Toy Photo dump!

Jan 2014-Stunt Una

Personal Gift to Baroness Una







Roman Doll for demo box. Dress is based on a separate find of a doll dress (with scrap of tapestry sewn on front) contemporary to doll find previous doll is based on.







Dolls for Montengarde 12th Night/Avacal Investiture 2015 gift bags to visiting royals.

Dolls are dressed in the Roman, Coptic or Byzantine style in the colours of the three baronies of Avacal, Principality colours, and Kingdom (An Tir) colours. Unfortunately as always I forgot to take pictures and these were filched from one of the photographers at the event (Beothuk, I think)





Hobby Horse and Doll (eventually dressed in Viking-tunic, apron-dress, shawl) for Baronial gift bags at Avacal's First Crown Tourney

Yes, I forgot to take a picture of the finished doll.





New style of doll, also reconstructed based on a Roman Egypt era find from about the same time period as the other doll style. Arms modified from original.

Printed fabric from test pieces done by Viscountess Morrigan. Original has a body that appears to be resist dyed in indigo, with white head and arms.

Roman chiton... not happy with how it looks. Will have to try a different style of dress on the next one.

Two more bags for largesse

(Image credit: Wendy Hobbs)

Flat haversack, don't know the exact dimensions. Roughly 12" x 11", I think.
Linen (outer-blue, inner-pale grey), cotton stitching.
Hems are done in running stitch, seams are done with a two-loop braid whip-stitched on with the weft. Gold and bright lime green. (See here for process.) Tassels were made with the ends of the loops and some additional thread of the same floss.

(Image credit: Wendy Hobbs)

Box Haversack, very large (12" x 17" x 3")
Melton-type wool, unlined. Bag is made of dark olive wool, with a burgundy front flap extension. Blanket-stitched edges on raw edges, in dark red wool. Front flap is attached using double running stitch and blanket-stitch at the edges, in apple green wool.

Belt Pouch Favour

Don't think I ever put this up, so I'm posting it for the permalink. It's a SCAdianism, but useful....

Yet another doll!

Oh look! I made ANOTHER doll! :)

Jorvik doll! In PINK! Is my Cinnamon Candy Cane Viking!
Linen, linen, linen, cotton weaving thrum stuffing, cotton thread.

This is item 50 for my A&S 50 Largesse challenge. 2 1/2 years early! That being the case, I'm splitting the challenge up. 50 toys for largesse (currently at 28), 50 accessories ie. hats (15 already for largesse-the other 8 on the current hats list are mine or my lord's) and bags (6- I kept the red silk reliquary bag!) and maybe some embellishments (only 1, but I have ideas!) -- haven't decided if that will be two or three separate challenges or not. I've been getting/offering-to-fill several requests for bags lately, and hats seem to be the fruitcake of the largesse giving world... I've only seen three of the hats I've given out actually on someone's head!

I wanna raid
for a Northumbrian girl
I could be happy
to take as a wife
a Northumbrian girl.

A weaver of pictures
She spins in the night
I see us together,
by the firelight,
My Northumbrian girl.

Ten silver seaxes,
And a man with a bow
The tiller relaxes
While I kill my foe
For my Northumbrian girl.

I pillage England
I raid in the night
You'll see us together,
Wed after the fight,
My Northumbrian girl.

Thor sent me strength now
I'm gonna get her somehow
I need another chance
Don't want to have to go to France
Yeah...yeah...yeah.

First Medieval Reliquary Bag (plain red silk)

I made my first Medieval Reliquary Bag!

It's supposed to be my 50th item of largesse, but I'm not sure I want to give it up!

10 cm long x 9 cm wide
silk, linen, copper alloy

It's a plain red silk (it's actually the buttonless cuff of an old silk shirt I'd cut up for trim!), with silk finger-loop woven drawstrings, silk loop-braiding sewn to the edges to close them, and linen finger-loop woven hanging loop, with copper alloy bells.

It's inspired by these reliquary pouches:
Embroidery in the exhibition-"Splendour and glory of the Middle Ages"; BELLS!, 14th century, German(?)
Plain leather and red silk Reliquary bags; 13th century, found in France
Blue silk Reliquary bag with draw-strings and hanging strap still attached, 13th century, found in France

Because I was using bells, I decided to thread them directly onto the silk thread I used for the loop-braided seams, and stitched down the loops to the pouch. I may go back and do some extra stitching to make sure the bells are really secure.

It's a little tricky to start the braid with the bell attached, but not bad.

The stitching of the seams is done in a spiral, over both sides of one of the loops (here looped over top to bottom), and through the edges of the fabric the opposite way.

I'm sewing the opening at the top in this picture, which is why I'm not sewing the two edges together. As this was a sleeve cuff, the outside and the 'lining' were already sewn together, but... eh. I wanted the look right.

Pull the stitch tight over the loop...

And bring the loop you just stitched through the other loop, and bringing the other loop down to be stitched next.

If this isn't clear, there are better instructions here.

Don't forget to bring your snoopervisor. Very Important.

You can stitch the ends in or use longer loops and sew all the way around the pouch. I was using left over warp ends from a tablet weaving project and the loops were only long enough to do one side with short ends, but I decided they were big enough for wee tassels! Since there were two sides to the opening, I did them in opposing directions so two braids would finish in each corner.

And the bottom of the pouch.

For the draw string holes, I used an awl to gently poke holes in the cloth without cutting any (or few) threads. I'd advise doing the drawstrings first so you know how thick they are before deciding how to make your holes. I'd already done the drawstrings and knew they were thin. A button-hole or larger hole might make it necessary to cut the cloth instead.

Eyelets are sewn with a buttonhole stitch in silk.

Fingerloop braided drawstrings in three colours of silk, all hand dyed by me; logwood (lavender), indigo (blue), not sure what the yellow was done with, was playing with a bunch of yellows at the time... I'm only sure it wasn't weld!

The bells were threaded onto the loops at the beginning.

This is the braid I used. Greyne dorge of 6 bows, "Grain d'orge" (French for "Barleycorn"), probably referring to the chevron pattern of the two colours down the centre of the braid.

Because the silk had shown signs of heavy fraying during braiding, I decided I needed a sturdier hanging loop, and went with linen. Very basic round braid of five strands because the linen thread was quite heavy; 4 shades of indigo (left over from a dye sampling day) and one of white.

The hanging loop was tied on with the short silk tassel through the bell loop on one side, and knotted with the tassels (both hanging loop and seam braid) through each other on the other side.

Snoopervising is exhausting work! (Thank you, Jack!)

Last year's hats

So... uh.... these are the hats I mentioned last year when I posted my Holly Hood....

Nothing super-amazing, sadly. Four-panel Birka style hat (childs) out of coarse-woven blue silk, with green stitching.

Four-panel Birka style hat (Adult-lg) out of coarse-woven red silk, with red stitching.

Long, Rus style hat (adult-m) out of coarse-woven red silk, with navy blue silk trim. It's lacking the metal passementerie 'beads' for the point, as I don't know how to do those. Also, not sure if they were never done made without them, or we've just never found evidence of them except when the metal preserved part of the hat.

Blue linen Dublin cap, without the curved seam (left that for the recipient to fit to their own head).

Grey linen Dublin cap, likewise without the curved seam.

Sorry, yeah. Not super exciting, this time. All given as largesse to the Coronets of Avacal, whom, I believe dispersed them to other royals to use as largesse. Hopefully they found good homes! They were nice hats! :)

Leather drawstring pouch

Another "Let's try something NEW!"

This pouch is based on this website.

Leather drawstring pouch (unlined), with finger-loop braided drawstrings and tablet woven seams.

Pouch is made of scrap leather which I believe is deerskin, and cotton thread (because it was my first time finger-loop braiding in 10 years and the first time tablet weaving edges EVER! YAY, NEW STUFFS!)

Isn't my clamp loom awesome? Not period, but oh so cool and handy! The two halves of each post are lined with those felt stick-ons you put on the bottoms of furniture to keep them from scratching the floor. The removable half has screws attached that go through holes on the other half and screw in as tight as they need to be.

In the above picture, the ends on my tablet warps are loops, so I just stuck a stick through the loops to keep them from pulling through the clamp. The blue thread seen hanging is the weft (on a needle, to sew through the leather). The bit of red at the start of the tablet weaving is my lead thread. I do a full set of 4-5 picks (a pass of the weft through the warp one way) to draw in the warps and space them evenly before starting with my actual weft, the tail of which is woven in as I start weaving.

I used six cards, alternating S- and Z-threaded, two each green and blue thread, staggering colours by one hole across the cards.

There's two ways to do a tablet woven edge, depending on the look you want and the purpose of the edge. In this case the tablet weaving is woven like a tube around the edges of the leather. You can find a different way of doing it here, which will produce a flat band that is attached at one edge to the edge of the fabric.

Pass the weft thread through the warp towards you, then sew through the leather edges away from you; turn the cards a quarter turn and pass the weft through the warp, and leather again. Essentially the weft thread is spiralling through the weaving and the leather.

I didn't make the holes in the leather first with an awl, because I wasn't sure how close the weft threads would pass, and whether I needed to sew through the leather each time, every other time, or whether I'd need to stitch twice every time I passed the weft through the warp. Determining this is mostly a matter of how thick the warp threads are. In my case, it turned out to be a stitch every time the weft passed through the warp.

The tablet woven edges were done with a continuous quarter turn forward. I chose to continue the weaving on to make the hanging strap rather than edge the opening with the weaving. There's some question as to whether this was done, but since leather edges don't fray and I didn't line the pouch, I decided I'd rather make a strongly attached strap than put unnecessary edges on the top of the pouch.

If you are going to do this, continue weaving a tubular or flat tablet woven band once you finish the first side of the pouch, for at least half the length or a little more that you want the hanging strap. (I chose to do a flat band and switch to a pattern of eight quarter-turns forward, eight quarter turns back.) Then shift your weaving forward on the loom so you can bring around the pouch and weave the other edge. (see picture below)

(By the way, the clips holding the edges of the leather together are dollar store hair clips! Also awesome for doing hems!)

If you'd rather sew edges to the opening, or have to because your pouch is lined and/or made of cloth, there's a couple ways to do this. If you are going to sew all the way around the pouch, including the bottom, you can start at one side of the opening and go across the top, down one side, around the bottom, up the other side and across the other side of the opening.

A more likely way of doing it (many of these pouches do not have a bottom seam and do not have tablet weaving along the bottom) is to start from a bottom corner, and when you reach the top of the pouch add in a second weft, and at the turning of the top corner split the deck of tablets in half. Do each side of the opening with one of the wefts and half the cards, then put the deck back together and remove one weft as you turn back down the other side. Most of the medieval pouches were done this way, including, I believe, the leather ones.

Either way you do this, the warp threads will want to go straight and the collective edges of the pouch aren't a straight line. You will need to turn the pouch, but maintain a straight line from the starting corner of the side you are currently working on and the unwoven warp. There's a picture of one way to do this here.

Continue on until you are finished the other side. At this point you can either finish off the weaving and trim off the warp threads, or, as many people do, cut the warp threads a bit away from the end of the weaving and use them as part of a tassel-something which many of these pouches had. The other end has the warp waste from where you attached the warp to the loom. I cut mine off roughly where the cards are in this picture.

I added some red thread to the tassel to make them more full, and to match the drawstrings which I'd previously woven.

Carefully cut or poke holes in the top of the pouch for the drawstrings. Make them small; you can always enlarge them if they're not big enough. You need to make an even number of holes (and space them better than I did!).

If your pouch is cloth, you'll need to sew the edges of the holes. See here for slits, or here for eyelets for suggestions on sewing the drawstring holes.

While a single drawstring can be used, two strings pulled to opposite sides is much easier to deal with. My strings are kind of short because the original drawstring I made was not really long enough to make into two, but I was out of time to make a second. :(

My drawstrings. 5-loop fingerloop-braid. A simple round braid in three colours, the same blue and green as used for the tablet weaving, and red of the same thread.

Et voilà!

And many thanks to Tenzing (orange), Persephone (black), Jack (also black), and Lancelot (*also* also black), for their diligent snoopervision of this project! And to the Polar Bear for inventing and making the Loom of Awesomeness!