The Viking Project - Day 2

Well, technically...it's been a whole lotta days. But for consistency's sake, let's just stick with the format.

So, on the second day, I wanted to finish off Mr. Munchkin's pants. Hoping to be authentic, I worked from a fairly well researched SCA handout on men's clothing. All that I had to work with was a sketch of a pair of pants found in a Danish peat bog in Thorsbjerg.

I must say, I do like things from Denmark.

Lego.

Bang and Olufsen sound systems.

Viggo Mortensen.


Anyway, back to the sewing. Winging it, I cut out what I thought would approximate the pieces.


And proceeded with one hell of a jigsaw puzzle.


The resulting pants are ... serviceable. Not ideal, but they'll work. With copious amounts of elastic and a very strong drawstring.

Next, a little dress for a little maiden.

As I've been working away on these projects, I'm finding myself far more willing to toss period accuracy out the window. (The pants might have had something to do with that.) So for Miss E's dress, I made a T-shape dress, but with square gores. As you can see, the pieces to the left of the body show what the finished sleeve and gore look like, and the pieces to the right show what they look like when initially cut out.



Like the tunic and pants for Mr. Munchkin, it's all sewn up and awaiting trim application and hemming. I'll post pics of the kids in their outfits once they're all completed and ready for the big reveal.

Next, my outfit.

To be honest, what I had been imagining just did NOT work out. As Mr. Ninja said, "It looks like you had your bodice ripped." So. You're not getting pics of the original concept. But the good thing is that I managed to salvage a cute summer dress out of it.

Using this tutorial, and lengthening it to a good size for a dress, I cut into the most wonderful heavy linen I've ever worked with.



The resulting dress looked rather like a paper bag. So, I sewed a casing onto the waistline and ran a ribbon through, providing some minimal shaping. And since I kept losing the ends of the ribbon in the casing, I tied on some cloisonne beads. Snagging a detail from a dress pattern that I helped Ms. Happy with this weekend, I ran a thicker ribbon through the casings at the top of the dress, tying it together in a sweet little bow.



Here's hoping that the next attempt at my outfit is a little more successful.