These Boots Are Made for Walking - a very, very late report from the Winter March

When it comes to reenactment, few things are as effctive as a planned event to get me working on Stuff I Need. In February 2013, it was time for Albrecht Bössor's annual winter march, when we test our kit and cooking skills under winter conditions - so I made boots with plenty of room for extra socks. Towards the end of May, it was time for a medieval pilgrimage on Gotland - and I made a travelling cloak to cope with the possibly fickle spring weather, and a leather costrel to solve the problem of transporting a day's worth of water.

This post deals with the boots and the winter march. The next one will be about the pilgrimage!

The Boots

The boots are the fourth pair of shoes l've made and I based them on a find from the ubiquitous Shoes and Patten-book from the Museum of London. There are several similar models described in Stepping Through Time, too, from 14th century Dordrecht.

The first boot, inside out - The finished boots before turning - The boots all done with laces untied...

I used my tried and tested slipper pattern (see this post) as a starting point and more or less draped the rest of the boot straight onto my foot with fabric. This is what our living room floor looks like when I'm making a shoe pattern...

Boot in the making...

The finished shoes were a number or two too large in order to comfortably accommodate two pairs of socks and still leave me enough room to wriggle my toes. During the march, the temperature hovered around zero degrees Celsius and we trudged though almost half a metre of wet snow at times. 

Stopping for lunch in the snowy forest

It didn't take long before my boots were completely soaked through. It was fine as long as we were on the move, but as soon as we stopped to cook dinner, my feet got very cold indeed. I was glad I had brought an extra pair of socks so I could change into something dry.

Cold feet - dry socks. Photo by S. Sternler

Another thing I learnt from the winter march was that wearing knee-high stockings with nothing else underneath my linen underdress was more than enough for warmth, but the underdress itself was not ideal. It only reached to a little below my knees, but there was a lot of snow and so it got really soggy really fast. And unlike wool, wet linen is both cold and uncomfortable and not something you want to have next to your skin. The wet underdress chafed my knees and calves and was rather unpleasant towards the end of the march. It's kind of obvious when you think about it, but there's nothing like personal experience for driving home a lesson in the properties of different textile fibres... 

So for the next winter march, I'll wear a woollen underdress instead. And seeing that it's only a few months away now, I should really get sewing...

References:
Grew, Francis & Neergaard, M. de (2001). Shoes and pattens. New ed. Woodbridge: Boydell Press

Goubitz, Olaf, Driel-Murray, Carol van & Groenman-Van Waateringe, Willy (2001). Stepping through time: archaeological footwear from prehistoric times until 1800. Zwolle: Stichting Promotie Archeologie

Tabby Test!

Now that I've started spinning for real, I couldn't stop myself from making a test swatch out of my first bit of purpose-made warp yarn. Making samples and test swatches is pretty much second nature to me. My teachers at the crafts school where I spent two years doing all sorts of textile-y things were great supporters of samples and it rubbed off. And when I went to university to do my degree in handweaving, I met another teacher with a healthy degree of sample obsession - to see her office with row upon row with binders stuffed full of handwoven samples was an eye-opener! 

So I make swatches and samples. I collect threads and yarns and fibres and put them on cardboard for future reference. It's a bit obsessive, I know, but also strangely satisfying. 

And when it comes to weaving with my handspun yarn, swatching is a Really Good Thing. It answers questions. Will it break? ls the thickness right for what I want to weave? How will the high-twist behave in the loom, how will it affect the finished fabric? Is there a point in continuing with this project or is my thread useless? 

I still haven't got my big loom up and running (soon, very soon!). But for making simple samples I have a small table loom. It looks a little like a toy loom, but with proper heddles and a proper reed so I can change the sett. Unfortunately, it only does tabby, but for testing my yarn it's perfect.

My table loom, on the floor.

 The yarn I spun at the Ronneburg event was just enough to make an eight-centimetre wide and 150 cm long piece at 8 threads/cm. Well, I had  to spin the weft too, of course, but that was reasonably quick work since I already had a bit of suitable yarn lying around from my previous practice sessions (the brown yarn in the pictures below). The warp yarn is somewhere in the region of yarn number Nm 15/1, or thereabouts. It's rather thin, so with the wide sett of 8 threads/cm the weft needed to be thicker and fluffier to give a bit of body to the fabric. The weft is perhaps Nm 7-9/1 (next time, I will remember to weigh and measure my skeins and calculate the yarn number for real...).

The first few centimetres...

I was pleased to find that my yarn wove beautifully with no breaks and very little stickiness. Before I did the warping, I blocked the yarn to settle the twist temporarily - it is a really high-twist yarn! Ideally, it should have been left wound in a ball for a bit to settle it more permanently, but I couldn't wait for that. After washing the finished pieced of fabric, the twist came alive again, displaying the characteristic 'crow's feet' pattern of high-twist threads in a tabby weave. Just like in historical textiles! I love it!

'Crow's feet tabby'

I will have to make more samples with my yarn. The fabric I'm going to use it for is not a tabby, but the old 14th century favourite 2/1 twill, which of course requires a different sett. But now I know that my spindle-spun threads work and will stand up to the wear and tear of being dragged through a loom. So...back to spinning!!! 

Obsessive Sampling Disorder (OSD)

Spinnst du? -Ja, ich spinne!

For some reason, my first version of this post disappeared yesterday. I don't know how, but it's not online or on my blogger homepage. People's comments are still there, but not the actual post. Ah, well. I'll have to try to reconstruct it, since my next post is connected to it. Here goes...

My spindle, now with thread!

I'm spinning again. After years (yes, years) of quiet practice, I'm now reasonably happy with my handspun thread. At last, I feel that I control the output of my spindle. So now would be the time to get going with the Slightly Insane Wool Project I wrote about here. But combing and carding all that wool...well, it takes a lot of time. And I want to spin now!

So I've chosen to go for a Slightly Modified Wool Project instead. Rather than preparing the wool myself at this time, I've settled for pre-prepared Shetland wool, just to start things off with. I begun spinning warp thread from it a couple of weeks ago, at the 100 Jahre 14tes Jahrhundert event at Ronneburg, Germany, where I went together with friends from Albrechts Bössor. It was a wonderful event with great people, excellent food and lots and lots of textile talk, including a workshop on frilled veils (which Isis of Medieval Silkwork has written about here). I spent most of the weekend hanging out in the "textile room" upstairs in the burg, lounging in the (mostly) sunny courtyard or down by the gate with the guards, always with my spindle close at hand.

At the Ronneburg: Spinning and talking textiles with Mervi of the Hibernaatio blog

I also - finally! - got to fire a 14th century handgonne!

Cold feet?

It's March, but winter refuses to go away. I know that most of my medieval gear works fine when the temperature creeps below zero, that's one of the advantages of wool - it's good at keeping you warm. If necessary, just add another layer. There is one thing I'm not happy with, though: my shoes.

Medieval shoes pose a bit of a problem for me since I insist on making them myself. I'm a reasonably competent spinner, a passable seamstress and a rather good weaver. I'm not a shoemaker. To date, I've managed to cobble together a handful of shoes and, looking back, I think I ought to be rather pleased with my leaning curve, if not the shoes themselves. Learning new things about old things is why I do this, after all - it's the reason I've spent 10 years making historical clothing without actually joining a re-enactment group until just recently (as of September last year I'm a member of Albrechts Bössor). However, wearing a pleasing learning curve on your feet when it rains, snows or when you're wading through 10 cm of mud is not necessarily an enjoyable experience, especially when the learning curve mostly consists of low, slipper-style shoes.

For the medieval-style LARPs I take part in, I bought myself a pair of ankle boots online. They were cheap, but - according to the seller - still made of vegetable-tanned leather. Well, um...no. They weren't. But they were cheap, and I suppose you get what you pay for. I just hope the Indian worker who made them got paid too. Even though the Cheap Shoes refuse to accept any kind of oil or grease and stay as hard as cuir bouilli after getting wet, I use them. They look acceptable at a distance, and will probably survive a nuclear explosion.

The Cheap Shoes taking a mud bath. This is not an arranged photo - the entire camp looked like this for two days.

The first pair
I made my first pair of proper turn shoes in 2009. I took a line drawing of a front-laced shoe from the Museum of London book "Shoes and Pattens" and simply enlarged it until the sole fit my foot - and there I had my pattern. I cut it from 2.5 mm vegetable-tanned leather, sole and upper both, and stitched it together using the seams and stitches described in the MoL book (I skipped the bit about using a last, since that would mean having to make one first). My biggest problem back then was to make the seams tight enough - it's still a bit of a problem for me. My first shoes served me well, though, although they kind of twisted themselves around my feet after a while. I blame it on the pattern not being adjusted to fit me properly.

The first pair of shoes, with a twist

Still, I wore this pair until last year - in the forest, on gravel roads, asphalt and cobbled streets. They put up with a lot of abuse and bad weather, but, despite looking like something chewed on by a goat now, they've held together.

The second pair
For my second pair of shoes, I reworked the pattern completely. I made the sole a lot narrower with a pronounced waist, which, according to a little googled research, should  ensure a better fit and stop the shoes from rotating on my feet. I constructed the pattern for upper using these instructions , a couple of fabric mock-ups and a lot of cellotape. Unfortunately, I got a little too enthusiastic about reducing the size of the sole and the finished shoes ended up a size too small. Not a huge problem, since veg-tanned leather stretch quite a bit and after a day of walking in damp grass they fit me well enough. Quite a bit of the upper is now under the shoe, though, to make up for the slightly-too-short soles. Lesson learnt: make soles narrow, not shorter! And try to make the seam holes on the soles exit closer to the grain side to prevent gaping seams.

The second pair

The third pair
For my third pair of shoes, I wanted to try something a little fancier than plain old front-laced slippers. I thought about adding a rand to improve the seam connecting the sole to the upper, but decided not to since I still had trouble with the basic construction. Instead I went for simple decoration and a latchet closure, using this shoe from Historiska museet (National Museum of Antiquities, Stockholm) for inspiration:

Eva Vedin SHMM 2007-04-17

 It's frustratingly dated as being "medieval" by the museum, but looking at other, better dated finds I think the style works fine for late 14th century.

The third shoe with fancy crenellation and latchet closure

At last I managed to produced a pattern that fits and the resulting shoes are my best to date! Comparing them to my first pair, I've certainly improved both the construction and the sewing. They won't keep my feet warm in winter, though... So I've made a forth pair: ankle boots with extra room for double socks. They will hopefully get a blog post of their own, some time in the not-too-distant future...

End and beginning of a learning curve

References and inspiration:
Making Medieval shoes:
http://www.the-exiles.org/essay/makingmedishoes.htm

Historiska Museet - Sök i samlingarna:
http://mis.historiska.se/mis/sok/fid.asp?fid=121838

Grew, Francis & Neergaard, M. de (2001). Shoes and pattens. New ed. Woodbridge: Boydell Press

Another Contemporary Embroidery

I have several longer, more historically flavoured posts lined up, but in the meantime here's another half-finished embroidered childhood selfportrait.

When I make these embroideries, I do a quick pencil sketch from the original photo straight onto the fabric. Then I usually start with the black outlines in backstitch to get the shape of it right before the pencil gets smudged or wears off. ln this case, though, I got a little carried away and couldn't wait to get going with the colours...

Here I'm aged five, watching the visiting ships of the 1980 Tall Ships Race in Karlskrona, the town I grew up in (it might just be 1983, in which case I'd be 8...)

Experimental Embroidery - a test post

Another completely un-blogged year has passed since my last post... Considering all the weaving, spinning and historical sewing I've actually done during this time, this feels like a slightly weak post to return with since it will be totally free from any form of historical craft. But it will have to do, for now.

I've finally succumbed to the vastly overrated world of smart phones, and got myself one with the biggest screen I could find. One I can draw and write on with a "smart pen". The reason I even bother to put this onto my blog is that I writing this very post by hand, as in with a pen and not a keyboard. My little machine recognises my scribbling and does the typing for me...the future is here and it allows joined-up handwriting! Yay! This post is also a test to see if the Blogger app works at all for me. If it does, I might start blogging while I commute to work, which would probably mean it won't be a year until my next post. So here goes...

A while ago, I took part in a weekend workshop called "Berättande broderi" (literally "Storytelling embroidery" in Swedish). Basically, free embroidery using sewing thread and a line drawing kind of expression. This inspired me to start making small embroideries from  old childhood photographs. I finished the first one this weekend.

It's me, aged about 3 or 4, with a fern on my head.

The Cap of St. Birgitta - second version

I've never really worn the Birgitta cap I made three years ago. When it came to actually using it, I wasn't happy with it at all. Every time I was about to put on a medieval headdress I chose to just tie an all-purpose rectangular piece of cloth around my head and pin a veil to it rather than wearing my cap. Eventually I figured out that I would actually prefer a larger cap than the one I'd made. Something a bit more like the first mock-up I made the last time around, the one I had to scrunch up beyond recognition to compensate for my lack of Proper Hair. 

So I made a new one! I wore it this weekend for the (to my mind) exceptionally paltry Medieval Festival at Bohus fästning, Kungälv (the second link will take you to a slide show of images of Bohus Castle itself - if you put up with the slightly tacky photo montages at the beginning you'll get to see some really spectacular pictures!). The cap, as opposed to the event, was a success!

I still don't have enough hair to fill the cap, but it nevertheless felt a lot better to have that extra fabric to play around with. The problem with the first cap was that it threatened to slide off my head, and I certainly prefer a bit of scrunched-up fabric to having my headgear fall off.

I took the opportunity to explore the art of embroidery a bit further this time and worked a slightly improvised version of interlaced herringbone stitch to join the two halves of the cap. It does look a bit scruffy, but I think it'll even itself out eventually.

The Cap of St. Birgitta - second version

And here's me trying it on and taking a picture of myself without a tripod. My arm is coming off at the shoulder (the camera is heavy!), but I've almost achieved that sought-after pear-shape! Yes, there's an obvious amount of deflated fabric too, but it's all my own hair in there this time!

Going slightly pear-shaped?!

References:

See the first post about the Cap of St. Birgitta, from 2008.