The Pouch of Damocles: Tussling with Tassels

Pouches (with tassels!), Manesse Codex, early 14thc.

Having completed all the construction portions of the purse, what remained was detail and ornamentation (other than the central embroidery, ahem).  Tassels are one of the most common--indeed, nearly universal--decorative elements on extant 14th century purses, so that was an obvious place to start.  I hadn't made tassels before but they are dead simple (stack of thread! all same lengths! tie in the middle! fold in half! wrap the top! DONE!); the only question is how long you need to make the threads and how many of them you need to create the tassel of your dream, and this is something you can tinker with on the fly with no trouble at all, at all (unless you happen to be short of whatever floss you're using).  

Tassels. Or festive squid.

However, every extant tassel I'm aware of is not just then sewn onto the purse; they all--all--are topped with a decorative bead of some kind.  Indeed some don't have any tassels remaining, but do have decorative beads still.  So, this is not something I wanted to eschew.  Unfortunately, we again run into the problem where museum photos are usually a) not all that and a bag of chips and b) not focusing on the detail I am interested in.  There is one very fortunate photo from the Met, though:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Forel", accession no. 46.156.34a–e

I'm pretty confident in figuring these to be wooden beads wrapped in silk floss (which appears to be the same stuff, corrected for fading, as the red used in the pouch's embroidery--just as the green and straw tassel silk seem to be), which are then wrapped in gold cord.  Wrapping silk around a bead base is a pretty common technique, but we must not discount the possibility that the top of the tassel is just mummified in the red silk, and then the gold's wrapped around.  I feel that would lose a lot of its form over time, though, so I'm still putting my money on the bead option.  This leaves the question open of how exactly they constructed the whole thing, but for my immediate needs it was moot, because I did not have any beads anywhere near suitable for the purpose, and I didn't have time to go on a procurement mission.

Plan B was to try and replicate a couple of Germanic ornaments, which I think might be turks-head knots in gold cord formed over the top of the tassel (and I'm sorry I don't have better close-ups of these; see previous whinging):

Textilmuseum Sankt-Gallen,
inventarnummer 32234.  These
may be so large they qualify as
basket weaving rather than a
turks-head knot.

German National Museum,
inventory no. T518.  Three
of the other tassels have their
wrapping; the one to the right,
as you see, has its under-layer
visible; and one other tassel is
naked. Gosh I wanna see this
purse up close & personal.

German National Museum,
inventory no. T1213.  Only image I can find
is this one from the 1960s. :-/

So I hied me unto the Intarwubs to find tutorials, because there is a YouTube of anything.  Ensued then several hours of frustration and bits of string horribly knotted in un-aesthetic fashion.  There are approximately 3 hojillion tutorials on turks-head knots, but I could not seem to make any of them work.  (It's probably not helping that nearly all of them are aimed at either leatherworkers or people who mess around with paracord (apparently that's a thing)).  

Having lost one of my two remaining evenings of work to this failed quest, I figured to do something a little simpler on my maiden voyage, and just wrapped some gold cord around the top of the tassels.  This looked superficially pretty good, but as I learned later while trying to attach the tassels, the loops don't stay in place in any particularly tidy way.  Which, on the side, made me wonder: how did they get the wrapped gold cord to stay so neat in the Met purse above (for over six hundred years thank you)?  Glue?  Tiny couching that I can't see?  Moral imperative?  

Anyways, I threaded the long tail from the original self-wrapping of the tassels through a needle, and then up through the bottom of the purse, then sort of tacked it down.  This led to a rather unpleasant discovery, which was that I'd been a little too fine and close when sewing on the tablet-woven edges--there were a couple places where I hadn't caught the lining in the stitch.  Ooops.  Lesson learned.  

Final work was to go through and tidy up any rough bits at the ends of the braids, which there were more of than I would have liked, hey ho.  I expect that will go better with practice.

End result:

shiny.