Sunday, July 18, 2010

Did you know that we're eligible for a 10% discount at Joann's?

SCA, Inc. members are eligible to apply for a 10% in-store discount card at Joann Fabric and Craft Stores!

To apply, first make sure your membership in SCA, Inc is current. If you are a non-member SCAdian, you do not qualify. You must keep your membership current to maintain your discount card. You can maintain, update, or apply for SCA, Inc membership here.

Next, print off a copy of SCA, Inc's IRS 501(c) (3) tax exempt letter. You can find it here in .pdf form.

Next, fill out this form at joann.com. Be sure to click on the Non-Profit Discount Card button or your application will be rejected. "The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc" will not fit in the Organization Name box. Use "Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc".

That's it!

Wait 4-6 weeks for your card to be mailed to you. When you recieve your card, take your printed copy of the tax exempt letter to your closest Joann store and have them activate your card before purchase. You must have the letter and a state-issued ID. You will also need to bring your SCA, Inc blue or white membership card as well.

Have fun!

-Jorun

Friday, July 16, 2010

"Thinking About Female Images in Viking Art" by Cathy Raymond

Cathy's blog is here.

This is the post I'm reading and pondering right now.

Just a few thoughts on aprons

So here's something to think about. In the post comments, a poster writes that the Anglo Saxons and Franks weren't known to wear aprons (at least in any extant finds or contemporary artwork). However, in Viking Age Norse art there are quite a few images that suggest (in a very stylized way) the presence of aprons.

Another commenter on the post points out that Venetian courtesans wore aprons as a disguise to blend in with the local goodwives, but that it eventually became symbolic of their status.

Follow me in this musing

Most modern people think of the apron as simply a utilitarian item (and an increasingly uncommon one, or one associated with pre-feminist Western life). An apron is virtually unnecessary in a world where modern people dress in very accessible, affordable, easily washable fabrics and have access to washing machines and dryers that remove 90% of the work of laundering.

Your shirt got dirty? Throw it in the wash.
Your shirt got stained and you can't get it out? Send it to Goodwill or throw it away and buy another.

However, in a world where your clothing has to travel from the back of a sheep to a spindle to a loom to a needle to get to your body, you want to protect the precious fabric that it took you a year or more to make if you include the husbandry of the sheep.

That's where an apron comes in. A linen apron makes a lot of sense to me, even if the linen or flax had to be imported to the more northerly Scandinavian regions. Linen is much easier to wash, bleach, and replace. Linen has a nearly as intense process from ground to cloth as wool, but the fiber itself is easier to care for once it's made and it doesn't depend on a food source to grow.

Linen, unfortunately, does not last as long as wool when buried with a decomposing body. Very few examples of linen are found in the extant record for the Viking Age. Cathy Raymond suggests that they could have just decomposed before the find was dug up. This seems a likely possibility.

So why would Norse women/goddesses be depicted wearing aprons?

I've got to go back to symbolism.

We already know from the record in the Sagas and some of the written laws that women had a much more equal and vocal footing in a marriage and in society than their Christian contemporaries and their eventual progeny as Christianity spread into the far corners of Europe.

So what if the pagan Norse symbolized womanhood or wifery with the apron as the symbol? The female head of the household would be ultimately in charge of many, many important responsibilities on a landholding, many of them messy and guaranteed to ruin a fine wool gown.

Any good pagan worth her salt will wish her representations of her goddesses to reflect the world she lives in. A responsible wife needs an apron to run her household and maintain her wardrobe, well why wouldn't a goddess? Thus we see the images of goddesses women in art as wearing aprons.

It's possible, then, that the Anglo Saxons and Franks, used aprons but never attached any symbolic meaning to them and so never represented them in their art.

Like the Venetian courtesans, aprons from utility to symbolism.

-Jorun



Saturday, July 10, 2010

Theories of cultural transmission before the Silk Road between Europe & Asia may pan out?

Before the Silk Road cultures!?!

I happened across the "Trollen Braid" controversy on the Norsefolk Yahoo! list and was intrigued, so I did a little Google digging. I'll state beforehand that this isn't conclusive research (or even very professional at that) and to please not be spreading this around as fact.

However, you could use it to warn people away from claiming that Trollen Braiding Wheels, as they're now being called in the reenacting world, are period. They are probably not within the SCA period, and most of the information regarding the wheels themselves is a garbled, internets version of the "Telephone" game.


The files that intrigued me initially:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Norsefolk_2/files/Clothing%20and%20Textiles/Brenna/
If you can't see them, just sign up for the list. It's a really good hardcore medievalist list with very prominent members from the academic world and reenacting world. It's not SCA-exclusive, however, and they try to stay away from solely SCA-related discussion since not everybody is a SCAdian.

There is also a huge discussion in the archives regarding these files, so check that out too.


Googling:

I Googled and came up with this:
http://www.kelticos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=7632
This blog post that led to the abstract below.

http://textilesociety.org/abstracts_2002/Barber.htm
Abstract. If anyone knows where I can read the actual paper, please let me know.


Googling on the "Trollen"braid again:

The Trollen Braid:

http://www.robinsonhistorical.co.uk/images/Work%20Sheets/Braided%20Cord.pdf
A how-to, showing a marudai-like weaving board and similar techniques


However! (And there's always a however)

http://etimage.com/english/bearingdial/bearingdial.html
This site states that the wheels claimed by reenactors to be for weaving were probably for sea navigation. Personally, I'm apt to agree with them since one was found in Greenland (very difficult to navigate to, according to The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown), and they are not broken in half as reenactors have assumed.

Also, "Tools for Textile Production from Birka and Hedeby. Birka Studies 8" by Eva Andersson (the premier source for textile artifacts in that region for the Iron and Viking Ages), makes no mention of these wheels. I'm also apt to side with the expert, especially since one of the wheels was found at Haithabu (Hedeby).

And, the big name herself, Else Ostergard of the Danish National Museum, has said through (hearsay) conversation with a European reenactor [http://www.et-tu.com/soper/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=forum&board=open&op=display&num=105&start=30] that the disk was found in Trelleborg, Sweden rather than Trelleborg, Denmark (Trollen) and is probably 17th century in extraction. This hints that it is a post-our-era tool find as well as probably culturally transmitted from Japan or China along the silk road or through overseas trade routes rather than in earlier eras through casual contact and eventual cultural dissemination in the Eurasian deserts.


But that leaves out the braids themselves!

It could be some form of whipcording (what is often called Viking Battle Braiding or slyngyng similar in our community, also not very documentable in an extant tool sense, though the braid structures are, apparently, but I digress).
http://www.northernneedle.net/Research/whipcord.pdf

However, the much more practical and sedate method of fingerloop braiding is the more probable culprit.

http://www.stringpage.com/braid/fl/fingerloop.html
This site cites a book on Japanese fingerloop braiding and that brings it all back full circle!

The way the above page is written is some reason to suspect (so that I don't get caught in an endless loop of trailing down sources of everything, I'll just propose it and stop there), that fingerloop braiding is documentable to the Medieval period in Europe, and not the earlier Iron or Viking Ages--Pre-Silk Road.


To sum up my thoughts on the tl;dr:

Since it's possible to create the structures of these braids in several ways (from top down on kumihimo marudai and the so-called Trollen disks to bottom up with whipcording and fingerloop braiding) it's reasonable to make a preliminary case, as without publishing or claiming authenticity, that the artistic and practical uses for these braids were known to cultures in Europe and Asia through their contacts in the Pre-Silk Road era. It doesn't necessarily mean that this was the transmission method--it could be that these things developed naturally in fiber cultures.

-Jorun

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Where the heck have I been?

Well, I'll tell you I've been incredibly busy and life has been happening and etc, etc.

Besides having a writing habit that goes in spurts, I've been trying to cope with the Michigan economy and the very nonexistent job prospects here. So, I started my own business as a seamstress doing alterations and making soft goods, costumes, and clothing for commission clients. That line of occupation is slowly chugging along.

The more exciting news is that I've been doing a lot of sewing and research for this SCA habit. I've been mainlining wool for about 6 months now.

I'll back up a little. I finally found a culture that I'm comfortable in for my SCAdian game and I'm considerably more committed to the research for Norse culture. It's been a long road for me, bouncing from a newcomer to 14th century English to 12th century Anglo-Saxon, to dabbling in Safavid Persian and Ottoman Turkish, to finally 10th century Hiberno-Norse. I feel like I've landed at home and I've not looked back. There is the rather difficult aspect of changing my name now that most people know me as Gillian, but it's been a transition and I feel like it's starting to work.

So my new fascination in Norse culture has led me to a very specific interest in using the proper materials for my garb. There's less wiggle room in Norse culture for fudging with silk and linen to save money, so I've been searching high and low for deals on wool. Luckily, it's been a wool-heavy modern season or four and I've built up enough of a stock to start fortifying my kit with real wool. In my heart, I want to be spinning and weaving my own wool for clothing, but modern woven will have to do for now.

To this aim, I've been trying to learn as much as possible about textiles and am starting to dip into textile production. I've also been sinking further into tablet weaving as that's what Norse women do when they aren't spinning and weaving and sewing and cooking. It's a busy life being a Norse woman!

Garb Updates!:
  • The blue tunic in the previous post is still not finished because I ran out of stupid DMC floss in that color and I've been too distracted to go find more. I also have no documentation for the embroidery style and I made the seams before I knew how to properly flat-fell seams. It will languish until I have more energy for it.
  • I'm nearly finished with my first hand-sewn wool kyrtle (gown/dress/whatever) and will find the time to post pictures when I have it fitted properly. I also need to do a little fulling on the seams to prevent unraveling and to lock the wool together to seal the seams. It's still lacking a hem and a neckline finishing--is anyone surprised?
  • I'm preliminarily finished with a experimental hangerrock in a style I think is possible based on the Birka finds. It's made from basket-woven, multicolored hounds-tooth wool.
  • I finally have a pair of brooches to hang my wealth from and hold up my hangerrock. Purchased from Raymond's Quiet press and based on a find from Yorkshire, UK.
  • I'm in the planning stages of a Birka coat and a cloak based on the Valkyrie images.
  • I now have enough serviceable underwear to stop having to wear modern pants and shorts under my garb. I based the first ones I've made on braises, but the next stop will be Thorsberg trousers.
  • I'm planning on finding someone *cough*NYM*cough* to teach me to spin and also someone to teach me to naalbind. For this, I'll need spindle, whorl, maybe a distaff, and a bone needle. It's time for me to make Norse stockings instead of using the 12th century hosen.
  • I'm putting together a map and time-line of the major archaeological finds that include textiles for the Viking Age. Probably to be submitted as an A&S project at some point. I have never seen anything like this, so I'm hoping it will be well-received.
  • I'm developing a 4 part series of classes dedicated to hand sewing and focusing on Viking Age stitches and techniques. The first part is finished and I attempted to teach it at Squire's, but no one showed up to the class. Still debating on whether or not I want to teach it at Pennsic next year in the full 4 parts. I'd like to teach it a few times just to see how it goes first.
  • I just finished my first real tablet woven project. It's pretty rough-looking. Tablet weaving is definitely an acquired skill, but I'll keep chugging at it.
  • I sorted and arranged all my garb stash fabric, decided what I would use it for, and labeled it all. This was part of a huge organizational project for my office. I also hung up all my garb and arranged my upstairs spare bedroom into a garb and SCA stuff storage room.
  • I made all the repairs on all the garb that needed it.
  • I sorted out all the garb I don't need anymore and added it to the Ealdnordwuda Gold Key that is now in my possession. I also sorted all the Gold Key by type of garment and labeled the boxes so it's easier to find people garb they can wear.
  • Last summer, I did a huge RIT dye project and dyed some of my older, yuckier garb more acceptable colors. I'm so much happier with it now. The two unbleached chemises I made for my very first Pennsic in 2005 are still in use as camp scrub garb and now they're dark red and salmon pink. They've been reworked since that Pennsic (thank goodness) and are now just very light t-tunics with short sleeves.
  • Still halfheartedly searching for a period alternative to a bra that will give me support and not make my chest look like a swamp monster. I fiddled for several years with a princess-cut thing, but it mashed my boobs up funny. I'm back to modern bras for the sheer saving of my neck and back, but the search continues slowly. I think some sort of fabric wrap will be the next attempt, but then I'll need aid in getting dressed. I especially need something to go under my armour so I can comfortably swing a sword. Budgetary concerns and this bra issue keep the armour front stalled as well.