Ring Pouches

Decided to try something new....

Anglo-Saxon/Medieval ring-pouch!

Sometimes known as 'pickpocket pouches' because it's easy to steal out of them. I'd like to point out here that evidence for these pouches suggest they were used to carry everyday items like combs and fire-strikers and such. People wouldn't have carried valuables like money in them, and I can't advise anyone to carry their wallet in one either!

Outer pouch made with left-over wool scraps from my stash; striped light-weight wool tabby. The lining is pale grey linen. Due to the sizes of the scraps the outer layer is made from two separate 30cm x 30cm pieces, the linen is a single 30cm x 60 cm piece folded over.

This piece was for largesse so I went with the lighter coloured linen as all medieval depictions of these pouches have white/pale lining. I'm not sure about Anglo-Saxon versions of this type of pouch. As far as I know, we've only found the rings with possible fragments of the pouches.

The most important measurement for these pouches is the CIRCUMFERENCE of the ring (not the diameter). The fabric of the pouch needs to be at least wide enough to fit all the way around the ring. So measure the circumference of the ring, divide by two (front and back) and add a couple cm or inches PLUS seam allowance!

I didn't bother with a progress picture of the first step (sewing the pouch together) since it's just a basic back-stitch seam, for both pieces (sewn separately). The pins around the side seams in the picture are there because I'd considered 'finishing' the seams to make them lie flat, but after pinning in the ring and looking at it, decided ultimately that they didn't need to be.

The raw edges at the top were folded in between the layers and the entire top was folded around the ring. Another option for these pouches is to sew the top shut and whip-stitch the ring to the top edge, leaving it visible. Which is a better idea for good looking rings, and not a 4" steel ring from the leather-working department of Michael's! :)

I found it easier to pin half the circle onto the ring and sew it, before scrunching up the sewn part and sewing the rest. The thread I used was a pale purple wool, since the stripes meant nothing else I chose would be invisible all around.

The leather strap (and they all seem to have leather straps, not cloth-though I could be wrong about that) was sewn on over the outside of the cloth, both above and below the ring. If you're whip-stitching the pouch to the edge of the ring, you could sew on the strap first.

I put the sewing holes in the leather with an awl first, as it's heavy leather and had to be sewn through two layers of leather and three layers each of the wool and linen, below the ring.

And there you are! Depending on how fast you sew, this should probably take you a few hours total!

Later Medieval versions of these pouches often had the ring sewn in further down the body of the pouch, and put a drawstring through the top edge to close the pouch. If you want to be able to carry your wallet in the pouch, I recommend doing that. However, the drawstring version is not, as far as I'm aware, period for Early medieval Anglo-Saxon.

Another Medieval variant is to make the pouch out of a large circle of cloth, or possibly to round the corners of the pouch. The square ones sometimes had tassels on the bottom corners.

There's another style of these pouches I also hope to try in the near future, that was specifically used for money. It involved a ring too small for a hand (even a child's!) to fit through, sewn to a long, narrow pouch too long for fingers to reach the bottom of. Coins and other small bits of 'currency' would be out of reach, but easily accessible to the owner by pouring out the pouch.

Haversacks!!!

I made some haversacks recently too!

I made a red one of unknown fibre, lined and strapped in yellow cotton (Avacal's colours!) that I started for the siege sewing competition at Avacal/Tir Righ War in... 2008? But I don't seem to have taken a picture of it when I finally finished it in 2011... oops.

(photo credit to Baron Beothuk for the picture!)

Brown and white herringbone twill, with brown linen lining and an inkle woven strap given to me by HE Bryjna, to save me from having to sew one! For a siege largesse competition at Dragonslayer 2012 in Montengarde. Given to Baroness Wilma at the end of the day.

Haversack- black and white twill wool /red linen lining and strap (to HH Avacal for largesse)

The edges of both layers were folded between and whip-stitched with red wool. The strap was sewn right sides together and turn inside in, which was such a pain in the butt I didn't want to do it again! This one has two separate, long straps knotted together at the top to adjust for height.

Haversack- red and white herringbone twill wool /red linen lining and strap (to HH Avacal for largesse)

This time, to hell with it, the strap was whip-stitched too! The bag is BIG!

Second Dublin Doll

I made... ANOTHER DOLL!!!! SURPRISE!!!!

Linen body (as usual), cotton weaving waste stuffing
Linen hat and over-tunic
Linen/Cotton under-tunic
Given to Their Excellencies of Montengarde as largesse, making #49 in my A&S50 Largesse challenge!

More Medieval Toys

Wow! A whole YEAR since I last posted? Yikes! I have been doing stuffs. I have Made Things. :)

Sadly, I have once again repeatedly let things leave my house without photo documenting them, so I can only show you pictures of some of them. :(

I have made more toys!

Roman Era rag doll, in Coptic dress (apparently I've posted this one before-here's some more info on her fate). This is how she looked in a show in Abbotsford, BC in 2011. The dress was inspired by this artefact in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When she was returned to me, I removed the tapestry piece as I didn't want to give it up, and replaced it with a stola to make a Late Roman Empire costume for the doll. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture.

Her hair is of unknown fibre, with a thin braid circling her head at the hairline to hide where I sewed in the hair; the rest is gathered in a small circle of cheese cloth left over from a dyeing project in school.

She was given to HH of Avacal for largesse. With her was a second doll (also not pictured), dressed in a simple red linen gown with a white linen coif (no hair).

I made leather balls too! These are all based on finds from London, though mine are a bit bigger. You can find them in AY17-16-Leather and leatherworking in Anglo-Scandinavian and Medival York from York Archaeology Trust; page 3407. These are all Fig. 1728d, and I previously made a Fig. 1728d and a Fig. 1728c for the show in Abbotsford, which ended up as largesse. I stuff them with waste wool usually, as I cannot get moss.

(Yes, that link is the whole book. Yes, you can download it for your very own. Yes, this is totally legit. In fact, go here, they have a bunch of their out-of-print books you can download for free.) :)

MORE MEDIEVAL DOLLS!!! Linen body, various different stuffing (left: polyfil-very puffy!; middle: weaving waste-various fibre thread left over from weaving (thrums), solid but evenly stuffed; right: linen sewing scraps-very uneven to stuff, looks crudely made).

These three, as well as the three balls in the above picture, and the two hobby horses below, were for a 'Dirty Dozen Largesse on a Theme' competition at Avacal-Tir Righ War 2012, which I entered as part of a collective. These guys are nekkid, because someone else provided their clothes. As well, another person provided a couple of dolls, another a couple of wooden tops, and I think there were a couple of felted balls as well (yes, yes, that's more than a dozen, I know! I wasn't there!) All 'proceeds' of the competition were handed over to various royalty for largesse.

If you enlarge the picture, you can see more or less how they're put together. I don't think I've posted here before, but I have a photo-tutorial on-line on how to make these. You can find it here. The dolls are based on this artefact.

MORE HOBBY HORSES!!!! Black linen, sewing scraps, cotton floss inkle weaving.

I had limited black linen for this first one, and limited time, and limited scraps for stuffing, and shorter than usual bits of leftover trim for reins, so I decided to try making them smaller this time and skipping the mane. I kinda like them better than previous ones, though I might try the next shorter one with a mane just to see.

Grey linen, sewing scraps, cotton floss inkle weaving.

Holly Hood

I was going to do this as part of one big hat post, but I love this hood so hard I just had to feature it! (Cleeck the Peechewers! Cleeck them! Make them BIIG!!!)


Exterior is dark green wool with a bit of a whitish haze to it. Light weight, 2/2 twill.


Lined in bright red coarse weave silk! Heavy weight, tabby.


No weird long liripipe, thank you very much! We're VIKINGS!!! ;)


It's reversible too!


You know, for sudden wolf-hunting emergencies!


Red wool herringbone (my favourite!) stitching around the bottom and front opening of the shoulder skirt.


And Sutton Hoo/variant of the Vandyke stitch to stitch down the burgundy silk edging on the hood (the wool is a touch itchy on bare skin and I'm a RICH viking, dammit! :)

Byzantine Doll

Another medieval rag doll! Byzantine fashion, inspired by this artifact


Not adding it to the largesse list yet. May actually *keep* it for my own toy-demo box! If I do give it away, there will be a new dress for it though. That's real tapestry sewn on the front!

Inga and the Seven Bacon Martyrs

Now that I've ascertained this piece has reached its recipient, the last piece off that warp...

"Inga and the Seven Bacon* Martyrs"

cotton warp/ground weft, wool pattern weft

This was part gift, part practice piece for spacing. The first piece I did had some problems with the ground weft.

For pretty much all of the shorter figures in that piece I had to add one or two additional ground wefts, thrown in from the edge to the first warp thread into the solid part of the figure, usually from the top and sometimes from the bottom of the piece, in order to even out the fell line (the last line of weft woven).

While I don't know for a fact (yet) that they did not do this, the research I've read so far has not mentioned it. Typically they have mentioned an issue with spacing at the beginning of one of the pieces where the figures were not as skillfully placed to avoid this problem.**


This is what they're talking about. You can already see signs of that problem as I finished the second figure in the previous picture. Here, above, after the sixth it has become very noticeable. The weft on the right of the second figure and to either side of the sixth is clearly packing down to a greater degree than within the figures themselves. You can still see the unevenness in the finished piece.

This is not a beating issue, I was weaving this on a modern counter-balance loom and using only the beater bar to beat down the weft. There was no additional beating done on the sections of bare ground cloth.


Finished piece on the loom. Off loom and right side up, I believe it's about 8 inches tall and 5-5 1/2 inches wide.

* Why bacon? Because...shut up. That's why! (Actually because I had the Evil Thought that the figures in the first piece I did looked like they'd make excellent bacon, and well, when I have those Evil Thoughts, they Must Be Done, or I will go mad. Also, Inga likes bacon.)

** The literature discusses the fact that two of the four pictorial pieces of the collected Överhogdal tapestries (pieces usually labelled 1a and 1b in the literature) appear to have been woven on the same warp, as they both contain an identical warping flaw throughout. They are, however, not continuous pieces, though they may have been sections of a single larger narrative piece.

One end of 1a has loops in the warp ends characteristic of being tied to the warp beam of a warp-weighted loom. The beginning of the piece has the same sort of distorted weft due to less skillful placement of the figures as in my piece, which continues for a short length, after which the spacing abruptly evens out as though a more skilled weave took over or the original weaver learned the method to the spacing.