Sometimes its hard to be a woman...

No, I'm not suddenly into country music ;-)
It's just that I find myself in the situation many a medieval wife with her own small business to attend to may have known: The husband needs something new to wear and suddenly 24 hours in a day are not enough to take care of all the chores, so some things have to wait. Unfortunately that means my book projects ...

Ok, I persuaded Andi to join me in late medieval living history, so naturally I won't leave him alone with all the sewing. And I really like making historical clothes :o)
Last year he joined the event in Soest in a mixture of clothes he had borrowed and some he had made himself. Now it's time for new clothes!

As he is going to portrait a rope maker and beekeeper around the year 1480, the set of working clothes is rather simple and somehow oldfashioned. It consists of shirt and braies, single leg hose fastened to a doublet without sleeves, a buttoned coat / jerkin and a hood.
Hose and hood are made from a 2/2 twill, dyed with madder to a reddish orange, the coat from a slightly finer woadblue 2/2 twill. Shirt, braies and doublet are made from handwoven tabby linen (and also the linig of the coat).

The main source is an altar from Kefermarkt in Austria with a scene ot the "Annunciation to the shepherds" which has a lot of great details. The coat is made after the one on the left, buttoned to the waist with pairs of cloth buttons.

The single leg hose was rather outfashioned in the 1480, but still in use with lower class people. There is a painting showing St. Leonhard and a captive from Bad Aussee where you can clearly see the single leg hose fastened to a doublet.

If you think it's joined hose - have a look at the shirt being pulled over the hose at the front and tucked into the hose at the back - that only works with single leg hose I think.

At the moment I'm doing the last hems, Andi has finished the hood yesterday. So I hope I can show you some pictures after the weekend :-)

Speaking of the weekend: It's going to be fun, we are attending an event in Quakenbrück with a lot of nice people from the Vruntlike Tohopesate and I'll work as a bookbinder the whole time. Finally back to books :o)

And now for something completely different:

...sheep!

Yes, I breed sheep :-) After looking for the right wool for reconstructing archaeological textiles for a while, I decided to grow it myself. Well, not on my head of course, but on sheep of my own.

It all started with 3 Gute sheep, an old swedish breed from Gotland quite similar to bone and wool finds from the Iron Age. Now I have 12 sheep of 4 different breeds - some purebreed, some mixed. My aim is to supply wool for my own projects from Stone Age to Late Medieval - and enjoy the nice and friendly animals sheep are...

It's been a busy month with all the ewes giving birth to little fluffy kids. But now they're finally all settled in, it's a real pleasure to watch the lambs hob around as only lambs can :-)

I only had 3 ewes with the ram last fall. I bought a young ram at the sheep gathering in september which looked very promising - and his offspring also looks promising!

See for yourself:

The black-and-white lamb is Loki with his mum Edda, he's 75% Gute Sheep, 25% Weiße Heidschnucke.

Then there is Enno with his mum Lillemor ("little mum" in swedish), he's half Gute, half Gotland sheep (a polled breed from Gotland).

And the only ewe lamb this year, Lotta. She's a purebreed Gute shep and halfsister to Edda.

At the moment they grow visibly from day to day; Lotta is the oldest with 3 weeks and her wool is beginning to change colour. Most Gute lambs are born black, but only face and legs stay black, the wool normally changes to a light till medium grey while growing. Both rams and ewes are horned and Lotta and Loki already show little horn stubbles. Maybe Enno is going to stay polled, the chances are 50/50 as his mother is polled and his father Birger sports a set of beautiful curved horns...

Soester Fehde - "Sturm auf die Stadt"

Here are some fotos I took during the Soester Fehde-Reenactment 2009 on sunday, the 23th of August:

Reading the "Kriegsordnung der Stadt Soest" to the defenders of the city

The defenders are ready

loading a handgonne

on station with the canons

Attack!


trying to go over the citywalls


You're not gonne go over my part of the wall!


They've got a cat!


But now it burns...


breakout of the defenders


treating the wounded


Soests burgers plundering the dead attackers

cleaning up after successfully defending the city

15th century fighting manual

Here is what I made out of the pages Tomasz gave me to finish: (klick)
A Kopert with a velum cover, a flap-and-lace closure and simple stitching through the covers back.
This type of binding was often used for books that were supposed to be used by scholars for their studies, therefore they had to be small, lightweight and rather inexpensive to produce. The fighting manual of a guard captain would have needed a lightweight binding, too - and one not to costly...
So I thought a Kopert would be apropriate :-)


To make it a little more nice looking, I used blue instead of unbleached linen thread for sewing and wrapped red thread throught the visible blue threads on the back. There are only three sections (folded pages stacked into each other) to it, so the back is rather narrow, no space left there for any other type of decoration.


Inside, the sections middles are strenthened with strips of parchment. These were often cut from pages of books no longer used. To imitate this, I used a scrap of velum with a poem written on it by Anje (thanks a lot!!). Rather a shame to cut it up - but the scribes and bookbinders of the middle ages seemingly didn`t have these scruples. Sometimes these strenthening strips are a treasure hoard for librarians: A version of the Nibelungenlied was found cut up and used this way!


Giving back this little book to its owner was not really easy, the neat writing in two colours looks great, I definitely want one for myself :-)
Maybe not a book about swordfighting, though - something about beekeeping or animal husbandry would be nice...

Soester Fehde 2009

Last year, I took part in a great reenactment event called Soester Fehde 1444 . Of course as a bookbinder :-)

It was a lot of fun and I finished another Kopert, this time a fighting manual, handwritten after a original from the end of the 15th century.

On the picture I'm discussing the binding with the owner, who brought the finished pages to me.

More picture will follow...

Kopert with decorated back

Some time ago I made a little Kopert (flexible binding with a velum cover) just to have something to show the public on an event called Klosterbaustelle Gerresheim. While I was working at it, Myriam from Diu Minnezit took a fancy for the book and so I finished it for her. Karin, who does beautiful book illuminations, painted a french lilly on the cover.

Have a closer look at it at Diu Minnezit

The outcome is quite nice, don't you think?

Bog find

If you haven't heared about it yet: The Faddan More Psalter is a book from appr. the 9th or 10th century found in an Irish bog in 2006.
It was bound as a libri sine asseribus, a book with a flexible leather or velum cover instead of wooden boards. In german this is called Kopert (from lat. coopertium), a type of binding I'm exspecially interested in. Nothing fancy, this was somehow the medieval version of a paperback...

You can read more on wikipedia: Faddan More Psalter
By the way, the german version of this article was a birthday present from a very dear friend last year :-)