A Blue Feldr Cloak with a Tablet Woven Edge

The first piece of viking kit I made for my outfit (well, cut.  There's literally no sewing involved) is my cloak, which is 61" wide and 81" long piece of brown and tan 2/2 herringbone twill.  I'm happy with it but it's drab.

Then I came across this gorgeous handwoven, hand-spun, indigo 2/2 broken diamond twill fabric at a reasonable price for quality wool, even machine-woven.

It's 122 cm wide (48"), a bit narrower than my current cloak.  The thread count is about 13 threads per centimeter in the warp, with a few less in the weft, placing it nicely with many historical textiles: Veka cloth, a kind of 2/2 twill from late-Viking Norway is quite similar.  It's a much lighter fabric than my old cloak.

Thor Ewing in Viking Clothing points to early Germanic cloaks being something like 250 by 150 cm, which is a bit longer than even my current cloak, but is the same width.  He estimates 230 cm long for a hólmganga cloak in Kormáks saga, but of unspecified width.  This saga is no earlier than the 10th century, and might have been composed relatively soon after that, but could also be much later of course.  Ewing then hazards a guess that a 160 cm width is reasonable - this matches my current cloak, but results in dragging on the floor.

Cloaks in the form of a double square are mentioned in De Carolo Magno:

The last part of [the dress and equipment of the old Franks] was a white or blue cloak in the shape of a double square; so that when it was placed upon the shoulders it touched the feet in front and behind, but at the side hardly came down to the knees.

If this was a double square, the width to match the length that fits me would be 125, which is basically exactly what this fabric is.

Carolingian clothing is of course not the same as Viking, but the rectangular cloak is a core part of traditional Germanic dress, so in the absence of other sources this is still useful to establish a range of normality.

Icelandic trade cloaks were specified by law to be substantially smaller: 160 by 80 cm.  We also see cloaked figures on a carved stone at Tu, Norway, and one in the Oseberg tapestry, both with the cloak corners nearly reaching the ground.

So the plan is to take the fabric and cut it twice as long as it is wide.

Except of course I couldn't stop at that.  One end of the fabric came with a twisted fringe to stabilize it, but I'd have to cut the other, leaving the question of what to do with that end.  I decided to unweave enough to weave on a tablet-woven border.  There are some extant textiles like this (although they were probably woven on-loom), and it mimics the much more common practice of using a tablet-woven starting band to set up your warp-weighted loom.

I decided to use some hand-spun hand-dyed yarn I'd made, both singles: a grey icelandic wool dyed with madder, and a white rambouillet dyed with indigo.

To keep things manageable, I chose the woven-in pattern from the Oseberg find.  The warp threads dangling where I had unwoven the fabric would be the wefts for my band.

I warped things up,

Threaded my cards,

Set up my warp weights so that I could push the twist out without having to reverse,

And got to work!

The idea here is to choose a clump of the white "weft" threads from the fabric and pull them through the band on each pick, but to keep the band stable and without a dangling fringe, I then pulled that same clump back through on the next pick.  This is quite stable.

You can see that the blue yarn is a bit hard to make out, but that's a lesson learned: match your yarn thicknesses.

The oseberg band is not quite symmetrical, and I kept that: the side closest to the base textile has a wider border.

The biggest challenge here is making sure that your band advances along the base fabric at the right speed.  I got this wrong in places, and they pucker a little.  Some of that relaxed with aggressive ironing, but some is not fixable.

I also had problems with the yarn breaking, likely because I had set up the tablets to twist in such a way that they gently unspun the yarn.  This is not a huge deal: fixing it is not so hard once you get the hang of it:

1. Pull the end of the broken yarn that is attached to the band out of the way, ideally towards the back of the fabric.
2. Without unthreading the yarn from its card, tie enough new yarn on to the old yarn still attached to the weight with a weaver's knot (there's a trick with your thumb to tie this knot), taking care to keep the knot small.
3. Pin the new, lengthened yarn in about the right place on the band (ideally on the wrong side), tensioned to match the other yarns in its card.
4. Proceed with weaving
5. After a few inches, come back and trim the loose ends as close to the fabric as possible.

Pinning demo

I would like to use sizing next time to see if it helps with this problem.

This process was fiddly, but it looks great and I'm quite happy with the result

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