Fil’Anthrope – Lagertha la Guerrière

Lagertha the Warrior subscription kit from Filanthrope in France

I recently discovered that Fil’Anthrope has limited edition, subscription kits for various characters. You have to sign up for the kit for a limited period of time, for this kit from September 10 to October 23, 2020. This is a mystery kit where you get some information about the character and the kit and chart will be sent in parts in six parts until April 2021. The kit is quite expensive, but it includes everything you need to complete the design.

The previous designs have included Marie-Antoinette, Esmeralda from the Hunchback of Notre Dame, a Steampunk character and Cleopatra. I was drawn to this as it is a viking warrior, and there are quite few cross stitch charts available with Scandinavian, or more specifically Norwegian, imagery. There is a lot of “Nordic” cross stitch patterns, but these are most often samplers with simple designs which are more Swedish than Norwegian. As Fil’Anthrope is a French company I don’t expect it to be historically accurate, but I hope it is not too far off. The cover photo is at least promising.

I enjoy both history and old mythology, but I had to look up who Lagertha is, as she is not a character I recognized from neither history nor mythology. Apparently, she is a legendary character, who was a shield-maiden, the ruler of Norway and married to Ragnar Lodbrok. Her story was recorded in the 12th century in the ninth book of “Gesta Danorum” by the Christian historian Saxo Grammaticus. Even though most of the characters in the story of Lagertha are assumed to be more or less historical characters who lived in Scandinavia in the 8th or 9th century, it seems to be generally agreed that Lagertha is mostly fictional.

After falling down a Wikipedia-hole of Norse mythology, the English and the Scandinavian language pages are quite different, I finally discovered that the TV show Vikings is loosely based on the story of Ragnar Lodbrok, who is called Lothbrok in the show. I have not seen this show yet, but it is on my watchlist. This might explain why the name Lagertha was chosen for this cross stitch pattern. I also found that some historians theorize that the myth of Lagertha may have originated in the Frankish tradition, so I speculate that the character of Lagertha may be more well known in France than in Scandinavia.

As mentioned above, the story of Lagertha was written by a Danish historian in a book about the history of Denmark. She is supposed to be from Norway, live in Norway or the ruler of Norway, however, the other people connected to her story seems to be mainly connected to Sweden and Denmark. The main focus of what I learned in school in Norway were the sagas of the Norwegian kings and Norse mythology written by Snorre Sturlasson, so that might also explain why I have never heard this story.

Floss organizers

A while ago I bought a bunch of StitchBow Floss Holders from DMC when I was kitting my HAED Teddy Bear Stocking. The pattern calls for so many different colours that it required proper organization of the floss. I also bought a couple of the large plastic wallets that take 15 StitchBows. I am quite happy with the StitchBows, but I find the plastic wallets unpractical. It is difficult to put the StitchBows back in their pockets and the binder becomes too space demanding and hard to manage when it is open. I really wanted some kind of box that gave me a better overview of my stash. So I spent a couple of hours searching the Internet.

I first discovered that DMC used to make a box for StitchBow storage, but it is discontinued, so my search continued. After a while I found an online cross stitch store in South Korea that had exactly what I was looking for. The shop is called Yeidam Cross Stitch. They had plastic boxes that could take 100 StichBows each. The boxes can be seen here.

I have to admit that I was sceptical of ordering from South Korea, and the payment method was not very good. But the boxes weren’t very expensive, so I decided to take risk, and potentially eat the loss, and I ordered five boxes. That should be enough for the entire DMC line with room to spare.

It turned that I had worried needlessly and the boxes arrived in good condition. They took a while to arrive, but I believe the delay can attributed to transport and customs control.

when I first got the boxes I only had the materials for the HAED Teddy Bear Stocking and the first Passione Ricamo mystery, and I kept each kit in a seperate box.

This is a photo of my kit for the Passione Ricamo Fairy Mystery SAL 2012-2013. I removed the inside tray to make room for the bead jars, but I didn’t really need the tray for this one so it was not a problem.

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This is a photo of the thread for the HAED Teddy Bear Tree Stocking. I managed to fit all the floss in one box. It was a tight fit, but I got it all in and I find it a lot easier to use than the binder and plastic wallets.

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I have since bought more materials and I have found that I ended up using a little bit of one skein and a little bit of another one in the same color for another project, and this annoyed me as well as made it impossible to keep track of what I have. I have now put all my DMC into the boxes in numerical order. If a pattern calls for several skeins of one color over a large area, like a background, I will buy the skeins for that and keep them with the project, but for everything else I just use from the boxes. This is what they look like now.

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Yeidam also has smaller boxes, and I considered buying them for smaller projects, but for the moment I don’t see the need. I bought a DMC Gold Series StitchBow roll recently and I think it will serve my needs for transporting a project and if I want to keep a kit seperated I just use a ZipLock bag.

The only drawback of using the StitchBows is that I have not found a good way to keep leftover threads, so currently I just keep each thread in a small ZipLock with the number tag from the skein. This means that I can re-use the bags later for other threads, but it might get to chaotic and will need a revision later.

As I have recently bought my first silks I think I will use Floss-a-Way bags for those, but I have not made a definite decision yet.

New stash – August 25, 2014

I got a package in the mail from Sew and So today. I finally caved and decided to order two kits for Châtelaines from European Cross Stitch Company, but I also really like the Boudoir Fan, which is a freebie that can be downloaded on the Châtelaine website, and decided to buy the materials for it. This is what I got in the mail today.
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  • DMC 333
  • DMC 3812
  • Waterlilies 099 Cocoa
  • Waterlilies 131 Banana
  • Silk ‘n Colors 073 Green Leaves Lt
  • Silk ‘n Colors 112 Wild Violets
  • Mill Hill seed beads 02010

I have wanted to stitch a Châtelaine since I first discovered them a while back, and I bought patterns for a couple of the big mandalas when there was a sale, but I haven’t dared to start any of them yet. The main reason is that kitting one up is quite expensive even if you don’t use all the special materials. I live in Norway and the availability of special materials is quite limited, at least I have not seen any of the materials required for a Châtelaine in a shop here and I have to buy them online. DMCs are available, but if I buy online anyway I can usually get them for about half the price of what they cost in a shop here. As Norway is also outside the EU it doesn’t really matter if I buy materials from countries in the EU or the rest of the world. The most important thing to consider is whether you get over the limit of import where you have to pay VAT which is currently around $ 33,50. I really don’t mind the VAT, but you also have to pay a flat fee to the handler on top of the VAT for their processing of the package which is annoying. This means that you have to make sure that the value of your package is under the limit or far enough above the limit so that the flat fee doesn’t become a too large percentage of your of your expense. I had forgotten this when I ordered from Sew and So and I thought the package would be caught by customs, but for some reason it ended up in my mail box without any extra charge. Because of all this I decided I could just buy the whole Châtelaine kits from European Cross Stitch.

I ordered the kits for Workshop 01 – Jessica and Workshop 02 – Rice as well as the PDF-patterns. I received a confirmation e-mail, but I have not received the patterns yet, something that I am not very happy about. I understand that there might be a wait for the materials, but the patterns are electronic files and could be e-mailed at once. Anyway, when I decided to do the freebie and buy the materials for that from Sew and So I also bought the DMCs for the two Workshops and those are the two that arrived today. I tried to order a fabric from European Cross Stitch for the freebie, but I haven’t heard back yet about that either. I plenty of other stuff to stitch in the meantime, so the wait for the materials is really not a problem.