Black and white striped Ottoman Entari

Work in progress – Striped Ottoman Entari – a black and white striped cotton trimmed with blue silk.

While going through my sometimes overflowing collection of fabrics, I started sorting out some of them into boxes of what kinds of fabric they were (green suit-weight wool, pale linen, etc) but some lengths of fabric quickly made me think of particular costumes, so I ended up bagging them together, hoping that they’d inspire me to SEW…

One of those fabrics was a black and white striped cotton that I received from my former teacher. There was about 4 meters of it, which was enough to make a late-period Turkish (Ottoman) Entari. When I was originally making my first Turkish costume, I wrote in my overview that this coat was:

“Medium-weight A or bell-shaped coat. Fitted to the waist and shaped with side gores with an overlapping front gore. Usually floor-length. Round or v-neck. Closed down the front with small buttons and loops or long frogs. Often depicted unbuttoned from neckline to chest and waist to floor. Most often with wide, elbow-length sleeves, though also shown narrow and wrist-length. Occasionally extremely long maunche-like sleeves with slits. Most often made of silk, lined in cotton. Rarely trimmed, but the inside edge was often faced with silk.”

Monster-print apron

trying on the monster-print apron

My friend Skye had a birthday recently, and when I was up in Edmonton at Marshall’s Fabrics I found this super-cool fabric. It has a series of old-school classic movie monsters; the Mummy, a Vampire, Frankenstein’s Monster, and a Werewolf – such fun! She’s a big fan of horror movies, and I thought this would make a good fabric for a gift.

Diamond twill shawl

Selfie wearing my new diamond twill style shawl with other elements of my Viking Age reenactment kit

A while back I picked up some “diamond twill” fabric at the Grandmother’s fabric sale. It’s not the right kind of fabric to do a full garment with (not enough fabric either) so I was kind of torn. I wanted to use it for my Viking Age costume kit – but wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

I decided to leave the fabric uncut… and just finish the edges to make a shawl… at least until I figure what else I might want to use it for. 

Viking inspired comb

Horse head viking-style comb

When I was making the Viking-Age style bag handles, I also added something else to the laser cutter layout – a horse-head embellished comb in the style of some of the horse-head bling found in Viking Age Scandinavia and Finland.

Hedeby/Haithabu bag handles

Hedeby style handles before staining.

A Hedeby-style of bag has been on my wish-list for quite some time. I’ve used small totes to carry around my things, because I can’t do without my phone and other necessities on my person when at a costumed event. However, there are a few period-informed/speculated bags… and the (commonly called) Hedeby (or Haithabu) bag is one of them…

Of course, no actual bag survived… and there are no depictions clearly of the bag – but several objects in similar designs did survive in wood and bone, from multiple areas in the Viking world (not just Hedeby) – theorised to be handles to this bag style.