I have chosen to try out some different interpretations of the Hedeby bag.

First I will talk a bit about Hedeby bags. The name of the bag comes from the region where the finds have come from. Hedeby (in modern day northern Germany, also called Haithabu) was a viking era trading hub. They have currently only excavated a small portion of the site, but they have found a lot of exciting finds.

In Hedeby there have been a number of wooden handles found. The current theory is these are handles of bags. It makes sense, because these are found in pairs. Unfortunately the only thing that has been found attached to these handles is some fibres on one of the handles.

I have seen many different interpretations for a bag attached to the handles (and I have even made one myself with wool I have woven). But for this new interpretation I am basing my theory off the fact that some of the handles only had holes and not slots. For this interpretation I have chosen a net bag.

Net bags have been made throughout history. Unfortunately due to the nature of the material finds are rare, but we do see them documented.

Netting is a very quick and portable activity to do, and I was able to do a lot of this work on the train to/from work. I had so much fun making it I decided to make a second one.

I have worn one of these net bags around during an SCA event and found it worked really well. It kept my items safe and with my cup allowed it to drain without staining the bag. Because this is a knotted net it is very easy to repair if any of the strings wear out. The only downside I have found is I can’t carry smaller items as the holes in the net are too big.

For future projects I want to try getting a smaller gauge stick and shuttle to make one with smaller holes and see if that also works. This will also work well with one of the sets of handles that has a lot more holes than I was able to fill with the gauge stick I had. I also want to try making a Hedeby bag with sprang as well and see how it compares with the net version. I suspect the sprang will have a lot more stretch in it, but if a thread breaks it will be harder to repair.