(lively music) - I really like the research as much as I like creating at the end, so that's why I call myself a historian artist.

My name is Stephanie Anderson and we're gonna talk about historical textiles, mostly from the Nordic countries.

I've really done a lot of research.

Everything I do is very historically accurate.

I study the original notes and they're in different languages, of course, and sometimes they're handwritten.

So it's a lot of work, but it's really worth it.

And I'm known kind of all over the Scandinavian world and all over Europe and the United States.

I'm a knitter.

I learned how to knit from my grandmas, and for me, it's a connection to history.

I really love creating something that's exact, historically accurate and then sharing what I learned.

I teach classes.

My pieces go to museums or TV shows or for educational purposes, and I really enjoy sharing what I've learned along the way.

The textiles that we're gonna talk about are mainly from the late 700s to about the mid-800s, but the Viking Age went from the late 700s to about the 1000s.

You have just little fragments.

You have to go from actually pieces of art that they had back then.

Their art back then were like little bronze statues that had a depiction of a woman and how her dress was, and if it fell to her ankles or if it was longer.

So you can look at pieces of art and come up with a whole interpretation of an outfit.

I really like to look at things under a microscope and then try and recreate it.

One of my first pieces that I really, really enjoyed was a hat.

So I saw on Facebook a Viking Age study group.

Somebody did a hat and they had their interpretation.

I thought the hat was pretty cool.

So I went back and read the original notes, and the original notes said that the pieces of yarn were very short, so I did my own interpretation.

I think my interpretation is much more accurate.

So it's looking at grapevines, looking at behind broaches, which are part of the pieces of art, and seeing how things were attached and how they pulled on the body to give an interpretation of how they could have worn it.

I took a class, it was advertised on Facebook.

I took a Facebook class, went by myself, and they asked me if I wanted to apply for a scholarship to go learn Viking Age textiles, and I did.

I got this scholarship.

I went to Norway and I studied Viking clothing, basically men's and women's clothing, and that's what got me into it.

And I just went down a rabbit hole.

I just could not stop after that.

(lively music) A Viking is somebody that travels.

It was actually a profession, not a person.

That era of people were in my history.

I went to Norway and that's where my family's from, and I got to see the farm that we came from.

And there were actually two Viking graves on the farm, which I didn't know that till I got there.

And the Viking graves are big mounds.

They've never been excavated.

They're still there.

It's still intact.

A few of us, about 20 of us, were asked to do a challenge and we are going to recreate a grave from Sweden.

And we recreate the whole thing, everything found in the grave, but it has to be as historically accurate as possible.

The lead archeologist sent me an email back and said, "I think you should book a trip over here to come look at some of this stuff."

So I did.

I went in June and I met with the lead archeologist and the textile expert from the historic museum in Sweden.

And we studied the Birka grave.

Things that haven't been documented and still aren't documented is the biggest surprise for me.

Like we turned over a broach and there was textiles on the inside, or we took out a piece of a bucket and there was a big piece of wool wrapped in linen.

And there's so much stuff out there and it hasn't been recorded.

So the Vesterheim Museum put out a call for people to submit something they'd like to study from their archives.

So I put in a submission to study women's pockets.

Pockets have really evolved from something you tie on.

Pockets were illegal for women for a long time.

So my studies at the Vesterheim Museum will be pockets.

I do not sell anything.

I have a backlog of people who ask me to produce stuff for them, and so I don't sell any of my work.

It's all for educational purposes.

I just did a talk over in Bemidji at the Sons of Norway, and people are surprised that somebody here in northern Minnesota does what I do.

I guess that's some of my biggest compliments.

Also, people just wanting my work for museums or asking me to be part of challenges because they know I do it right.

I think it's really important to understand how life was.

We have an unbelievably cushy life, but we struggle to produce the quality of artwork that they had in the Viking era.

The quality that they have, we cannot reproduce because we keep trying to do it with our modern era of things.

You can't do it.

To really understand that you think our modern times is so much better, but they had skills and knowledge that is unbelievable.

(lively music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.