Textile Resources for the Re-enactor

Welcome to my filing cabinet! Here you will find links to some articles, bibliographies, and weaving drafts I have produced on the subject of Western textile history that may be of interest to Dark Ages, medieval, and Renaissance re-enactors. Some of these are reprinted from various group newsletters inside and outside the re-enactor community; others are teaching aids from classes I have taught. Now that the website's been here over five years, though, many of the works here have been produced specifically for web publication. All of them are copyright © by me, Carolyn Priest-Dorman.

As a Viking Age re-enactor I am most often known as Þóra Sharptooth, a tenth-century steader from the area near Jorvík in the Danelaw. However, my interest in textiles is by no means limited to Vikings or the so-called Dark Ages.

Documents Available Here

New or Updated Since Last Time:

• "Banbagia a la Perugina": A Bibliography of Sources on "Perugian Wares", focusing on the technical and art-historical specifics of these textiles, especially in their medieval and early Renaissance manifestations; new
• The Warp-Weighted Loom: Some Sources, an annotated bibliography and some links for people interested in learning how to weave on the warp- weighted loom; revised and updated 17 June 2002 (with a link to historic footage of people weaving on the warp-weighted loom!)

Tablet Weaving:

• Annotated Bibliography of Tablet-Weaving Sources, a list of sources for tablet weaving before the seventeenth century; updated 29 November 2001
• Double-Faced Designs on a 7-Block Grid with Radial Symmetry, my contribution to the February 2000 TWIST (Tablet Weavers International Studies and Techniques) sample exchange; my samples were designed by applying design principles from medieval bands
• A Hebrew Alef-Bet, a chart for weaving Hebrew letters in double-face double-turn tablet weaving
• Intermediate Tablet-Weaving: Figured Double-Face Weave, a workshop pamphlet on designing and weaving with alternately S- and Z-threaded tablets; includes graphics
• Metallic Trims for Some Early Period Personae, a work on brocaded tablet-woven pieces in northern Europe before the twelfth century, with graphics
• A Saxon Threaded-In Tablet Weave, a recipe for recreating an unusual early Saxon tablet weave, with a graphic
• Tablet Woven Wedding Garters, a description and photo of some silk garters I wove for a friend's wedding
• Two Laurel Wreath Motifs for Double-Face Double-Turn Tablet Weaving, two turning drafts for weaving laurel motifs
• Three Recipes for Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Tablet Weaving, based on finds from London, with threading diagrams
• Viking-Style Tablet Weaving: Birka Strapwork Motif, a recipe to create a brocaded motif in a simpler technique

Spinning and Weaving

• "Banbagia a la Perugina": A Bibliography of Sources on "Perugian Wares", focusing on the technical and art-historical specifics of these textiles, especially in their medieval and early Renaissance manifestations
• A Four-Harness Medieval Huck Weave, sources and weaving draft plus a scan of a sample; the original is in a Belgian church
• Just What Exactly is 'Whyt Samyt' Anyway?, being a handweaver's bibliography of sources for technical information on divers weaves and setts of the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, and Renaissance; updated 29 November 2001
• Medieval North European Spindles and Whorls, a compendium of information considering over 1100 surviving spindle whorls and over 45 surviving spindle shafts from the Middle Ages
• A Supplementary Handweaver's Bibliography: Additional Sources for Textiles of the Roman Empire, Middle Ages, and Renaissance; a (very much in draft!) listing of sources that, while they are useful, don't contain the nitty-gritty of thread counts
• A Tenth Century Linen Weave Sample, with a scanned image and a weaving draft
• The Warp-Weighted Loom: Some Sources, an annotated bibliography and some links for people interested in learning how to weave on the warp- weighted loom; revised and updated 17 June 2002 (with a link to historic footage of people weaving on the warp-weighted loom!)

Dyes and Dyeing

• Colors, Mordants, and Dyestuffs of the Viking Age: An Introduction, basically a list of things we know they dyed with
• Early, Medieval, and Renaissance Dyeing Recipes, a bibliography of pre-modern written sources that include dyeing recipes; reorganized and expanded to include sources dating to as late as the beginning of the 18th century

Non-Woven Textile Techniques

• Fifteenth-Century Fingerlooped Braid Reproductions, a set of scanned samples based on the single-worker braid instructions in Harleian 2320, article 4, "Directions for Making Many Sorts of Laces," a manuscript dating to the early fifteenth century (with a brief bibliography)
• Nålebinding Techniques in the Viking Age, a list of known examples of Viking Age nålebinding, arranged by stitch type with cross-references to competing nomenclatures; includes an annotated bibliography of sources
• Old World Sprang through the Early Middle Ages: A Brief Bibliography, an annotated bibliography of sources on sprang ("plaiting on stretched threads"), including historic examples

Embroidery

• Anglo-Saxon and Viking Works of the Needle: Some Artistic Currents in Cross-Cultural Exchange, a consideration of embroidery and sewing stitches used in the Anglo-Saxon and Viking milieux
• Viking Embroidery Stitches and Motifs, a work discussing the stitches employed and the types of motifs encountered in Viking embroidered pieces, with graphics

Other textile-related documents at this site:

• NESAT Tables of Contents, a list of the tables of contents for the six published books of proceedings from the North European Symposium on Archaeological Textiles, to aid researchers in historic textiles
• Here is a page about my old loom, which I'm trying to identify. If you know anything about this sort of loom, I'd love to hear about it!
• Here also is the Impossible Tablet Weave page, with links to scanned images of samples and text discussing the Impossible TW question from the CARDS-L list.

Documents coming someday soon:

• A Warp-Weighted Loom Primer for the Clueless Beginner, based on my experiences with a reproduction Icelandic four-shed warp-weighted loom [not available yet]
• Toward More Medieval Tablet Weaving, a paper on the history of tablet weaving, mostly in northwestern Europe [not available yet]

This page was created on 30 June 1996 and last updated on 17 June 2002.

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