Using the lessons from my test piece, I decided to move forward with a more challenging project, and weave a pair of winingas. Winingas are a piece of clothing common to men’s attire in the early medieval Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures. They appear again as puttees in British military garb in the late 1800s. Typically made of wool they are long strips of fabric which wrap around the lower portion of the leg, protecting the fabric of the pants and the legs themselves from being caught by bushes and brambles. Most of them appear to have been woven to width, with visible selvages on both ends. They can be fastened at the knee either by tucking or with a metal hook.
These require a long warp as each winingas is 4 yards long. Up to this point the longest warp I have woven was 2-3 yards. The pattern is usually a type of twill. I decided that since the pattern was only a 4 shaft twill and I have an 8 shaft loom, that I would weave them simultaneously using a double weave pattern and two shuttles. Below are the drafts for the 4 shaft basic pattern and the 8 shaft double weave.
But before I could start weaving, I needed to spin. For this project, and probably most of my medieval reconstructions, I have opted to use Shetland wool. I have chosen this for two reasons:
- Shetland wool matches the character of medieval wool described as described in Ryder, 1984 and is similar in character to the wools from Scandinavian sources.
Many northern areas were occupied by Vikings, and it is possible that the Herdwick breed of the Lake District contains Norse influence. Most of the Norse wools mea- sured were from Scotland, and the general impression is that these are more hairy but have less pigmentation than Roman and Saxon wools. Orkney and Shetland were occupied by Norsemen until the fifteenth century, but although the sheep husbandry of these islands contains considerable Norse influence, the sheep (as already indicated) appear to date back to an earlier period. Even if Norse settlers introduced sheep, they are unlikely to have been very different from those already there.
The wool evidence therefore indicates that the pre- dominant sheep type during the Middle Ages was of hairy-medium/generalized- medium type. It was probably comparable with the surviving short-tailed and vari-coloured Orkney and Shetland breeds, which we noted in earlier periods, and in which it is mainly the rams that are horned.
Ryder, M. L. (1984). Medieval Sheep and Wool Types. The Agricultural History Review, 32(1), 14–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40274301
- Shetland wool is easy to acquire and comes in a variety of colors. I purchased mine from The Woolery
These had a longer staple length than the wool for the test piece and I opted to spin it at twice the weight.
After spinning I seized the warp threads with wheat starch. This stiffens the threads and is supposed to make it more resistant to wear from the loom. I have seen a number of seizes recommended. Gelatin is frequently recommended and would have been available to historical weavers of winingas. I am, however, a vegetarian and try to avoid using (dead) animal products if there is a reasonable alternative. Wheat starch also would have been available to historical weavers, so that was my choice. In retrospect, I’m not sure that it was very effective, though whether that is because of the substance, the preparation or the application, I am not sure. I boiled the starch in enough water to cover the warp yarn and let it cool. Then I soaked the wool in the water before hanging the hank to dry. The starch on my test piece had been rather heavy, and grainy, so I reduced the concentration in this batch. (Approximately 1 Tablespoon of starch in 4 cups of water).
I learned several things in weaving this project. I learned that wool singles fuzz a lot when weaving on a jack loom. I also had the opportunity to perfect how to handle broken warp threads, because they broke, again and again and again, and only the hours of time I had put into spinning the thread kept me from throwing up my hands and trashing the whole project. In the end, the best method for me was to add an insert on the broken thread, tying it off to the beamed warp with a slip knot, and then following directions from The Woolery both on the insert and then again when the broken thread had moved forward enough to be incorporated into the cloth.
You can watch the video here: Fixing a Broken Warp Thread
In the end, I think I would have been better off not using the double weave technique because it required me to change shuttles every fourth throw, and manage two sets of floating selvages. It may very well have been faster to just weave a double length of the warp, and it certainly would have been a more relaxing weave.
Here are the winingas off the loom. The one above is folded in quarters and has been cleaned up and hemmed. The one below has not been cleaned up and you can see that every white thread on there is a place the warp broke. After cleaning and hemming, they were washed in hot water to allow them to full, just a little bit.
These were super challenging and while I haven’t given up on creating cloth from my handspun wool, I am happy to go back to commercial spun thread for a while. I may end up opting, as I have in the past for linen, to go with a hybrid approach and use commercial yarn in the warp and handspun in the weft. We will see.