The Bernuthsfeld Man's tunic is really a rather special affair - a very, very simple cut, but it is put together from only patches. It's not a heavily worn tunic that was patched up.

Most publications about the tunic are in German, including one published in one of the NESAT proceedings, which includes this overview picture of the tunic's front:

[caption id="attachment_3151" align="alignnone" width="640"] Picture from: Farke, Heidemarie. "Der Männerkittel aus Bernuthsfeld. Beobachtungen während einer Restaurierung." In Textiles in European Archaeology. Report from the 6th NESAT Symposium, 7-11th May 1996 in Borås, edited by Lise Bender Jørgensen and Christina Rinaldo, 99-106. Göteborg, 1998, p. 100.


As you can see, it's rather... patchy. The individual bits of fabric all show marks of wear from previous use, possibly in garments; there's lots of twill variations and only rather few plain weave bits. My count is 19 different fabrics, used for 43 patches. Some of them are folded double, others are used as single layer. The "cut", if you can call it that without there having been proper garment cutting, is as simple as possible.

Why that tunic looks like it does? Nobody knows - it is a singular piece (alas, like quite a few textile finds). With its patches, possibly in different colours, but at least in very different kinds of fabric, all looking old and worn, and with the very conspicuous checkered fabric #31 right on the breast in front, it would have been very obvious that this was not a "normal" member of society, though. There are a few late medieval images that show beggars dressed in very, very patched garments - so maybe this tunic was a beggar's work clothing?

There was some spinning today... in both black, and white. The reason for this is the exciting new and large project - recreating the finds (including the garments) that were found with the bog body of the Man from Bernuthsfeld (Wikipedia has an article about him, but only in German).

The body and the finds were off for research since 2011, but have returned last summer to the Landesmuseum Emden. The wish to show a better picture of the man, and how he might have looked in his lifetime, has led to this reconstruction project of the finds... which is totally awesome, and means a lot of (partly quite fiddly) work.

First step, after the extensive planning, is getting the fabrics. And, you might have guessed it - they are not your common garden-variety pieces, available without a problem in the next fabric shop. The tunic is put together from patches - more than 40! - and these patches are mostly from already worn fabrics, more than 20 different kinds.

Weaving small bits of fabric (a patch here, a patch there, patches, patches everywhere) is much less efficient than weaving a proper, large piece - which means that a lot of the planning was figuring out how large the individual pieces have to be, and how they can be woven without driving everybody involved utterly crazy.

The yarns are partly also a problem - which is the reason that I did a tiny bit of spinning. The rest of the yarns will be machine-spun, but as close to the original yarns as possible, and the weaving has already started. So exciting!

[caption id="attachment_3143" align="alignnone" width="442"] The yarn, dark and light - it is for a checkered patch that sits prominently on the breast of the tunic...