My English writer friend and blogosphere buddy, April Munday (see her excellent blog site here: A Writer’s Perspective ) commented that she couldn’t quite visualize what the psaltery’s gig bag was going to look like, based on my previous photos of it. I replied that that was because I had made a major error in cutting it out! 😛

Luckily I do err, usually, on the big side, so I have had room to re-cut the pieces to more closely resemble the instrument the gig bag is being made for.

Here is what it looked like an hour ago. It has undergone some more refinements in shape since then!

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Here the psaltery is inside the gig bag in progress… Just ignore the terrible hand-sewing–it will all be hidden away inside!
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Since taking these photos, I have trimmed down the ‘top’ of the gig bag to be more in line with the top of the psaltery. But I’m not aiming for precision–just a nice useful bag!

You are mostly seeing the inside of the bag, the lining side. The patterned material will be the outside of the bag, and a lot of it is left over because I intend to make a flap with Velcro at the closure, which will sit at the top (the left side of the psaltery looking at the photos). Then I will attach a backstrap to the bag so that I can sling the bag over my head with psaltery inside, where it will rest easily on my back while I wander around the lanes of the Pennsic War. At least that is the plan and the hope! 🙂

The other side of the exterior fabric is just as nice as the side I elected to use for the main body. I will probably use that ‘second’ side for the pocket, and maybe the flap if I sew the flap on separately. Please excuse the blur–working with all these layers of heavy cloth has made my hands tired and my tremor more noticeable.

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It will be awhile before my next update on this bag, because I will soon start to work on a couple of Viking smokkr, or apron dresses, which go over the basic Viking underdress. Here is a look at my first smokkr, which I made last summer. I will use it in part as a pattern for the next two, but with improvements.

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Plus I have lightweight linen on the way to make two more underdresses that will be cool in the hot weather, both for Spring Coronation in May and at Pennsic in August. My first underdress is the blue one, above, and below, in a detail. Janet VanMeter helped me dye it from gray to a pretty, soft blue.

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There is a funny, or maybe sad, story about the blue dress. As I was starting to apply the trim by hand to the neckline (also finished by hand), the thread of the neckline started fraying apart! Oh no! 😦 You can actually see the thread unraveling at the back of the neckline here.

I had to re-do the entire neckline, although the trim did help to hold it in place. Guess what the mystery cause was?

I was using thread that had belonged to my Mother and that was probably well over 50 years old! 😛

Now I’ve asked my friends to let me know if the seams in this dress are coming apart when I wear it at events. And I’ve gone through my thread collection and weeded out all the ancient thread. ❤