A Sprang Carry-all from Haithabu
As a general rule, I like to minimize my “future creep” at events, and one easy way of doing that has been to use period storage/carrying containers for most of my belongings so that I do not have modern plastic bins or duffel bags to hide. While the “Viking frame purse” based on finds of…
9th c. Frisian Kit Updates
Since it has been over two years since I first published my 9th c. Frisian kit, I thought it was time for a follow-up to include a few more items I made to help flesh out the presentation. I did not base this kit on a single grave find, so I cannot say for certain…
The Britsum Pipe
A while back I started prowling through the online collection of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden to try to find more accessories or other items to help flesh out my 9th-century Frisian kit and I ran across a wooden pipe found in a terp (raised artificial dwelling mound) in Britsum, Netherlands, and dated between…
9th century Frisian Kit
Most of the time I portray a moderately high-status c.600 CE Langobard man in what is now northern Italy. Where I live in real life, there are very few other people reenacting this particular period, and I am usually the only Langobard at events I attend. On the other hand, there are many, many people…
Iron Age Scandinavian Kit
My greatest love is the late Migration Era, but for this project I wanted to create a full set of soft kit that would be appropriate for a “Roman Iron Age” presentation from Scandinavia in the late 3rd or 4th century CE. The goal was to put together a set of everyday clothing that was…
No math Damendorf Trousers
I made some pants last week and someone asked me how I did it. What follows is my attempt to explain a process that involved me squatting in my underwear and looking rather foolish at times, but allowed me to make probably the best-fitting trousers I own without using any math. Why on earth would…
Pyramidal Scabbard Mounts in Langobard Tombs: Feeling Single, Seeing Double?
I am currently in the process of making a scabbard for a recently acquired spatha, and I will need to suspend it from something. In order to come up with an appropriate belt or baldric based on finds from the Langobard necropolis at Nocera Umbra, I began researching the hardware associated with scabbards and sword…
Experimental underwear
If that isn’t a clickbait title, I don’t know what is. Seriously, though, this was a little project I did to try to understand not just *how* the garment was put together, but how the maker might have patterned the garment for a specific recipient – that is, how they determined the proportions and dimensions…
Who the heck are the Langobards?
I get asked this question occasionally at events – usually as the followup to “What are you? You don’t really look like a Viking or an Anglo-Saxon and your shoes are weird.” The shortest answer I can usually provide is, “well, they were sort of like the Angles or Saxons of Italy.” The rest of…
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
farolfvs me fecit 