Having made the logical leap that things never match exactly, I've managed to work up this motif from the Mammen dig. It takes rather a bit more card twist than previous work I've done, and with the time I've had to backtrack for having missed a card it's taking rather a long time to work each motif repetition, but I keep reminding myself that I can only do better for working hard on it.

Seem to have had a breakthrough in designing card weaving patterns with spirals. Somehow I'd expected things to line up everywhere, and that's just not the case. The brain weasels are protesting the break in the line that connects the two spirals into an "S", but they'll just have to live with it. The design is offset by one, so that everything will weave evenly--pics when I weave up an example. It's either have it off by one in the very centre of the motif, or have it off by one at every corner, or use an odd number of cards! I'm sure people who actually buy books with designs in would know this already, but I'm really only extrapolating from extant textiles and working it out on squared paper.

I probably ought to start working up my turning diagrams in Excel or another spreadsheet programme so that I can easily see the effects of deleting cards and/or shrink the motif while maintaining aspect ratio. It's just easier for my brain to work from scratch using a pencil.

Have more than 125 cm done today. I'm using the same technique as I used with my red dress lace, but I've put the loose warp ends onto bobbins (my first attempt got horribly tangled because I didn't plan sufficiently), which hang to create the necessary tension in the warp.

They still need to be shrunk/fulled/felted in the wash, but they're complete, and comfy. Made them ankle-height, so that they're nice with my ghillies even in summer.

Since taking this photo earlier today I've managed to catch up the lower sock with the upper, so I've both heels done. All that's left are the ankles, and I'll have another finished pair of socks.

Am looking forward to another quick project using up some cut velvet scraps salvaged from some worn out clothing. Any tips on hand sewing with velvet?

There may be three separate panels, but I'd like to think this collar looks pretty spiffy.

Am considering redoing it, as I've gathered unevenly (didn't notice until the last 10 cm or so) and the edge left inside is awkward. I do still like how it looks, but I think it could be a bit better.

Still need to embellish the front slit with buttonhole stitch, but that's for another day, when I'm not expecting company. Does the bottom edge of the collar look like it needs edging, too, or is that over the top?

I've finished all of the constituent pieces that go into the shirt. The front/back of the original was all one piece, but in order to use my fabric more efficiently I cut mine slightly differently.

Have tracked down the original at the Warwickshire County Museum, and requested more information than they list on their site. Pending what they tell me, I may not edge the individual pieces before sewing them all together, as "interlaced insertion stitch" does the job of outlining the seams pretty well on their own. Also, need to consider whether thirteenletters would want the bobbin lace of the original, or whether I might finish the front opening differently.

Oh, how spiffy is this? I took liadethornegge's advice, drew the fourth thread out from the embroidery, and hemstitched the edges. The result is, indeed, quite sexy.

As of Sunday, in Knoxville and still rather addled by flu, I was rather afraid of cutting into the linen on which I'd embroidered, for fear of disrupting well over a hundred hours' worth of work. Well, I got over it. It wasn't until I got back to NJ that I really figured out hemstitching, but I have since finished the collar, and it looks absolutely lovely.

Have hit the snag/fuckup for this project, however. In embroidering, either I'd gotten my measurements a little strange, or I'd simply figured someone else would solve the problem, as I seem not to have appropriate sizes for each of the pieces. The collar, e.g., is probably around 10/12 cm too short to go comfortably around his neck, while the cuffs are each about that length too long. (Yeah, I don't know what I was up to.) Am solving the cuffs by just tucking the excess under and not worrying too much about it, but I may have to add length to the collar by some means. Whatever I manage, I'm sure it'll eventually look like a feature. ;)

There's finally enough light to shoot, today.

I like the result, definitely.

Having installed an aiglet on the lace today, I've put my finished dress to the test by wearing it about the house. The lacing went much, much more easily with the aiglet, and will take about half the time as sewing the dress up would. The lace and eyelets look handsome together, though the seam no longer extends straight down my front (oh, well) but curves around the breast a bit. The top of the lace doesn't need much in the way of securing, so I've just used a slip stop and tucked in the end; the loop left makes me want to hang something pretty from it, but I think that's the Viking aesthetic coming through.

Tried to get a photo of the finished seam, but it's dark as twilight out (it's lashing down rain) and none of the light in the house (or the flash) is good enough to get good focus...except for maybe the task lights, and they're down in the cellar for the great hole.

Lots of work, hopefully worth it.

Over the past several days, I've turned out about 1.75 m of tubular card woven red cord for a dress lace. I used 12 Z-threaded cards with two opposing strings in each, turned 180º forward each turn, with a warp twined left to right.

I like the result. The cord is has both good tensile strength and a bit of stiffness. The weave is rather elegant, though a bit too tiny to capture with the not-great macro setting on my Kodak. The look is surprisingly modern, nearly like rat-tail cord, but the coefficient of friction in my cord is higher, and it doesn't slip so freakishly easily as rat-tail cord, which I consider definitely to be a feature.

To anchor the bottom of the cord inside the dress, I've used a slip knot that tightens toward the end of the cord to form a stable loop, and passed the working end of the cord through that loop. This created a rather easy way to fix the cord without worrying that a knot would pull through the eyelet and cause social difficulties at awkward moments (because Murphy's an Irishman, and if there's a poster child for sod's law, it's me).

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to lace the dress the whole way up with the new lace, yet, as the knot at the end has been difficult to get through the eyelets; I've already broken one of my lovely bone needles trying to poke the knot through this many holes. Am hoping to drive down to South River* tomorrow to get a metal aiglet that will fit the tip of the cord, so that lacing the dress will not, as I feared last night, take twice as long to lace as it did to sew it shut every time.

Overall appraisal--should be great, with the right technology.

*Grannd Companies is advertising etched silver aiglets for extremely reasonable prices, and they should be less than an hour's drive from here.

And now I wish that I were good at knitting, rather than the barest levels of adequate.

I have managed to achieve handspun woollen thread on my drop spindle. So far, it's averaging about maybe a quarter of a millimetre, with some variation. A cross-section of the diameter is probably ten or fewer fibres, so I'd say I'm doing rather well for this kind of margin of error. If I plied it, even once, it'd even out quite a bit, too.

I'd started out attempting to work up handspun thread because I was going to attempt some laid-and-couched negative work like Jane's fab cushion, but I ended up using the entirety of my stash of fine black woollen cloth, even the scraps. I do wonder how this thread sews (I'll have to wait a bit for the fibres to relax after spinning), but now I need to think of a new project for it.

Have finished all 71 hand-whipped eyelets, and the dress laces nicely. Not entirely certain how I ended up with 71,* but that's what fit along the opening, and I can't complain too much. During test-lacing there was only a slight bit of gapping between the two bottom-most pairs of eyelets, which may simply have been due to having laced the very bottom backwards; shall see if this corrects itself with truer lacing. Otherwise, devreux' recommendation of cm spacing was spot-on, as the edges butt nicely together. The lacing itself lays a little more regularly than is shown at right; I was dodging cat claws, as I hadn't shoved the excess lacing into my dress to keep it from enticing catly mischief.

...which brings me to several questions.
1. In order to lace myself in comfortably--i.e. thread the lace loosely for 10 holes, then tighten for support--I'm going to need about 180 cm of lace, which is probably around half a metre longer than I really need for the finished lacing. Does everyone else just use a shorter lace, or do you hide the excess somewhere (and how, for bog's sake)?
2. What's the best way to anchor the stationary end of the lace?
3. catlins2busy, you'd mentioned top-down lacing being more useful for those of us who are well-endowed; was this just in the later-period dresses Her Excellency was making?
4. Also, I need to figure out the optimum lace itself. I've done my practice lacing with a bit of scrap cotton 2 mm in diameter and 2 m in length, and while it will stay laced without even knotting the top pair of eyelets together, it does not come undone easily at all. Want to experiment with a lace done up from the same thread with which I whipped the eyelets, and from Crowfoot et al., I've come up with the idea to do a tubular card-woven lace, with 12 cards threaded each with 2 threads and given a 180º turn each iteration. Has anyone experimented with cord-making this way, or does everyone use either finger-looped cords, or boughten string?

*I have a theory that involves the sheer mass of my rather abundant cleavage bending the fabric of space due to gravitational pull, but it remains just a theory.

From the warp threads left over after I made my latest card woven band, I started on a pair of socks in yellow and a couple shades of red/orange, as I've mentioned in stickn_with_it. Am doing these in Oslo stitch like a lot of my recent naalbound projects. Having tried the Uppsala heel variant in my last pair of socks, I think I'm going to go back to the York heel. Not using the needle my Dad made me, this time, as the stitches are tiny (deceptively not so in the photo, but they are).

Am debating how high to make these, once I turn the heel and stitch up the ankle. May try knee-high socks like the pair from 12th century Switzerland, even if they need cross-garters to stay up.

Having finished my card weaving project with hand-spun, hand-dyed wool, I've otherwise updated my black hängerok and associated pieces. I've chosen to use some not-popular-with-SCAdians garment interpretations for this outfit, and I think it looks both elegant and appropriate.

Now that I've the York-motif tablet weaving in place, I've taken in the dress to accommodate the weight I've lost, and added more appropriate straps. The new straps are sewn fabric well between the average 4 and 10 mm width usually found. The dress design is still based on the six-loop style popular in Norway, which I have taken to indicate a dress wrapping around between the brooches. This allows for the sweeping line while walking shown in a number of period female depictions, as well as for ease of movement and fit to a changing body shape due to pregnancy. Not many SCAdians do their dress this way, opting instead for a completely-closed garment in the Haithabu style. Due to my shape, I find this design much easier to get into and out of, as anything that fit my hips or my bust wouldn't fit my waist.

The material I removed when I took in the hängerok I've re-pieced into one of Libby Hackett's Dublin scarves; the one in question is of fine wool without fringe or obvious ties, so I've pinned it to a linen scarf that has been knotted at the back of my head over loose hair. I believe this gives the hairstyle/headdress shown on some of the female figures depicted in the Oseberg burial and on quite a few of the goldgubber.

The tunic was embroidered with the acanthus motif from the Mammen man's burial in 10th century Denmark. The brooches are 10th century, from Snasen, Norway. The knife is of a Norwegian shape, and the whetstone is after an extant piece from Kaupang-Skirringsal in Norway. The beads are as close to flavour as I can find, but the cowrie shells have been seen at Fröjel on Gotland--probably the only eastern Norse element I've included in this outfit. The wood and leather needle case is technically of Bronze Age design, but it and its bone needles were made for me by a friend, and I like to show off his work because I do use them. smarriveurr made the wire-woven necklace for me.

The white underdress is the next piece to be replaced. Am at present trying to decide how closely to fit the sleeves.

mollydot requested that I take photos detailing the process of card weaving for those who haven't quite got the hang of it. Said photos can be found here on my Flickr, for those who might be interested. Please do let me know if there are sections I could clarify.

Caveat: I don't really want to deal with pattern drafting for this set, as that's a more intermediate skill; I just want to cover the basic mechanics.

Weighed out and mordanted some handspun fibre last night, and did some madder dyeing today. I used my usual 8:2:1 fibre:alum:cream of tartar mordanting on the undyed fibre.

This time, I used an approximately 1:1 ratio by weight of dyestuff to fibre (well, technically 60 g dyestuff to 75 g fibre, as I ended up adding some more last-minute on a whim). This madder soaked overnight in an old jam jar before I brought it up to temp over the course of an hour this morning. Again, I used a cast aluminium dye pot and locally hard water. As I did in December, I processed the dye liquor between 60 and 70ºC for an hour, then strained it twice. I added two skeins of undyed wool, and one skein I'd dyed in the December batch for top-dyeing. After an hour I decided the bath was looking a little anaemic, so I did some exhaust brews from the madder root from which I'd taken my dye liquor and added them at temp to the dye pot. The shot of additional pigment and another hour resulted in some lovely colours, including a rather surprising and much-hoped-for true red in the top-dyed skein. I've top-dyed yellows with indigotin before, but never with this kind of result.

In photo, balls L-R: 4:1 fibre/dyestuff from December, onion yellow for comparison, 1:1 fibre/dyestuff from today. Skeins, L-R: 1:1 on undyed wool, 1:1 top-dyeing over 4:1.

So it would seem I don't suck entirely. I have absolutely no idea what I was doing wrong yesterday when I couldn't get this pattern to work (that part of the band not pictured, but it was oogly) but I've gotten it through several repeats and am rather happy with the design. Intend in the finished project, as per the top of the turning diagram, to add a border at the edges.

Still haven't decided whether I'm going to do this up in yellow and blue, like Shelagh did, or in onion yellow and madder red with a black outer edge, to match the colours in my heraldry and coordinate with the trim I already have on that apron dress, which is black and the bottom edge embroidered with thin bands of yellow and red. That decision will affect whether I dye with indigo tomorrow or wait for a bit on that. Yellow/blue may look better on a different piece, now that I think about it.

Managed yesterday to finish all the facings for my cotehardie/GFD, so it's back to the order it was while previously being worn. Am going to take a break from it before I tackle the many, many eyelets I'm intending to sew--especially as I need to wrap my head around the predictability of the diameter of a finger-looped cord from a particular gauge of thread. I figured in the meantime that I'd update one of my apron dresses with card-woven trim done in woollen yarn I'd spun and dyed, instead of the as-bought string I've been using.

While going through a re-enacting contact's lovely gallery of card weaving several months ago, I happened across a band she'd done from one of Egon Hansen's designs. I'd found a similar motif from an extant bit of brocaded card weave a couple days ago from (IIRC) R.A. Hall's Book of Viking York, which I've sketched out on squared paper, and had wondered how to go about it without the brocaded technique. Not havng access to Hansen's book any time soon, I've been extrapolating from her scanned band, from advice from Phiala, and from experience with a similarly-flavoured motif how I might use both changes in turning direction and twists around the z-axis to achieve smooth lines in the finished product. I've mapped out a handful of turning sequences so far, and have managed to correct my pattern fairly well--all I have to do is manage the reversal of the motif as it repeats, and I should be set. I hope.

I am, unfortunately, at that awkward intermediate stage well beyond the "basics" theory pages every other SCAdian lady seems to have webbed, but not entirely experienced enough to draft easily from extant pieces. I can double-face easily enough, but smooth lines are hit-or-miss unless I've checked my work against someone else's. Luckily, this pattern is only five cards wide (seven as Shelagh's done it), so I can practice in cotton until I have a corrected pattern. Having taken Phiala's Snartemo-drafting class has helped get my head around the theory, though I've yet to understand precisely how one might determine the threading pattern from the design, rather than basing the design on the threading pattern.

Am intending to do up some more blue yarn with indigo I'd gotten from Lettice's Still Room, now that I have the necessary reducing agents. Having done this once before under guidance (admittedly back in 2003), I'm not entirely willing to do this indoors if I can help it due to the smell, so I may sneak down to Trenton and use one of the outdoor furnaces at the Barracks. If it goes well I may eventually see if I could talk "Uncle" Wayne into a natural dyes demo, possibly next spring, though were that to happen I'd have to add usage of dyes in the American colonial period to what I know of usage in the European Dark Ages.