All the Fingerloops

As evidenced somewhat by the lack of posting about it on this blog, I've become somewhat disenfranchised with the leather doublet project.  I still love the idea, but I look at what I have to do next, and I just can't bring myself to pick it up.  Sometimes I just need an easy win to get over the hump, so I found a distraction that I hoped would do just that.

I have been contemplating for a while on ways to make period appropriate trims or small weavings, and had generally been curious as to whether tablet weaving was period for a 16th century persona.  When cursory research down that route proved inconclusive, I started to look at fingerloop braiding.  My wife already had the wonderful book Tak V Bowes Departed, but this talks about a 15th century manual.  I did some braids anyway to learn the techniques, and started digging further.

As I dug, I found references to later manuals: https://fingerloop.org/ has two 17th century manuals, but with limited pictures & samples.  And then I started looking at bibliographies.  Eventually I found that The Met had put almost the entire Phelita Millward manuscript, with blow ups of the samples, on Pinterest, and I was hooked.  That spider motif kept calling my name, and I just had to figure it out.  Unfortunately, there's no text around the motifs, just these charts which are nigh undecipherable without the right resources.

Some of the best early resources for loop braiding come from the author Noemi Speiser, but the one referenced over and over again, Old English Pattern Books for Loop Braiding, is out of print and was a self-published book.  I got lucky and found it in a local university textile library (NC State), and thanks to a friend that works there, I had it in my hands.  In addition to that, the follow-on set of books by Noemi Speiser and Joy Boutrup, specifically European Loop Braiding: Part II: Instructions for Letter Braids, was instrumental in deciphering these motifs and charts.  I finally had all the resources in hand to make that spider, and oh was I excited.

Luckily, I'm married to a fellow re-enactor and textile enthusiast, so we practiced the technique for a 7-loop Spanish braid using both the Boutrop and the lovely blog post from Ingrid Crickmore which is the basis of the 14-loop charted motif braids.  Working out most of the hiccups there, we attempted the spider the next night and all I can say is SUCCESS:

 

For those that care, the materials used for all of my samples so far is Aunt Lydia's Classic 10 Crochet Thread.  It's easy to find, comes in a wide variety of colors, and is big enough for me to see what's going on while I'm learning. I'm hoping to get a complete sample book of all the braids in Tak V soon.

Amsterdam Vacation - History pieces

I had the pleasure of taking a vacation with my lovely wife and family this summer that included Amsterdam and Norway.  While our selections in Norway were limited by the ports of call of our cruise, we had free rein in Amsterdam to do as we choose.  Being who we are, our choices of stops were fairly historical in focus (duh!).

In Amsterdam in no particular order, we were able to visit:

Rijksmuseum

Probably the best known museum in Amsterdam, and one of our highest priorities to visit, we probably could have spent a week here and not seen everything we wanted to.  Museums with children are always challenging, luckily big kid is getting old enough to entertain little kid while mom & dad do their thing.  The biggest draw, of course, are the Night Watch and other Rembrandt paintings.  The Rijksmuseum is fairly good about having their collection available digitally, but the things you just don't get from the online presence is the sheer scale and vibrancy of these works of art.  They are massive, and so, so beautiful in person.

Hermitage Amsterdam

This museum is a branch of the famous Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I honestly didn't even know it existed until we were already planning to go here and were looking for things to do.  Then we found out they had a Dutch Golden Age exhibit running in coordination with the Rijksmusem and the Amsterdam Museum, and it quickly came to the top of the list.  They had a huge collection of civic guard portraits in this exhibit, and the presentation was awe inspiring (I'm pretty sure my jaw hit the floor when I walked into the big room).

Museum of Bags & Purses

A personal interest for both me and my wife, this was pretty high on our list and we didn't figure it would take too long.  It's not a huge museum, and all of the pre-1700 items were on a single floor, but they do have a nice little collection with several sweet purses, a bead purse, and a lovely leather purse that I've seen before (it's WAY bigger than it looks):

Museum Van Loon

This is the house of one of the founders of the Dutch East-India Company.  Again, a small museum, but unique in that it consists of the house, the garden, and a coach house still together.  While the house itself is later than our period of interest, the Van Loon family is not.  There are several portraits and a few artifacts for anyone researching the later 16th/early 17th century times.

Rembrandt House Museum

This was one from the wife's list of priorities, and I'll admit I wasn't that interested until I got there.  With it being the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's passing, this museum like others in the city were well stocked.  This was probably the busiest museum we went to as we managed to hit it right as a school group was leaving, we think.  There is evidence that some of the furnishings in the historical portion of the house are actually from other museums in the city, like the Rijksmuseum; it's nice to see that partnership and sharing among the local museums again.

Oude Kerk

It's hard not to end up in at least one historical church while in Amsterdam, and this was our choice while we were there.  Translating to Old Church, it truly is, originally built in the 12th century, there are various additions throughout the centuries.  The entire floor of the church, practically, is full of graves with some very interesting grave stones if you're into that kind of thing, but the painted ceilings were especially nice to see.  They also have a few artifacts on display from varying time periods.


We also managed to visit a couple extra gift stores: those in the National Maritime Museum and the Niewe Kerk (New Church - new is relative, being consecrated in the 15th century).  If I had to do it over again, I would have liked to find time to do a full visit to the Maritime Museum, as they apparently have a very nice collection of historical maps.

All in all, a wonderful vacation filled with a ton of history.  Pictures are spread across at least 3 devices (2 phones and a digital camera) so haven't fully been gone through yet, but I'm hoping for some gems in there.

Old Fencing Curriculum

In a time that seems so very long ago, my wife and I moved to a new state and found a lack of consistent SCA fencing practices.  So what do young upstart Freescholars of Atlantia do?  That's right, we made our own.  We had a good friend who lived in the area, we called him up, and found a place to practice.  Over time, the practice grew, we became white scarves (I suspect partly because of this practice), and several members joined us.  At one point, we gathered a group of people to sit down and generate a list of topics to cover and hence was born Percy the Pontificating Provost's Practical School of Defense.

Kate has mostly retired after kids (although they're almost getting old enough for her to come back out), and my activity waned for a bit, so others stepped up and led the charge.  I have since become active again, but other life priorities prevent me from taking charge any more, but I promised some folks at the current practice that I would put up this, for lack of a better word, curriculum.

I will state that this list of topics was not just from the minds of my wife and I, but a contribution of various people, many of which I will likely forget, but I will try (SCA names only, no titles because I'm lazy): Galen of Black Diamond, Rosalind Delamare, Gaston du Valmont, now Iskender Bey al-Istanbuli, Marion le Red, Chris MacConing, Ysane de la Selle, and so many more.  (If any of you remember more, please let me know so that I can add note their contributions.)  The list was also heavily influenced by our primary teacher, Giacomo Vincenti (yes that Giacomo), without whom Kate & I would not have been the fencers we became.

This list has not been touched in quite some time.  I leave it here in it's last form of a teacher's list and a student's list.  Neither has a lot of information, mostly being just lists of topics.  At the time, it was what we needed.  I hope that these inspire others and if you can use it, they are free for your use, just please give credit where credit is due.

PPPPD Student

PPPPD Teacher

Class on Leather Doublets & Jerkins

This last weekend with my lovely wife, we taught a class at an SCA event that presented some details and inferences of the research I've been doing in regards to extant leather garments.  I think the class went pretty well, and it was pretty well received.  For those that couldn't make it, the link to the slides is: https://tinyurl.com/ybl8h49r and the spreadsheet that drives it is at https://tinyurl.com/y978b3gb.  The one thing we didn't share with class was a link to my curated Pinterest board with the available museum pictures.

The short version is leather doublets & jerkins were more prevalent than what we generally see in the SCA.  From what I've been able to discover, these type of garments made out of leather were treated just as if they were from any other cloth: could be decorated or not, assembled with regular sewing-type seams, etc.

To recap some of the class, I've found 81 extant doublets and jerkins between the periods of 1540-1650 so far.  43 of those are from the Mary Rose wreck which pretty much requires access to a copy of Before the Mast to get details, and can definitely skew any kind of analysis.  The next single biggest cache comes from the Royal Museum of Sweden, which contains a total of 11 unassembled doublets, which are absolutely stunning.

There was no way I could go over the entirety of what I've found so far in a one hour class (or even on this blog).  I encourage anyone interested to go through the main tab of the spreadsheet for the full list, as many of the items either can't be captured to Pinterest or have no available online pictures.  If you know of one I haven't captured, please reach out as I'm always interested in finding more.

And again, make more leather jerkins.