I Turned Myself Into an 11th Century Norse Viking

Hi everyone, I'm back. Some of you might know that I was hospitalized for my mental health about five weeks ago, and I'm doing so much better now, as you can see. Thank you so much for your outpouring of love and care and support. All the donations that you gave me over on Ko-Fi, coffee, Kofi, I don't know how to pronounce this site, but over there helped me to be able to take some proper time off of work, which allowed me to recover, and I'm just in a much better state now because of that, and also the support of my friends and loved ones, my therapist, and also the nurses and doctors that helped me at the hospital. As a sort of summary of what happened, my mental health has been really great for a while now. I've made great progress in recovery with complex PTSD, and overall I thought it wasn't impacting my life that much, but then a bunch of circumstances in my life stacked up all of a sudden, including multiple weeks of sleep deprivation, so you can imagine that already alone really impacts people's mental health, and everything just stacked on itself, and finally my brain just sort of broke, is the best way I can describe it. I just couldn't see a way out of my situation, everything felt so incredibly weighty on my soul and on my being, and so I knew I needed to go to the doctor and go to a psychiatric hospital because everything was just too much, and this can really happen to anyone, even if you're very far along in your recovery process, even if you've been doing so much EMDR and so much somatic processing and IFS work and all these things, there can still be moments where everything in life just stacks up, whether or not you have CPTSD. So that's essentially what happened, and I'm really grateful that at least now I'm on the other side of things more or less, because it just feels like I'm coming back into myself again, and it feels like relief. When you're at the bottom of your barrel, it often feels like you're not going to get out of that spot that you're in, and my therapist was very impressed by how I bounced back fairly quickly, but that's just because really I think of my own resilience I've built up through years of recovery work, and then also the support network around me, which includes all of you. So thank you again from the bottom of my heart for all that support, it really means so much to me. Over the summer, my video schedule is going to be a little bit easier, as in I probably will be releasing a video every three weeks or so, and that's because I just don't want to rush back into things right away. I want to kind of ease myself back into work and take my time with things, but with that being said, I'm so glad that I've recovered enough at this point, because I've been working on a project for about two years now, and next week I'm going to be going on location to finish up this documentary that I've been working on, which I'm so excited to release. It's been a dream project of mine for really so long, and I'm just so grateful that it's actually finally happening now. So this is going to be the final shoot for it, and it's just in the nick of time. So it's been so great to be able to conserve my energy for that as well, because I really really didn't want to miss this shoot. It's been in the works for so long now, and in my schedule for quite a while. Even though I'll be traveling for that shoot, I am doing some other little smaller videos compared to this massive project that I'm working on that's super secret, but won't be for always, don't worry. So one of the smaller shoots that I'm going to be doing is giving myself an 11th century northern European or Scandinavian makeover, and I'm going to be leaving in a few days, so I'm gearing up to sew things. I already have the coat, which I'm going to be using from my medieval 14th century kit, because it works for other periods as well, since it's just the very straightforward center and side core design that you see throughout the middle ages. But I am going to sew a Norse apron dress, so that's what I'm going to be working on for the next couple of days. And then since my budget for videos has been lower due to everything going on in my life, and the decreased work and everything, I'm going to be trying to use as many pieces I've made before from my kit as possible, and then also borrowing some things from some of the friends that I'm going to be seeing at this shoot that I'm going to. It's a shoot, but it also involves reenactment. And all of this, for the bigger project, will make sense one day, I promise. One day very soon in the near future, in fact. So yeah, there's a little update about my state of being. I'm doing better, please don't worry. And I'm going to be jumping into sewing the apron dress now, and getting going on this project. All right, let's get to it. So in a whirlwind of preparations before I needed to leave for my shoot, I needed to get the garment at least drafted, cut out, and somewhat sewn before I left. I took my bust measurements, as this was the most important one in order to create the apron dress, and I began drafting my pattern. I'm basing my own dress off an interpretation of the Kastrup find from Denmark, which is most likely from the mid to late 9th century, earlier than the 11th century. But I suspect that designs didn't evolve very quickly at this point, especially not one like the way in which I will be constructing this apron dress. The reason this is technically an 11th century makeover is because of the beads that I chose for the final look, which you'll see later on. I decided to do a fitted back for the dress, and then do the cartridge pleating at the front of the garment, as you see on the fragment of Kastrup apron dress. All of the inspiration for this garment and the sources I utilized are in the description box. I also subscribe quite a lot now to the more spoken about theory that apron dresses were potentially more in the style of the Iron Age peplos, because it just makes sense to my brain. The more modern style of the tight fit apron dress with the lower straps just feels less feasible for the practicalities needed from the garment for the everyday person. Additionally, it makes sense that the apron style garment wouldn't evolve all that much from the Iron Age going into the Early Middle Ages or the Viking Age. So my own garment is a combination of the Kastrup find along with the more Iron Age thought process, which you'll see represented later on once I sew these straps. I made the garment from this lovely blue wool, which is very soft and just fine enough that it drapes beautifully. I started sewing the fitted back pieces together, and the shape of them is something like this, based off of an interpretation by Hilde which you can find in the description. I joined the pieces together with pins and then sewed them up with back stitches, but my time before leaving had come to an end and I had to halt the project here for now. You're about to see a little time travel as I ended up going to Iceland to finish up the documentary that I've been working on for the past two years. I live in Europe so the journey wasn't all that far and it felt so wonderful to be back in my community as I lived there for four and a half years. One thing I've learned about running my business, especially since I have my fingers in more than one pie at a time, is that I have to try and stay as organized as possible, which can sometimes be an overwhelming task for my very neuro-spicy brain. That's why I love Odoo, the sponsor of this video. Odoo is an all-in-one management platform offering over 45 interconnected applications designed to meet all business needs. For example, they offer project management, invoicing, website creation, human resources, and more, and are tailored to every industry regardless of the size of your business or whether you have a single project or an ongoing activity. Odoo is the ideal platform to manage or grow your business because they are centralized, meaning that all apps are in one place to simplify your business flow. They're integrated so all of the apps communicate seamlessly with each other and the user interface is intuitive and simple to use. Just look at these beautiful invoices that I'm able to generate with the help of Odoo. Their platform is completely scalable, so as your business's needs evolve, so do their applications. Odoo also automates manual and repetitive tasks to save you time and they are tailored to your location, so all your country's tax rates, currency, and regulations get automatically adjusted so you don't have to worry about it. Best of all, Odoo offers several pricing plans. The first application is free for life with unlimited hosting and support included. Then you can get access to all available applications for an affordable subscription. Click the link in the description and try out Odoo for yourself. Thanks to Odoo for sponsoring this video and I'm super happy with how my invoices look through their platform. Well, let's go end up in Iceland now and keep on working on this Norse Viking dress in the land of Vikings. Seems very fitting, doesn't it? So now I was officially in Iceland. Location reveal, woohoo! I participated in a week-long Viking reenactment event that some of my friends are a part of. I met these specific friends last year whilst shooting my documentary and then they swooped me up and have claimed me as their own now since. They're all trying to convince me to move back to Iceland. I borrowed another apron dress from my friend Ingibjörg, which is the yellow thing that you see me wearing, and I got to hemming the top part of the front of my apron dress because it needed to get pleated. Also this clip includes so many things I love in one. My dear friend Mats made me those nullbound wrist warmers that you see, and my other dear friend Devin made me that little 14th century pouch. I felt so much love wearing these amazing treasures from my beloved friends. Finally the top was sewn along with the back pieces all stitched up and I got to pleating, which meant I had to create a running stitch for a lot of rows to create even elongated cartridge pleats. This took me a couple of days of on and off work, but in the end the gathering process felt so satisfying. Everything lined up really nicely and the cartridge pleats were complete. For the straps I took a little scrap linen from my friend Hugrun, with permission of course, and cut out a strip to then fold the edges under to create little loops to attach some future tortoise shell brooches, a staple of the early middle ages in Scandinavia. Once cut out I whip stitched all the edges together and made four in total. Then I was still at the reenactment but wanted to do a little fitting to see how it all looked. I took off the lent yellow apron dress and exchanged it for my new blue one. I thought it turned out so incredibly cute and all that was left was to give it a proper hem. It ended up being a little shorter than I expected it to be, but that's okay, it is what it is and we don't even fully know how long these apron dresses were and also probably it was different lengths for different people, so it works. I traveled to the countryside of Iceland to my friend Hugrun's farm. She had a bunch of accessories that I could borrow as well, in addition to a bunch of cute animals to cuddle with. I don't think her cat liked this very much though. Now it was time to get ready. I borrowed these beautiful tortoise shell brooches from my friend Thore and this style was seen all throughout the middle ages. My beads are my own and they are based off of a find from Gotland in the 11th century, hence the dating of this whole look. I love the glass sphere so much and find it incredibly whimsical and a little bit witchy. For the headwear I have my usual 14th century Birgittas cap, which also works for this earlier medieval period as a base under a veil. I made this one earlier in the year from linen and then I got to cuddle with another furry creature. I am so spoiled. This meant though that I needed to do a little fur dust off before tying my apron dress with this tablet woven belt. I wear this one for a lot of different types of varmints and time periods because I just think it's a classic. Then Hugrun gave me her incredible viking pin stash to choose from as well as this tablet woven headband. My friend Bensi gifted me this beautiful ring at the reenactment which was so sweet. This silk veil is also graciously borrowed from Hugrun as it's meant to be a fancier interpretation of 11th century clothing. This one was plant dyed though I can't remember which plant. I tied the band around the veil and then took these lovely amber stone pins and secured the veil to my linen cap and the look was complete. Now it was time to go outside for the reveal. I keep biting my tongue. No, no, no, no, no, no, no! I keep biting my teeth. No, no, I keep getting that. Help!