Textiles

The textiles stall is run by Elspeth Harrid also known as Olivia Hull.

When you visit this stall, you will see various items to do with the production of textiles, whether it is natural wool straight off of the sheep, or different types of fabric and patterns used during Viking times.

Textile manufacture was done predominantly by the females of the household. Once the wool had been cut from the sheep using a pair of sheers (usually crafted by the blacksmith), it would have been separated using two pieces of wood with metal/wooden spikes on them these were called cards. You put a small piece of wool on one card and brush it off onto the other. You continue this until all the fibres are separated enough to use for spinning.

The spinning would have been done by the women and children of the family using a drop spindle. This looks like a piece of wooden doweling with a round weight attached to the bottom. The weight would have been made from clay, soapstone or wood. The idea is to spin the spindle and separate the wool fibres so that it spins into a thin thread. You can change the thickness by the amount of wool you push towards the spindle.

When it is spun it can either be put onto a frame for dying, or wound into a ball and then put onto a shuttle to use on the drop loom.

All Viking women would have had the use of a drop loom. It would stand in the corner of the house against the wall. Weft and warp threads would be placed on the loom and attached with weights at the bottom of the loom. The wefts at the back would be pulled through to the front and attached to a piece of wood called a heddle bar. This would be raised and lowered to enable the warp thread to be passed through to make the cloth.

Fabrics would come in lots of different colours. The richer the colour the more expensive it was to produce. All types of green and brown were cheap and easier to make, but colours such as deep reds and oranges or purples were extremely hard to make and would cost a lot of money. Only the rich would have very bright or rich colours. The fabric or wool would be put into a vat of hot dye called a dye bath. This would be made by boiling up the dye stuff and then it would be strained before the material to be dyed was placed in it. To fix the dye (mordant) they would have used things like iron filings, oak apples and even stale urine. Although the latter would have to be at least two weeks old! Depending on what mordant you used also determined the length of time the colour would last and also what colour you would get.

Fabric would either be made from wool or linen and if you were very rich you could have traded for silks from the Far East with travelling traders such as Rhuss Vikings.

Sewing needles were made from all kinds of substances from hard wood to bone and metal. They were very similar to modern needles although quite a bit larger in appearance. Scissors did not exist at this time so smaller versions of the sheers were used.

If you visit the textiles stall, you will also see the different types of clothing worn by Saxon and Viking people. For example Saxons would mainly use embroidery for decorating their clothing, whereas Viking people tended to decorate their clothing using tablet weave.

This was done by threading wooden cards with wool and attaching them to a small loom or your belt and then turning the cards forward and back to create a pattern. Depending on the amount of cards and colours of wool the patterns created could be quite varied.

Resources:

Textiles of the Osberg Ship - a useful resource about a range of textiles, weaves and dyes found at Osberg.

Viking Embroidery - A document on the archaeological evidence of embroidery during the Viking-age.

Viking Clothing - an interesting resource for clothes in the Viking Era using the Saga's as a reference.

Viking Answer Lady - for general articles on many aspects of Viking Clothing (and daily life in general).