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At last, The Stockings

My Eleonora of Toledo-inspired stockings have been an adventure – with more than its share of misadventure – but they’re done and I’m delighted! [1]

After a couple trial runs, I started work on them five years ago. Though there’s an excellent pattern available on Ravelry [2], it’s in a heavier gauge than I wanted. It’s also faithful to the surface design of the originals, and I wanted to tweak a couple of details.

So I developed my own pattern. Most of it is based it on information gleaned from the Medici Archive, who hold the actual stockings. At the time, they had high-resolution images available on their website. [3]

As I intend to wear the stockings, they are not a line-for-line copy.

the originals are silk; mine are wool, which I prefer because of its resilience, knitting qualities, comfort – and ease of repair

the original stockings look baggy in the calf and foot. The decreases for the calf are far too low on the leg to fit me, and the feet are too thick. Perhaps, after at least eleven pregnancies, Eleonora’s feet and ankles were somewhat the worse for wear. Whatever the issues, the stockings wouldn’t have been practical in their original form, so I adjusted the shaping.

In a period-consistent manner, I tweaked minor details of the surface patterning that didn’t appeal to me

on the cuff, I used purl squares instead of eyelets in the centre of the diamond pattern and omitted the second zigag at the edge

on the widest leg panel, I substituted a chequerboard pattern for the ladder effect of the originals

And finally, though the original stockings may have been knit flat and seamed up the back [4], I knit them in the round. Strictly personal preference. By the sixteenth century, knitting in the round was known – the Virgin Mary, in this 15^th century painting by Master Bertram of Minden, is clearly knitting a garment in the round

The heels and feet are mostly educated guesswork. Unfortunately, all the available detailed images were of the stockings in profile. None showed the back of the stocking or the sole face-on, so I based the shaping on Richard Rutt’s diagram of feet of 16^th century knitted silk stockings.[5]

That heel pattern has an odd little quirk – since the heel flap is rectangular, there’s a small nub left sticking out when it’s worn. My daughter, who modelled the stockings for the pics, tells me she didn’t even feel it. It’s kinda cute, though I expect it’ll eventually flatten & felt into the sole with wear & sweat.

From the Medici Archive images of the stockings, I guesstimated that the originals were knit at ~18-20 stitches per 2.5cm, and found a cobweb-weight yarn in wool white that knits up at 18st/2.5cm on 1mm needles over one of the leg patterns.

I scoured the yarn, dyed it with madder, then overdyed it with cochineal, made a gauge swatch and started knitting.

The first stocking went smoothly. It took about six months, which I felt pretty good about, seeing as I was knitting a complicated pattern on tiny needles in my “spare” time.

With the second stocking, the “adventure” set in.

First of all, when I got the yarn out, I discovered that, for some reason that still eludes me, about half the remaining yarn was darker than the yarn I’d knit the first stocking with. No idea how or why – it was the same dye lot of the same yarn, scoured and dyed at the same time, and had looked the same when I started knitting.

Rather than have an abrupt colour change somewhere, I decided to knit alternating the two shades throughout the stocking, even though it would make the second stocking a bit darker than the first one.

Then I went in for foot surgery, and continued knitting while convalescing.

Big mistake.

Never, ever, work on anything more complex than a garter stitch dishcloth when under the influence of heavy-duty painkillers! I’d nearly finished the second stocking when I realized I’d knit the foot off the wrong side – since the stocking is shaped at the calf, it matters which side the foot comes off of! I ripped it back, reestablished the pattern, and decided to put it away until I was less annoyed with myself.

Life happened, and it was a couple of years before I picked the project up again. At which point I discovered that, though I thought I’d packed it away carefully, moths had gotten at it. I wrapped it up & stuck it in the freezer, where it sat for a year or so.

Finally, I picked it up a couple of months ago, and started darning the moth holes. That took a while – darning many, many, moth holes can be tiresome. Luckily, the surface pattern is so busy that the darns barely show!

When the darning was done, I started knitting the foot again, and discovered that my notes from the first stocking were vague in spots, so I had to reinvent the toe decreases.

My daughter modelled the stockings so that I could take the pics. In the process, a couple more moth-weakened strands gave way, so there was some more darning.

And now the stockings are done. Despite all the mistakes, mends and imperfections, I’m thoroughly pleased with them and eagerly waiting for a suitable SCA[6] event to wear them to!

And just for the fun of it, here’s a pic of the sole. Turned out that the stitch count worked out so that I was able to continue the pattern all the way around the foot!

[1] Because of copyright concerns, I haven’t included an image of the original Eleonora of Toledo stockings. If you want to see an image, and more information, have a look at this article; they’re on page four: https://kemeresearch.com/files/ATR_60_2018_pp3-9_Malcolm-Davies_FINAL.pdf

[2] https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/eleonora-di-toledo-stockings-first-edition

[3] The images I used are no longer available on the Medici Archive project at https://www.medici.org/ . I have no idea why.

[4] Currently, there doesn’t seem to be information available on some details of the stockings, including what the gauge is, how the feet were made, and whether they were knit flat or in the round. So, while it’s not 100% certain that they were knit flat, the interpretive text at the Palazzo Pitti, where they’re displayed, said “The closure seam is at the centre back”, and Richard Rutt’s text indicates that 16th century stockings were sewn up the back, so I went with that. Or rather, decided not to go with that.

[5] Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting, Loveland, Colorado, Interweave Press, 1987, p.74

[6] Society for Creative Anachronism

By Helena Frei| April 21st, 2021|clothes moths, cochineal, damage, dyes, fibers, knitting, madder, mistakes, Pent, repairs, SCA, scouring, wool|Comments Off

My Viking coat is finished!

It’s been a journey; I’ve been working on the coat since spring. It came together from three sources: weather, a stalled project, and a pattern I bought so long ago that it now turns up in listings of vintage patterns on Etsy and eBay.

The weather:

Several years ago I was horribly cold at an SCA * camping event. There was frost overnight and, while daytime was warmer, it was still crisp.

It wasn’t the first time I had been cold at an event, just the worst, and I thought it would be nice to have a seriously warm Viking-style coat.

The stalled project:

During the years people were donating their furs to Goodwill, I got a full-length black mink coat that I intended to use to line a cloth winter coat. I found the ideal tweed for the coat shell, got the interlining fabric and studied much information on how to sew furs. And stalled there, intimidated by the idea of cutting into a fully-functional mink coat.

That was more than ten years ago. Finally, I figured this was ridiculous and decided to take the indirect route – to make a fur-lined Viking coat to get experience in handling that much fur.

Due largely to the lack of surviving physical evidence, there’s been a lot of discussion on whether the Vikings used much fur and whether they used it for linings. I think they did, and I agree with archaeologist Tuija Kirkinen. In her paper on the ritual use of fur, she stated that “the use of pelts and furs for clothing is self-evident in a region at the edge of the taiga”. ** While I don’t live at the edge of the taiga, the weather, even in southern Canada, can get ridiculously cold, and I’ve found that furs (and I include sheepskin) are best at keeping me warm when the temperature dips below -30C (-22 Fahrenheit).

The pattern:

The Turkish Coat is one of the first patterns Folkwear published. I don’t remember exactly when I bought it – sometime around 1974. And I’ve been meaning to make it ever since.

The Viking coat was the perfect opportunity. From surviving fragments and images, it appears the coats Viking men wore might have been constructed in a similar way.

Granted, it’s a “male” garment, and the existing evidence shows women mainly in shawls. Which I’ve tried, and discovered that to keep warm in seriously cold weather, I’d have to wrap myself up in many, many layers.

Nope. For the sake of sanity and mobility, I decided on a coat.

The materials:

The fabrics: since this was going to be an experiment, I wanted to spend as little as possible on it, so I dug through my stash and found two yardages that worked well together – a medium“indigo” blue and a vivid apple green wool.

While they’re both commercially dyed, both are colours that are possible with natural dyes that were available to the Vikings.

The blue is easy – woad, which contains indigotin. Woad seeds were found on the Oseberg ship.

On the other hand, green can be dyed many different ways, so the possible dye sources are guesswork. Maybe woad plus weld or broom – or one of the many other sources of yellow.

Coincidentally, a friend – textile artist Jaclyn Paltanen – just did an experiment on dyeing woad-based greens on wool and got a lovely range, including that apple green!

Both fabrics are pure wool, and they’re fulled. The apple green is a lightly-fulled 2/1 twill; the blue is more heavily fulled so I’m not sure what the weave is.

There’s still occasional discussion about whether Vikings fulled their wools, but apparently archaeologist Inga Hägg has documented the existence of fulled wools in Viking-era finds in Hedeby in her Die Textilfunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu***. Fulled wool is not appropriate for every kind of garment – but for a coat intended for Canadian winters it most definitely is!

The lining: this is where I spent some money – $35 if I remember correctly. When I bought the donor coat for the lining, I wasn’t sure what the fur was (and neither was the man who owns the secondhand shop where I bought it). We guessed it was some sort of water critter – maybe beaver or otter – or maybe marten, all of which were available to the Vikings **.

To my surprise, when I took out the lining, I discovered it was fur seal. It’s not at all like what I know as seal!

Turns out the fur seal is a southern hemisphere beastie, so it’s improbable that a Viking-era coat maker would have had access to it. However, I’m taking a pass on “authenticity” here; the furs I thought it might be – beaver or otter or marten – would all have been available. We do the best we can!

Making the coat:

The first step was figuring out how to allow for the thickness of the fur lining. While I got over 48 million hits the last time I googled “fur sewing”, the vast majority handled fur in the present-day convention – as something to show on the outside of the garment. Finding information on working out how to allow for a fur lining took some digging. The clearest I found was on a Threads Magazine forum post from 2010:

“Take a length of the fur and wrap it around your middle with the fur facing inward, safety pinning it closed. Using a tape measure, measure around the outside of the fur. Take off the fur and measure around at the same spot. The difference between the two measurements will be your “fur adjustment.”

So that’s what I did, and it worked!

To check the size and length, I made a muslin ****, trying it on over a wool Viking-style gown and a heavy sweater.

After I cut and assembled the shell fabrics I gathered my courage and started on the fur coat.

Taking it apart, I was reminded of the amazing amount of hand work that goes into furs! Even though the pelts are now sewn together by machine, the garment assembly is largely manual. The edgings and the lining were sewn in by hand, and there was a grid of long, loose hand stitches anchoring the pelts to the underlining throughout the coat.

Once I’d disassembled the coat, I realized I’d been lucky. The body of the coat was very close to the shape & size of the body of the Folkwear pattern, with only one significant difference: the original fur coat had a straight up-and-down overlap, while the pattern’s fronts are at an angle that’s supposed to keep the coat closed without fasteners. All I needed to do was stitch in two triangular sections at the centre fronts to add the overlap – and luckily again, the front facings which I had removed were big enough to cut the triangles from.

The sleeves were another matter. Originally, I intended to use the fur sleeves to line the fabric sleeve, but I found that the combination of the fur and the fulled wool fabric was too bulky for comfort. So back to the stash, where I found a medium-light woolen twill remnant that worked to line the sleeves.

Regarding authenticity, I made two decisions to be deliberately inauthentic, and the first was pockets. The Folkwear pattern has no pockets – just pocket slits, which are probably Viking-appropriate. But with a fur-lined coat intended for brutally cold weather, making pocket slits that would have been convenient openings for weather to get in seemed self-defeating. So I added pockets. Gotta have somewhere to stash those kleenexes!

My other “inauthentic” decision was to underline the coat with a lightweight cotton, much as the present-day fur coats are. I wanted to make this coat look good and last as long as possible, and the underlining helps with both. It keeps the internal stitching – and there’s a lot of it – from pulling on the outer fabric and showing through to the right side.

If cotton made it to Scandinavia at all during the Viking era it would have been a wildly exotic fibre, and way too expensive to use as an underlining.

I could have used linen, which was available then, but the 3.5oz linen I have in my stash would have added a lot of weight – and the coat is heavy enough as it is. There may be some super-fine linens that wouldn’t have been so heavy, but from what I’ve seen on the web they’re also super-expensive. Which is where reality cuts in – this is a coat to wear, not a museum-quality interpretation.

Final details and a decison:

Once the coat was “finished” and wearable, I decided that, having put so much thought and work into, it would be worth going the extra mile and spending a bit more time and money on trim and fasteners.

Which is another post!

* Society for Creative Anachronism – a world-wide reenactment group that focuses on pre-1700 CE history

** Tuija Kirkinen The role of wild animals in death rituals: furs and animal skins in the late iron age inhumation burials in southeastern Fennoscandia. Fennoscandia archaeologica XXXII, 2015

****I use 1/4″ gingham for muslins – the gridded weave of gingham makes the grain lines obvious. (And yes, there’s only one sleeve – I took the other one off to use as a pattern for the sleeve lining.)

By Helena Frei| October 19th, 2018|costume, dyes, fibers, fur, indigo, SCA, the stash, Viking costume, woad, wool|1 Comment

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Right fabric, wrong colour

dyes, wool

Right fabric, wrong colour

Us makers of “historically accurate” clothing are inveterate bargain hunters. Appropriate fabrics are expensive, and sometimes that bargain is the right fibre and weight, but the wrong colour, so we are often also experimental dyers.

A note on historical accuracy: to be totally accurate, one would have to use fabrics that are hand-woven of hand-spun natural fibre, dyed with natural dyes and hand-finished. While this is theoretically possible, it would be nosebleed expensive, and beyond the time and/or money budgets of most historical costumers.

In my practice, I do my best, but there are many compromises. I try to use natural-fibre fabric, but occasionally a wool mixed with probably-synthetic “unknown fibre” creeps in. I burn test when shopping, but current textile treatments seem to be making burn tests less reliable, and bargain hunting makes taking a snip home & seeing if it dissolves in bleach impractical.

And dyes; I use natural dyes for small pieces and yarns, but fabric lengths need a big & complicated contraption to natural-dye evenly, which I don’t have & don’t have room for. So I dye lengths in the washing machine, using present-day dyes.

In the last week, I had a couple of surprises when I changed the colour of four fabrics!

The first is an elderly length rescued from the basement of King Textiles when they moved. The second is one my favourite salesperson at Archie Fine Wools dug out for me – again from the basement – a few days before the shop closed. The other two I bought at the Textile Museum of Canada’s marvellous Yardage Sale.

A burn test suggested that the King Textiles one is a wool/cellulose-fibre mixture, but diamond twill is a rare find in commercial fabrics, so I bought it in spite of the suspect fibre content. And in spite of the unfortunate colour, which was an anaemic salmon pink on a grubby cream background. Another compromise – right weave, semi-wrong fibre, wrong colour.
The bolt for the second one – a faint blue plaid on a tan background – was labelled “wool” (I don’t remember the mill name), and a burn test confirmed it.
The third – a bluish pistachio length – has “pure new wool” woven into the selvedge; a burn test suggested a wool/cellulose fibre blend.
The fourth one – a sad, dusty, plum-purple one – has “Kadylaine” woven into the selvedge. This might be a brand of pure wool (“laine” = wool, in French), but might also be a trademark for a wool blend. The burn test also suggested a wool/cellulose fibre blend.

With the apparent blends, I console myself that, at least, if they are actually blends rather than wool treated with something that misleads burn tests, rayon is the most probable cellulose fibre to be mixed with wool, and rayon isn’t reprocessed oil!

The diamond twill from King Textiles

The bolt had been lurking in their storage, likely for a decade or three. Last year I tried dyeing it with “periwinkle” acid dye from G&S Dyes, and didn’t take a “before” picture. The diamonds (presumably the wool component) came out a pretty shade of pale blue on a silvery grey background (the “possibly rayon” component).

However, the colour was uneven, which I’ve never had happen before when dyeing in the washing machine. Not blotches, but broad stripes of deeper blue. I suspect that, in its long time on the shelf, either friction from being shuffled around, or absorption of the acid from the cardboard it was wrapped around, or both, made parts of the fabric more receptive to the dye. In those places, it took more heavily, hence the “stripes”.

I tried dyeing it again, but no luck. It just got a little darker, but the stripes didn’t budge. I was disappointed, and the fabric joined the UFO pile.

This week, since my washing machine was occupied by dyeing projects, I finally got some colour remover and had a go at removing the colour, hoping to take out enough to have another go at dyeing the length. And hoping that the chemical beating it took from the colour remover would make the whole piece more evenly dyeable.

The surprise? The colour didn’t shift much. It’s still the pretty pale blue – what I think the Elizabethan colour “watchet” may have been – on silver grey. BUT the “stripes” are mostly gone, and I can work around what’s left.

It looks like the colour remover selectively took out just the excess the dye!

The wool from Archie Fine

This one was feather-light, with a beautiful, butter-soft hand, and was ridiculously cheap for a quality wool, ($3/yard, if I remember correctly), but the colour was unfortunate – the precise shade of tan that turns my skin sallow and blotchy. It’s possibly even older than the diamond twill – only 32″ wide, which is a width I haven’t seen new since the 1960s!

I overdyed it with “periwinkle” acid dye from G&S Dyes, which seems to be turning into my go-to dye for shifting unbecoming colours of wool. It came out a lovely, tweedy stone green, with the faint bluish plaid popping to a clear sapphire blue. It also shrank about 30%, which adds to my suspicion that it’s an old yardage – the two more recent wools that I dyed shrank maybe 5%!

The shrinkage also thickened it, so it’s no longer feather-light, and the hand is a little woolier, but that’s OK. I’m going to use it for a Viking apron dress, and the change has transitioned it from Mid-20th Century Men’s Lightweight Suiting to Plausibly Viking.

The bluish pistachio length

With this one I was aiming at bright spring green, so I overdyed it with yellow. Since the burn test indicated a cellulose component and I had Dylon for cellulose on hand, I tried that. It improved the colour marginally, but not to the green I was aiming for.

Not too surprising; if it is actually wool, as the selvedge says, since the Dylon I used isn’t designed to work on wool. So I got some yellow acid dye & had another go. That bumped it up to a lively green.

I’m still not sure about the fibre content. From the way the acid dye took it from a barely-perceptible change to strong spring green, I suspect it actually is 100% wool – but with some kind of finish that confuses simple burn tests.

The sad, dusty plum purple one

This one was another happy surprise: when I pre-washed it for dyeing – I was going to aim at a deep, deep blue – the sad, dusty look vanished and it lightened a couple of shades. It may have been under-rinsed in the original dyeing process, or just plain dirty.

Whatever the cause, washing left a lovely violet shade, which is just too pretty to change.

I’m going to make a kirtle out of it, and be damned to the idea that purple is for royalty only!

By Helena| June 3rd, 2017|dyes, wool|Comments Off

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A really, very, thoroughly, annoying mistake

knitting, madder, madder, mistakes, wool

A really, very, thoroughly, annoying mistake

I was in the home stretch of knitting the second Eleonora-style stocking, when I put it on to check whether the foot was long enough to start the final decreases.

And found I’d put the heel on the wrong side – the calf decreases were down the FRONT of my leg!!!!!

Aaaargh!

Much unraveling to do – complicated by the fact that for some reason, even though they were the same dye lot and dyed at the same time, two of the skeins had taken the madder slightly differently and were a shade browner.

Because I was down to half of the last brighter red ball and was concerned that I’d run out before finishing the stocking ( I would have), I was alternating rows of the brighter red with rows of the faintly browner red to avoid an abrupt transition.

This worked fine – but makes unraveling weirdly complicated because of the way I crossed the yarns at the end of each row to avoid gaps.

My only excuse is that I was working on the stocking while stuck in bed and on pain killers after foot surgery. That’ll teach me to knit while distracted!

By Helena| March 29th, 2017|knitting, madder, madder, mistakes, wool|Comments Off

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Eleonora stockings – progress!

cochineal, dyes, knitting, madder, Renaissance, silk, wool

Eleonora stockings – progress!

My latest attempt at the Eleonora stockings!

This is actually my third go at these stockings. Between my first attempt and this one, a lot more information had come out about them, the best being the images in the Medici archive.

The first time I tackled the stockings was from a pattern I downloaded from the internet, and knit with commercially-dyed red wool fingering. I stopped knitting & discarded this test as soon as I realized that the pattern was for a stocking with a present-day shape, only using the surface patterns from the originals, and that the gauge was way too big – more of a sport sock than an elegant lady’s stocking. The pattern doesn’t seem to be on the internet any more.

The second test was from the pattern by Anne DesMoines published on Ravelry. This one I knit with a silk yarn finer than the wool of the first test. Initially, the silk was white, and I dyed it with cochineal. It had some issues – the dye insisted on being a fuchsia pink instead of red, and the gauge was still too big, with fewer pattern panels than the originals. Also, I found the silk very unpleasant to knit with, and abandoned the attempt.

For the current stocking I bought white laceweight wool yarn. This time I dyed it with madder overdyed with cochineal, and got a very satisfying brick red.

This yarn knits up at a finer, more period gauge – approximately 14 stitches to the inch on 1mm needles. None of the documentation I’ve seen to date gives the gauge of the actual Eleonora stockings. However, because of the number of stitches in the pattern panels and the number of repeats, it must be very fine.

As far as I can tell from the available images, this edition of the stockings has same number of patterned panels as the originals, and the stitch count is very close.

I changed a few details – I didn’t like the second zigzag and the eyelets in the cuff or the “ladder” effect of the double garter stitch in one of the panels, so I eliminated the zigzag, and substituted a purl square for the eyelets and a chequerboard pattern for the “ladder” effect, all of which are consistent with late 16^th century knitting techniques.

Since I plan to wear the stockings, I changed the shaping. The original Eleonora stockings are baggy in the calf and foot – the decreases for the calf are far too low on the leg to fit me and the feet are too thick. Perhaps, after at least eleven pregnancies, Eleonora’s feet and ankles were somewhat the worse for wear.

Instead of designing the foot following the the Medici archive images, I used the foot shaping for 16th century stockings shown in Richard Rutt’s A History of Hand Knitting. The soles of the originals are mostly moss stitch or seed stitch; instead, I picked up and continued the band pattern just for the fun of it.

One stocking is done and the second is in progress. With luck & a following wind, it’ll be done by Pennsic!

(The little *blip* at the back of the heel is historically accurate. I’ve been assured that it wears in fast and is comfortable..)

I’ve just been reminded of another change that I forgot about – and this one’s a biggie! The Eleonora stockings were knitted flat and sewn up the back; mine are knitted in the round. I couldn’t bring myself to knit them flat. The technique was known by Eleonora’s time – Bertram von Minden’s Knitting Madonna, painted ca 1400-1410, is knitting in the round!

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By Helena| June 26th, 2016|cochineal, dyes, knitting, madder, Renaissance, silk, wool|Comments Off

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Dye tests – scouring linen

dyes, fibers, linen, scouring, silk, wool

Dye tests – scouring linen

This linen will be red. What shades of red, I don’t know yet – a series of tests with madder, cochineal and brazilwood is my current dye project.

Playing with the colours is fun&exciting, but much as I’d like to get right into weighing out the madder and grinding up the cochineals, I first need to scour the fabrics & yarns. Less entertaining, but necessary – before the colour goes in, whatever is inhabiting the fibre has to come out, and there’s a surprising amount of gunk on even the newest, cleanest, whitest textile!

Of the three fibres I scoured – silk, wool, and linen – the most dramatic was the linen. Though the yardage was new and clean and very white, the water turned this dirty yellow from the waxes and pectins from the linen, plus whatever was added in the processing.

In this case, I suspect there were optical brighteners – the fabric started out bright white. Now it’s still white, but with a more “natural” tone.

…

The PH meter I ordered just arrived in the mail! Now to calibrate it…

By Helena| February 3rd, 2016|dyes, fibers, linen, scouring, silk, wool|Comments Off

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My Viking coat is finished!

The weather:

The stalled project:

The pattern:

The materials:

Making the coat:

Final details and a decison:

Which is another post!

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