In the later medieval period, caps were an everyday clothing item for both men and women. They kept people's hair clean and out of the way, stopped people's heads from getting sunburnt, and gave women something to pin their veils onto. Like other utilitarian objects they don’t usually survive, but there is a 14th century cap which has been preserved as a relic, because it’s said to have belonged to St Birgitta of Sweden. It’s an interesting item, made from two halves joined together with knotwork and finished with an embroidered band. YouTuber Morgan Donner has put together two excellent videos on how to make this cap. She has a video specifically about how to do the knotwork: ...and a longer video, which takes you through the entire process of making the cap. Thanks to Morgan's videos, I was able to replicate the cap. There is also a very good tutorial from Cathrin Åhlén at Katafalk, complete with a pattern, which I found really useful. My knotwork is made from 6 linen threads, each of which should be about 5 times the length of the knotwork. I started at the back of the cap and left half of each thread as a tail while I did the herringbone rows. Then I used the tails to weave around the herringbone stitches and thus complete the knot. It’s annoying if one of the tails isn’t long enough, but not a huge problem because you can darn in another length of thread. Small mistakes in the weaving aren’t obvious either. I'm 98% sure this photo shows the place where I had to darn in another length of thread. And this is the back of the cap showing where the knotwork starts. I found that a strip of thermal-backed curtain fabric works really well as a backing to stabilize the two halves of the cap while you complete the knotwork. However, you’ll need to be very careful that whatever you use to draw the grid on your curtain fabric isn’t going to rub off onto your cap, or use a washable fabric pen that won't matter if it rubs off. I used a biro, and was not very happy to discover that even when dry it transferred itself to my cap. Fortunately, Sard Wonder Soap lives up to its name. In the comments on Morgan's video about making the cap, someone suggested it might have originally been made for a child, with the knotwork added later so it would fit an adult. I also wonder whether it might have been a regional style. The images of caps which don't appear to have embroidery come from other parts of Europe, and the design feels very Scandinavian to me. It reminds me of the wire posements found at Birka and other places, and it's based on the number 6, which is a recurring pattern with ancient Scandinavian textiles. HSM details The Challenge: Everyday. Caps like this were part of the 14th century European woman's everyday wardrobe, although they weren't always embroidered. Material: Part of a pillowcase that I'm reasonably certain is linen. Pattern: Cathrin Åhlén's pattern, which is available on her blog. Year: 14th century. Notions: Linen thread. How historically accurate is it? It's made from linen like the original, in the same way as the original, so far as I can tell. While it's not an exact copy, I like to think it's pretty close. Hours to complete: Around 10. First worn: around the house after photographing. Total cost: Probably a dollar or so. I got the pillowcase, along with another pillowcase and a sheet, for $6 at the Sallies.

Egyptian linen from 5000 BCE, image from the Bolton Museum. Note the scale bar - this is very fine linen! When reconstructing Aegean Bronze Age clothes, I rely heavily on the kind of techniques that were used in Egypt around the same time. The reason for that is simple: we have evidence from Egypt. We know nothing about the techniques used in the Aegean, because no textiles survive in that region. We do know a bit about ancient Egyptian sewing and textile manufacture techniques, because we have surviving examples even from the Old Kingdom. Because these Egyptian garments are so well preserved, we can tell how they were made. The Egyptians used a very simple range of seams, sewn with either running stitch or whip stitch. Sewing thread was usually undyed, but there are some dyed examples. Either way, sewing thread didn't necessarily match the colour of the cloth it was used on. Here are some examples of seams and hems from Egypt: Illustration from Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, 2000, edited by Paul Nicholson and Ian Shaw, page 283. Egyptian needles were made from copper, bronze, silver, or fish bone. Thorns (and, I suspect, fish bones) could be used as pins, but the Egyptians didn't generally use pins. They held the two pieces of fabric together with their fingers as they sewed. Scissors weren't available until the first century CE, but I use 'em anyway. My commitment to historical accuracy doesn't extend to cutting pieces with a flint knife. Of course, the problem with using Egyptian techniques to make Aegean clothing is that this approach relies on assuming Aegean techniques were similar to Egyptian ones. This assumption may not be correct, since even a cursory look at art from the period shows that Aegean clothes and textiles were quite different from Egyptian ones. We also know that textile production methods in Egypt were quite different from those employed in the Aegean. Ancient Egyptian clothes usually involved draping a rectangle of cloth round the body. The cloth was woven to size and did not require much in the way of seams or hems. Aegean clothing, however, utilised curved pattern pieces that had to be cut out of the fabric piece. This meant raw edges that had to be prevented from fraying. Flat-felled seams weren't common in Egypt, but they do a good job of stopping raw edges from fraying, so it may be that this type of seam was more common in the Aegean. In spite of these important differences I still think Egyptian sewing techniques are probably the best indication of how Bronze Age Aegean garments were constructed. They are techniques that can be used to manufacture a wide variety of items, including the types of clothes shown in Aegean art, and there is plenty of evidence for trade between Egypt and the Aegean during the Bronze Age. For information on Egyptian sewing techniques (and all sorts of other interesting stuff), see Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, edited by P. Nicholson and I. Shaw. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000.

Here are the patterns for the strip of brocaded tablet weaving I made recently. Feel free to use them however you like. Note that these are brocade patterns; they don't have anything to do with the way the tablets are threaded and could be used for any type of brocade. My ground weave was just a plain four-hole structure with all the holes threaded in the same colour, which is how the original from Birka was made. This interlace design is copied from band 2 from Birka grave 824. The numbers refer to tablets. By way of a recap, here's what the pattern looks like made up: This is the pattern for the rune design: As before, the numbers along the top indicate tablets, but this is a brocade pattern. It doesn't show how tablets should be threaded. Each row corresponds to a shed - i.e. a quarter turn of the tablets.

Recently, Cathy Raymond made some moretum, as described in Virgil's poem of the same name. I'm not a huge Virgil fan, so this was the first time I'd come across the poem. Moretum is often translated "Salad", perhaps because the more accurate translation "Cheese Spread" is deemed too plebian. Nevertheless, moretum is a cheese spread with herbs and garlic. Yum! Here was a recipe I absolutely had to try, and it fits conveniently into the last Historical Food Fortnightly challenge of the year: Breakfast Food. I ate my moretum with crispbread. It's not authentically Roman, but it is delicious with moretum. Virgil's poem describes farmer Symilus preparing his breakfast before going to work in his fields. First he makes bread, but he doesn't have any meat to eat with it and the thought of eating bread on its own doesn't appeal to him, so he makes some moretum. This involves a number of herbs from Symilus' vege garden: "ac primum leviter digitis tellure refossa quattuor educit cum spissis alia fibris, inde comas apii graciles rutamque rigentem vellit et exiguo coriandra trementia filo." You can read the full Latin text here and there's a translation here: "Away, he garlic roots with fibres thick, And four of them doth pull; he after that Desires the parsley's graceful foliage, And stiffness-causing rue,' and, trembling on Their slender thread, the coriander seeds" That's an insane amount of garlic. Cathy Raymond says Roman heads of garlic were smaller than ours, but it still seems like a lot, especially since the poem specifically tells us the smell makes Symilus' eyes water. It's so much garlic that I question whether this recipe is representative of what the Romans actually ate, or whether Virgil was indulging in a bit of poetic exaggeration. It just doesn't pass the sniff test (pun intended). I don't know why Virgil might have exaggerated the quantity of garlic, but I used half a clove. I don't know where that translator is getting parsley from either. It looks like they've translated apius as parsely, but apius is celery. I covered both bases by using parsley and celery. When Cathy made moretum, Opusanglicanum talked of making it with Pecorino Romano. I'd like to try it with labneh, but Pecorino Romano is closer to what Virgil had in mind. Pecorino Romano was made in Roman times, and Symilius' cheese is obviously some type of hard cheese. He keeps it hanging from his roof by a string tied through a hole in the middle of the cheese. The poem goes on to describe how Symilus pounds his herbs and cheese together in a pestle and mortar. This is the recipe I've come up with, based on the poem: Half a clove of garlic (though in hindsight a whole one would be nice too) Roughly equal quantities of Pecorino Romano and finely chopped celery A good pinch of parsley A small pinch of rue A small pinch of coriander seeds A dribble of olive oil A couple of drops of red wine vinegar Pecorino Romano quickly forms a paste when you crush it in a pestle and mortar. It does not need a lot of olive oil, and I would recommend adding just one or two drops of vinegar at a time. I think it would be easy to add too much and spoil the flavour. The Challenge: Breakfast Food. The Recipe: Moretum, from the poem of the same name attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Virgil. The Date/Year and Region: First century BCE Rome. How Did You Make It: Just like Symilus in the poem, I put all the ingredients in a pestle and mortar and ground them into a paste. Time to Complete: Just a few minutes. Total Cost: The block of Pecorino Romano set me back $12.50, which I thought was excessive at the time. Now I've tasted the moretum, I have to say I don't regret buying the cheese. How Successful Was It? Very, very good. Next time you're entertaining, consider making some moretum to serve as a dip. I'm confident your guests will enjoy it. How Accurate Is It? Very! I've even made it in a pestle and mortar, although if we're going to be honest that's mainly because it requires less effort to make it the authentic Roman way than to clean out a food processor.

Here it is: a Minoan kilt based on the ones shown in the procession fresco from Knossos. It's decorated with embroidery in an effort to demonstrate that embroidery techniques can produce the kind of textiles shown in Bronze Age Aegean art. Here's the fresco for comparison: Knossos procession fresco Group C, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Kilts had cultural significance for the Minoans, and giving a young man his (first?) kilt was a Big Deal. It was such an important life event that it was recorded on seal stones. Most kilts in Minoan and Mycenaean art are fairly plain, but the Knossos procession fresco shows an important cultural event, most likely a seasonal religious festival, and the people involved are wearing special clothes for the occasion. Ornately decorated kilts may also have been reserved for specific members of society, though in theory anyone could own a kilt like this as long as someone in their social circle possessed the time and technical skills needed to make one. One of the things this project taught me is that making a kilt this way is not particularly difficult, it's just time consuming. I embroidered the kilt before I cut it out, then finished the edges by simply turning them under and stitching them down, which may or may not be something the Minoans would have done. It would also be possible to line the kilt, or even just leave the edges raw since fulled wool doesn't fray. Fabric edge folded under and stitched with linen thread. Close up of the kilt. Pictured: plied cord used to tie it round the waist and traces of chalk left from drawing the embroidery design. The plied cord is conjectural, but was a common method of fastening clothes in the Bronze Age Aegean. Here's what it looks like laid out flat. The kilts in the procession fresco are a little unusual. As far as I'm aware that tapered border at the bottom doesn't occur anywhere else in Minoan art; decorative borders are common, but not tapering to points at each end. Additionally, all the kilts in the procession fresco are made in the same colours (blue with yellow stripes or yellow with blue stripes), with the same overall design and decorative features. If the trade delegation shown in Rekhmire's tomb is anything to go by, Minoan clothing was normally much less uniform than this, even for important occasions. This suggests the procession fresco kilts were a specific style of garment related to the event shown in the fresco, and potentially even made specially for this event. Where exactly does all this get us? Sure, this is a garment the Minoans could have made, but is it a garment they're likely to have made? Unfortunately there isn't enough evidence to answer that question conclusively. I can say this reconstruction is consistent with what we know about the Knossos textile industry, and solves an important problem with making the procession fresco kilts - specifically, the fact that the tapered stripes at the bottom would be extremely challenging to weave even for an experienced weaver using sophisticated techniques. So this is a plausible interpretation, but not a definitive one. Important public service announcement: if you think you might like to make an embroidered wool kilt, I strongly recommend using a dust mask. Yes, a dust mask, like you would use for sanding down a surface before painting. You may laugh, but trust me, your sinuses will thank you for it. The wool constantly sheds tiny fibers that will do unspeakable things to your nasal membranes. HSM details The Challenge: Specific to a Time (of day or year). The men pictured on the Knossos procession fresco were participating in a festival, which would have happened at a specific time of the year. The similar colour and design of their kilts, which appears to have been unusual, suggests they may have been made specifically for the event shown in the fresco. Material: Half a meter of fulled tabby wool. Pattern: Based on Dr. Bernice Jones' research. Year: 1470 - 1315 BCE. Notions: Wool yarn for embroidery, linen thread, plied linen cord. How historically accurate is it? The purpose of this reconstruction was to demonstrate that embroidery techniques can produce textiles consistent with those shown in Minoan art. But we don’t have enough information about the textiles shown on the Knossos frescoes to know for sure how they were made and this is one of several possible interpretations. Hours to complete: I lost count, but I think somewhere around 60-70. First worn: Round the house after I finished hemming it. Total cost: $45.

This blog is going to be all about my historical experiments. Currently I’m doing both the Historical Sew Fortnightly and the Historical Food Fortnightly, and I really do need a place to put my research and so on. Rather than file it away on a drive somewhere, I’m going to put it in a blog where other people can perhaps benefit from it. Let’s kick off with something fun! For HSF Challenge 10: Art I wanted to recreate a decorative band from a fresco found at Tyrins. As you can see, all I actually managed was a short piece of woven cloth about two inches wide, but you would not believe the time it took or the difficulty I had just to get this far. I’ve always been impressed by the elaborately woven cloth shown in Minoan and Mycenaean art, and after attempting this project my admiration for those Bronze Age weavers has increased exponentially. I tried a whole lot of different ideas before I got this result. I started with a wool warp, but the thin wool wasn’t suitable for the warp and kept breaking. I had to start again with linen warp threads and a wool weft. Bronze Age wool was structurally different from modern wool, so a Bronze Age weaver might not have had this problem. So far as we know, Aegean Bronze Age textiles were made on warp weighted looms (as opposed to the ground looms used in contemporary Egypt). In her 1991 book Prehistoric Textiles, Elizabeth Barber states that the patterns we see in Aegean Bronze Age art were most likely made using supplementary weft floats. Having made this thing, I completely agree with her. In fact I think supplementary weft floats might be the only way to reproduce this particular pattern. I found that other types of weaving like tablet weaving and tapestry didn’t adequately reproduce the pattern on the fresco, and indeed there’s no evidence the Mycenaeans used these weaving methods. Supplementary warp floats are essentially a type of brocade technique. The main warp is woven normally in a tabby structure, while the supplementary weft threads “float” over various numbers of warp threads. In this case the warp floats cover the entire surface of the band with no ground weave visible at all. This type of weaving is also known as overshot, and it is possible to create very elaborate patterns this way. Although this pattern looks simple, it is very complicated to weave – or it was for me – because there are five different colours of supplementary weft. Google overshot weaving and you will find that most of the patterns out there use only one supplementary colour at a time. There’s a reason for that. For those who are interested, you can find an introduction to overshot weaving here. You will notice that page tells you in bold font that your supplementary wefts must be thicker than your ground wefts. This is something I learned the hard way and it is very important, but it’s easy enough to fix. Just use two lengths of yarn for the supplementary weft and a single yarn for the ground weft. Weaving this pattern would have been much easier if I was an experienced weaver and knew what I was doing. This is actually only the second thing I’ve ever woven, but I imagine the original was made by someone who did have experience. Nonetheless, I suspect this was a complex and relatively difficult design even by Mycenaean standards. If you look at frescoes showing Mycenaean and Minoan clothes, you’ll see that the patterns don’t usually have as many colours as this one does. High-end luxury textiles were extremely important to the Mycenaean economy and were exported in large quantities; see for example M.E. Alberti’s 2007 paper The Minoan textile industry and the territory from Neopalatial to Mycenaean times: some first thoughts, in Creta Antica 8, pp. 243-263 and The Management of Agricultural Land and the Production of Textiles in the Mycenaean and Near Eastern Economies edited by Massimo Perna; Francesco Pomponio, 2008. Textiles were such big business in the Bronze Age Aegean that Mycenaean Knossos employed 900 textile workers. And here are all the HSF details. The Challenge: Art Fabric: this is the fabric. It’s made of linen yarn and two-ply wool. Pattern: my own interpretation of the pattern shown in the fresco. In the future I’ll put the pattern up here for anyone who might be interested in seeing it or, god help you, using it. Year: 13th century BCE Notions: none. How historically accurate is it? Well, that’s a good question. Sadly, we just don’t know. We don’t even know for sure the band would have been woven; it might have been embroidered or even painted. Given the evidence for complex weaving in Europe and the Aegean, I think it was likely woven, but that’s my opinion. No textiles survive from this time period in the Aegean, so we only have surviving frescoes to tell us what the textiles were like. Ultimately, all I can say is that I reproduced the design in the picture using materials and techniques that the Mycenaeans used. Hours to complete: making this little band took me about 6 hours, on top of all the many many hours of research, trial and error, swearing, and unpicking. First worn: N/A Total cost: $20 for a couple of balls of yarn. I already had some of the colours I needed.

This post is all about my attempt at one of the signature flavours of the 18th century: mushroom ketchup. Mushroom ketchup was to the 18th century what garum was to the Romans, an all purpose flavouring agent used in a wide variety of dishes, and in fact the taste is not unlike fish sauce. It's a salty, savoury, umami flavour. Due to the popularity of mushroom ketchup, historical recipes tended to assume you were making the stuff in industrial quantities, which is prohibitively expensive for most of us today. But do you, as a modern cook, actually need an industrial sized bucket of mushroom ketchup? In this post I'm going to make a smaller, affordable quantity of this ketchup using about 500 grams of mushrooms. If you do need a large quantity of it, here is an awesome cheat recipe made with mushroom bouillon. Recipes for mushroom ketchup varied, but they all followed the same basic pattern. You salted your mushrooms and left them to sit for a while so the salt could draw out the mushroom liquor, then you squeezed all the liquor into a pot, boiled it with spices, and strained it again into bottles. Some cooks added wine or ale, but this was apparently optional, and the spices involved varied. Here is a recipe from Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery. And here is John Farley's version from The London Art of Cookery. The similarity in titles, by the way, was probably not accidental. Farley seems to have "borrowed" a lot from Hannah Glasse, who herself plagiarized earlier authors. At least one recipe requires the salted mushrooms to be placed in a low oven for 24 hours, but I don't care to leave the oven on for a full 24 hours with no one to watch it while I sleep and go to work and besides, not all recipes included this step, so I just put my casserole dish full of mushrooms next to the hot water cylinder. Note that I have chopped my mushrooms to make them easier to squeeze. Here is what I ended up with. At this point the mushrooms have been sitting for a full 24 hours and have released an amount of juice which, frankly, surprised me because I had expected some liquid to be visible, but as you can see there's none. They smelled good though, so there's that. Maybe this is why John Farley says to leave the salted mushrooms for four days, and maybe Hannah Glasse didn't say to heat the mushrooms because her audience already knew that. But my mushrooms weren't looking good. Hmmm. What if I zapped them in the microwave? Microwaving things makes them soggy, right? Now we're getting somewhere! In this picture they've been microwaved for five minutes. I microwaved my salted mushrooms for one minute at a time on medium power, about fifteen minutes in total. I took them out to check their progress after each minute and kept going until there was a lot of liquid in the dish and the mushroom pieces were soft. It seems you do need to heat the mushrooms in order to extract their liquor, but you can totally cheat and use a microwave. Here's my modernized version of Hannah's mushroom ketchup recipe. For around 200 mls of ketchup you will need: 500 grams mushrooms About 2 tablespoons of table salt (it doesn't need to be exact) 1 teaspoon whole peppercorns 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves 1/8 teaspoon ground mace 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger Clean your mushrooms, remove the stalks, and chop them. Layer them in a pan with the salt sprinkled over them and leave them somewhere warm until they're soft and sitting in a nice pool of mushroom liquor or, y'know, help them along in the microwave. Squeeze all the mushroom liquor into a saucepan using a cloth. This will take a lot of squeezing, and you will be able to extract a lot more liquor than you think. Don't throw the squeezed mushrooms away, you can dry them completely and use them for cooking. Add the spices to your saucepan and simmer it, covered, for 15 minutes, then cool it and strain it into a bottle. The ketchup will be watery, and that's okay. It's a concentrated flavouring not a sticky condiment. You add small quantities of it to boost the flavour of stews and gravies. If you have a whole kilo of mushrooms (try the farmers' market), it's worth doubling this recipe because it is labour intensive and trust me, you will find plenty of uses for mushroom ketchup. It's delicious. There's a reason people in the 18th century were nuts about this stuff. It tastes, obviously, of mushrooms, but with wonderful aromatic citrus and gingery top notes from the spices. 10/10, this stuff deserves to make a comeback.

Here are the patterns for the strip of brocaded tablet weaving I made recently. Feel free to use them however you like. Note that these are brocade patterns; they don't have anything to do with the way the tablets are threaded and could be used for any type of brocade. My ground weave was just a plain four-hole structure with all the holes threaded in the same colour, which is how the original from Birka was made. This interlace design is copied from band 2 from Birka grave 824. The numbers refer to tablets. By way of a recap, here's what the pattern looks like made up: This is the pattern for the rune design: As before, the numbers along the top indicate tablets, but this is a brocade pattern. It doesn't show how tablets should be threaded. Each row corresponds to a shed - i.e. a quarter turn of the tablets.

This month's HSM challenge is Silver Screen - make something inspired by a costume from a movie or TV show. My original plan for this challenge was to make an Egyptian bead dress (a historicized version of a costume Theda Bara wore in Cleopatra), but in order to get that done in time for the deadline I would have to have started sometime around July. I didn't. So I've had to scale back my ambitions and find a less time-consuming project. The idea of taking something blatantly, egregiously unhistorical and turning it into something actually attested in the archaeological record really appeals to me, and that was always what I wanted to do for this challenge, but as I say I ran out of time. Then one day I was flicking through my copy of The Viking Way while I waited for some code to compile, and I came across the Hedeby masks. And I remembered that episode of Vikings, where the French emperor Charles and his daughter Gisla have those outstandingly unhistorical masks. Vikings gets a lot of flak generally for its historical inaccuracy, and for good reasons. I understand the process and the considerations involved, but I find Vikings hard to watch because it departs so far from reality. As far as those masks go I'm not aware of any historical reality behind them and I have no idea why the writers chose to give the characters masks*, but the vikings did have masks and I thought a historically accurate viking era mask would be a fun little thing to make. As always with Vikings, the reality is much more interesting, and much stranger, than the TV show. In reality, viking masks looked more like this: Reconstruction of a 10th century viking mask made from felt. This mask is based on a 10th century one from Hedeby. The original appears to represent a sheep and I tried to make mine look like a sheep too, but I should probably point out here that we do not know for sure the Hedeby mask was meant to be a sheep. It's a bit ragged now and may have been bent a bit out of shape, but it certainly looks like a sheep. Here is the original Hedeby mask: From page 172 of The Viking Way by Neil Price. The masks found at Hedeby were probably used in rituals relating to the god Odin. It's a standing joke in archaeological circles that any object whose purpose isn't immediately apparent must be a ritual artifact, but in this case we can be reasonably confident the masks were associated with worship of Odin. There's a good discussion of this in The Viking Way, and we actually have a 10th century description from Constantine VII of a dance that involved animal skins and masks. The original Hedeby mask has a fuzzy nap, made by brushing the surface of the felt with some kind of a stiff brush. My version also has a nap made by brushing the felt surface in the direction the sheep's fur should go. The Challenge: Silver Screen. Fabric: A piece of felt 25 cm by 25 cm, which I made from the wool I had left over from my Borum Eshøj belt. It's easy enough to make felt from yarn if the yarn is thick and made from real wool; you simply un-spin the yarn and felt the resulting strips of un-spun fiber. Pattern: The Viking Answer Lady provides a gridded diagram of the Hedeby sheep mask. I played around with it to make a pattern that takes into account the shape of the surviving fabric and is bilaterally symmetrical, as the mask would have been originally. Year: Somewhere around the 10th century. Notions: Linen thread to sew up the nose and help shape the head. How historically accurate is it? I think it's very accurate. Maybe even 90% as the pattern is directly based on a 10th century artifact. The felt I made is wool, but it may not be exactly like wool used in the viking age. I'm not sure about that. I made the felt with soap and a sushi mat, which of course isn't the authentic viking way. I don't know how they made felt, but I do know how cloth was fulled in the middle ages and I therefore suspect the felting process involved urine. There's a limit to how far I'm prepared to go in the pursuit of historical accuracy. Hours to complete: Two, including making the felt and messing around with the pattern. First worn: I tried to take some photos of me wearing the mask, but this was not a success as it turns out the eye holes on the original aren't quite in the right place for me to see out of them. Total cost: Effectively $0 since the wool was left over from a previous project. This piece of felt would have used a couple of dollars' worth at most. *If this was Fargo or perhaps Game of Thrones I would be inclined to think the masks had a symbolic significance, but Vikings is not that clever.

I promised I'd post the pattern I used to weave my decorative band from Tyrins, so here it is. Each square on the graph paper represents two warp threads. You can see there's a lot more to it than you typically get with an overshot weaving draft. It's really three different patterns. If anyone out there does use the pattern, please leave a comment. I'd love to see what you do with it and hear any suggestions or improvements you have. Here are some better photos of the finished band. This one shows the underside, with all the messy supplementary weft floats. They are every bit as much of a pain in the backside to keep track of as they look.

Here are the patterns for the strip of brocaded tablet weaving I made recently. Feel free to use them however you like. Note that these are brocade patterns; they don't have anything to do with the way the tablets are threaded and could be used for any type of brocade. My ground weave was just a plain four-hole structure with all the holes threaded in the same colour, which is how the original from Birka was made. This interlace design is copied from band 2 from Birka grave 824. The numbers refer to tablets. By way of a recap, here's what the pattern looks like made up: This is the pattern for the rune design: As before, the numbers along the top indicate tablets, but this is a brocade pattern. It doesn't show how tablets should be threaded. Each row corresponds to a shed - i.e. a quarter turn of the tablets.

Here are the patterns for the strip of brocaded tablet weaving I made recently . Feel free to use them however you like. Note that these ...

Here it is: a Minoan kilt based on the ones shown in the procession fresco from Knossos. It's decorated with embroidery in an effort to demonstrate that embroidery techniques can produce the kind of textiles shown in Bronze Age Aegean art. Here's the fresco for comparison: Knossos procession fresco Group C, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Kilts had cultural significance for the Minoans, and giving a young man his (first?) kilt was a Big Deal. It was such an important life event that it was recorded on seal stones. Most kilts in Minoan and Mycenaean art are fairly plain, but the Knossos procession fresco shows an important cultural event, most likely a seasonal religious festival, and the people involved are wearing special clothes for the occasion. Ornately decorated kilts may also have been reserved for specific members of society, though in theory anyone could own a kilt like this as long as someone in their social circle possessed the time and technical skills needed to make one. One of the things this project taught me is that making a kilt this way is not particularly difficult, it's just time consuming. I embroidered the kilt before I cut it out, then finished the edges by simply turning them under and stitching them down, which may or may not be something the Minoans would have done. It would also be possible to line the kilt, or even just leave the edges raw since fulled wool doesn't fray. Fabric edge folded under and stitched with linen thread. Close up of the kilt. Pictured: plied cord used to tie it round the waist and traces of chalk left from drawing the embroidery design. The plied cord is conjectural, but was a common method of fastening clothes in the Bronze Age Aegean. Here's what it looks like laid out flat. The kilts in the procession fresco are a little unusual. As far as I'm aware that tapered border at the bottom doesn't occur anywhere else in Minoan art; decorative borders are common, but not tapering to points at each end. Additionally, all the kilts in the procession fresco are made in the same colours (blue with yellow stripes or yellow with blue stripes), with the same overall design and decorative features. If the trade delegation shown in Rekhmire's tomb is anything to go by, Minoan clothing was normally much less uniform than this, even for important occasions. This suggests the procession fresco kilts were a specific style of garment related to the event shown in the fresco, and potentially even made specially for this event. Where exactly does all this get us? Sure, this is a garment the Minoans could have made, but is it a garment they're likely to have made? Unfortunately there isn't enough evidence to answer that question conclusively. I can say this reconstruction is consistent with what we know about the Knossos textile industry, and solves an important problem with making the procession fresco kilts - specifically, the fact that the tapered stripes at the bottom would be extremely challenging to weave even for an experienced weaver using sophisticated techniques. So this is a plausible interpretation, but not a definitive one. Important public service announcement: if you think you might like to make an embroidered wool kilt, I strongly recommend using a dust mask. Yes, a dust mask, like you would use for sanding down a surface before painting. You may laugh, but trust me, your sinuses will thank you for it. The wool constantly sheds tiny fibers that will do unspeakable things to your nasal membranes. HSM details The Challenge: Specific to a Time (of day or year). The men pictured on the Knossos procession fresco were participating in a festival, which would have happened at a specific time of the year. The similar colour and design of their kilts, which appears to have been unusual, suggests they may have been made specifically for the event shown in the fresco. Material: Half a meter of fulled tabby wool. Pattern: Based on Dr. Bernice Jones' research. Year: 1470 - 1315 BCE. Notions: Wool yarn for embroidery, linen thread, plied linen cord. How historically accurate is it? The purpose of this reconstruction was to demonstrate that embroidery techniques can produce textiles consistent with those shown in Minoan art. But we don’t have enough information about the textiles shown on the Knossos frescoes to know for sure how they were made and this is one of several possible interpretations. Hours to complete: I lost count, but I think somewhere around 60-70. First worn: Round the house after I finished hemming it. Total cost: $45.