Silk Girdle with Pewter Mounts

I found myself recently in need of a new belt for my 15th century wardrobe. Unfortunately, the vast majority of belts in the Italian images of the time are intensely boring. They are narrow, plain, and rarely have a visible buckle, much less any sort of decoration. I was, however, able to find a few instances of belts with what appear to be pewter mounts:

While these examples do not show much detail in the mounts themselves, they do seem to indicate that decorated belts of some sort were seen in the latter part of the 15th century in Italy. There are also extant Italian women’s girdles with far more elaborate decoration than is seen in any portraiture, so it is not inconceivable that the same is true for men.

Before I could start playing with furniture, however, I would need a belt to put it on.

I feel that leather belts are over-represented in the SCA, at least among belts with buckles, so I decided to make a silk belt instead. I hadn’t woven with anything but cotton crochet yarn before, so I had some things to learn.

The first thing to determine was what yarn to use. I had a hard time finding silk yarn in the size I wanted, pre-dyed, in less-than-enormous amounts. I ended up getting 2/30 black silk from Halcyon Yarn, which was not too expensive and came on 250 yd. cones. I had been looking for 2/20 yarn, but my choice was between 2/30 and 2/12, so I opted for the smaller gauge. In hindsight I think I should have gone the other direction. On the advice of my weaving guru, I doubled the warp and tripled it on the edges to try to give the belt enough body to support the metal mounts. A later belt made with the same type of yarn that doubled the weft as well came out sturdier, but I think just starting with the 2/12 yarn might have been easier. As it turned out, the belt was very thin and crisp, but seemed to be able to do what I needed.

When I calculated how much yarn I would need, I also failed to take into account just how much yardage would be needed for the weft thread, and I ran out quite a ways before the end of my warp. I got another cone and continued after a bit of a break. Unfortunately, my inexperience weaving with this yarn meant that the first 12 inches or so of my weaving was a learning experience that had to be cut off, reducing the total length of my belt drastically. In fact, it barely went all the way around me once I was done. This would require some creative design work with the belt furniture to make it work.

Though the goal of this project was to make an Italian belt, the best resource I have for belt furniture is the excellent Dress Accessories, c.1150-c.1450 (Medieval Finds from Excavations in London). Working from examples in this book, I decided to use an alternating pattern of cast pewter mounts in the shape of a lozenge and a chess rook, one of the charges on my device.

I cast the mounts with two rivets to make them more stable on the belt, but as it turned out the rivets were too close to the edge (especially on the lozenges) and were impossible to peen. I ended up trimming the rivets down and using them as staples, but that solution  proved to be fairly unstable as well.

Since my belt had come up short, I needed to cover the extra distance with an extra long buckle plate. There are extant examples of quite long buckle plates, if not exactly in this style. I certainly took some liberties in the overall design of the belt, but I think everything ended up pretty much inside the bounds of possibility.

For the buckle plate and strap end I needed to get my hands on some sheet pewter. Buying it would have been prohibitively expensive, and hard to do in the small quantities that I actually needed. Instead I decided to cast some sheets in a wooden mold with a shallow depression cut into it. The end product was rough, but serviceable.

I cut a piece of the sheet down to form the buckle plate, hammering and sanding it until I got a reasonably smooth surface. I cut and filed the end into a triple-arch shape, and decorated the face of the plate with a graver made from a deck screw and a wooden pen holder.

The strap end was made the same way, with the addition of pierced work done with a drill and needle files. Both the buckle plate and strap end were drilled and later attached to the belt with cast pewter rivets.

The buckle was cast in a stone mold with a wooden back. The loop was carved into the stone, while the bar was cut into the wood to offset it from the rest of the buckle. The bar required a lot of filing to get it round enough to function properly, but it did the trick in the end. The tongue was cast in a wooden mold made by drilling a hole between two boards. The initial cast was very rough and required a lot of finishing. The tongue is very thick, but I decided to play it safe, given the relative weakness of pewter compared with other metals.

One of the main goals of making this belt was to learn from my mistakes, and in that regard it was a great success. The finished belt works well and performs its primary purpose admirably. The silk is a bit delicate, and does not hold up to hanging anything from the belt. I would have preferred a bit more body to the belt itself. The jury-rigged attachment of the mounts is not especially secure, and a few of the mounts have worked themselves out, to be replaced by superior versions with central rivets.

I had originally planned to drill a hole in two of the lozenge mounts to use them as eyelets, but the width of the buckle tongue just didn’t work with that arrangement. Instead I just worked eyelets between the mounts, which seem to have performed admirably so far.

Despite the effort that went into this belt, the current plan is to melt down the mounts and remount the buckle and strap end on a leather belt with new central-rivet mounts.