love and covet this look, I wanted it to be something I would actually wear, in garb or out of it.  So I decided to go with a necklace.

Step 2: Get the proportions

Getting something that looks like the necklace above isn’t quite as easy as buying blue and yellow beads, done.  There’s the relative sizes of the beads - how big the the large focal compared to the small blue spacers?  The general reporting didn’t include that kind of detail, and i wasn’t motivated enough to track down an archaeological report.

I took the image above and opened in up in MS Paint.  I could draw line along the diameter of each bead, and across its width, and then get the length of those lines from the pixel addresses of the start and stop points, combined with a little Pythagorean Theorem:

Length = SquareRoot( (Xstop - Xstart)^2 + (Ystop - Ystart)^2)

• Small blue beads: 18 pixels across, 5 pixels wide
• Small yellow beads: 21 pixels across, 9 pixels wide
• Larger amber bead: 33 pixels across, 27 pixels wide
• Large blue beads flanking focal: 40 pixels across, 17 pixels wide
• Focal: 80 pixels across, 45 pixels wide

Values are all very approximate.  It’s not always clear in the image where a bead starts or stops, because there are shadows.

So how do I translate “pixels” into beads I can buy?  FIrst, I simplified all of those values above.  The smallest dimension was 5 pixels, so I divided everything by 5 and rounded to get nice integer values:

• Small blue bead: 4 x 1
• Small yellow bead: 4 x 2
• Amber bead: 6.5 x 5.5
• Big blue bead: 8 x 3.5
• Focal: 16 x 9

Now I can start to get relative sizes of beads.  For example, I want a focal with a diameter 4x larger than the diameter of the smallest spacer (16/4 = 4). 

Step 3: Shopping!

The Focal

The main challenge would be the focal.  There would not be many options for that, and I suspected they would all be found at Heart of Oak Crafts on Etsy.  Bead Pattern 92 is a Hiberno-Norse design from centuries later than the Celtic necklace, but a good fit nevertheless.  It’s blue, with yellow dots, and two side lobes that look like the larger blue beads in my original. (Which might be part of the original focal, I don’t know.)  Only problem is that Heart of Oak doesn’t provide dimensions directly for this, just a comparison with a US penny.  I decided to purchase it on faith and do my best with the other beads.

Heart of Oak Bead 92

The Blue and Yellow Spacers

A little Googling taught me that the flat, round shape I wanted for the spacers called “rondelle” by bead people.  The smallest rondelles I was finding in that deep cobalt blue were 6mm across:

Found on eBay

 

The small yellow glass beads that flank the amber beads in the original were the same diameter, so I also got 6mm yellow rondelles:

From Etsy vendor BaubleShoppeBeads

 

Amber and Faux Amber

The bigger of the amber beads was not-quite round, but I was not finding amber beads in a lot of shapes.  I went with round beads.  How big should it be?  My “4 across” spacer is 6mm; so my “6.5 across” bead should be:

(6 mm/4)*6.5 = 9.75 mm

So I got a trio of 10mm diameter amber beads.

From Etsy vendor AmberusShop

Now what about the smaller amber beads?  The amber on this necklace is a bit odd.  On either side of the focal, there’s a larger amber bead and a smaller one.  The smaller ones are about the same size as the spacer beads.  The two larger beads aren’t identical (not unusual on early bead necklaces); the other bead is about the same diameter, but has a much more pronounced saucer shape.  I picked up some 9mm diameter saucer-shaped beads in a frosted amber glass.  The frosted effect was not ideal, but it was what I could find.

From Etsy vendor SeeSpotRunFindings

 

Lastly, for those smallest amber beads, I got 8mm glass rondelles, so they’d just be slightly larger than the spacers around them.

From BedazzlingBeads on Amazon

 

Step 4: Stringing

I almost immediately decided I didn’t much like the small 8mm amber glass rondelles.  They got visually lost between the bright yellow rondelles flanking them.

I also didn’t really like the asymmetry in the restrung original.  If you look at the image at the top of the post, you can see:

Tiny amber ---- Medium amber ---- FOCAL ---- Tiny amber (or glass?) ---- Medium amber

The second 'tiny amber' may even be a single yellow glass bead; it's a bit hard to tell.  This is fine and good and period, as near as I can tell.  Strict adherence to bilateral symmetry does not seem to have been a priority in early jewelry, although reconstructions often show designs that are echoed or rhymed on either side - similar sizes/different colors, similar colors/different sizes, things like that.  However, I was again looking for a piece of jewelry I could wear in or out of the SCA, so I wanted something more typically modern:

Tiny amber ---- Medium amber ---- FOCAL ---- Medium amber ---- Tiny amber

I also used my 9mm saucer beads for the "tiny" ambers, rather than the 8mm rondelles.  The difference in diameter isn't very much, but the greater thickness of the saucers gives them substantially more visual presence.  Yet, they feel substantially smaller than the 10mm round amber beads, so there's a nice distinction there as well.  This is again a departure from the original, but I preferred the effect.

I played around with the number of blue spacers to use.  My first trial used 25 between each of the showpiece beads.  That put the saucer beads behind my shoulder line.  It wasn’t a bad look but I wanted the showpiece beads more around the front, partly to show them off, and partly to echo the original bead swag.  15 blue beads did the trick.

Results

Overall, I am extremely pleased with the outcome!  This is a lovely necklace that is sleek enough for daily wear, and historically plausible enough for SCA use.  Although the original inspiration is Iron Age, I think it would pass as plausible for most early-ish northern European bead necklace/swag contexts.  A bead historian might find something amiss, but the casual viewer will not.

The focal is also not nearly as large, relative to the spacers, as in the original.  Without dimensions for the original beads, I’m not sure if this is because my spacers are too large or my focal is too small.  However, I actually like the size of the focal that I have.  It gives the necklace a different look, something more like a graduated string of pearls, where the elements are closer in size to each other.  It makes the necklace a bit more suitable for daily wear outside of events to my mind.  I’m also slightly concerned that a bead 4x wider than the spacers would be so large that it would lift the string of beads on either side off my neck slightly, putting weight on the main bead and being uncomfortable as a result.  (This would not be a problem with beads suspended from brooches, I expect, as they sit further down the chest and hang, rather than rest on the collarbone and sternum.)  

Accessories that worked (and didn't)

Fun day at Crown Tournament! I set up tents and made hot drinks and judged A&S.  New Storvik tent was awesome and the repaired/augmented/repainted list looked great.  Lots of people did a lot of work.

I wore my Incan outfit.  It was not the best outfit for the weather - high of 60, cloudy and chilly for a lot of the day.  I opted to leave on my pants under the tunic rather than go bare-legged, because cold.

Wool Slippers

At the last minute, I'd thrown my nalbound slippers into my bag, to wear as liners to the Roman sandals that were standing in for llama rawhide ones.  While I can't fit them into my boots as socks, the sandals adjusted around them fine.  I put them on after the dew was mostly gone, and lo! My feet stayed toasty, warm and dry all day.

Arnegunde Pin

I have a repro long pin from the Arnegunde burial from Raymond's Quiet Press.  I don't see it on their website anymore; here's a picture.  It's the really long one that looks like it could shank someone.  I have never been able to figure out how to wear it. The brass polygons weigh down the anti-pointy end, so it tends to droop down and pull itself out.

I've seen instructions for wearing Viking ring-headed pins that involve tying a thong or thread to the ring, then winding it in a figure-8 from the tie-down point, over the pinned fabric, under the pointy end, and then back. Well, I tied a thong on between two of the polygons, and it worked just as well as a ring.  I don't know if this is the "real" answer, or if the Incans secured their long cloak pins in this way - but it worked. Which was good, because I really, really needed the blue wool blanket I was using as a cloak.

Llawt'u

The feathered headband did not work, as such.  Even in mild wind, the feathers got blown around a lot.  Feathers should have been sewn down or otherwise secured, and possibly I used the wrong kind of feather.  I used some quills I had - so, turkey wing feathers, I think.  Something softer and less meant to catch air might have been better.

Hospitality

Laurel Tavern Donuts aren't period, but I only just recently tried them. They're awesome and I wanted to spread the love.  I got there too early, evidently - I got a variety of yeast-raised doughtnuts, but there were no cake ones ready yet.

Of coffee, tea, and hot cocoa, I think cocoa was the clear winner. Only made one pot of coffee, which only had one or two cups drunk.  Maybe instant next time. The stove was also useful for reheating the ribs that Uncle Igor brought.

Incan Tunic - Completed

Well, that was an adventure.

Dyeing the Fabric

I hemmed both pieces all the way around prior to dyeing, because I had time before I could go dye shopping.  This might not have been the best idea.

The dyeing did not go as expected.  The orange piece dyed just fine.  The dark blue-black lost almost all its color after the rinse, remaining a (lovely, but not what I was looking for) dove grey.  I used enough dye for the fabric by weight, so what was the  problem?  I didn't use the Rit Dye Fixative, so maybe that was it.  I bought a bottle and did it all over again, this time in the washing machine (because my shoulder got sore from all the stirring.)

Same. Darn. Thing. Only now with a few color blotches. Sigh. I went ahead and used the grey fabric.

Sewing the Tunic

Pinning the orange "interfacing" to the longer grey "undertunic" was harder than I expected.  Here is where pre-hemming the fabric was a bad idea, as the edges did not always exactly line up. I did my best to fold and fiddle things into alignment. I sewed around the neck slit first, cut it open, flipped the orange through, and then sewed down the orange on the outside.  The neck slit wanted to rip, so I reinforced each end with some buttonhole stitch (on my machine).  I suspect on the original, this was woven in.

I turned it inside out again and sewed up one side, keeping about a 5/8" seam allowance except where I wanted the armhole to stop.  I angled out to the very edge of the fabric there. See, since the layers were already hemmed, I wouldn't be folding them under. If I'd just stopped without angling it out, there would have been a 5/8" step from the seam to the sleeve.

Turning it right-side out, I laid the yellow ribbon down along the waist at this point.  I used a commercial yellow satin ribbon, I think 1.25" wide.  Obviously not period, but I was not up for dyeing a long strip of cotton yellow just for this.

Inside out again, to sew up the other side and tuck the ribbon edges under themselves to prevent fraying.  Then, because the hem wasn't even, fold up one side so that it was.

Cats!

My wool felt arrived in time.  I blew up the image of the cat and used it as a pattern.  The yellow eyes were more of the yellow ribbon, stabilized with Wonder-Underish stuff.

The cats were all sewn together. I have lots of experience sewing felt faces, thanks to my son's insatiable need for felt plush toys!  Yellow eyes to red eyes to face; white teeth to red mouth to face.  I considered needle-felting the pieces together, but I don't have a lot of experience with that, and the examples I've seen of it didn't have crisp lines. 

Cultural Appropriation Panic!

It was at about this time that I stopped to wonder if these were jaguars.  I still don't know a lot about Incan culture, but I'm pretty sure jaguars were sacred animals.  Was I making the equivalent of priestly vestments for casual wear?

I did a quick Google search for jaguars in Incan art.  They uniformly look different, with large fangs always represented at either side of the mouth.  Plus, there are several species of smaller wildcats in South America.  The Pampas cat can have a black coloring, and its (modern) range includes the Rio Ica region where this tunic is from. 

So... okay.  I might still be doing something wrong, but at least it's not the sort of big, obvious thing.

Finishing

The only thing left was to attach the cats to the tunic.  I seem to have gotten the proportion slightly off - when I positioned the cats with their faces about the right distance apart, I had more margin by the sleeves.  I am okay with that.  One cat got sewed down.  I got impatient with the other cat and Wonder Under-ed it.

Accessories

Wikipedia and other lousy Internet sources describe the llawt'u headdress as 'cords wrapped around the head' or 'a turban.'  Most of the images on the Internet are only from the front, and show something like a wide headband. Sometimes there are ornaments at the center forehead.

I found some great pictures of Inti Raymi, a re-enactment of an Incan sun festival in Peru. While many of the photos center on the more spectacularly-dressed nobles, here are as close to some 'regular guys' as I could find. In one or two images, I thought I saw a simple tie in the back. 

I tried a Storvik llawt'u, with a red and white striped band and a drekkar ornament.  It... did not really go with the tunic. At all.  So I got a piece of trim with appropriate-ish geometric designs.  The feathers were bought for quill-making but have found new life.

Fringe at knees and/or ankles seems to be a thing in the pictures from the manuscript linked to last time. I bought some nylon fringe in red - doesn't really go with the tunic but I also wanted fringe for another project and red it is. I stripped some of the fringe from the ends of two lengths and tied them on at the knee.

Sandals were of llama rawhide. Not having any to hand, I'm substituting in a pair of Roman (?I think? Sylvanus Perrin made them ages ago) leather sandals.  I also found a pair of gold leaf-shaped earrings - big round circles would be better, but I don't have any.

 Some more resources, for future reference:

https://archive.org/details/elreinodelosinc00vegagoog

https://books.google.com/books?id=PQYQruNKzaYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://www.peru.travel/en-us/what-to-do/festivities-and-events/inti-raymi.aspx

Odds and ends today

Spoon!

I thought I had lost my good wooden spoon. I bought it from a local merchant, not sure who anymore or if he even still sells.  It's based on a Coppergate, York find, and I love it.  I call it my "food shovel," and I finally understand how a spoon can be an all-purpose utensil.  I did find it, but I wondered what I would have done if I really had lost it.  So I spent about 45 min whittling down a cheapo wooden spoon from the grocery store, mostly to thin down the edges of the bowl.  For someone with no carving experience, I think it came out pretty well.

I used it to eat soup tonight, and it's not quite done.  Still a bit too thick to really get comfortably into the mouth.  But it does work.

Shoulder Sack

I have a bunch of stuff to return to people at Fall Crown, and it was looking kinda tacky in the plastic grocery bag I'd stowed it in.  So I made a shoulder sack.  Because of the size of the fabric I had, there are seams at the bottom of each satchel.  That's probably not the best design.  But all the items fit into it, it seems to settle nicely over my shoulder, so hurray!  I should try walking around a bit with it - things tend to slide off my shoulders, so I shouldn't assume it'll stay there stably.

Llawt'u

The barony is trying to get folks in livery hoods for Crown.  I want to wear my Incan tunic, so a European hood isn't going to go.  I've tried to make an Incan (male) piece of headgear called a llawt'u.  I've seen it described as "cords wound around the head" or "turban" or "headband."  The pictures look like a headband or head wrap, sometimes with a cord overtop.  High-ranking men seem to have bling sticking out of the center-front of it - and the higher the status, the more the bling.  Re-enactors dressed as plain soldiers, for example, just had two feathers.  The Emperor had big gold thingies.  Anyway, mine's made out of red and white striped fabric, and the blingie is the Storvik populace badge, backed on felt so it sticks up appropriately.

I'll have a final post on my Incan outfit in a couple days. I've ordered some (admittedly nylon) fringe for the knee ornaments.  I can't tell from the pictures I'm seeing if they were fiber or feather, but since they seemed to be on men of all ranks, I thought probably not feathers. I could definitely be wrong. (I should check the re-enactors as the solar festival...) I am not doing rawhide sandals - my Medieval Moccasins will have to do.   I will probably also skip the man-purse that seems to be a part of the outfit.  I don't have the right sort of patterned fabric - I used to, it was a souvenir from Texas that I got in 1989 or something, but I haven't seen it in years, so I assume it got de-cluttered sometime around college.  But I'll have the shoulder sack for carrying things around in.

Rit Dye on Wool

Just a few notes for future reference:

I needed winningas in a lichen purple shade. At Pennsic, I found light grey/dark grey herringbone twill leg wraps at Boots by Bohemond.  A fellow customer strongly encouraged me to look into the silk dyes at Dharma Trading Company. That made sense, since silk and wool are both protein fibers.

Once home, the Dharma dyes and kits seemed a bit intimidating, and various people on the Internet seemed to have reasonable results with Rit dye.  I decided to try that. Especially since I wanted a light color, it seemed like that might work okay.

I remembered to weigh the dry wool.  At half a pound, I probably only needed 1/4 of the bottle of dye, but I used 1/2 so I could use more water and also to ensure some sort of color.

I purchased Orvus Paste to scour the wool.  Two tablespoons in about 3 gallons of water hot from the tap.  I gently pressed the wool into the water and let sit for an hour, then drained off the soapy water.  I checked the water temperature by feel, did my best to match it from the tap, and let the wool soak for fifteen minutes or so in a rinse.  (Sudden temperature shock will felt wet wool.)  Checked temperature and drained again.

I added water of about the same temperature to the pot, plus the dye, plus about a cup of white vinegar (said to help set the dye on wool).  I added the wet wool and placed the whole shebang on the stove set to low.

I wasn't sure what to do next. Most of the websites talked about constantly stirring the pot.  But you generally don't want to agitate wet wool - it felts.  I hesitantly stirred, very slowly, and mostly rotating the entire mass of wool rather than rearranging it.  The color seemed very dark very quickly, but I also found that if I held the wool up, the dye-water would drain out of it, leaving a lighter color behind.

Worried about felting and seeing a fairly medium purple (and knowing that colors look darker when wet), I pulled the pot off the stove after only about 5-10 min or so.  I rinsed in clear water (still trying to match temperature) until it ran mostly clear - I'd done five or six rinses and I was still getting some dye, and I decided to call it good. Husband has been warned that there might be some dye transfer if he gets these wet.

I hung them out on the porch to dry.  Overall: Okay!  Mostly even color, with one or two spots that are more pink than the surrounding, but it's subtle.  It came out a medium lavenderish, which might be too dark for lichen purple, but I'm okay with it.  The wool is maybe slightly fuzzier than when it went it, but it's not a long piece of felt, so I think that's okay too.

Magical Veils

I made a veil out of the amazingly light wool Meisterin Johanna gave to me.  I'm leaving it as a rectangle - that's as reasonable as anything else for conversion era. This would not usually be worth a blog post, but...

Meisterin suggested finishing the edges with a rolled hem embroidered with little knots that resemble tiny pearls.  There was a video.  I gave the technique a go, but 1) the rolled hem defeated me, and 2) my little tiny pearls were very sad.  I tried the rolled hem on its own, and still no love.  I am not very good at them.

Enter: Eithni's Magic Veil Stitch (link goes to a Word document for download).  It is, truly, magical.  There are so many things that promise to work, easily, quickly and 100%, and the reality is rarely there.  Whenever I try a new craft technique, I expect it to go south, somehow.  It never seems to work right without some practice - which is pretty reasonable, actually. But still frustrating when you're told "just do this, it works!"  No, it doesn't.  

This did.  This totally did.  I followed the instructions, made my little Z's of thread, and gently pulled to tighten. I expected fabric edge to roll in somewhat, and splay out somewhat, and generally make a mess until I figured out the right way to make it work.  Nope!  Pull thread, hem rolls.  I tried it again.  Pull thread... hem rolls!  It works beautifully.  Going around corners has been the only tricky bit, and that still works pretty darn well.  (I may need to go back with a few extra stitches to tie things down.)

If you are studied in the mysteries of the rolled hem, your way is faster.  It's one stitch instead of two.  This way is faster for me, because it prevents the cursing and the swearing and the tearing out of the work that always seems to occur when I roll. 

 

Nalbound hat complete

Ta-da!

• Mammen stitch, with just one linking stitch picked up instead of two.
• Brown wool is blended Icelandic wool I handspun on my Hershey Fiber Arts drop spindle, using a grasped spinning technique
• Brown portion took about 50 yards of yarn (if I measured it correctly on the niddy-noddy)
• Blue yarn is commercial Merino (I think; I have the card for it around somewhere). I remember the card said it was hand dyed, and it may be handspun as well.  From South America.
• Could maybe have been another row longer.
• I used my thumb for a gauge.
• Lighter colored yarns are so much easier to work with.  There are a double handful of mistakes in the brown, I think because it was so hard to see which loops I was picking up. With the blue, everything was very easy to see.
• These singles were also much nicer to work with than the plied yarn I tried.  No tails to weave in, since you can spin the yarns together.
• Photo is somewhat washed out (tried to adjust for too-dark background).  The brown is a deep chocolate brown. The blue isn't much darker than shown, though.

This will probably become a normal hat come winter time.  It's nice to have an SCA-appropriate warm hat, but honestly I find few occasions to wear cloaks, mittens, etc.  In the outdoor season, it's usually too warm, and for the indoor season, I'm indoors.  Well, if I ever make Tournament of Ymir, I'll be all set.

Any plan where you lose your hat...

...is a bad plan.

Per the last post, I have turned 50 yards of handspun dark brown wool into most of a hat.  It is not quite enough. I think 75 yards would have done it; 100 yards would have done it easily.  I will make up the rest with the light blue yarn I have left from the socks.  I think that was also sold as handspun, but by a person in South America, not by me.

Not knowing anything about knit (or nalbound) hats, I made a flat disc with the intention of tapering the sides out into a bowl-shape.  Well, I let the disc get too big, so the taper became a right-angle turn.  It's looking like a pillbox hat.  I think when it's long enough to pull snugly onto my head, it won't matter too much - the odd bumps should smooth out.  Wetting and blocking it (I have to find out how to do that) may also help me reshape it into more of a sock-hat.

I did this much of the hat over the weekend.  It went relatively quickly.  I have no good reason to be working on a wool hat right now, when we're in the middle of a July heatwave.  It just seemed rather urgent that I get the hat made.

In related news, the first attempted hat got a drawstring run through it, and now it's a little pouch-thing.  Full of holes, so not good for carrying small items.  Trying to decide if giving it away as largess would be insulting to the recipient.  XD

Wisigarde vitta planning

1. In the picture of the vitta, the gold wire looks almost knitted. I'm thinking it's a chain stitch.
2. I believe for my 2013 Pentathalon, I [Google] translated a bit of a book I have on royal female Merovingian burials, and it said the gold was drawn wire, rather than flat plate (like the Kentish ones) or foil-wrapped silk (like every other precious metal thread ever).  I have some Japan gold for the task, not wanting to use brass wire and gold wire being way out of my price range.
3. The ground is shown as white linen.  That almost certainly did not survive, and is the museum's most conservative version of what the ground may have been. Or it is just a mounting to display the finds.
4. Also, how wide the ground was is not a given.  The reconstruction/mounting of the artifacts ends just at the end of the goldwork.  I would expect at least a small border, for comfort if nothing else.

Questions for me:

Silk or linen ground?  What color? What width?

I have some dark blue and dark red linen, either of which would look great.  Not sure what silk I have left.  My exhibition catalogue with this item in it doesn't give any dimensions, but the artist's sketch of it on the deceased show it around the same width as her eye, maybe a bit wider. And inch isn't a bad estimate.The goldwork decoration I have is about 1/2". How should I place it to get the same proportions as the original?  I measured the on-screen image (which is photographed at a slight slant) not because an image is the same size, but because the proportions should come out the same:

• Gold and garnet ornament approx 7/16" diameter
• Approx 3/16" space between top of ornament and top of band
• Approx 1/4" space between bottom of ornament and edge of goldwork under it
• Approx 1/8" goldwork to bottom of band.

That adds up to 16/16, or 1" wide. Serendipitous! When I measure the band on the screen, I get 7/8".  All things considered (band at an angle, hard to get ruler right up against monitor, inaccuracies in measurement), I'll accept that.  Given that my ornament is about the same size, I guess I'm looking at a 1" wide strip of embroidery.  I may make the band just slightly wider, but not much - I don't have all that much forehead to play with.

I did some quick sampling.  The japan gold I bought doesn't chain stitch worth a darn.  It can be couched down, although turning the rows gives either a bumpy edge, or one in which the gold wrap in stretched and the core fiber peeks out.  Then I remembered that the Sulky metallic silver thread I used for the brocaded Birka headband had a gold sibling.  A double strand of that chain stitches fine, although managing the threads is a bit of work.

Either the couching or the chain stitch will look okay, I think, and I'm leaning toward the chain stitch.  (Which means I didn't have to buy the japan gold, but whatever.  I'll decorate something with it some day, I'm sure.)

Wisigard Vitta because reasons

So let's say I wanted to make a vitta a la the 6th cen. one worn by Wisigard:

And let's say I wanted to use my primary charge in place of the garnet there - I originally drew it as a 16-point star, but the heralds made it into a compass star, so it's usually drawn with eight points.  I can get an all-gold 16-pointer or a 5-pointer with a garnet:

  

 

 

 

 

 

Would it be my fault if it ended up looking something like