Latvian or Semigallian Head Dress                                                       Marion le Red

Background:

This item is a Semigallian/Latvian head dress or vainags.  Many of the primary sources for Latvian grave finds are in Latvian or Russian with a few in French or English so I could not read these. Instead, I looked at many secondary sources. In these sources the pictures of the head dresses had spirals either forming a ring around the head or were sewn into a head scarf.  Details on the grave finds all mentioned wool and some horse hair fragments with the spirals. Evidently they had plackets that spaced the rows of spirals. They also mostly had a bell or clacker on a tail the length of the tails ranges from very short not going below the neck to shoulder to mid back or below.

Here are the pictures I based my reconstruction on:

Process:

I started by making coils of 20 gauge cooper  wire and seeing roughly how many coils it would take to wrap around my head.  My guess was 3 coils, although in the end I actually used a little over 2 per row of coils going around my head. I asked my husband for a copper bar and he was nice enough to forge a piece of copper in to a bar that was a little wider than my coils.

I looked at the decorations on my examples and decided that for the 3 pointed triangle was a common design so my husband made me a stamp. Then he helped me stamp the edge of the bar.  I choose a drill that was about the size of the internal diameter of the coils and drilled 5 holes one for each row of coils in to the bar.  

After drilling all the holes I then sawed the bar into the spacers and rounded the edges of the bar with a sand belt. I made the triangle by cutting copper sheet into equilateral triangles that were approximately 3 times the width of the coils. Once the triangles were cut, I sanded the corners and sides smooth and stamped them with the triangle stamp.

The bar spacers and the triangles were then pickled in a vinegar bath to remove scale and oxidation. They soaked for 8 hours one day and then were rinsed. However, overnight a green patina started to form on them, so they went into another hot vinegar bath for 8 hours and then dried with baking soda to neutralize the vinegar.  Then they were washed and shined to look like a bright penny.

Once the copper was clean and shiny, I put the bars on a wool string that I sized to my head and tried to find an equal size between all of the bars. I then started to cut my coils into that size lengths or a little larger.  After cutting the coils I pushed the ends back flush to the coil and lined the coils up in size from smallest to largest.  See the picture below -before putting the coils on a single ply wool yarn:  

Then I put threaded both ends of the string through the tail and wrapped the end around the last ring of the coil before threading it back up the tail and tying the string off. The head dress with 2 of the 5 tails on it is the picture below.

References:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/85/66/1e/85661eaeaded46a9e7919770ed5e8b1b.jpg

https://www.etsy.com/listing/152319690/viking-womans-crown-diadem-fully?utm_source=OpenGraph&utm_medium=PageTools&utm_campaign=Share

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/b8/85/0d/b8850da47bc74b4763e4278562d6bf7e.jpg

http://visc.gov.lv/vispizglitiba/saturs/dokumenti/metmat/vesture_6_9/bildes14.shtml

https://www.academia.edu/4008784/Ancient_clothing_in_Latvia_7.-17_century._Lat      pg 60/61

http://swordmaster.org/2012/05/13/ob-odnom-tipe-pogrebalnyh-golovnyh-uborov-u-yuzhnyh-severyan-v-konce-x-xi-vv.html

North European Symposium for Archaeological Textiles X figure 47 that horse hair was woven to hold the head dress togeather.

https://www.academia.edu/4296979/The_possible_reconstruction_of_rich_Semigallian_woman_s_headdress