Making a Tasselled Belt for a Bronze Age outfit

Hello, I'm Sally Poynter. Well, the UK is in the middle of a heat wave at the moment, so I of course am playing with water. It's a busy time of year to be an archaeologist, as well as being peak excavation season, and I have managed to get out into the field digging for a few days just recently. It's been really good to be back in the trench. It's also coming to the height of the time of year when the museums have us in doing interpretation work, and at the moment I'm overhauling my Bronze Age outfit. Now, a lot of it's good. Lots of hand-spun materials in it, so we've got hand-spun linen and we've got hand-spun wool, but the belt, well, I think that could do with a little bit of an overhaul. It's fine for keeping my skirt up. It doesn't really reflect some of the features that we see on original items, so I'm going to try and get a new belt finished. This is a very, very simple tabby woven bit of wool. We don't know exactly when the rigid heddle like this comes in. We know it's around by more the Mid-Iron Age, so it's possible that for this state line a string heddle on a backstrap loom would have been a much better choice, but yeah, the end result is pretty much the same, and this is more an exercise in getting this belt done than it is about using absolutely accurate techniques, but what I wanted to show you today is how I finish the ends, because these sorts of belts often have very exuberant tassels. They're quite diagnostic, if you like, for this time period. There's quite a few surviving fragments, both from the Danish oak coffin burials. I think there's also one in the Museum of Ireland, so they seem to have been fairly widespread, so tassels are a very good choice for a Bronze Age belt, and as soon as I've finished this bit of weaving, which as I said isn't the main focus of this video, we will get on to making a really nice tassel on the end, and hopefully that will be useful if you fancy doing something similar. Just while I'm at it, this little bit of paper around the edge is just so I can keep an eye on how wide my band is, that's just there to help me keep things even. And here's the inspiration that I'm drawing on today. The first two pictures are Danish finds, then the third image is the National Museum of Ireland, and we're back to a Danish find to finish up. Really beautiful work, and from such a long time ago. We've seen from the pictures of extant Bronze Age belts that they quite often have additional threads added to make up the bulk of the tassel. Now I was planning on doing that, I was going to thread up some lengths, just sew them through the belt and then cord away afterwards, but when I took this off the loom, I've actually got well over 40 centimetres or so of warp threads left over, so I'm going to use those. I'm just separating a strand out, I'm threading a needle, and I've just decided for the sake of argument that I'm taking this right up to the top here. I'm sewing back into the warp and I'm just going to level that off so that we end up roughly in the same place now. Let's do it that way, that's it. So I think that's going to be long enough for my tassels. Doing it this way means every single strand is turning into five, which is a little bit arbitrary, it could have been four, it could have been six, depending on how I've done it all. I'm just going to keep doing that with the rest of them and that's going to give me lots of material to work with. So I wouldn't overthink exactly how you do this, all you really want to be doing is adding in some extra material. It's all going to come out more or less the same length. I'm not worrying at the moment about whether I've got loops or cut ends at the bottom, I'm going to sort that all out afterwards and I'm going to do that all the way across and I should end up with a really nice quantity of material to make my tassel with. Only a few left to go now, I'm really not worried about the exact number of strands that I have in this tassel as long as there's lots and lots of them. That horsehair belt that was in the previous pictures, the one that's in the National Museum of Ireland, that one had hundreds and hundreds, I think it might even be into the low thousands of strands of horsehair in its tassels and they were very much supplemented, there's far more in the tassel than there ever were in the original warp thread. So there is no problem with adding as many strands as you feel you need to give a really good bulky tassel and actually I think even though it was fluke that I ended up doing it exactly this way because of the leftover threads, I think this is going to work really nicely. So I'm just levelling up as best I can and without being too stressed about it and even at this stage hopefully you can see there's the potential there for a really good tassel. Now what I'm going to do is make cords out of bundles of these and then I actually decided whether I'm going to do the little worked loops at the end that you do see on things like the Eggbed Girl belt and skirt, it's very much the same technique as her string skirt, or whether I'm just going to finish them with a little tiny knot. I don't know, let's have a go. So if I've got two strands split, two strands without, I'm just going to use a basic cordage making technique for this. So this is exactly the same as you'd see in any of my string making videos, it's a reverse twist cord, twist away, cross towards myself, twist away, cross towards myself. So I'm essentially spinning and plying at the same time and this gives a really nice tight neat cord. You've seen me do this much more often with things like nettle and flax and bramble, it's actually quite nice to do it with wool for a change, it's quite nice and soft on the fingers. Now then, what am I going to do with these ends? Okay so that cord will just sit there, I could come back to these in a bit and decide whether to whip the ends. Do you know what, I'm going to keep this really simple, I'm just going to put a knot in the ends of these for this particular belt. I think if I do another one with a tassel at both ends, I will go for the worked loops but that, I think, particularly when that's clipped short, I think that's going to work fine. So I'll do another couple so you can see what's going on. So I'm using four strands, let's twist this round so you can see what's going on, twist and cross, twist and cross, twist and cross. This isn't an exact copy of any of the inspiration pieces we looked at earlier so I'm quite comfortable with a slight modification at the end of the tassel, although I do have to say that when you're working with two bits that have a loop in the end, actually they really would have lent themselves to that bound loop end. Next time, next time, I'll do another tutorial for that. So I want to try and get the tassel knots in roughly the same place, so I'm going to take a moment for each one that I do of these to do my best to get them to sit in a sensible spot. This is roughly even. Two down, quite a lot to go. I will come back to this video in a second when I've done most of them. I'm about halfway through now and I'm getting into quite a nice rhythm with making these. As I mentioned, this is a broad interpretation, it's not an exact copy, so I'm not worrying too much about the exact measurements of my cords and I'm certainly not worrying about the fact that I'm going with knotted bobbles rather than overstitched ones at the end, but I do want it to have the feel of a Bronze Age belt and one of the things that it's going to need when it's done is a way of containing all of these tassels because, as they are, they flip around, which is quite nice in its own right, but those original ones all have a much more organised arrangement to them. So what I think I'm going to do is, when I've finished cording all the rest of these, is I'm going to sew a little thread through just to contain the bottom into a sort of bell-shaped tassel and after that I'll wash everything which will very slightly fall the fibres and that will help everything stay in place and I can do final arrangements of the tassel so it sits really nicely against my dress. Now though, there's quite a bit more cordage to make but I'm quite pleased with how it's looking. You might notice, by the way, that there's a little bit of two-tone effect going on with this. This is an undyed browny-grey wool, so sheep's wool, but the loom that they were sitting on sat in my conservatory for quite a long time. I think I'd actually started working on this maybe a year ago and then life got complicated for lots of different reasons and it just sat there and of course conservatories are not the best places for things not fading and even though it's an undyed wool, it's the natural sheep colour and you've probably seen brown sheep that have gone blonde at the ends of the locks with sun. It's a little bit like human hair bleaching in the sunshine, that's exactly what's happened here. So in some areas the brown has become much lighter. There you are, you can see a really clear difference there. That's the original colour, this was upside down and where the sun has been against it, it's lightened a bit, so that's just the way it is. I'm really not going to worry about it. As I say, this is a proof of concept belt because I'm working out how long I want my belts to be, how big I want my tassels to be. They're always useful. I always need dressing up clothes, if not for me, for educational use, so it'll all come right in the end. It's just a simple overhand knot and I'm rolling it down to be as close to the length of the other ones as I can get without being too paranoid about it and then I'm just clipping off the ends. They'll fluff up when I wash this and that should look quite nice. Just about to run out of tassels now. How many have I got left? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven strands. I've been using four for each of these. Do you know what? I am not going to worry about it. I'm going to make this tassel in the usual manner using two strands of two and the last one I'll use a strand of one and a strand of two. I really don't think it's worth guessing in a tiz about. If I had two left over I could easily have run in an extra thread but for one it's really not something we're going to stress about. This is something that you see in prehistoric textiles quite a bit that they're technically competent, beautiful in many cases, but they don't get so hung up on evenness and right angles and symmetry in the way that we do today and that's because we've been almost trained by living in a machine-made world that everything should be absolutely exactly the same every single time and that's become what we're used to. But I don't think life in the past is like that in a pre-industrial age and actually that's going to look fine. You're hardly going to tell that that's a little bit different in thickness by the time we finish up. So one more knot to go and like all the others I'm just going to ease the knot until it's close to the same length as the others as I can. Clip that off. Right so now I want to contain this because as I mentioned earlier this is going to flip around otherwise. So I have got a needle here threaded with a bit of yarn and I am going to very, very roughly and without overthinking it, divide this into two. So half's going to be one side, half's going to be the other and I am just going to run I'm just going to run this behind each knot. I'm just going to pop it through the cord and not being too finicky about it. I'll leave an end because I'll knot that in a moment. Yeah that's going to work. These controlled slightly bell-shaped tassels do seem to be very much a thing in the Bronze Age. What I think is rather fascinating is that we've got the very famous Danish ones because of course their preservation is just marvellous but we've also got that Irish one. So it's clearly not just from one region although there was always the possibility of contact and trade and things being not in the places that they were made but given the limited evidence available to us it does seem that this is just something that's quite in at the time. Tassels on things and these controlled tassels with a bit of shape to them. So that's what we're aiming for here. I am half wishing that I'd taken the time to do the lovely bound loopy ends on this but this is not a brilliant belt because it faded and because I only set this up to have a tassel at one end it's probably going to end up in more dressing up kit than really really serious museum cornersy kit although I shall be wearing it at a museum fairly soon. We'll just see how things go. Okay so what I'm hoping is that by tying this off here and then very gently washing everything to settle in the shape that that will give me this slightly controlled tassel that we see in the extant ones which will help with that impression of bronze ageness. So almost all woven goods are better for wet blocking. All that means is I'm going to take this over to the sink now give it a warm soapy wash and tug it into shape. I can see already that I've got one slightly long loop there. I can feel there's a slightly shorter one over there. Tugging these into shape whilst wet and letting them dry is going to really help with the effect of this and the next time you see it it will be on my costume. So here's the belt on the outfit. I have left the original belt on because I decided this was actually quite a good way just to hold the skirt up and keep the gathers in place and then I could use the new rather fancier one with its nice tassel more as a feature piece. You really can see that fading on there or inset a picture as well. I quite like it actually. I know it wasn't what we'd planned for when I set up the loom but it's a really good example of what happens to even non-archaeological textiles even when they're naturally pigmented under bright light. So it's just another thing that helps me tell stories about archaeology, conservation, interpretation. Yes there are things about this belt that in an absolutely ideal world I would have done a little bit differently but I think it's quite a good addition to my current outfit and the thing about things like this is that we change and improve them every single time they get put into use. I'm off somewhere very exciting this weekend. I'm going to be at the British Museum. It's the Festival of Archaeology weekend. It's also the tail end of their World of Stonehenge exhibition and that's where I'm going to be wearing this in a day or two. And this is a side of the British Museum you don't often get to see. It's eight o'clock in the morning and we're starting to set up for the Festival of Archaeology. Such a lovely building. Shame it's in the middle of London. Means you've got to drive through it. Well I think we're just about set up at the British Museum ready for Festival of Archaeology. This is my little section with prehistoric textiles. There's nettles and flax and they're still setting up so she's only half in outfit but ancient craft are showing lots of lovely things including fantastic jet and shale jewellery. Then around here James will be bronze casting and flint mapping and coming around here even more we've got a nice display of stone age tools and then Graham from Potted History will be making pots. So loads going on today at the British Museum and I think we're going to have lovely weather for it. Well I've managed to start weaving a slightly wider band on a back strap loom today which may be a more appropriate method for interpreting this time period. So we shall see how that comes on as it gets a bit further along. It is so busy today at the Festival of Archaeology though. I'm spending more time talking to lovely people than I am actually making things. I better get back to it. Well we've had a fantastic if very hot day at the Festival of Archaeology. My belt worked out really well. I know what I'd like to change next time. I hope you've enjoyed watching this. I will see you next time. Bye for now.