Bjorn's Ceilidh 2024

 Alternate title: The Dress Seven Years in the Making

Back in Jan of 2017 I posted about the Laurel's Prize Tourney and beginning thoughts about what I would do.  Too many years later I have finally finished the dress!

The background of this blog's banner head is the neckline of said dress. After the Laurel's Tourney, I entered it in a "gentle" A&S competition my barony hosted for those newer to A&S who wanted the experience of competing without the pressure to be perfect.  There was a four-inch strip at the hem that I was thinking to embroider later.  But embroidery is not my passion and the fancy stitching never happened.  What did eventually happen is a thing of beauty.

The inspiration for the finalized version of the dress is a series of illustrations from the Fecamp Psalter.  It is held at Koninklijke Biblioteek in The Hague, Netherlands, and the website is in Dutch (found online here).  There they call it "The Eleanor of Aquitaine Psalter", but the psalter's original patron is not named in the psalter itself.  It is from around 1180, so the clothing is quite contemporary for my persona.

You notice the hem in the overdress
has geometric shapes on it.

Looking closer at it, you can see that they seem 
to be gems and pearls, or perhaps glass beads.

The full outfit with silk veil.

    

Close-up of hem.

 

I used a stem stitch with two strands of DMC cotton floss (color #3822) to recreate the lines in the original.  The blue and yellow glass beads were made by fellow Scadian Irene von Lassen.  Her love of all things glass and her devotion to perfection was demonstrated by her making double the required number of blue beads needed, just so I would have a set all the same size. The blue are 3/4" in diameter, the yellow rectangles are 1' x 3/4".  The white glass beads are 6mm and from a 36" strand I bought from Joann's (bead landing tm).

In order to support the weight of all that glass, I sewed a 3" strip of cloak-weight wool between the layers of the turned-up hem.  The white and yellow beads are sewn on with beeswax coated silk thread.   The blue beads are held with a mesh or netting made with two strands of silk embroidery floss.  The mesh was created by sewing rounds of blanket stitch, decreasing the number of stitches with each round.

The beads cover only the front around to the back edge of the side gores.  Honestly, I didn't feel an imbalance of the weight of the dress because the back hem was beadless.  I'm working on a new reliquary bag to replace the peach one I made ever so long ago.  The new one will be a yellow that fairly closely matches the rectangle beads.

~ Marjorie