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.