Stringing Them Up

What do you do with 21 days of Viking beads?  There are several options, of course.

You can put them in a drawer and forget about them.

You can sell them.

You can give them away.

Or you can do what I did.  I strung them.

Current accepted wisdom is that Norse women in the Viking age normally wore their beads in half-necklaces strung between two brooches.

I'd like to note that this was still a new understanding at the time we made our version of the Hon Horde necklace.  Also, that necklace was found as part of a hoarde of treasure, not as a grave find.  I'm pretty sure the half-necklace "festoon" concept is based on grave finds, which probably do tell us more about how women would display these beads when dressed in their best.

At this time, I do not have any brooches for proper display of these bead strings, but I have ordered a pair and expect them to arrive in a couple of weeks.  

By the way, I learned the word festoon for these bead strings from Dawn's Dress Diary, a blog I really enjoy because the author does such a fine job with documenting so much of what interests her and does a truly magnificent range of clothing re-creations.  If you like what I do, I think you'll really like what she does.

I strung these bead festoons in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to modern eyes (mine), but I acknowledge that a Norse woman of 1000 years ago might have made some very different decisions about how she displayed her glass finery.  There are several people out there with their own rubrics for how to approach stringing Viking necklaces and not all the approaches are the same.  

I may end up selling these or I may end up giving them away.  For now, I'm enjoying having them strung so I can enjoy them in a different form than a ziplock baggie full of loose beads.

Next project I have to tackle is armor repairs.  Whee.  Let's see if I can be safe to fight this weekend!