Mammen embroidery on tan wool

Stitching the Mammen large face and hands design onto tan wool

Does this design look familiar? Well, even if you’re not familiar with the Mammen finds, you might remember an earlier post where I stitched this up onto blue wool.

Well, I liked it so much, I decided to use the embroidery machine to do a second round of it on tan wool too!

This design from the Mammen finds is often shared online named “large faces and hands” and I  re-traced it from those designs (not from photographs of the original garment) and digitized it for machine embroidery.

Mammen embroidery on blue wool

Mammen embroidery on blue wool

Not too long ago I showed off a hooded mantle I made in teal wool, decorated with machine embroidery, including the acanthus vine found originally in the late 10th Century “Mammen” find.

From what I’ve seen, this is one of the few finds from Viking Age Nordics that include figurative embroidery… despite the SCA love of putting decorative, figurative embroidery on All.The.Things.  There are a number of different motifs from this find, including the vine, and the repeating pattern I’m using here.

RAM Vikings – Embroidery

Interpretation of a man’s outfit

In my last post I gave a bit of a sneak peek for this post – about embroidery.

There’s  a lot of controversy or discussion around the use of embroidery on Viking age garments between reenactors. There are a LOT of people who love their highly embroidered cloaks and apron panels, but there have been a scant number of textile artifacts that display embroidery.

Red & black Viking apron panel

Photo credit ©Mysticus Photography – my new embroidered apron panel

In my Viking Age Capsule Collection post I mentioned that I wanted to slowly transition my Viking Age wardrobe to a red / black / grey / blue colour scheme. I found this red and black twill fabric at the Grandmother’s Fabric Sale in spring 2017, and since it was only 0.6 meters, there wasn’t really enough to do much. I reserved a piece for this apron panel, and then used the remainder for reverse facings on my black and red wool (blend) coat.

Current Viking Age Palette

I decided to do one side of this apron panel with the red, and the reverse with the same black I used for the coat. No real reason other than I had pieces of both leftover, and both match my current desireable colourway.

Beothuk’s photos from Coronation

As mentioned in my previous post, like at Twelfth Night, I wasn’t able to take much in the way of photos at Avacal’s Coronation and the Kingdom Arts & Science Championships because I was swamped trying to do other things. Luckily, one of the local photographers (Beothuk)took MANY amazing photos, and published them publicly online.

All photos are direct links from his Flickr feed – if he removes them, they’ll break here. All copyright his.

My Finnish Iron Age costume

I opted to wear my Finnish Iron Age costume for my presentation (using my early attempts at the coil-embellished apron and necklace while the updated, more accurate versions were on display for the judges to touch and feel). For Court in the evening though, I swapped out and wore the updated versions. Beothuk got a few photos  (I didn’t get any!)
//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js
Court was pretty much hilarious all the way through – I don’t think that there was a single time I wasn’t laughing.