kareina

The following is from an email to Paul, the ex-boyfriend who provided much of the hair in my beard. Having typed it up, I thought I would repeat it here.

I think it will amuse you to hear that I now have a full, luxurious beard, thanks to you, and my other ex, Crian. I made it by sewing your hair to some silk that covers my chin, his hair to the part of the silk that covers my cheeks and the little bit just under my lip, and my own hair (collected from my comb, and rescued before it went down the shower drain), onto the silk for the mustache. It took only 44 hours sewing time to make. What do you think?




More photos here. These photos were taken by my friend Wilhelm. He also took some with his old fashioned film camera (like one puts a towel over one's head before looking through the view finder old-fashioned), but those haven't been developed yet.

In addition to the beard I also have a set of "man muscles".

All this is the fault of my friend, Kim, who last winter told me "We are going to start a new Viking "Lajv" (the Swedish term for LARP) campaign this summer". Since I had just finished a sexy viking man's tunic for myself out of a lovely fine blue/grey wool twill with blue silk embroidered seams, a wonderfully soft linen twill under tunic, and a heavier wool twill trousers with red embroidered seams, I said "count me in".

Then I decided that since my viking clothing was all designed for a man, I should play a man, but a proper viking man needs a beard. Now, I could have just gone on line and purchased a beard. But a store-bought beard, even if made of real hair, is likely to have a synthetic base. I don't want plastic against my face for two minutes, let alone a weekend-long event, so I decided to make one with a silk base.

Since I had your ponytail you sent me years ago, and Crian sent me his when he cut it off, I had way more hair to work with than needed for one beard. The technique is easy. For the mustache I worked with one strand of hair at a time--fold it in half, thread the loop through the needle, take a tiny stitch in the fabric and put the needle back through the loop of the hair. Tug the ends and you have two strands, each half the length of the original, attached to the beard. Repeat. Often. For the beard I switched to a faster technique--take more than one strand at a time, but space them further apart.

With experimentation I discovered that five strands at once is pretty much ideal. Three is too few, four, five, and six are all ok, seven and eight work, but not as well. Every time I used 10 or 12 or more at once I was unhappy with the way the loop failed to cinch up around the hair and took it out and divided the clump into more reasonable sized batches.

Ideally I would like to go back and fill in more hair, especially along the line where the beard touches my cheek, so that the fabric is less visible, but there wasn't time to do that before the event (which was this weekend).

Once I started working on the beard I decided that I also needed to do something about my girly figure, since my tunic doesn't look at all masculine when I wear it normally (even if I am wearing a sports bra). This promoted me to undertake a set of "man muscles". Step one was to sew a very fitted linen bodice. Then I added pieces of terrycloth towel in layers over my waist and shoulders to change my curves, and finally added an unbleached linen layer over the top of that to hold it all together. I had planned to quilt it all together in the lines of rippling muscles, but ran out of time before the event, so that
will have to happen later (and before I wash it the first time).

Everyone at the event tells me that they had no problems remembering to refer to my character as "he".

I hope that all is well with you, and that you have had some good adventures this summer. I also encourage you to come visit me in Sweden!