Jouhikko project part 4: Finishing (temporary, no pictures)

 

The cedar tops on my instruments from (website) are beautiful, but the downside of them is, they’re very soft. I had good success repairing a file mark in the top of the soundboard, and though I matched up the grain rather well, it was still very obvious as the only feature on the face of the instrument. So, while I hadn’t originally planned on heavy ornamentation, the decision was made for me. Nobody is going to look at the screwup if there’s pretty pictures next to it!

While I was considering my options, it occurred to me that I probably should have planned for ornamentation the whole time in the name of authenticity. The “oh look at the pretty wood” mindset is to some extent modern. Many wooden items found in graves are made of woods that would have been imported, like beech, so of course people of the time also appreciated a nice *exotic* wood. But that doesn’t mean that they forewent ornamentation in the name of showing the wood off. For them, wood was what you made everything out of, and keeping it plain meant you didn’t have the time or expertise to do anything else to it; so simply being wooden wasn’t very interesting. Nowadays, where our lumber is frequently terrible, carpentry is a niche skill, and cheap items are made of plastic, clean work and a good polish is enough to be impressive.

So we see the decoration-heavy mindset in the Trossingen lyre, which has a scene of a shield wall kolrosed into the face, along with an ornamental pattern. Kolrosing is much like scrimshaw conceptually - one scratches the design into the wood and then applies pigment into the scratches.

I decided that a nearly finished lyre would be the wrong time to learn yet a new process, so I stuck to what I knew and broke out the woodburner. The original design wouldn’t fit my instrument, nor would it make sense held vertically, so I forged my own path. On the top, where I had the most canvas, I put my Ringerike-style hippogriff design. This was a bit of a challenge, as this was the smallest I’ve drawn it by hand. On either side of the tailpiece, I grabbed a piece of border art from Jonas Lau Markussen, who has a lot of great resources on Viking and Anglo-Saxon art.

Once the wood burning was done, I cleaned it up with 800 grit sandpaper, then moved up to 2000 grit and applied Danish oil before a final polish and oil with 3000 grit. I was pleased to get at least a little chatoyancy from the maple and some fun grain structure.

I wanted to do something special for the tailpiece, so I got a very nice size antler shovel from Scene of the Crash reindeer farm. I cut the shape out on the scroll saw, thinned it out, and drilled holes for the tailgut and fine tuners. While the fine tuners aren’t exactly period, they save so much sanity versus pure friction pegs. Three circle-dot motifs, added with my modified screwdriver, complete the look. This was actually the first piece I finished, even before I bought the wood.

Modern lyre players recommend nylon for the tailgut, since it isn’t sensitive to humidity. Many luthiers opt for paracord. If you have an unobtrusive color, this can look fine, but I decided to be different and did a ten-strand fingerloop braid of artificial sinew. Since this is waxed nylon, it would stay put just as well as the paracord with a hopefully less modern look.

The first iteration bridge was cut from 3/16” maple and tapered down in a simplified version of a violin bridge. Period bridges, such that we’ve recovered, are frequently quite thick and are sometimes made of amber. However, a massive bridge also noticeably dulls the sound, so I didn’t want to go that route if I could avoid it.

My strings, as per tradition, are made of twisted horsehair. I really wanted black horsehair, which is coarser and more textured, but that was out of stock, so I stuck with bleached. My mentor has a video demonstrating the process (in nylon) much better than I can type it out here:

The bow was another sentimental piece. Constructing a simple, untensioned bow is all about finding the right stick. In this case, a willow branch is ideal - light, strong, stiff, and the right diameter directly off the tree. I went to the Fuller Lakes trailhead, which was where I did a three-generation camping trip as a young teenager. A ways off the trailhead, to the side of the road where nobody goes, was the Perfect Stick- half an inch wide at the base with a gradual taper, with smooth bark, only a few tiny leaf buds, and growing more or less straight up.

In lieu of steam bending, I just boiled the end until it took a curve by tightening some paracord around a roll of duct tape. Taking the bark off was initially an accident. I tried to clean my cut edge and accidentally removed a strip, so I just kept going and found I liked the texture. To mount the hair, I cut a slit in either end of the stick, knotted the hair on either side, and wrapped some bark around the ends with some liquid hide glue over top to secure everything. Gentle application of a flame helped to tighten stray hairs that didn't want to maintain tension.

The biggest adventure at this stage was after assembly, trying to figure out string diameters, bridge weights and proportions, and all the other variables turning a weird box into an instrument. I eventually settled on a thin, wide bridge that somewhat evokes the original, and replaced the tailgut with a six strand braid. I’m mostly happy with the sound, though still the D string has some kind of resonance that makes it louder than the others. I may need to give it a still thinner string to reduce the tension, or maybe the problem is structural - the instrument itself seems to resonate at specifically D3. But for now it’s under control enough to sound decent, and I’ll see whether anything similar happens on the tagelharpa.

Jouhikko project part 3: construction (temporary, no pics yet)

Constructing a lyre via hollowing isn’t a hard process on paper - there aren’t a great lot of steps, broadly speaking. And it can be as hard or easy of a process as you like, depending how intent you are on good results.

I am very intent on good results.

With the large design questions settled beforehand, I went over to my friend’s garage and got to work. The first step is cutting out the general profile on a bandsaw. Since making fine turns with a bandsaw wasn’t going to work, I radiused all of my inside corners with the drill press. On the three string, I left the wood inside the yoke in place for the time being - I wasn’t going to cut through the head of the instrument, and no jigsaw was available. For the four-string, I meant to do a tongue and groove joint anyway, so the bandsaw accomplished most of the material removal, save for some remnant at the shoulder.

After that, reducing the depth of the arms would give me handholds while doing everything else. As my boards were too wide for the bandsaw, I did this with a forstner bit in the drill press, by drilling from the backside. I couldn’t get exactly to size, because the bit has a spike in the center. That meant I had to stop just short of the spike leaving a hole in the arms when I was done, which left at least an eighth inch of extra material clinging on for the time being.

After this, I needed to define the slope on the back of the instrument, so I re-traced the angle and removed the relevant material with a belt grinder. Since hollowing was dependent on the drill press, having the exterior shape defined first meant that I could make the inside and outside parallel reliably.

The last and most time consuming step that I got done for both instruments that weekend was the rough hollowing itself. I started with a forstner bit, as with the back side of the arms. The table on the drill press was set to roughly 1/4” down, so as to avoid the aforementioned hole problem. The four-hole jouhikko was actually thicker than the maximum throw of the drill press, so my initial drilling was simply as far down as possible. The second drilling targeted roughly 3/16”, but this time, the forstner bit had its tip ground off. This caused a fair bit of wander until it found purchase, but it made a mostly flat bottom, save for a faint ring around the outside and a raised dot where the cutting surface was gone. Doing this, I averaged five gallons of wood shavings per instrument, as measured by overflowing the scientific precision garbage can.

On our second day together, we went over to a table saw and engaged in joinery cutting, where we cut the tongue and groove joint for the four-string and broke down of a spare maple board. Parts from that would be useful for pegs later.

At home, the longer process of refinement could begin. I took the jigsaw and cut out the last piece from the three-string, then looked to the joinery on the four-string. Unbeknownst to me, a lot of tension had been released from the wood, so the arms had moved together by roughly 1/4”. So, I trimmed the yoke to fit… and discovered my mistake. Fortunately I only had to buy a little extra wood to cut a new yoke, and my caliper and router work was precise enough that it fit perfectly. Almost makes me feel like a real woodworker.

More work on a bench sander squared up the outside of the bodies and removed the worst of the 60-grit texture. This handled the flat areas, but the bottoms of the arms had jagged excess from the forstner bit. This cleaned up with the router, as did the outside radius on the yoke. It also cleaned up the inside of the body beautifully up to an inch down. That’s as far as my 1/4” shank tool would go.

Special attention was required for the base and inside of the arms, and the tailpiece hooks. The arms took a half-round file to flatten out the imprecise cut at the base of the arms and keep the curvature at the base of each arm consistent in all dimensions. The file was also the best way to keep the insides of the arms straight.

I cut out the bottom (and on the four-string, the top) of the tail hook with a hand saw and did the rest of my contouring with hand files. The round file gave a nice profile for the actual hook portion with minimal extra cleanup.

To get the back face down to thickness, I put a straightedge across the face and measured down with a caliper. Both instruments were quite thicker than I figured necessary at this point, so cleaning up the last of the sides would go hand in hand with stock removal from the bottom. I set my cleanup depth in several locations with a small drill bit with tape around it - once the hole disappeared, I would be done sanding. Once again, the file sander was the best tool for the job, since anything that removed material faster didn’t fit in the space.

My original bracing was made from maple, until I read that it was best to match the wood that the soundboard would be made from. I ended up with extra cedar left over, so I carved bass bars and soundposts from the leftovers of the same boards on each instrument. The soundposts were hand-carved to rough circles about as thick as the soundboards were wide. The bass bars were whittled and sanded to a somewhat traditional shape, with a bump in the middle and a gradual taper to the ends, so the greatest stiffness would be right around the bridge.

 

My sound holes weren’t especially scientifically laid out, save that I had roughly the right clearance for where the bridge would go and space for the bracing. I went with a layout vaguely resembling the original on the Trossingen lyre, and did something a little different for the sake of difference on the Sutton Hoo - no surviving reference on that one, so I assumed that it would be roughly like its contemporaries.

Not all of my original maple bracing went to waste, as the maple jouhikko ended up a little thin in the back. When I found I could flex it slightly with my fingers, I was worried that it wouldn’t support the soundpost. A maple bass bar added to the back fixed that.

I had a particularly new experiment for this project in that I decided to use hide glue for assembly. Reports online said that regular wood glue dampened sound and hide glue didn’t, and if worst came to worst, I could open the instrument again. Rehydrating the glue to the correct consistency was an experiment, but overall I didn’t notice any of the smell that I had heard about, and the glue was easy to use.

I did cheat slightly and glued my soundpost to the top board after experiments trying to wiggle it into place through the holes went poorly. It also helped me set the length of the posts correctly. I found out afterwards from Reddit that my bass bar placement was technically backwards - it should be parallel to the strings. The way I installed it, it would be… on a violin, where the strings come together on the fingerboard instead of fanning out between the arms. That’s something to learn from on my next instrument, since I plan to do one more eventually. Meanwhile, both of my lyres repeated this mistake, since I glued them at functionally the same time.

Once the lid went on, I was able to file the edges flush and sand out all of my tool marks.

I copied my peg spacing from my existing instrument and drilled the pilot holes on the drill press. My laurel had a spare set of tapered peg tools, so I was able to ream the holes out with those. The taper lets the friction pegs work, setting their tension by pressing them manually into place. I carved the pegs from maple for both instruments. I tried mahogany at first for the 3-string, since interchanging the woods would be pretty, but the mahogany broke in half during the test fit, with no string attached. So that was a bust, and I had to start over.

After sanding the instruments to 400 grit, this is the point where the posts diverge, because I finished one instrument long before the other! Stay tuned for Finishing Out the Jouhikko.

Jouhikko project part 2: design

Having covered my various sources of inspiration, a discussion of design will now make sense. 

My initial plan was to build a single three-string jouhikko inspired by the Sutton Hoo lyre. This would make for a simple, rectangular body with rounded corners and minimal deviation from the instrument I already had. 

Recreations aside, my other goals for the project were twofold. One was to carve the body from a single piece. There are two ways of building a lyre; the more modern way is to assemble it from individual pieces, as one would a guitar or violin. Single-piece carving is the traditional way, which appears borne out on the Anglo-Saxon model lyres as well. Having tried instruments built both ways at the coffee shop, I was more taken with the unibody sound. My other goal was an arched back. That one goes back to playing the Irish bouzouki as a teenager. Having played the standard guitar-construction Trinity Hall model, then tried an arch-top, the difference in sound was monumental. An soundbox with parallel sides can create standing waves inside it, where some of the sound bounces back on itself and cancels itself out. This is definitely not a feature of the original lyres, which were rather flat and would fit comfortably inside of a modern 2x10, but the depth of an instrument isn't terribly obvious while it's being pointed at the listener.

I would also be including violin-type internal bracing - a soundpost and bass bar. The soundpost goes near the treble side of the bridge to support the face and bridge, while the bass bar passes directly under the bass side at a slight angle to the face grain. This stiffens the soundboard, strengthening it and helping it transmit long-wavelength bass vibrations well.

This is my initial plan that I drew up, drawn to scale of 1 square = 1/2". Most measurements were copied from my existing instrument, with radii and such determined by scientific eyeball. This plan includes a faceted back that I hoped would be feasible to carve out. There's also the matter of the yoke. 

The Sutton Hoo lyre had joinery halfway down the arms. This is outside of my projected capabilities for good joinery, so I opted for a tongue and groove joint directly on the yoke.

My early aspirations for building a lyre included a turned button, but considering that I don't have easy access to a lathe, that would be impractical. Instead, I included a hook carved into the end like the Trossingen lyre. This doesn't involve using any processes I wouldn't already be doing.

On Patrick's advice, I made a physical mockup to see how it feels in my hand. The usual idea would be to use cardboard, but since I didn't have cardboard handy, I grabbed a sheet of pink foam. This let me also check dimensions on the depth of the arms, since it was an inch thick.

The rubber met the road about a month before W-AT War, when Patrick invited me for a shop day which would be a couple of weeks before. This was in conjunction with me having the idea to actually make a Trossingen-inspired lyre, and Patrick encouraging me to make two lyres, one of would be four strings.

With some direct inquiries into what tools would be available, I had to work fast reworking my plans and getting materials together.

On the materials side, my laurel offered me a spare set of spruce soundboards and a peg reamer and shaper. The good wood store sold 8/4 maple, which could be in 6x2" widths reliably. On the plus side, the maple is reasonably priced, on the other, I had to buy the whole ten foot board. So, that was two jouhikkos, a section to break out on the table saw, and a four-foot piece for an eventual tagelharpa cello. I also got exceedingly lucky in that for a mere $40, there was an unmilled three-foot mahogany board which was two and a half inches thick by eight wide. This would be enough to make the four-string instrument.

Maple is considered the ideal tonewood, its hardness making it good at clear treble. Mahogany is a first aesthetic choice, and a second acoustic choice, making darker-sounding instruments in general. This should work out well for a four-string instrument, perfectly engineered for outputting Sad Viking music.

Now I had to sort out what the final shapes of my instruments would be. Remember that nice scale drawing? Throw that out. Well, maybe not throw it out entirely, a lot of the lengthwise landmarks are still useful, but it's not seeing the light of day entirely as written.

My decision finalized with a three-string Trossingen jouhikko and a four-string Sutton Hoo tagelharpa. The latter is simple, as it basically involved adding an inch to the width of the instrument to add room for an extra string. The Trossingen design involves some careful consideration. 

The original Trossingen lyre, for reference

The original lyre has a round bottom, a contoured yoke, and more importantly, trapezoidal arms and a narrow box. Given that jouhikkos are some variant of rectangular, I was on my own to invent what this would be. Keeping all the relative lengths together was a given - altering those would change a lot of things in ways I couldn't predict easily. This would mean the proportions would be radically different than the original, much like the Sutton Hoo version. But I could still evoke what I wanted by keeping the yoke its original width and narrowing the soundbox. The question was by how much.

I measured the angle at which my strings fanned out and determined that the strings drew closer together by half an inch between the peg and the body. The starting distance between the string and the inside of the right arm gives the room you need to put your fingers through the back of the instrument and work the strings. Too much distance here isn't the end of the world, but it can make it harder to reach the middle string. Too little, and you can't avoid brushing the string with your fingers on accident. 

On a normal jouhikko, the arms are straight, but the strings converge towards the bridge. This moves the string away from you as you try to play in higher positions, with the arm supported by your hand. By narrowing my soundbox 1/2" per side according to my measurement, not only would I get the look I was after, I would keep my melody string parallel to the arm as far as I could reach, thus making playing in higher positions more consistent.

It was around this point, considering how much time I would have to actually get my instruments as far along as possible, I abandoned my original arched back idea. That would be a royal pain no matter how I did it, and using unfamiliar tools, I would have an excellent probability of messing up. I then realized a feature I had seen on other lyres and now figured out its purpose - a simple thickness taper from the butt to the shoulder. This keeps the two faces of the instrument out of parallel and does much the same job. A quarter inch taper should be plenty.

I drew up a pair of posterboard templates to trace onto my wood, and after some foam mockups, settled on my plans.

 

With the wood blocks shortened to fit in my luggage, the patterns traced, and my bag carefully weighed for 50 lb of supplies, it was time to carve.

Jouhikko project: Part 1

You thought I was going to talk about building instruments. Haha, gotcha.

This is actually

PROLOGUE 2: DOCUMENTATION AND RATIONALE

So you want to be a Viking bard...

This is easier said than done. We don't have anything resembling Viking written music, or indeed any way to make sense of it if we found some. We have some poetry, like the Eddas, and those can be made into ad hoc songs. This is how we got My Mother Told Me, which is a couple stanzas turned into a sort of sea shanty for the Vikings TV show.

 

 

Colm's pronunciation differs from the possibly more grounded pronunciation that Jackson Crawford uses, but hey look, he's playing a jouhikko!

Problem is that this is a totally modern interpretation. Maybe we'll have rolled the dice and landed on exactly how they'd have done it, but let's be real: we're in the dark as to how compositions actually went. We have a pretty good guess that poetry accompanied by a backing instrument would have been common, but without any way of knowing how they'd have played them, all we can do is try to rebuild what they had and play the instruments based on regional traditional styles - they're the closest thing we have to the surviving musical sensibility, though even they will have evolved considerably. This Hurstwic article lists references to music in the sagas, but the references are few and far between. Being a musician was seen as a mark of prestige, much like being a skilled poet, but beyond that, not much is to be had.

Most records of music in the area come after the rise of Christianity, which isn't a reliable gauge of what the culture would have been like before.

Looking for extant instruments is also tricky. While we have great records of hygiene tools and other small organic items, instruments actually belonging to the Vikings are remarkably few and far between. From 10th century Birka, there is a simple bone flute. From 10th century Jorvik, there is a set of pan pipes, drilled into a single piece of wood. This has enough surviving holes to play five notes, though the break on one side of the piece suggests at least two more higher notes were available when it was new.

 

Tiny drawing c/o https://panflute.net/history-of-the-panflute.html

 

There also exists an unfinished, possibly damaged in construction, amber bridge for some sort of string instrument. This was found in Dorestad and dates to the 9th century, but what exactly it went to is uncertain. Judging by string number and spacing, a six string lyre seems likely, but even that educated guess as to genre leaves us with a useless number of possibilities.

That was illuminating, but unhelpful. What evidence are you actually using?

So for relatively intact lyres, the Anglo-Saxons and Germanic tribes had better luck than the Vikings did. Two prominent survivors are relevant here. The first is from the 7th century Sutton Hoo burial. The body of the instrument does not survive, but the arms, yoke, and two metal ornamental plates do - for some value of the word.

via Wikipedia, the surviving fragments

 

Of some note is the joinery - the yoke is a separate piece from the rest of the instrument, attached by a sort of pyramidal peg joint partway down the arms. The yoke has its grain perpendicular to the rest of the instrument, so that stress from the pegs doesn't risk tearing out the wood. The arms are mostly hollow, with a soundboard nailed on with bronze pins. The body of the instrument is maple, and came with a beaver pelt carrying bag. Reconstructions suggest a deceptively simple straight-sided rectangular shape with rounded top and bottom.

 

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

 

Meanwhile in Germany, the Trossingen lyre remains in remarkably good condition. The arms are slightly angled outwards, most or all of the pegs are still in place, and the bridge is even still present. The face is richly engraved with a scene of a shield wall.

By No machine-readable author provided. Opodeldok~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=644808

 

 

 

These aren't the only examples of such instruments; we have a small assortment of instruments matching this general form from around Northwestern Europe and Britain. The bow, however, lacks documentation from this time period, or indeed, much documentation at all. Our earliest example comes from the Klosterneuburg psalter, which features an illustration of King David not with his usual harp, but with a bowed lyre, along with two other musicians on similar instruments. This is from the 1100s.

 

 

The Trondheim Cathedral, opened in the 1300s, features a grotesque of a man very clearly playing a jouhikko-like lyre. The artist must have either been familiar with the instrument or referenced the pose, because the player is playing with the backs of his fingers (as is traditional), sitting down, and gripping his bow correctly.

I wouldn't personally hold it tilted that far over, but in context, there's a pillar immediately to his left, which he's craning his head around. I've broken bows by lack of spatial awareness before, and also had to cram into tightly packed sessions, so I can hardly blame him for scrunching his posture.

The jouhikko itself is a traditional Finnish instrument, played with the backs of the fingers. It's traditionally carved from a single piece of wood, though it can be built other ways, and exact planforms vary. Some have tight hand-holes that only let you reach two strings with your fingers; others have slender arms. Some have large pyramidal blocks with holes at the bottom end to admit the tailpiece cord; others have square bottoms and buttons like a violin. Styles of playing include flat-bridge designs where all strings drone at once, which is common for four-string tagelharpas, or curved-bridge designs where only two strings are played at once. The latter approach is the usual for three-string instruments. The instrument's traditional modern practitioners include Lassi Logren and Rauno Nieminen as authority figures, alongside some less traditional pagan bands like Wardruna.

And that's basically it for historical documentation. The bowed lyre is something of a dark horse, and preserved actual instruments are nightmares for archaeological survivability - thin organic materials decay quickly, and one could imagine that high value items like those often didn't become grave goods. Someone wealthy could perhaps afford to bury a lyre, but one could just as easily see a good instrument getting handed down through the years until it fell apart.

 

What does this mean for a reenactor's jouhikko?

No part of what I'm doing is neatly documentable to my own time period, so I'm stuck speculating no matter what. The upshot of this is that I'm free to put my own spin on the project, because my layman's guess is just as wrong as anyone else's. My approach will be to make instruments that blend in with traditional plucked lyres, but still are functionally jouhikkos. Due to fortunate material availability and an extra dose of ambition, I'll be building two instruments: a four-string flat-bridged tagelharpa based on the Sutton Hoo lyre, and a three string curved-bridge jouhikko based on the Trossingen lyre.

Jouhikko project: Prologue

Years and years ago, one of my crafting inspirations (who currently is living the dream as a blacksmith down in Pennsylvania), built a Sutton Hoo lyre, and I thought that was the coolest thing. I've played instruments since I was but single digits of age, and the art of constructing an instrument was something I never thought I'd be able to do on my own. But, to be able to have a period Viking instrument (or as close as possible to one, more on that later) would be amazing.

A few years later, my dad and I built a CnC machine. I used it for several projects, but it eventually fell victim to the need for streamlining and some construction difficulties with the gantry. I never got around to my goal of CADing out a lyre and carving one that way. Not only would that solve my confidence issues, in that all the precision work would have been done by a robot, but it would also eliminate most of the need for tools - at the time, I lived in a literal hotel room. 

So, that dream languished for probably most of a decade. I got to handle one of the lyres on a return visit to my old friend's neck of the woods, but that was as close as I came. 

Last year, I discovered what a tagelharpa was, along with its structural twin, the jouhikko. Not only was the rustic droning sound fantastic, it filled essentially the same niche as a regular lyre for something portable and period I could take to bardics. My old beat-up ukulele (which I had re-tuned as a mandolin stand-in) just wasn't the same, obviously. The jouhikko would also be nice because I have ten years of fiddle experience; thus, I wouldn't have to worry about that part of the learning curve. 

I also found a website that claimed to sell bowed lyres on sale for about $300, which was a fairly affordable price. Lesson learned - don't buy from Staghelm, no matter how good the price is. As of 2024, I don't think anyone on Reddit can prove they've produced a single instrument in the last year, and they certainly didn't make mine. They also didn't make an effort to dispute paypal the second time, so at least I got my money back. But, on the way back from GWW last year, I got into a conversation on Facebook with another SCAdian named Patrick. We'd met briefly at the one event I had gone to in his neck of the woods, and I was impressed with his selection of instruments (which probably included the jouhikko, but I didn't retain the info at the time). But we hadn't really interacted since until we ended up talking about my Staghelm that was probably going to need some TLC if and when it arrived. 

Fast forward to December, Patrick and I met in a coffee shop one morning. It was an absolutely chaotic trip, given that his city is easier to reach by plane than car, but I came back with a loaner jouhikko. That turned into an opportunity to talk more about instruments and their design and building, which culminated in an invitation to Patrick's shop in June. It was, again, something of a chaos trip, given that it was the single free weekend for a month on either side of it, but we had a grand time getting my instruments roughed out. Since then, I've been on my own to do the remaining work. My woodworking time has been divided between 20 minute at a time borrowing the shop at work, and a few weekends of actual work time on the porch.

This is my most complex bit of woodwork so far, and I've put a great lot of thought into it, so this will probably be multiple blog posts as I catch the documentation up to my actual progress.

Many thanks to Patrick, without whom I would undoubtedly be flailing about blindly.

Kaftan and leveling up in weaving complexity

Last year, preparing for War took a great deal of effort. I had enough kit for weekend events at most, and in moderate to cold weather. Great Western War would be five days long and hot, which meant I needed to make more garb pieces, and prepare for heat. This is before counting the dozen-Hedeby-bag project.

This year, going to West-An Tir War, my goals were much more modest. All my old gear still worked, so I wanted to have a new piece of showy garb. I already had a section of diamond twill linen from Woolsome.shop, and patterns from my winter kaftan, so putting one of those together would be easy. The hard part would be the four yards of tablet weaving necessary to trim it out.

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A-II-2_guldgubber_depicting_a_man.jpg

For the kaftan itself, I went for the simple bathrobe-style wrap coat, as depicted on carvings. I did a couple of muslins to check the fit, since I wanted to use my more tailored, newer sleeve pattern, but didn’t know how the length of a tunic pattern would interact with the different body panels from the kaftan pattern. The kaftan pattern, being older, didn't necessarily have the same width body panels as my tunics, and the different handling of the neckline meant that the fabric around the shoulders might behave differently. 

 

The old pattern was for a multilayered coat, and all the pieces I could find were for the layer marked “B.” Was that the outside, inside, middle… who knows, past me didn’t think to write that down. Or maybe I did, on the layer marked A. Maybe I figured it would be obvious when I held the pieces up to each other and one was slightly larger; either way, with no comparison, a muslin was the only way to be sure. The new kaftan would only be one layer of a fairly breezy fabric, so I would only need to match the lining for size. Then I needed to verify if I still needed gores and make sure the neckline was adequate.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/473159504599083340/

 

My old coat left the back of the neck as a straight cut, since I wanted the collar to rise up and give coverage from weather, and then the inner front panel was shaped differently than the outer. This was partially to close off the neck more, and partially to emulate the bottom center museum illustration, which seemed to show both panels at different angles. The new one warranted carving out the back of the collar for aesthetics, and also adding a couple of inches of straight vertical before starting the angled edge. This would give me a closer fit around the back and sides of my neck, which I prefer for sun protection.

I also reduced the bottom width of the front panels, as I had made a realization during fabric layout: I had purchased my usual 3m of fabric for making a tunic. A normal tunic doesn’t have two huge front panels, so I would have to be judicious about my fabric use.

When I reached my final muslin, I was close enough that I knew the result would be wearable, so I made it from one of my old linen bedsheets that got damaged in the wash. This received some Pom Pom and tacky flamingo trim, and I wore it for the Selviergard Spring Offensive Ball.

Many thanks to Kinehild for the loan of a serger for this project. The diamond check linen is a fairly open weave to begin with, and then it’s also linen, so it prefers to violently fly apart if left unattended.

My initial plan for the weaving was a fairly wide, simple double face pattern consisting of long, solid rectangles. The idea was that it would have been easy to make, but unusual for either tablet or inkle patterns. But, as I was looking through my pattern books, I realized that it was a very unusual opportunity to have more than eighteen inch length to show off, and wouldn’t it be cool if I did the Skjoldehamn ankle bands, which was the final pattern in my current favorite book. So I cursed my hubris and started warping in my spare time at work, strewing linen thread across most of the lunchroom. 

 

 

The ensuing pattern was six pages long, took thirty inches per repeat, and took a week to weave one of those patterns. Getting confident near the end, I could shave a day off that, but there’s still only about six, maybe seven repeats.

 

At the very end of the band, I dropped the end of my weaving frame half off the table, which this time broke my frame apart. I tried to use the surviving parts to backstrap weave, but that simply broke the front. So, that was where that particular band ended. 

 

 

Post wash, I ended up with 12 feet of weaving, with just enough left after trimming to have most of a repeat to show off as a sample.

 

 

The complexity of the band let the ends match up really well without any particular effort on my part. I keep the trim seam offset from the sleeve seam so that I'm not stacking the multiple thicknesses of everything in the same place and ending up with a massive thick spot. Even though this band only has two threads per card and is thus rather supple, it's still a much thicker thread than the fabric it's attached to, so folding the ends under creates a lot of bulk.

 

 

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. Given a little more room in the fabric, or less snaggy material, I might have made it a little longer, but it's super comfortable as a single layer, and it breathes fantastically.

Frame bag 19ish: The big one

 

 

When I first started working on frame bags, it was back in 2019 or so. I was back with my folks, having my process of getting my A&P license thrown into chaos by the panini. I had just enough crafting funds to be dangerous, was looking for a largesse project, and had discovered that in my small town, oak could be obtained cheaply by buying baseboard by the foot. (Nowadays, I can just buy a sheet of it at Lowe's, but that chain vacated the area years prior; the plain baseboard still makes a pleasingly stout handle, though). I made five or six bags initially, only some of which I finished at the time. A couple went out as largesse right away; one (made from the remnants of my first pair of winingas) went to a friend spur of the moment with his heraldry embroidered on it. 

I wouldn't say I knew what I was doing at embroidery at the time, but dang if I didn't get it done. The strap turned out a bit thin, even with a nine-loop braid. Keeping my materials matching with the weaving on the bag meant that there wasn't a lot of bulk. Now, one of those bag blanks was due to be mine, and for the four years between then and now, all parts of the bag save for the strap sat safety pinned together, while I considered the strap problem and toyed with ideas for proper art to embroider on it.

The bags from my previous post represented an attempt to solve the strap problem, while maintaining relative mass-reproducibility. Changing from a round to a flat fingerloop braid midstream, in chunky yarn, at least gave the possibility of flattening the strap out a little over the shoulder, and let me braid a strap in a single evening.

The new handle design with the bird heads on either side was another attempt at solving an ergonomic problem inherent to frame bags. The width of the bag is determined by how wide the attachment points are between the frame and the fabric, and the depth is determined by how much fabric is sticking out the sides - at least on the simple folded-over bags I'd used thus far. Then the actual room for your hand is limited by how far apart the strap holes are. The initial batch of handles was based on this pattern. In the back of the file, there's a picture but no pattern for bird-headed handles, so mine were a freehand attempt at something similar. The relatively narrow attachment area with wide-set strap holes and ornamental overhangs gave me room to make the bag quite wide and thus easy to open, while keeping everything looking proportional.

 

 In 2022, I tried my hand at antler carving whilst making then-Princess Alienor's reign pouch. Had she wanted a frame bag, she would have gotten these, which I made from a split section of caribou beam. She didn't, and we went with a ring pouch, so she got a carved and inlaid moose antler lid instead. I finished the caribou handles later, after getting a belt sander for Christmas, and set them back for myself. These were built off the original handle plan, and they caused some issues. They're sturdy enough to probably support my car when stood on end. But, that means my tiny portable scroll saw didn't very much like cutting them, nor did my orbital sander like trying to sand them flat. Then, when drilling one of the attachment holes, my pilot hole bit snapped off flush. That's how I learned that in a pinch, not only can a masonry bit go through antler, it is also a natural predator of other, lesser drill bits.

I finished the handles off with a few coats of polyurethane to keep finger oils at bay, then sanded it down to 3000 grit so it was nice and shiny.

 

In November, I watched The Welsh Viking's breakdown of the Mastermyr tool chest, and got a look at the tool used to make the ubiquitous circle-dot motif. It occurred to me that this looked like a screwdriver with a couple bites taken out of it, so I got the dollar screwdriver I previously used for fixing shower clogs and took to it with a file. My coworkers questioned if I was making a prison shank, but it was worth it in that I could now add that motif to the antler. I dropped a bit of black india ink into the holes, cleaned the excess, and touched up the finish with a bit of mini painting clearcoat. Handles: handled.

In spring of 2023, I attended the local collegium and took an embroidery class (taught by the wife of the aforementioned recipient of that first bag, as it happened). Now with a knowledge of printable soluble stabilizer and some practice under my belt, I had the technical knowledge to finish my bag. That winter, I went to another collegium in Winter's Gate and took a goldwork class. While I had at that point suffered through the majority of my metallic threadwork and wasn't going to remove it to do it differently, I got some experience couching and got to use that for the areas that wouldn't have handled satin stitching well. More on that later.

Now I needed art worthy of embroidering. I had wanted to do my device (a hippogriff rampant countourny), but what I had before was either a) two cliparts mashed together, which looked weird proportionally, or b) a simple silhouette, which was thankfully easy to draw, but not not that interesting as a focal point like this.

For an earlier A&S challenge, I had recreated the Heggen weathervane reverse side to make myself a banner for displaying my various site tokens. (I've brought up this artifact before in the shield post as well, where I used the border.) That had a bird with a cool hat, and it was even fighting a snake, which was fantastic; the harder part would be all the bits that weren't a bird. Vikings wouldn't have drawn a rampant pose, and if there's an example of a horse from the Ringerike period, I am unaware of it. So, I had to do some rearranging; the wings went from balancing on top of the bird like a scale to being in a more normal position, and the snake needed considerable rearranging. The snake was in fact the last thing to be finished on the design, by a considerable margin. The back half of the hippogriff had to be invented wholesale. For that, I referenced the lion on the other side of the weathervane and blended the original tail with how I'd rearranged the wing. 

An unexpected interpretive challenge was the feet - the original bird doesn't have any, and since nobody drew a surviving horse, there aren't any surviving depictions of hooves. For that, I referenced Jonas Lau Markussen's Viking art breakdowns. Otherwise, I stuck as close to the original sources as I could, rather than go with Markussen's interpretation. His art is a passable reference for the general design ideas in each time period, but his available artwork is very much his reinterpretation. His version of the face, for instance, has an almond-shaped eye that looks like how one would expect a fierce bird to look, but the original has a perfectly circular eye with a pupil, that looks scared and confused at everything around it. So relatable, thousand year old bird picture. I feel you.

I designed the artwork in vector, which was extremely helpful for linework editing and resizing, and printed it out on soluble stabilizer. 

The last missing piece of the bag was the bag itself. I found an affordable diamond twill from Woolsome.shop and redesigned the bag with rectangular side gussets. The lining was made from linen left over from a tunic. 

By this point chronologically, GWW 2023 was coming up, and I needed a project to pass the time if I completely failed to find anything to do, so I prepped as much material as I could before departing, in case I finished the whole thing over a week of boredom-motivated crafting.

That very much did not happen, and over two weeks (including crashing in a Seattle hotel and watching three hours of Star Trek in the evenings), I didn't even finish the linework. It was pointed out to me after the fact that I had slowed myself down by assembling the bag before I started embroidery, but c'est la vie. 

 

There was also a scare wherein a water bottle opened in my backpack and soaked the project, melting the soluble stabilizer before I could finish my linework. The fabric got crunchy after that due to the excess starch, but progress continued mostly unimpeded. I started off satin-stitching the infill, and then learned as I went that I much preferred split stitch fill. After having sewed the entire snake in gold thread, I took Margery's goldwork class at Winter's Gate Collegium, which taught me how to do metallics much more efficiently in time to complete the hat. 

Once the griff was finished, it was time to start finishing touches. I had started my embroidery a little low, so I got some linen thread from overseas and wove a length of Siksala 38, picked apart a section of side seams, and added it in. A bit of dark teal split stitch over the outer bag seams cleaned up the look significantly, and some burgundy lucet cord that I already had finished up the top once the lining was sewn in. 

To attach this style of handle, I figure-eight thread through the top of the bag and the holes in the handles, and when I have enough wraps that the join looks substantial, I wrap over the threads to protect and tension them. It's much like installing a buttonhole. The spacing between the handle and the bag largely manages itself due to the figure eight wrapping.

The strap is the most technically interesting part of the bag; the pattern is Siksala 38 again, with an extra border card added on each side. In the future, I wouldn't have made the extra cards pink; this was my first time trying tubular tablet weaving, and I did not anticipate the inherent twist. My goal was to have that line of accent color running straight up the side of the strap the whole way, but the twist didn't cooperate. 

 

I started tubular weaving with just the border cards, then started adding in the pattern cards two at a time starting from the left. Initially, they sat next to the existing cards, letting the ends get captured into the strap, then I added them into the pack proper. The idea was to take alternating pairs and put one pair into the pack, and the other onto the right side of the pack upside-down. That way, when the band curled over, the new cards would form the back side of the band. When I was done adding cards, my card pack looked like B-B-B-1-2-5-6-9-10-B-B-B-(upside down)-12-11-8-7-4-3. Next, I interleaved all of the cards at once back into their original positions (BBB-1->12-BBB) and switched to flat weaving. This joined the flat and round sections seamlessly. Letting the tension gradually looser settled the band at its intended width, and I could begin weaving the pattern.

In the two straps of this style that I've done since, I simply added cards center-out or edge-in without any shenanigans with no ill effects. The strap curls briefly at the transition, but nothing else happens.

This bag has won two popular vote A&S competitions; once at Selviergard yule with the embroidery only, and the Wreath of Hephaestus after its completion in January 2023.