Norse Apron Dress

Our local group's fall event was Norse themed. I usually wear much later-period clothes, so out of an abundance of caution I tried on my Norse outfit ahead of time. The blue linen 10-gore dress I made with Ysabeau of Prague's help several years ago (perhaps my second piece of SCA garb) still fit, but the snug gray herringbone weave apron dress was no longer an option. Time to make a new apron dress!

In the Society for Creative Anachronism, it's a rumored bit of inter-kingdom anthropology that  different kingdoms have recognizably different styles of Norse apron dress. This is partly due to the fragmentary nature of the archeological evidence - there are multiple possible interpretations of the documented finds, and it's possible, even likely, that long-ago women wore a variety of styles over the wide range of geography and years that get lumped together as "Norse." When I visited the Hafnarfjörður Viking Festival (note - Flickr is changing their policies and all my photos will likely be moving soon) in 2017 I saw Icelandic history buffs wearing almost every common variation, sometimes several layered together at once. The "sandwich board" style of apron dress is impractical and flappy when made in linen, but when made in Icelandic wool the layers stick to each other like velcro, removing the fire hazard. It was a vivid demonstration that sometimes making a garment in the original materials makes all the difference in how practical it is.

The kingdom of Atlantia is known for the heavy use of lovely appliqué, especially towards the front hem of the apron dress. Ansteorra (my kingdom) often uses inkle-woven trim as the supporting straps. I don't know the details of other kingdom-specific style trends, but I have heard that they exist. If you know of a fun one, let me know in the comments. My usual costuming focus is several hundred miles, and several hundred years, away from Norse, so it's not an area I've really spent much time researching. I just needed a new apron dress to wear to our Norse-themed local fall event. I had originally planned to just make a very Ansteorra-standard apron dress, but then my archaeologist friend Deidra Black, who really enjoys Norse, came over to hang out for the day. She is the best kind of bad influence.

With Deidra's encouragement and advice, I drew inspiration for my dress from the Haithabu finds in the general shape and length, the "princess seam" ridges up the front, and the self-fabric straps. Two-part self-fabric tube straps support the apron dress. The short front loop and the much longer back loop are connected held together like links of chain with brooches from Raymond's Quiet Press (I prefer the smaller design). The brooch pin doesn't have to be sharp, since actually go through any of the fabric. The necklace was a gift from Ysabeau, with lamp work beads she made and an adorable little sun dial center pendant.

The piecing of the body was heavily influenced by the shape of the remnant fabric I was using to make the dress (still linen rather than wool - heat stroke is no one's friend, and I live in Texas, not Denmark). I made one piece for the front, shaped a bit like a tall triangle (the flared skirt) with the top point covered by a square (the torso). The two side-back pieces each had one straight edge for the side seam, and one square-then-angle side. The center back section was another triangle overlapped by a square. 

I just used general measurements to fit my body and made the whole thing a little too big, then put it on inside out and had my (very patient and helpful) family pin it a bit closer along the seams. I wanted a relatively easy fit, but I didn't want it to hang like a bag. 

I re-sewed the seams to their new size and serged all the raw vertical edges, then added the front ridges, top hem, and straps. I have learned that there is a very good reason for Ansteorran woven straps, even though I haven't seen any archeological evidence to support them - turns out, making these long, skinny tubes is a giant pain. I was machine sewing these, rather than doing it by hand, though my struggles with the rouleaux loop turner might have nearly cost me all the time I saved by using a sewing machine.

The criss-cross design of the back straps is just something Deidra and I made up, because we liked it. The center back anchor point works well to keep the straps from slipping off my rather sloped shoulders. Also, I am more fond of cookies than my dress stand is. The dress is not so loose on me as it is in these pictures, but you get the idea.

 

The green belt in these photos was woven by my Laurel, Amata Amati d'Arezzo, and was the belt she put on me when she took me as an apprentice. I usually wear a much later-period green leather belt I made for myself, but this belt is very special to me, and I wear it with my early-period clothes.

My recently-formed household had decided that we wanted to each wear some version of our household colors of gold, blue, and white to the event. Ansteorra gold is a standard color that many Ansteorran costumers just keep in stock. The blue is the shade our household had selected, which works well for me since it's my favorite color and it already plays heavily in my existing garb rotation. Francisca Sastre de Arellano kindly gave me the blue linen for the bottom band, since I didn't have any and there would not have been time to order it. The blue band was pieced together from shaped sections to make the most efficient use of the existing cloth. I hand stitched the blue pieces together, couched the metallic cord into place, and then hand stitched the blue over the bottom edge of the yellow apron dress, turning in the raw edge of the blue at the top, and both the yellow and blue at the bottom. This double thickness of fabric all along the blue section weights the hem of the apron dress and helps it lay nicely.

I wanted to do something to decorate the dress, but I didn't want to just use woven trim. I know that wire possament was found in some Norse graves, and I like the logic puzzle presented by knotwork, so I decided to couch metallic cord knotwork onto the blue hem band. I have no evidence that Norse women wore this kind of decoration, but it's not completely unreasonable, and I think it's pretty. 

I found a design online for a knotwork tree and a four-point star (a heraldic charge used by my new household). Buoyed on by tea in the mug I bought in Iceland, I re-engineered the tree into a chalice (another household heraldic charge), inserted the four-point star into the middle of it, and worked out how the knotwork would extend around the whole of the hem. I later decided that the main circumference of the hem would only have the three-part braid, leaving off the four-point stars. Even I have a limit to how much I'm willing to over-complicate a project, and when I couched the cord for the chalice I found I was having trouble getting the points as sharp as I would have liked. In retrospect I believe I know how I could have resolved the sharp-turn conundrum, but at the time it wasn't worth the additional effort it would have involved. 

I followed Osanna van der Linden's advice and made a few minor alterations before I traced out the shape with water-soluble marker and started couching the cord down. The original design looked a bit like a fox's face, which is an interesting effect, but not what I had intended. I didn't want to have to deal with starting or stopping the cord in the middle of my design, and I really wasn't sure how much length would be taken up in all the turnings and crossings. So I unspooled the whole length of the gold cord, found the middle of it, and started couching the middle of the chalice design, working my way out in either direction. The gray thread I used to couch down the cord worked well with both the gold cord of the chalice and the silver cord of the braid. The blue fabric was held smooth in an embroidery hoop. 

For the three-part braid that continued around the whole hem, I unspooled the silver cord, cut it in half, folded each resulting piece in half, and made that fold the beginning of the braid. I just sort of formed the braid freehand, staying a uniform distance away from the raw edge of the blue fabric. There are areas where the braid is tighter or looser together, but I'm ok with that. It's not supposed to look like it came from a factory, it's a piece of handwork, and I wasn't trying to overthink it.

The gold cord continues from the chalice straight into the braid. I really like the continuity.

The back hem of the dress, with the small flourish I used to finish the cords.

A closeup of the center back of the hem decoration. I had to decide on some way to end all the cords I had brought around to the back, so I just plunged the silver cords through the blue cloth and anchored them in place where they met. For the gold cord, I made a decorative little twist and then plunged the cord through. For all the cords, I left another inch of cord in place behind the fabric, anchored in place with tiny stitches of blue thread.