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…
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