While making the first version of my Borum Eshoj dress, I knew I wasn't cutting the skirt as accurately to the drawing as I could have been.  I admit I was thinking first about my mundane notions of vanity – which normally I really try not to do, because I think a big part of my historical recreation is setting my modern self aside. 

The modern self that is proud of my long thick shiny hair, my fit figure…cover your hair and put on the poofy full skirt, Greet, and see how it goes.  It's just an experimental game.

So, here's version 1.0, with skirt cut just full enough to fit the hips, and version 2.0, with skirt cut something like the drawing.  Version 2.0 has a circumference of 100", which I find is my comfortable stride minimum; any less and I run into clambering-around issues.

Both shirts are cut the same length, it's just that skirt 2.0 is sitting a bit low.  It ought to meet, like in 1.0  You can see the braid I used to trim the neck.*  The neck of shirt 2.0 is also 1/2" tighter all the way around.  It could still come up in the front – I'm not sure what weaving the slot integrally would do to the proportions of the neck opening, since I think the weave would stretch somewhat.  Here's the drawing:

I think version 2.0's fullness is much closer to this depiction.  One of my constant technical design concerns, also, is that clothing cost way too much in work hours** to have non-pregnancy-friendly women's clothes, so I wanted to test how the fuller skirt might work on a pregnant woman.  Isabella kindly played mannikin for me.  You can see the drawstring left on the outside – I'm not going to wear a skirt only belted on, sorry. (There is a drawstring in the checkered Huldremose skirt.)

We decided that the skirt worked much better above the 8-month bump, rather than below.  Isabella wears a larger dress size normally than I do, but is shorter.  She tried on the top, too, but it was too small in the shoulder/chest circumference for her.

We don't quite understand why there's a vertical slit in the top at all – it's not needed for breastfeeding, as it would be in a full-length garment, as one can just lift the hem of the short top.  Hald seems to imply, in "Ancient Danish Textiles", that it's left over from when the shape of these tops was influenced by the shape of an animal skin, but her prose is very sketchy.  I need to read more to understand the state of the art on this better.

*It's a four-strand braid of 3-plied linen thread, and I didn't have the heart to cut it, as it was just the right length to perhaps tie around something.  I might poke a hole in the other side, and then tie them together – the weave on the herringbone twill is certainly loose enough to not be damaged.

**Regarding the man-hour production value of clothing:  I think it's in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's Work, where she explains the studies in the 1950's, of remote Greek villages who still made feast clothing from scratch, using drop spindles, vertical looms, etc, and the discovery that making ONE set of clothing for each person in the village took far more village man-hours than food production.  Staggering to think about.  And since food availability is certainly related to population replacement (not just fertility, but also child survival) – I think people's clothes were too major an investment to bother having non-pregnancy-friendly clothing design, though I also think that people might not have had such a personal ownership of garments.