Thinking of Suds

So I have been doing research into soap and soap making... It seems that the Vikings may have been one of the first groups of people to make and use soap consistently for cleaning themselves and their clothing. There is some speculative evidence suggesting that they did both in the same time, and that this fact may have been due in small part the the presence of hot springs in a majority of the locations where these people settled. If you didn't have to spend half the day waiting to prep the bath water, you were more likely to bath. Which makes sense actually...
So, to this end, the AoA circlet project has been abandon due to lack of funding... and I am moving on to soap making. In the next day or two I intend to start with the extraction of lye from wood ash. I will be posting pictures of my progress as soon as I start; and I will try an chronicle the whole process as much as I can. The chemistry of this process is somewhat shaky and involves things like tasting the solution, floating eggs, and melting feathers... it feels so much like alchemy it is spine tingling.

AOA Circlet Research - Part 4

More Jewlery form Grave digs - these are from Denmark (Black background from Terslev and Blue background North Vedsted) images from http://oldtiden.natmus.dk/

Both of these have firmly concluded my research... Twisted and woven jewelry was clearly created and worn by peoples of the Viking era throughout the region.

It has also pointed out something subtle to me. The pieces from Gotland show a marked influence from the Latvian and Lithuanian areas of the same time period. Clearly these cultures were more closely linked than has been previously discussed by most scholars... Surely I am not the first to notice.

AOA Circlet Research - Part 2

Here are two more images of circular jewerly from Gotland.

This one is from the same reproduction supplier as the first one posted

And this one is from an actual grave find... From the Polotsk National Historical Cultural Museum and Reserve (http://polotsk.museum.by/en/node/129)

Twisted ring from island of Gotland. 11th century. Gold 900*, filegreed. D-25,0.
Excavations by V. Bulkhin.
Upper Castle, Polotsk, 1978.

All of what I am finding looks like a large gauge metal wire with a smaller wire or multiple wires twisted with it. More specifically two small gauge wires twisted with one another, and then that new created twist then twisted with a larger gauge wire. The terminals all seem to either be animal head or tendril like scrolls… More research on actual grave finds is needed, but I think this has me going the right direction

AOA Circlet Research

As the people of 10th century Gotland did not wear circlets and weaving metal to look like tablet weaving is waaaayyyyy beyond my skill level (for the moment); I have decided to look at other ring shaped jewelry and then use it as a base for my design. Here is what I have found so far:

In the category of allegedly of period origin, but with no specific extant piece listed we have:

From: http://www.urweg.com/


Gotland Bracelet
Lye, Gotland, Sweden - Viking Era

More to come as I figure out how to better incorporate images into a post