Weaving loose ends

Another autumn has come and there's been many things happening over the last year, many of them terrible (gestures broadly at the world) but a lot of small (and big), good things have happened within my small group that have kept me occupied for the past year.

My Laurel won crown, again. This was an interesting, and vastly different crown tournament because the previous king and queen had needed to step down and Æthelmearc needed to hold two crown tourneys on a single day: one for instant monarchs and one for their heirs. Murdoch and Ríoghnach won the insta- throne tourney, and our household immediately went into busy mode again this spring, with very little warning. Normally royals have six months as the heirs to prepare, but we had about...3 minutes. So there was a frenzy of making favors for our Queen to take to Pennsic war, new clothes, largesse... just a lot of things.

I made a new Viking ensemble for them. I got zero pictures of it during the process. I don't even have decent pictures of them being worn, as the entire reign was something of a blur. Closest evidence I have is this:

In the midst of that sewing, a close friend also got tagged in to be on the Æthelmearc Arts and Science team for war points. She decided to make a gorgeous Finnish mantle and apron with the crazy spiral decoration, but couldn't find or get the right fabric here in time. So I offered my loom and she moved into the fiber studio part time to tackle her first weaving project.

It was a crazy ambitious project and I'm so intensely proud of her. And it's just so pretty! Also, as she was finishing this up as we were camping outside for just a week- the whole functionality of that period accurate, glorious white shawl is... questionable. It is so hard to keep white clean when you're surrounded by dirt 24/7! I would love to know how they did it in period or if it was just accepted that your white shawl with all that fringe was going to get pretty grungy after about 15 minutes of being on a farm, in a smoky longhouse,... anywhere near children or animals.

Just after Pennsic, I also found out that my husband was going to get his writ for knighthood in the next reign. For planning purposes, I was let in on the secret early (sewing takes time!). Murdoch and I had two options: either a writ in early October at Haunting in the Hollow and then his ceremony in February or a "one and done" at Haunting. The single day "call to court, send to vigil and then knight in the evening" is rarer in the SCA (for sheer logistics alone) but for us, it made more sense. February is not a great time of the year to predict weather in the Northeast of the United States, and I didn't want to risk getting snowed out and having everything pushed back- as happened to a friend of ours.

It just happened, however, to fall two weeks after our biggest fiber show of the year, and the ceremony itself needed to be a surprise from my husband, so for about two months I was waking up at 4 or 5 am, sewing and weaving frantically until I heard him get up and then switching gears to work on show prep until I fell asleep.

It was a long two months. But so worth it.

As a result, also don't have a lot of pictures of those clothes either.

I did get him to put on things afterwards to show them off so I have something, but am hoping to get some decent outside pictures eventually. Ignore the face. He was very very tired after a long weekend of big emotions and lots of friends and very little sleep.

Vigilant white tunic and undyed linen pants

The pants are a diamond twill linen and the tunic is wool trimmed with silk. I would have added more decoration but he really prefers simple and unadorned and I wanted things that he would actually wear again after this.

SCA Knight's cloaks are traditionally black and have the heraldry of the knight on the back encircled with either a gold chain or a white belt. As he had been a squire for nine years, we'd had plenty of time to talk about preferences and I knew that he really, really didn't want the normal cloak. It works great for the 14th century. It looks odd on a Viking. With Murdoch's permission, I made a wool rectangle cloak and trimmed it in gray wool and wove a Birka brocade trim (without the brocade) and created the chain by simply repeating the center section of the design.

For heraldry, his heraldric design is a white wolf head on a black background with blue and white stripes at the bottom. Since he was a child, he always had dreams of a white wolf that would guide him out of nightmares. The symbol became a talisman for him and while the idea of the fylgja, or Norse guardian spirits, appearing as anything other than human women is a debated topic- this is the role the wolf always seemed to have played for him. He is also a devout follower of Odin and has studied the ulfheðnar extensively, and so for years, whenever we would see a white wolf pelt, I would encourage him to get it.

"Not yet. Not until I'm a knight".

So clearly, the choice of how to do his heraldry was obvious. I was lucky that Serpent Eye, an excellent fur trader and dealer in all things bone and animal, had a white wolf pelt. They are fantastic and we've been big fans of them for years.

Luckily, because my Laurel ceremony was last year and that had sparked "what if" conversations about what he would like when/if his day came, I also knew that he wanted me to give him his wolf in a more priestess role, which is a very hard thing to fit into a traditional sca knighting ceremony. I was lucky that King Andreas and Queen Kallista were amenable to letting me speak a bit after I presented the cloak, and also that the rest of our household speakers were amazing and also brief so that the ceremony wasn't an hour long.

Our nephew carrying his wolf into court.

The making of my dress is one of the few things that I do have pictures of, only because it was done after everything for him was completed and the fiber show was over and I could breathe for 5 minutes.

He had originally said that he envisioned my dress as upper class Norse meets Heilung, which is a feat to pull off in two weeks. I managed with "traditional Norse" and then moved it 10 degrees to the left. So it shouldn't be used as an exact recreation or historical reference of anything. I went with natural colors because white appears in many shamanic traditions. The apron is made from white wool with tiny flecks of gray and the under dress is linen.

The forecloth I wove out of Icelandic that I had handspun many years ago. It had a really great texture. The bottom hem has a varafeldur treatment with gray and white Gotland sheep locks and the fabric is 2/2 twill.

The panel above the varafeldur is a band of silk and then a mica and gold posament inspired by a band from Birka grave 832.

I wove the gold posament bands first and then cut out circles of mica. I actually used large mica flakes that were layered and coated in thin resin to create a sheet and I'm really glad that I went that route over traditional mica because it created the same look while being a little easier to work with.

The sewing of the pieces took a bit of fussing. I had thought that it would be a matter of tracing a design and following it but metal and resin and stone have minds of their own so in the end it was more flow, less rigid and exact. The nice thing about the resin and mica sheet is that it can be pierced with a sharp needle to sew it into place without the mica shattering or flaking, so that definitely helped the process.

I also added some bands of silk at the top and some wool braids from made from the fabric yarn and some stashed light gray Icelandic yarn that I had spun up.

Hopefully I can get pictures of us both wearing them again, maybe once we get some decent snowfall here.

I did get one single decent picture of him in his knighting garb that day, thanks only to Sir Madison!

Which wraps up all the finished projects, and now onto the new ones!