Mom's Wool Hangeroc

Another piece for my mother's Age of Exploration classroom unit, she wanted a new apron dress to replace her blue linen version, below:

I made her this apron dress almost a decade ago, so an update was certainly in order. My first order of business was to work on the straps. When I made her blue linen, I was still attaching the loops to a larger piece of strap that would go over the shoulder. Well, I know now that this isn't supported by any evidence. If you would like to read more about that, I have addressed it in several of my previous posts.

I'm kind of in love with how the straps turned out. I used a wool weaving yarn to do the hand-sewing, and it was so much fun to coil them up - they look like little drink coasters! But as precious as they were, I still needed them for the dress.

Once the garment was constructed, I treated all the seams. I used the same wool weaving yarn to do a running stitch holding the seam allowances where I wanted them. I've seen this technique used by many other costumers, and I was curious to try it myself.

In the end, I love the effect that the lines of running stitch give the garment. It's a quick and easy technique, but it certainly adds a lot of interest to the piece. All that was left to do at this point was add the silk trim.

I used a tablet-woven silk band as the final element, and attached it with inconspicuous little stitches of a matching silk thread.

Here's the final piece, as it was displayed at Laurel's Prize 2017, before I shipped the dress to Mom for her classroom unit.

Bibliography:

Baker, Jennifer. "Stitches and Seam Techniques Seen on Dark Age/Medieval Garments in Various Museum Collections." 2009. <http://nvg.org.au/documents/other/stitches.pdf> 11 June 2014.

Ewing, Thor. Viking Clothing. Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, Inc. 2006.

Glæsel, Nille. Viking Dress Garment Clothing. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2010.

Hägg, Inga. "Viking Women's Dress at Birka: A Reconstruction by Archeological Methods." Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E.M. Carus-Wilson. Ed. N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting. Pasold Studies in Textile History. 1983.

Schweitzer, Robert. “Beginning Tablet Weaving.” Forward into the Past. 2 April 2011. <http://www.fitp.ca/articles/FITPXXI/beginning_tablet_weaving.pdf>

Geijer, Agnes. "The Textile Finds from Birka." Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E.M. Carus-Wilson. Ed. N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting. Pasold Studies in Textile History. 1983.

Thunem, Hilde. "Viking Women: Apron Dress." 25 February 2015. <http://urd.priv.no/viking/smokkr.html>