So after Dating and placing my Viking Age style beads… now what?

In my previous post, I outlined what kinds of beads I would be looking for out of my large glass bead collection.

In short, I sorted through thousands and thousands of beads, picking out shapes, colours, and sizes I thought “felt right”… then divided them all by colour, and then looked at my list to pull out the documented shapes, sizes, and opacities that I had evidence for. I also pulled out some wonderful melon beads, dotted beads, striped beads which I was super happy to find in the collection.

some of the melon beads I collected

Some of the dotted, striped, and silver-lined beads

Dating and placing my Viking Age bling – Summary and moving forward

Viking Age reproduction beads from Finland

So I started this project wanting to try to make more of my jewelry more historically informed – choosing beads that resemble beads found at Viking Age grave sites (etc) rather than just stringing together pretty beads.

As I started making my spreadsheet, there were so many beads that were represented by so many different places though. When I thought of how in the world I was going to sort them (so I could ‘easily’ just grab a pile and be confident they belonged together) I became overwhelmed.

So instead, I decided to start first with my pieces that are less common – my silver (etc) jewelry – and then make plans based on those.

Throwback Thursday – Viking Knit – my first time using silver

The silver wire chain, once through the smallest drawplate hole, is small enough for a Pandora-style glass bead!

This is another post that I started ages ago, saved as a draft… but forgot to post!

After feeling a lot more comfortable with Viking Knit (Trichinopoly) after a few successful projects in stainless steel and copper wire, I decided to buy some silver wire. (Almost twice the price.)

Wool viking hoods

Two new steel blue/grey wool hoods – one adult, one child size.

Count this as a bit of a throwback post in itself – I actually made these ages ago… took the photos – but never ended up blogging about them!

RAM Vikings – Pins, keys, and rings

Display of pins, rings, and keys from the RAM exhibit

Today’s post from the Royal Alberta Museum Viking display from Denmark is from a display with a number of trefoil brooches, penannular brooches, pins, rings, and keys. I’m not entirely sure what the common element is between all of these – other than things made of (mostly) bronze, worn as personal adornment.