As I wrote yesterday, there are several versions of the smokkr and just as there is a gathered version of the sark there is one of the smokkr.

The most well-known find of a gathered smokkr comes from Køstrup in Denmark where almost all of the fabric between the tortoise brooches is still in a condition good enough to be reconstructed. About 7 centimeters in the middle has narrow gathers which continue downwards, we don’t know how far. The only difference to the narrow gathers we have seen on sarks is that these are not sewn to a strip of fabric. As far as I have understood it the sewing thread is not preserved either (it was probably made of flax), så it is hard to understand if the gathers were sewn together like a smock or in some other way.

There is also a find from Norway where the gathering between the brooches is wider. In addition to this, Inga Hägg mentions gathered smokks in Birka, but I have no information about how they were constructed.

The gathered smokkr from Køstrup is also interesting because it has a nice tablet woven braid along the upper edge, between the brooches. The same accounts for several smokks from Norway and Iceland, but at least in most cases it seems like the tablet woven braids have continued outside of the brooches. In Birka the smokks are decorated with cords or thin strips of pattern woven silk instead. There too, the edging seems to continue beyond the tortoise brooches and probably around the whole smokkr. The cords from Birka which were used in this way had a triangular cross-section and could have been made by finger braiding. The back of a smookr from Hedeby, which I mentioned yesterday, has a braid made from six strands along the fitting seam. So there are several ways to decorate a smokkr along the upper edge, independent on if it was gathered or plain, but all of them are narrow. The widest of the tablet woven braids used in this way is a little more than two centimeters wide and the silk strips are usually not more than about a centimeter wide.

You can buy patterns for smokks here: Sark and Smokkr