Reconstructing Seyðisfjörður band
In December 2020, a landslide in Iceland uncovered a cluster of archaeological finds. There was a surprisingly well-preserved piece of a tablet woven band among other exciting artifacts. Dated to 9th-11th century, this colourful piece of ribbon decorated a woman's attire. I originally thought it was attached to the top of an apron dress, because of the loop, but it turned out to be an edge of a blue-dyed coat.
Detailed photo of this tablet woven ribbon was made public in November 2022 by Fornleifur blog.
Photo credit: Fornleifur blog, by Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson
Colours
The quality of the preservation is amazing. One can see original colours by naked eye - yellow, red and blue.
In 9th-11th century it was common to use madder root to achieve bright and lightfast shades of red. Dyer's woad was the source of blue. However, identifying the source of yellow is not easy in general. There are indeed so many plants that can dye wool beautiful yellow that it is rarely possible to determine it even with help of chemical analysis. Dyer's weld and reseda are usually considered as yellow dyes of the best quality, but rich yellows can be achieved with as common plants as lady's mantle, thistle, heather, St. John's wort, horsetail or birch foliage.
Examination
A trained eye can easily identify that the pattern itself is woven on 8 tablets with two threads per tablet. Two outermost tablets are threaded with 4 threads, creating a solid border. All 4 border tablets have the same Z slant.
In the picture, there are visible 3-4 large diamonds in the centre of the preserved piece. On its right side there is the charming motive resembling small leaves. On the opposite end of the band there are presumably remains of the same motive.
(c) Lucia Andalova. My first reconstruction strated promising but soon there were some issues
What is the problem with my draft
As mentioned above, I did not have access to the original high resolution photo back in 2022. The pattern draft I made seemed to match the band perfectly. But did it really?
(c) Lucia Andalova. One of reconstruction attempts I made in November 2022.
As I finally got the opportunity to take a close look at the original photo I saw what was wrong. Slighty damaged places of the ribbon made me believe I saw something that was not there.
Only now, two years later, I saw that red circled pieces of pattern are IDENTICAL. Also, what I interpreted as a fork (blue circle) is probably a little leaf. That said, there was time to draft a new, more correct pattern.
That day came in April 2025, when I finally got the time to make the draft and weave the band according to it. The pattern is now available for purchase here.
-lan-