Monday 9 May 2011

Anglo Saxon Crafting – actually pretty cool!

Whilst I was away last weekend we happened to encounter an entire village of camping ‘Saxons’ and ‘Vikings’ who were basically doing re-enactment thing at Corfe Castle (Dorset)!?!

Whilst my rather judgemental side was inwardly giggling at the people who were giving up their whole bank holiday weekend to dress, sleep, eat and ‘role play’ like a people long gone, there was actually quite a lot of crafting going on that was pretty cool.

Two women in particular really impressed me.The first who was the weaving lady...

























I watched her set up her weaving tools for about 15 minutes (imagine the worst wool spaghetti disaster and that was pretty much was she was contending with to set up), and then she used the blocks to act as some kind of loom. To make the patterns she twisted particular blocks.

























It was very slow progress (about an inch per half an hour) and very hard work but the results were pretty good.


























The second was the glass bead lady...

























She’d done her PhD on Anglo Saxon glass wear and had spent tons of time trying to re-create the methods used to put colour in glass beads using iron, copper, tin etc.

















Apparently the purples were the most difficult to get!?!  Amazing how these kind of beads are around everywhere right now and they were first being created hundreds of years ago! Love the colours.

Still - thats still a bit too much dedication to your craft for me!

2 comments:

  1. Pretty sure I could watch the weaving lady all day. Thanks for the strong image. Cool. Very, very cool.

    ReplyDelete
  2. WOw that was cool, don't think I would like to do it myself but it is pretty amazing stuff. Was she selling the braid?

    ReplyDelete

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