#smokkr

Its armor and weapons or massive bling - there's no in between with this kid. She finally approves of the dress.

hellooooo and welcome to Lucy's sewing corner! Long story short, over the last couple years I've developed an interest in viking historical costuming (hence my tablet weaving hobby), and while I am VERY new to this I recently went to a renaissance festival and took it as an opportunity to make an apron dress, or smokkr! Since I've posted some of my other fiber craft stuff here before, I thought it would be fun to post about the outfit here.

First off, HUGE shoutout to Tonje of tonjesvikinglife.home.blog for writing a very good tutorial on how to self pattern and make the dress. I came into this with a reasonable amount of sewing knowledge but not a lot of actual experience in making garments and found her instructions helpful and easy to follow. Definitely check out her blog post on how to make a smokkr even if you aren't interested in making your own for a bit of background on the garment and some great historical garb pictures. She's also got a video on the process if that's more your speed.

But anyway, with only about ten days until I would be at the ren faire, I decided that I was actually going to make the dang dress that I'd been thinking about. Typically a smokkr/hangerok/apron dress would have been made of wool, but it is Too Warm and wool is Too Expensive, so I decided to make mine out of a very nice medium-weight linen blend that I found at a local fabric store, pictured below:

Look at that color! I mourn the loss of Joann Fabrics every day but I am very grateful to the wonderful people at this particular store. Support small crafting businesses if you can, they are lovely and happy to help.

Based on Tonje's instructions and my desired end length for the dress, I needed 210 cm, which works out to ~2.5 yds (despite living in a country that uses freedom units I used metric for this project for the sake of being able to easily consult the guide). I ended up buying 3 yds and using some of the extra to make a hair kerchief, which you'll see in some of the later photos.

If I remember correctly the whole process of measuring the fabric (though I had already worked out my body measurements), drawing out my lines, cutting, and halfway pinning the dress took about 5 hours. It probably could have taken less time if I a) was less nervous about screwing it up, and b) wasn't trying to do this in a basement where only half the lights worked. Point is, if you generally know how to sew this is not a super time consuming project.

Tonje's instructions are written assuming you're handsewing which you Could Not Pay Me To Do, so the dress has a slightly bigger seam allowance of 2 cm, which is also what I used for the hem and the top (is it still a hem if it's at the top of a garment?). I put everything together with a basting stitch at first to make sure it fit, and then went over those seams with a smaller stitch. Enjoy this very cropped picture of the first time I tried it on.

Originally, I was planning on making straps with the same fabric as the dress but that seemed a bit time consuming, so I decided to use bias tape instead. Excitingly, this meant it was time to make accessories! In a shocking turn of events my local Michaels doesn't carry turtle brooches, so I got a bit creative with some shank buttons. Behold:

Once my hoard had been acquired, it was a simple matter of stringing the beads up nicely and attaching everything via creative safety pin use. I ended up just wearing a t shirt underneath since I didn't have time to make an underdress, and it worked very well! I'm extremely pleased with how the final look turned out, so please enjoy some pictures of it in action at le faire, terrifying editing and all.