Medieval Threads

Sleeve sources

2012-03-01T12:34:00.003-08:00

The sleeves for the 12 Hour dress are really simple - big rectangles with an s-curve cut into the top. They probably should be a little narrower than they are, as cut there are 2 pleats just back of the top shoulder, which does not seem to be a typical style for women's sleeves of the period (1410 or thereabouts). Whatever, it's not unheard of and it hangs well, which is really the main thing.

As far as sources, here are two. There are more, but these are the on-line ones that I used:

April from the Les Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry :

There is another very similar sleeve, but with dagged edges, in Bibl. de l’Arsenal, ms. 664. fol 47. which I cannot find a picture of to link to. There is a picture of it here on page 7.

The 12 Hour Gown

2012-03-01T07:40:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday I decided to drive up to the DC area for a an event in Fairfax with my laurel's husband. After going through my pile'o'garb, I decided I didn't have anything to wear that would go with my new circlet and would attempt to make something suitable for an indoor, semi-dressy event on Friday.

So I did.

Picture Project Runway-gone-Medieval style madness, but I did it! The red wool over-gown was started Friday morning and totally finished less than 12 hours later. Nothing is glued or safety pined. Granted, the seams are serged and I already had the base pattern from making the green linen kirtle, but I'm still pretty pleased with myself. The only visible machine stitching on the outside of the gown are the buttonholes.

Unfortunately I have lost just enough weight since making the kirtle that it no longer supports me the way is should, so the whole thing will need to be taken in a bit sooner rather than later. Also, the neckline on the overgown needs to come down a bit and I will eventually want to replace the buttons with something a bit more authentic (there are plain silver shank buttons on there now, not terrible but not quite up to standard either). The green kirtle under this gown is the straight front pattern, which I find to be less flattering on my body than the curved front version. I think I look about 4 months pregnant in it, no matter what I do to suck in my gut or stand straight. This doesn't seem to be as noticeable in pictures of the curved front dress, but part of that may also be because that particular gown has a waist seem, which generally has a slimming effect on me at least. Once I get the whole thing taken in, perhaps it will be a bit more flattering.

Pouting

2012-02-16T08:51:00.000-08:00

I had a very lovely discussion with some fellow weavers at KASF about my need to find a smallish table loom to do sampling on. It's really a pain to warp up the big floor loom to do a small amount of weaving to test thing like set and thread suitability, especially since there is so much warp wasted on the bigger looms. Imagine my joy when one of those weavers found a perfect loom, in wonderful condition, for sale near by for a really fantastic price! And my little business had been doing well enough that I could have totally swung the cash. Well...then Tuesday I was working away on some cornhole bags (bean bags for the non-initiated/tailgating redneck types, yes I am bitter) and my sewing machine decided to throw a fit. The tension has gone totally bonkers. Back to the repair shop it went, only to be told it's pretty well done with it's reliable and useful life.

The good news is I now have a beautiful new babylock that should last me a good long time, even sewing cornhole bags and other thick fabrics. The bad news is no loom and no money (anyone need a knitting needle case?) So I am very sad and sort of pouting about the whole weaving situation, I really was hoping to get started on the Perugia project in the next week or two but oh well. With some luck I will be able to go visit a friend who has a table loom for a couple of days and do the sampling there.

In the mean time, before the great Sewing Machine Disaster I was able to order all the linen for the DH's new suit of cloths so I can at least get started on that. With a spanky new machine that will sew things nicely too! Yay for that! I've started looking at briaes patterns and images. The pinboard is here if you are interested in what I'm finding. I'm learning towards a style like that seen at left, which is from Tacuinum Sanitatis (BNF Nouvelle acquisition latine 1673), c. 1390-1400: making millet bread (fol. 56). Since he will have chauses over these rather than split hose, some extra length in the leg (as opposed to the brief style that you see a bit latter) will be more modest. The super long ones with the weird floppy legs seem like too much for the poor boy to deal with. This is a nice compromise.
The plan is to make one pair, make the chauses, see how it all works, then modify the briaes as needed. He's not a big event-goer but he'll still want more than one set of these. There are a couple of camping events I can get him to in a year so he needs enough manties to get through a weekend.

Perugia brainwaves

2012-02-05T04:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was KASF (Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival, an SCA event dedicated to all things artsy) and I had the very great pleasure to share my display space with some of my most favorite people from the northern part of the state, who I hardly ever get to see. We're all apprentices, and all interested in the same things though with a focus on different time periods and geographic regions, so it's always fun to talk and see what we've all been working on. We're also at different places in our skill sets and research, so it's fun to share sources and help each other out.

Besides, there are only so many people in the world who would get it when you mention that you want to eat a lot beets sometime to see if that really will turn your cloths pink, and not only that but then make plans to try it out with you.

Anyway, I'd been mulling over my Perugia towel project, and one of the women had what may be a solution to the very slow and tedious process of picking up every single blue pattern row with a pick up stick! And it might actually be period! Opphampta weaving is something she's been doing on her drawloom, but you can do this on a 4-shaft loom like mine with a set of tie-up sticks and a sword. The idea, as far as I was able to gather in looking at the book while at the event, is that you tie up the draft for the pattern section on these supplementary sticks behind the sheds using string heddles. The sticks rest on the warp while you weave the plain weave sections in whatever pattern you are doing, then when it is time to do you damask or opphamta pattern, you pick up the appropriate sticks, slide in the sword to create the shed, throw you contrasting weft, and proceed. No more picking up each row and counting out each row by itself! Yay! Still slower than plain weaving but a whole lot faster than the other way of doing this, and totally within the skill set of the people who wove the original towels. I suspect this will work better for the more geometric designs, which is what I want to do for now anyway, but it could be set up to work for the more complicated patterns too.

I also got a copy of a whole book dedicated to the cotton industry in Italy from 1100 to 1600 lat week, which I am very excited to start reading. So far I've only thumbed through it, but it looks like it's well researched and should be an interesting read. Since cotton was used in these towels, it will be useful to know more about where it came from and how it was produced as I write my documentation. I'm also hoping to find out how else cotton might have been used during that period. From my thus far very limited understanding, it was fairly expensive stuff, but it was cultivated in parts of the Mediterranean. And interestingly, according to Marion at The Curious Frau, who is one of the most knowledgeable people about late period German costume out there, cotton was used to make those fun German headdresses that look like a doughnut stuck on the back of your head.

After all this, I still really wish I had an 8-shaft table loom to do some sampling on. Oh well. If anyone would like to buy me one...or failing that if you see a good deal on a used one that is somewhere on the east coast, do let me know!

MOL Band 142 Redux

2012-01-28T16:05:00.000-08:00

This particular bit of tablet weaving was really annoying me, I've been getting thing together for KASF next weekend and realized that since I did the snartemo trim for the DH I have not managed to tablet weave anything useable. Which is just sad and pathetic. Partly I am afraid of silk, it's expensive though not hard to come by if I order it. But so expensive!! And who wants to use up pretty, pretty (and expensive) silk on something that comes out badly?

My Laurel had recently had some good success using bamboo instead of silk for some weaving, it's not quite the same but has a similar hand and drape, so when I was home in November I stopped at Village Spinning and Weaving and got some 10/2 bamboo in a nice reddish brown color. At $14 for 900+ yards, that's a pretty good savings over a similar amount of silk. I've got plenty to play around with and screw up. So last night I warped up enough to give the MOL 142 band another try. This was supposed to be a fillet, to which I will eventually sew some nice pewter beads which look like belt fittings, much like the original once had.

Well, after weaving a few inches I can safely say my problem with the first band was most definitely the stupid cotton! Getting a neat selvedge without weird little lops poking out just wasn't working before, and now it's not a problem. The whole thing is much smoother and neater and overall I am a lot happier with how it's looking. Suffice it to say, I'm going to have to get more of this stuff for playing around when I am afraid of the silk. And I'm not a lot less hesitant to warp up some double face trim, to get started on that project and make a pair of garters! Yay for progress!

I'll post some pictures of the new band once I have a bit more done. It's only going to be long enough to go around my head so I don't expect it to take too long to do.

Perugia towel research

2012-01-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

I'm finally starting to make some headway on my long-delayed Perugia towel project. This is a Very Good Thing Indeed, as I think it will be a fun challenge and produce something useful and (hopefully) beautiful in the process.

I'm starting to compile my visual sources on a pintrest board, a new (to me anyway) tool that I find wonderfully useful for this sort of research and also totally addictive. What a great way for visual people like me to keep links organized! Hurray!

Anyway, I did the indigo dying for the cotton contrast bands yesterday with very good results. The blue came out nice and bright and even, so that's ready to go. I have 3 tubes of 40/2 linen ready to go, which should be more than enough for one napkin sized towel. I'm just starting to wonder if the 40/2 is too small. 20/2 is definitely too big, but I can't seem to find anything in between. Last year I was given a tube of what I think is 30/2, but I'm not sure and can't find more anywhere anyway. Gah. Hopefully the 40/2 will work, that's the best I'm going to get. Having to work at 48 EPI or small is a little terrifying, especially when I get to thinking about the pickup part (the blue bands are all done with a pickup stick, by hand), but this is supposed to be a challenge after all.

If you are at all interested in these towels, here are some on-line sources that might be of use to you:

http://larsdatter.com/perugia-towels.htm - tons of links to extant towels and art work with towels in it
Perugia Towels - a blog about Perugia towels and the weaving techniques used to make them. Lots of useful information
Bibliography of Sources - Thora Shaprtooth's bibliography of sources on Perugia-wares. Very helpful.
Affordable reproductions from Historic Enterprises. Sort of makes me wonder why I want to make my own sometimes...

A&S 50: 47- Indigo dye silk and cotton - modern method

2012-01-26T11:31:00.000-08:00

Fibers before dying

Picking up where I left off with mylast attempt at dying with indigo (working with wool and linen), I decided mynext attempt should focus on cotton and silk fibers. The cotton will eventually be used as thepattern weft for a Perugia towel and the small amount of silk will probably beused for some tablet weaving experimentation.

As has already been discussed,indigo is a close chemical relative of woad, one of the earliest knowndyestuffs used in Europe. It is uniquein the universe of dyestuffs in that it requires no mordant to produce bright,colorfast shades of clear blue. Thismakes the dye process relatively simple, in that the fibers to be dyed requireno pre-treatment, however development of the dye vat can be a very complicatedprocess as all oxygen must be removed from the water in order for the indigo toprocess and adhere to the fibers.

Having attempted to use achemical-free method of developing the vat and failed miserably, this timearound I opted to use the simpler, modern method relying on color run remover. While not a period process, this posesseveral distinct advantages; first the smell is limited to that given off bythe indigo alone, and second the dying entire process can completed in a fewhours rather than a few days, thus further limiting the unpleasant smells. I can finish my dying and air the house outwhile my husband is as work, and he will be none the wiser to the day’s noxiousactivities! (Did I mention the indigostinks?)

Stinky, stinky indigo paste

The process:

Materials:

  A total of 8 oz of fibers (I dyed 2 oz ofcotton, .5 oz of silk, and approximately 4 oz of handspun alpaca and still hadusable dye in the vat)
  10 grams indigo, ground as finely as possible(my indigo is in chunk form so I ground it myself in a morter)
1 tsp washing soda
1 oz color run remover
  Small jar
  A crock pot that will never ever have food in itagain
  Spoon

"bloom" of scum after vat has processed

I set fibers to soak in warm water. While fibers were soaking, I ground myindigo and added it to the washing soda in a small jar. I mixed this with a small amount of boilingwater to make a paste and stirred to dissolve all the particles. I then added water to my crock pot sufficientto cover half my fibers at a time and the color run remover and set it to “low”to warm up. Windows were opened and thekitchen fan was turned on to start airing thing out as the indigo stink wasalready getting bad.

After 30 minutes, I added theindigo to the crockpot carefully, trying not to introduce any air bubbles inthe process. There was grit in the bottomof the indigo jar, so I spooned a bit of the dye vat water into jar to get thisout and added it to pot. I gave it all agentle stir, and let the whole thing sit for 45 minutes to develop.

A thick scum of indigo had formedon top of my vat so it was difficult to tell if the dye has turned thegreeny-yellow I was looking for, but with some gentle poking it looked allright. This bloom of scum is apparentlynormal and cannot be avoided. Not surehow the dye book authors get their nice clear vats for the pictures, but thereyou go. The cotton and silk went infirst and set for 20 minutes. They cameout beautifully, with a deep rich blue on the cotton and a vibrant blue on thesilk. I had a few white spots where Ihad tied my skeins too tightly, but I repositioned the knots and dip dyed thosesections for about 10 minutes and the skeins are more even now.

Finished yarns, alpaca, cotton and silk

The alpaca went in for 20 minutesafter the cotton and silk were finished and came out a grayish blue. This is I think because it started out anatural tan color rather than white. Again,the take up was a little sparse where I had tied the skeins too tightly.

Learnings:

I need to tie my skeins more loosely to get moreeven dye take up
You can stir the vat! Just really really carefully
Indigo stinks, did I mention that already?

Sources:

Dean, Jenny. WildColor. Watson-Guptill Publications,1999.

Bingham, Gayle. WoadDying. Medieval Textiles issue 29.Sept. 2001. (http://www.elizabethancostume.net/dyes/medtex.pdf)Last visited Nov. 18, 2010

Kolander, Cheryl. Dying with Indigo – Natural Fermentation Vat. (http://www.aurorasilk.com/info/indigo_tutorial.shtml)Last visited Nov. 18, 2010.

Priest-Dorman, Carolyn. Colors, Dyestuffs, and Mordants of the Viking Age: An Introduction

(http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/vikdyes.html)Last visited Nov. 18, 2010.

A project for the DH

2012-01-25T15:37:00.000-08:00

The DH does sometimes come to events. Not often, and mostly local ones, but he does come with me. So he needs cloths to wear that meet my own personal standard of authenticity but also don't take up so much of my time and precious fabric that I resent them not getting worn very often. Or as often as I would like them to get worn.

Image after Norlund, from M Carlson

Anyway, he came with me to our local 12th night celebration this weekend, and something about that event and my glee at receiving my fabulous turn shoes in the mail has got him wanting new cloths to wear. He wants a G63. For those of you not familiar with this term, this refers to a specific men's garment dug up in Greenland that dates to the later part of the 14th century. This is fine with me as it fits in well with my own persona and most of my own garb, and it's a garment I've been wanting to make anyway. Plus he will look good in it.

I'm wondering though, there is some weirdness with the sleeve shaping, namely a (seemingly) random vertical seam at the elbow and triangular elbow gore filling out a space where the bottom half of the sleeve is not quite as wide as the top half. There is also the usual gore at top of the sleeve typical of the Greenland gowns. I'm wondering if this elbow seaming has any actual purpose or was done due to fabric constraints? It's a pretty full sleeve so I don't think the elbow gore is there for movement, besides which it's the wrong shape, or at least appears to me. If I have the right sized fabric, would it be wrong, from an authenticity point of view, to simplify this by eliminating the elbow piecing and making this a two-piece sleeve like all the others?

At least he's willing to wear proper chauses and braies with this thing, that makes it so much more fun me! I've got to find him some better shoes though. Ordering some off-the-shelf probably won't work to well for him though as his feet are quite wide and all the turnshoes I've found so far run a little narrow. We'll figure something out I'm sure.

A&S 50: 43 MOL band 142

2012-01-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

The original band fragment was found attached to a plaitedhair piece and would have been used in styling the hair. The silk band shows evidence of having hadmetal plaques or other ornaments sewn on to it on intervals. The band would have been worn with the artificialhair hanging down the sides of the face in looped braids, a fashion popular inthe 1340s.

The structure of the band closely resembles plain tabbyweave. This effect is achieved bythreading the tables through two holes diagonally opposite each other andturning the cards ¼ turn, alternately turning the cards forward and backward The original was 26 tables wide, with two edgetables on either side threaded through all four hole S-direction. These edge tables were turned continuously forward. The band was woven in plied silk and measures10 mm in width with 46 weft picks per centimeter.

My first attempt at this band was done in purl cottonusing 26 tablets. The turning pattern isquite simple however I found the thread to be quite difficult to workwith. I was never able to get an evenselvedge or anything close to the dense weft pack seen in the originalband. After much wringing of hands ofgnashing of teeth, and some consultation with more experienced tablet weavers,I determined that the difficulty lay in my choice of fibers. The cotton is simply too sticky to work wellwith this particular weave. I was ableto weave enough of the band to get a general idea of what the weave looks like,but will need to use silk or something with a softer hand if I wish to make anyuseable length of this band.

Sources:

Crowfoot, Elizabeth. Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450(Medieval Finds from Excavations in London). Boydell Press, 2001.

Crocket, Candace. CardWeaving. Interweave Press, 1991.

Lewins, Shelagh. TheAncient Craft of Tablet Weaving: GettingStarted (http://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm) Last accessed Nov. 18, 2010.

Gaslee, Sarah. BasicTabletweaving. (http://www.stringpage.com/tw/basictw.html)Last accessed Nov. 18, 2010.

A&S 50: 33-Rosette Twill

2012-01-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

Twill and its variants make up nine of the sixteen mostly commonlyfound textiles identified in Bender-Jorgensen’s North European TextilesUntil AD 1000. In my continuingeffort to understand weave structure and improve my weaving skills in anhistorical context, exploring some of these twills presented an excellentchallenge. The rosette twill inparticular appealed to me as both a technical challenge, and an attractive andappealing pattern.

Forthis project, I decided to make napkins using two colors of weft on the samewarp. Using ivory cottolin warp set at24 ends per inch, I wove two lengths of the same pattern using tan weft andlight green weft. Unlike some of myprevious twill experiments, this time I used a floating warp to ensure a neatselvedge, which was a big help.

Learnings:

Floating warps really do make a huge difference! My selvedges not only are free of the weird floatersI was getting on the Greenland twill, but they are much more even. It took some getting used to and slowed me upa bit at first, but once I got used to working with them it was worth the extraeffort.
Patterns like this are far less forgiving ofmistakes in tredling than plain twill. You can see every little mistake. My usual strategy of warping up twice what I actually needed too to gettwo usable napkins proved to be a good one here, as I had quite a few tredlingmistakes at the beginning.
I need to do some work on color combining. I was surprised that the tan and creampattern had better contrast that the green and cream. This is not at all what I would have thoughtwould have happened. I suspect that doing white-on-white would have a better effect that I had initially thought as well, given how nicely the cream/tan combo came out which bodes well for my Perugia project.

Sources:

Bender-Jorgensen,Lise. North European Textiles until AD. 1000. AarhusUniversity Press (December 1992)

McKenna,Nancy. Medieval Textiles: North EuropeanTextiles (http://www.medievaltextiles.org/lbj.html)Last accessed Jan. 19, 2011

A&S 50: 14 Learn Fingerloop Braiding

2012-01-20T10:10:00.000-08:00

Fingerloopbraiding is a method of weaving narrow braids or cords using loops, or bows, ofthread held on the fingers. This methodof making cords reached its height of popularity between 1200 and 1600 inEurope, but fingerlooped cords were used much earlier and continue to be usedin some parts of the world today. In themiddle ages, fingerlooped cords could be found on a wide range of objects, frompurses to hairnets to seal tags. Asthese cords are so useful, particularly for closing pouches and the fronts ofsupportive gowns, I decided that it behooved me to learn to make at least a fewof the simpler sorts of fingerlooped cords.

Usingthe naming conventions from Tak V Bowes Departed I have attempted and amnow reasonably comfortable with five different fingerlooped cords, “A LaceBaston,” a two-colored cord from the Harley manuscript dating to 1475, “ThisFlat String,” another two colored cord from ToMake Pursestrings dating to c. 1600, “Two Strings at Once” also from Harley, “ABroad Lace of V Bowes,” from Harley, and “Round Lace of V Bowes” from Harley. All are distinct, with the except of the LaceBaston and the Round Lace of V Bows, which are worked in exactly the samemanner save that the Lace Baston used departed bowes, that is bows in which twocolors have been joined together. All ofthese cords use only five bowes.

Morecomplex cords are possible and many are described in the extant braidingmanuals which use more than five bowes, some of which require two people tomanipulate the bowes. I have not yetattempted any of these more complex braids but am looking forward to finding abraiding partner so that I can give some them a try!

Learnings:

Braiding is not thathard once you get into the rhythm of it
Small dogs andfingerlooping do not mix at all well. Nor do curious cats
The phone willinevitably ring in the idle of a long braiding session
You can make much longercords by working your braid from the middle of the bowe. It’s not as scary as it sounds, it just takessome time and patience to sort out the bowes when you start back up from thecenter to work in the opposite direction. Your mileage may vary working on more complex braids but it works wellwith these five simple ones. This couldbe avoided if you had a second person to tighten up the braiding for you with asword beater or some kind as you worked

Sources:

Benns,Elizabeth et. al. Tak V Bowes Departed. Soper Lane. London, 2006.

Crowfoot,Elizabeth. Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450 (Medieval Finds from Excavations in London). Boydell Press, 2001.

Goddard,Andy. Fingerloop Braiding (http://www.bumply.com/Medieval/braiding01.html)

Priest-Dorman, Carolyn. Sample Fingerlooped Braids from aFifteenth-Century Manuscript (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/fingerloop.html)

Goslee,Sarah, Fingerloop Braiding (http://www.stringpage.com/braid/fl/fingerloop.html)

Swales,Lois et. al.. Fingerloop Braids. (http://fingerloop.org/)

The finished Venetian Coat and 12th Night report

2012-01-16T13:51:00.000-08:00

Here it is, in all it's glory! Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. For a weeks worth of work, it's not too bad. There are some minor tweaks with the fit I would like to do, and had I had more time I probably would have done a few things differently (doing a full lining for one thing, and side splits for another) but it looks good and the client was happy was happy and comfortable, which is the main thing.

12th Night was quite a bit of fun. I was a little worried about the drive down there, I have not been a car for that long since my surgery in August, but I was ok coming and going and am only a little sore today. Given all the walking we did on Saturday and how cold it's been, that's not surprising at all.

There were quite a few more merchants there this year than last, which was really a nice surprise. Eadric the Potter was set up, and I got a really beautiful 14th century ceramic cookpot for camp. Eadric does amazing work and is very knowledgeable, if you are not familiar with what he does you should check our his website and his Etsy shop.

I also found a new guy to buy reasonably priced reproduction buckles from! Hurray! Thorthor's Hammer does lovely work, and as I said is quite reasonably priced, which is novel for metal workers in this area. I got a really pretty little heart shaped annular brooch for $8. Score! Plus he has fibulae for Roman that don't cost an arm and a leg, so I will be able to replace the buttons on my tunica exterior.

Aside from shopping, I did enter my Eyelet Brick Stitch bag of Doom into the A&S display, along with the lampworked rosary, neither of which had made it to 30 Year or WOW last year. It was a little hard to watch people Picking Up The Bag (!!!) but nice to see that they appreciated the work that went into. I was awarded a silver nautilus in evening court for it too! For those of you not in Atlantia (or in the SCA) this is an arts and sciences award given out for an extraordinary achievement in the arts.

Now I've got to get myself together to KASF, it's only 2 weeks away! Gah! I'm not making anything new, or competing, but my display is a mess. I need to get organized and make sure I have all my A&S 50 stuff in some kind of order.

Coat Progress and new costume resource

2012-01-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

The coat and camica are done! Yay! The client came last night for a fitting last night and the coat itself fit well and she was quite happy, but I had failed to up underarm gussets in the camica, which turned out to be desperately needed, so I put those in this morning. That's what happens when you make a thing in 3 days with no chance for a fitting. It's much better now, and we were able to get it placed well enough to see that the neck draping will work perfectly. I may actually have the neck a little too wide, but that should be easily solved with a few pins. It will work out perfectly if she ever decides to do an actual Italian gown.

Sadly, in the joy of finishing the blasted project, I failed to take a picture. Not that it fits properly on my dress form anyway, about the only thing that would would be a costume from Downton Abby. I will get a picture of the whole thing this weekend though.

In other later-period costuming news, Kendra at Demode posted yesterday about a fantastic resource for those of you/us interested in 16th century costume. She found a scanned PDF of a book by Lucas de Heere with some really fantastic illustrations of contemporary costume, a couple of which I have not seen before (and I have done a lot of research into this period from my Faire days). What's really great about de Heere is that he's drawn common people, not just the aristocracy.

Turkish Coat Progress!

2012-01-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

The coat is coming along nicely! Last night I did the fitting and everything fit, which was a relief. Not that I don't trust my measuring and patterning skills, but it's always a bit scary when there is so little time to fix major problems. The sleeve looked great, I am very glad I went with the more fitted shoulder and sleeve shape. I think it will make a huge difference in the overall look of the finished coat, especially in the fabric, which is rather on the stiff side.

So, today I put the rest of the coat together, got the button holes made (by machine, I really think they should be button loops but I don't have time to make them that way), and tonight I will be doing the hand sewing. I have to sew on the trim, finish sewing on the buttons, and sew the hem. Not so bad really.

I am sort of debating about the trim. There is not enough the gold and pearl trim to do the fronts, but I can use it for the sleeves. I have plenty of the gold giump style braid, but it's a bit plain for the brocade. Either way, the fabric is rich enough (the pictures don't show it off too well) that the trim will just finish off the edges and add a bit of depth to the whole thing. I can't decide if I should just use the braid, or go ahead and use the pearl trim on the sleeves and the braid on the coat neck and down the front. I think using both might look a little funny, especially with the richer trim on the sleeve where it won't be as noticeable.

Any ideas?

New turn shoes

2012-01-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

My 12th Night present to myself arrived today - a pair of brand new bright red 14th century styled turn shoes! yay! This is my first pair of proper turn shoes and I do think they are going to take a little getting used to and breaking in, not having any arch support in the shoe to speak of is quite different than modern foot wear, and the bottom is very slick. Without the usual rubber bit on the heal of modern shoes, this might get tricky on carpet on certain linoleum floors. I ordered them from revival.us and am very happy all around. I think the color will look smashing with my green hose and blue garters! Now I just need to find/make/find someone to make for me some wooden pattens and I am all set.

Not much else going on to report...I made very little notable progress on the Turkish coat yesterday. I've decided to go with the Greenland/grand asiette style sleeve, as this makes more sense to me and will look better. The sleeves are cut, I've got the sleeve opening cut, the facings (I'm not lining the coat, it's made from upholstery polyester and she will roast to death with a lining, I did not pick the fabric) are attached and sewn down. Tonight I will fit the coat and figure out where the side gores need to be, tweak the waist and side seams, and mark the hem and hopefully finish this thing over the weekend. Then I can make the camica and be done! Hurray! Oh...the trim. There is trim. And buttons. Which I do not have yet. Sigh. It's always something.

Venetian Coat Sleeves

2012-01-05T06:37:00.000-08:00

Work is coming along on the Venetian coat. I've got it cut out (always an important first hurdle to overcome) and the center back gore is put in. I went with a basically rectangular construction, based on the pattern for Ottoman style coats given at the Renaissance Tailor because this seems plausible and I don't really have time to do a great deal more research. I did however skip the weird underarm gore thing, partly because I don't have time to figure this out and also because it does not make sense that this is how the Venetian version of the coat would be cut.

Here is my thinking...the lady in the Titian portrait is clearly NOT wearing actual Turkish clothing. The fabric is plain satin, which as far as I know was not a big thing in the Ottoman Empire at the time, the trim is wrong, and the fit is more constructed that what you see in the few illustrations of contemporary coats I've looked at. So, my thought is this is an Italian interpretation of what the Ottoman's wore, and thus cut more like Italian cloths. Given that, I've cut the body of the garments in two rectangles with triangular gores at the sides and center back, which squares with how similar robes are cut in Janet Arnold (sort of, it's at least plausible and makes good use of the fabric).

Which brings me to the sleeves and upper body. The original coat the lady I am making this for made is cut just like your basic early period tunic, with honking big gores under the arms (see the picture). This is all well and good, but produces a much looser look around the upper body than you see in the Titian painting, and as far as I know wasn't a commonly used construction method in the 16th century. So...what to do? A shaped armscye? Something more like the grand asiette style sleeve I've used in my fitted gowns, but looser fitting? Clearly some sort of set in sleeve is called for, the question is weather I want/need to use the gore in the back, and how set in it should be.

Acid dye fun and Venetian dresses

2012-01-02T17:54:00.000-08:00

So acid dye is Not Period, but I went and saw the Muppets and got inspired by all the fun Muppet-colored dye possibilities. Multi-colored rovings always remind me of Fraggles for some reason actually, usually not in a good way, but I think these turned out pretty well. For my first attempts at dying roving anyway, I'm pretty happy with the results. I think they will spin up into nice, good-Fraggle looking yarns.

I've got a total of 8 ounces in the each colorway, so there should be enough to so something of real significance with either color. Not a sweater, my dye pots aren't large enough for sweater quantities of roving anyway, but scarves and mittens and hats and things are certainly workable. Next up, more indigo! I need to do some cotton for my long-delayed Perugia towel project and some silk to compare the results.

In sewing related news...not much going on other than knitting needle cases and bags, but I am working on a Venetian Turkish coat thing for our local Baroness for 12th Night. It's all a bit last minute, but I think it will turn out nicely. The only thing I'm a little worried about is the camica layer. I think (?) it's just a regular old camica, but I have not done a lot of research on 16th century Venetian clothing so I'm not really sure how this should be cut so that it's reasonably correct, looks like the picture, and will not result in any unfortunate wardrobe malfunctions (mostly the last one).

I know there is a surviving Tuscan camica from the same period that is square-necked and cut roughly the same way as your basic tunic, but with but pooffy sleeves. This seems like it might be a good way to go. The Titian painting does not seem to show a heavily gathered (or gathered at all) neck line on the camica, just some loose drapes as though the shoulders are pulled up further than they are meant to sit. With the squared neck and some judicious pinning to avoid any unfortunate and untimely slippage, I think the right affect could be achieved.

ded

2011-12-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

Somehow or another I have managed to actually start a very small, itty bitty business! And the Christmas rush has been driving me nuts! That's what they don't tell you about working for yourself...it's all "you can set your hours" (not mentioning that they will be 7 days a week) or "you can work in you PJs" (because you won't have time to put on real pants). November was a good first month, December has been even better, and I'm hoping to keep the ball rolling into the New Year now that I have some product ideas that people seem to actually want. Yay!

Not that this has anything to do with this particular blog. :) Except that I am thinking about doing some hand dyed rovings, so that's sort of relevent. Kind of.

Anyway...I am exhausted! And totally ba-humbuging the whole holiday thing. Tomorrow should be the last day for orders I *must* get mailed, so then I can rest a little, maybe bake some cookies and try to get into the Christmas spirit, or at least into the I-don't-want-cry-I'm-so-tired spirit. Then maybe, just maybe, I will have time to actually make something new for 12th Night.

I ordered some really gorgeous new wools from Fabric.com last week (? I think?) when they were on sale for $4.99 a yard. Of course, I feel so fat and repulsive right now, the idea of making a dress out of such pretty fabric seems terribly wasteful, and I do have my blue linen houp I can wear. Maybe with the new hat I've been planning.

We'll see.

First, a nap. And some eggnog, heavy on the rum! :)

Our new baby

2011-11-30T14:44:00.001-08:00

I've been fairly busy the last couple of weeks working on things for my fledgling business, trying to get stock made up, filling orders, and coming up with new things to try. That hasn't let a lot of time or energy for historical sewing, but I'm hoping that once things settle down a bit I'll be able to establish some sort of new routine. It doesn't help that now that I'm fairly certain that I *can* weave, my loom room has been taken over by the newest addition to the household, the as-yet-nameless kitten. The DH wants to call her Patches, but I have an aversion to naming animals silly words rather than actual names. She was called Ellie at the pound, but that's the name of a friends dog, so that won't do. Right now I'm leaning towards Annie. So far we've been calling her Miss. Kitty Fantastico until we come up with a real name.

It's been a rough fall. Ok, to be honest it's been a rough year or two but I think the last couple of months have really been wearing on me. Not being able to get out of the house since the the surgery and having so much trouble doing even basic things, on top of the pain, the cat dying, and everything else has just got me down. Usually I try not to post about personal things here, but part of my lack of productivity and progress with some of my projects is that I'm feeling really discouraged in general. Working so hard and seeing so little return for it is frustrating, and it seems like that's what I've been doing on all fronts lately.

Rewind please?

2011-11-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

What a miserable week. I went to California for a jewelry show last week, something totally outside the scope of this particular blog but I've been trying to see if I can make profitable over the last few months. The show did not go well, but I'm not really sure why. It didn't seem like any of the vendors there were selling much, so as far as a learning experience goes it was kind of not that helpful.

Business matters aside, the trip sort of went down hill from there. Trying to get home on Sunday, the plane I was supposed tot ake out of LAX developed some sort of water leak and the flight got canceled, leaving me stuck in LA for 11 extra hours, with another 5 hour layover in Miami. When I did finally get home Monday afternoon (only 17 hours late and not having slept or eaten properly) I found my cat sitting on the living room floor in a puddle of her own urine and unable to stand up. The vet did what she could but she (the cat, not the vet) ended up having to be put to sleep yesterday morning. According to the DH Maya (the cat) had been acting strangely for the last couple of days and he hadn't seen her move on her own since before Saturday. I feel awful that I wasn't there for her, not that I could have done anything. Poor old kitty.

Anyway, the trip wasn't a total fiber waste. I did stop by Village Spinning Weaving and get some more Gotland for my never-ending warp spinning project. I'm trying to spin up enough to weave either an apron dress or one of the short sleeves Greenland dresses. So far I have 3 shades of Gotland for the warp, but I think if I warp carefully that won't be a problem. I will need to make sure I get all the same color wool for the weft or I'm going to have a crazy checked dress. I also got some bamboo to try out for tablet weaving. It's much less expensive than silk, making it less scary to work with and get wrong, but has a fairly similar hand so it should (I hope) work up better than the cotton I have been using for the London bands. I want to make a filet, similar to the one in the MOL book with the bits of fake hair still attached. That particular band did not work at all well with the cotton so hopefully the bamboo will improve things. Once I get the hang of things a little better I will move on to silk, I'm just not brave enough yet to spend that kind of money on a learning project.

Hat problem solved!

2011-10-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Maybe anyway...

The stiffening issue for my truncated hennin style hat has been really bothering me. I was trolling around the forums on Ravelry today for no particular reason (avoiding packing/laundry/cleaning) and stumbled across a post about some earlier period Spanish hats called toca. The relevant point is that they were stiffened with paper! Vellum to be exact, and there actually is one extant! Hurray! There is a good paper about recreating one here. The vellum makes so much more sense to me, especially after looking at the Spanish hats and the similarity in shape (somewhere between the hennin and a bishops miter).

That being said, I think using paper is not the best plan for durability sake and I don't really know if I want to try to track down vellum, so I will probably still use buckram. At least I now I have a better idea of some plausible base materials though, and that makes me feel better. I'm not making a modern substitution blindly.

Advice

2011-10-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

I need a new dress form. I have one. She is lovely. She is about 100 years old (literally, we can roughly date her to 1910 or so), which has it's uses but has a lot of draw backs too. The silhouette is all wrong for modern bodies and and I'm not really willing to corset her or pin into her to reshape her. Because she is old. I'd like to stop using her she will last longer as an antique and get a new, more adjustable, right-shaped dress form. The adjustable thing is important as I am really trying to loose some of the weight I have gained since my car accident, and now that I'm in the post-op world that should start getting easier rather than progressively harder. Plus I do sew for other people, in a small space, so the adjustable thing would come in handy when working for clients (so long as they fit within the size range for the form).

I've seen some forms at my local Hancock and Joann's which look like they would be ok for my current purposes priced at around $100, depending on the current sale. I think they are made by Dritz. Has anyone had any experience with these? Are they a total waste of money? They don't like like they would hold up a 45 pound houppeland terribly well on the adjustable stand, but I would think some clever use of PVC pipe would solve that problem. I've never found an adjustable stand that *would* hold up such a gown (at least not for long), even when I had the luxury of using industrial forms.

More hat pondering

2011-10-24T11:34:00.000-07:00


Petrus Christus, after 1460, Portrait of a Young Girl

So I've been poking around at all the Burgundian hat pages I can find (not too many, sad to say, though there are a few) and the current generally accepted "right" way to make these things seems to be willow, cane or some other basketry method as opposed to stiffed fabric. Huh. I suppose this makes as much sense as another else, we know they knew how to weave straw, we know they wove straw into hats, so why not? Of course, we also know they made felt and fabric hats and some of them (like the Phrygian style caps and loaf hats) are pretty architectural so I'm not really 100% convinced, but lacking any extant hats to look at, it's as good an argument as any.

What bothers me about this argument though is that many, if not all, of these cone type hats seem to be covered with fabric (though I can think of one that sort of looks like woven ribbons or a basket type surface, it's hard to tell). Covering woven straw or reeds with delicate fabric seems like a bad plan, as the straw would wear through some of the clearly very delicate cloth that's on these hats. Sure, you can pad it out to protect the cloth, but that makes for a pretty chunky looking hat.

I don't know. I have a lot of buckram so since I have that to hand and am not entering that hat in an A&S competition, I'm going to use that for the first version of the hat. I've always loved the simplicity of the hat in the Christus portrait, and the neck drape is all kinds of fun, so I might go with that look instead of the more formal gold thing in the original painting I'm basing the actual dress on. The black hat strikes me as less formal somehow, which I think would work better with my wool gown. The dates on the paintings are close enough that I don't think it will be a problem, plus the hats are very similar in shape and sitting in the same position on the head (the gold hat is a little more rounded in shape) so the style doesn't seem to have changed much.

One other interesting structural mystery about these hats is the loop. What are they for? What are they attached to? You can see in the Memling picture here, showing ladies with loops but no hats, that the loops appear to be attached to headbands or something attached to the hair, not the hat. It might be that the hat sits over the loop/headband thing and attaches to it, with the loop acting as a counterbalance. This makes a certain amount of sense to me. When I was in college, I had to do a theatrical version of a horned hennin as part of my senior project and it was very difficult to counterbalance. I solved the problem with some creative shaping in the back of the hat, which looked ok but prevented me from turning my neck in certain directions. That same semester we had to make these big bubble-shaped head pieces based on the same hennin idea and solved the problem with little close fitting caps that went under the whole mess, so perhaps the loop-band is serving the same purpose.

Duchie Award!

2011-10-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

I was reward to checking on all the blogs I like to follow today by finding out that Edyth at The Completely Dressed Anachronist nominated me for a Duchie Award! I now feel shamed into actually sewing something historical this week, not just making knitting needle cases and taking naps (why oh why am I so sleepy?!)

Anyway, the rules for receiving the Duchie Award are to post on your blog, in any order:

Five things you love about historical costuming
At least three blogs to pass the Duchie Award onto
A link back to the blogger who awarded you the Duchie

Starting from the top...five things I love about historical costuming. Just five?
Cloths as experimental archeology - I think is this is more obvious as applied to medieval and earlier clothing, but the same can be said for later periods of fashion as well, but you get a better sense of how people actually lived when you try to live in their clothing. Literally walking a mile in their shoes gives you a whole new insight into how it was to live/sleep/eat as an Elizabethan, Victorian, Roman or whatever.
Attention to detail - Unless you are lucky enough to wear couture, modern clothing is mass produced usually in sweatshops. The finishing is sloppy at best. Sewing allows me to focus on the detail work, finishing things properly. Historical sewing opens up a whole new level of detail, not just finishing the seams and paying attention to details of fit, but doing it in different ways than we use today.
Gotta love a challenge - Everything about period costuming, from researching to pattern drafting to sourcing materials is challenging. Some things are certainly easier to do than others, but there is always a way to make it better, more authentic. Even a simple tunic can be a huge challenge if I want it to be, and that keeps me interested in what I'm doing.
Playing with colors - In real life I wear jeans and a lot of grey, browns and black. Sometimes I get crazy and throw some pink in there, maybe burgundy. When I create historical costumes I get to put aside what modern tastes say are fashionable, what "goes" and get creative. I can wear goose-turd green and pink and red all at the same time. Or crazy striped fabric that gives most people a headache, or red shoes with yellow stockings and blue garters. And this is fashionable. Plus I get to figure out how to do all this with plants, and that's just plain old cool.
Geek out!!- The best thing, if I have to pick just one best thing, about all of this, if that I get to geek out on stuff that I'm interested in. I like pretty things and playing dress-up, but I also like the technical parts of all this and figuring things out. It turns out there are people, and sort of a lot of them, out there who are just as geeky as me about weave structure and sheep breeds and dye materials and how to set a sleeve as I am.

And lastly (because I already did #3 at the very top), my nominees,

Demode - because Kendra is amazing. She makes beautiful cloths (not costumes, cloths) and does excellent research. Her focus is later period that what I've been doing of late, but it's still inspiring and I know where to go when I get around to making an 18th century gown!

The Costumers Closet - again with the mostly later period than me stuff, but the work is beautiful and really inspiring! I appreciate that she posts a lot of in-progress pictures so we can see how she's putting things together, something I aspire to do more faithfully.

Katie Jacobs - Lovely work, again later period, but more importantly she posts how-tos and sourcing tips, and other great information useful if you going to actually *wear* some of the cloths you have made to a reenactment. She gets the looks head-to-toe, which so many people miss.

12th Night Planning

2011-10-10T14:43:00.000-07:00

I've spent the better part of the weekend being productive for the first time in what feels like a hundred years. It was wonderful. I made cornhole bags (don't ask), knitting needle cases, finished some embarrassingly backed up work from over the summer, and redesigned my jewelry web site. I've spent a huge amount of time at the sewing machine and the ironing board, and my leg does not hurt. Hurray! Sure, I got tired, but I lasted longer that I would have even before the surgery for we're on the right track.

Anyway, the theme for our kingdom's 12th Night is the Court of Maximilian I in 1500. So, German. Which sounds interesting, but not something I would be likely to wear again. However my persona is Flemmish, so that's close enough, and I've been wanting to do this red gown forever, and it dates to 1450 so, again, close enough. I have some red wool to make the gown out of, it's actually red shot with navy, kind of a tiny hounds-tooth, and ends up reading a really rich burgundy. It's a little light, so I may have to line it, but I have some burgundy linen I can use for the lining.

The collar and cuffs look to have a very short pile, my guess is it's fur. Finding a good low-pile fake fur is not going to be easy so I will probably just use velvet, hopefully in a silvery or cream color so it looks like the picture.

I'm really *really* excited about the hat. Especially since it isn't black. It sort of looks like the crown might be rounded too, but that might be a trick of the veil. I've got to decide how I want to build this thing, doing it with buckram will be easy enough but I'm not sure if that's how they were most likely made. It could also be a felt form that's been decorated. I doubt it's straw. At least I know what I need to research.

Rijksmuseum digital exhibition

2011-10-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has launched a very cool digital exhibition called Accessorize. It's in flash and sort of a bandwidth hog, it loads fine for me over FiOS but your mileage may vary depending on your ISP. Anyway, it's worth whatever wait time! The exhibition covered accessories from 1550 to 1950 and you can drill down in the images to an insane level of detail. It's a bit late for my interests, but there are several pieces of gold work embroidery in the 1600-1650 section that are really stunning. There's lots of great inspiration, who doesn't love goldwork?

Healing!

2011-09-30T19:03:00.000-07:00

So as you may have gathered I had surgery on my right hip about a month ago (late August, the day before Hurricane Irene came to town to be exact) and this has made much of my medieval crafting rather challenging for the last month. Because I could not put any weight on the leg, I could not spin or weave or drive my car, nor have been able to sit in a normal upright position for much of the month. The sitting part has been getting steadily better, I can now sit at the sewing machine for awhile anyway, though I have had to modify things at the ironing board so I can iron sitting down. Trying to iron on crutches is about ridiculous as it sounds (I tried, I really did). Staying in any one position for very long is still hard though, so I have not been making much progress on anything, which is is frustrating.

That should be changing though. They cleared me to start putting weight on the leg last week, and today the doctor said I could drive! Hurray! Such a small thing, but being house-bound for over a month has been really challenging. Just the psychological impact of knowing you can't go anywhere, never mind that you don't want to go anywhere or have anywhere to go, is pretty traumatizing. Tomorrow I get to give it a try, we need to be sure I can stop the car quickly if I need to, but all indications are that it should be fine. This also means I'm ok to spin at the wheel again, and work at the loom! Yay! So I can get back to working on the projects I want to be working on, at least in small bits.

Distractions

2011-09-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

Things have been a bit quiet around here for the past couple of weeks, partly because I've not been doing a whole lot of anything productive, and partly because I've been a bit distracted by a very off-topic project. Outside of my historical crafty interests, I knit and make jewelry and am in the beginning stages of (hopefully) starting a small business selling some of these things (hence the etsy link you see on this site). Well...my mom took one of the jewelry pieces to a group she belongs to in California and long story short I'm going to be selling at a trunk show in November. Yay! So I've been trying to get my inventory built up, get a website with a shopping cart together, and get business card and all that fun stuff together, all while still hoping around on crutches and unable to drive. Oh, and also going to physical therapy three times a week.

You can see the fruits of my labor-so-far here, at www.follyandnonsense.com. If nothing else, there is a picture of Molly, my dog, modeling one of my dog sweaters on the home page. :)

A&S 50: Nine: Learn to Weave – Basic Tabby Structure, Rigid Heddle Loom

2011-09-18T05:28:00.000-07:00

Tabby, also called plainweave, is the most basic of weave structures and a great place to start for newweavers. For my first weaving project, Idecided I use to use the small 24 inch rigid heddle loom I already had, andwork with tabby (partly because rigid heddles work best for tabby and partly becauseI had almost no prior weaving experience).

The basic structure is verysimple. The weft threads travel overevery other warp thread, alternating each row to create the weave. This can be achieved with finger manipulationor needle weaving, but the rigid heddle makes manipulating the warp threadsmuch quicker and simpler, allowing the weaving to raise or lower the threadsall in one motion. The primarydisadvantage to this style of loom (aside from having only one heddle or shaft)is that the heddle is free-floating and doubles as the beater, making itdifficult to maintain an even beat and keep the selvedges straight.

The cloth was tabby wovenusing a rigid heddle loom at 10 DPI at the full loom width of 24 inches. Afterweaving, the cloth was fulled in a washing machine. Pre-fulling, the weave wasquite open and relatively even, though some areas were packed more tightly thanothers (this was my first major weaving project and the first time I had workedwith a wool warp, so there was a bit of a learning curve in this process).After fulling, the weave evened out a great deal and packed down considerably.By the end of the fulling and dyeing process, the warp and weft were barelyvisible and a compact, water repellent fabric had been produced, as can be seenin the finished piece. This is significantly thicker and denser than the clothused in the extant Dublin caps, but will serve as a useful warm layer at coldand wet events.

The cloth used to make myDublin-style Viking hood had been intended for another project, but due toexcess shrinkage in the fulling and dyeing process was not suitable for myintended use (a later period hood). After making a pair of mittens out of partof the length of fabric, I had a piece left which was just large enough to makethis cap if I placed the fold along the back of my head rather than across thetop (kismet!). As conservation of resources seems within the spirit of the timeperiod, this alteration of the basic pattern seems to be plausible if notentirely supported by the archeology in Dublin and Jorvik.

Of the twelve caps and threeremnants of caps studied in Heckett, nine of the caps and two of remnants arewool. All of the examples are tabby woven, with an even weave structure. Allbut one are classified as having an open weave. The wool caps are woven at arange of 12 to 23 warps per centimeter, with wefts ranging from 9 to 20 percentimeter. The cloth for all of the caps is lightweight and quite fine, andsome of the silk is very delicate. At least some of the hoods seem to have beenpurpose-woven on narrow warps. All of the wool caps analyzed in Heckett haveselvedges along two sides, while the silk caps all appear to have been cut tosize from wider pieces of cloth. Most have not been analyzed for dye, but ofthose that have two were undyed, two showed traced of iron mordant.

Sources:

Heckett, Elizabeth Wincott. VikingAge Headcoverings from Dublin. Royal Irish Academy, 2003.

Walton, Penelope Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre from 16-22 Coppergate,Councilfor British Archaeology, London, England 1989.

Viking Silk Cap,Yorkshire Museum(http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/themes/life-in-viking-york/viking-silk-cap).

Crowfoot, Elisabeth. Textilesand Clothing c.1150-c.1450. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, 4.London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1992.

A&S 50 Eight: Learn Tubular Tablet Weaving

2011-09-11T07:16:00.000-07:00

For my second-ever tablet weaving project I decided to be ambitious (as usual) and challenge myself a bit by weaving tubular cords for small book bag. Such cords can be seen on a brick stitch pouch housed in the V&S and studied extensively by Master Richard Wymarc and several have been found used as seal tags and as strings for rosary beads (see Crowfoot and Myers).

The basic technique is quite simple - a few cards are threaded, usually all Z or all S, and all the weaving in carried out by always working from right to left (or left to right), carrying the weft thread under (or over) the work to create a tube. The band will spiral, or not, depending on which direction the weft is passed through the shed and whether you pass the weft over or under the band. Learning which combinations will produce the desired effect takes some experimentation, but a handy reference can be found in Cindy’s Myers article on the purse strings, at http://www.silkewerk.com/tabletweaving/tubular.html.

My purse strings suffer from some unwanted spiraling, which due to my lack of technical understanding at the time, I was not readily able to control. I now realize that the areas free of spiral alternating with spiral were likely due to changes in the direction the cards turned. Had I turned the cards consistently in one direction, or changed the way I passed the weft when I changed my turning direction, I would have had a more consistent cord.I am looking forward to experimenting more with this technique as the cords produced are quite attractive and could be useful for many purposes. Unlike fingerlooped cords, there is no restriction on the length of cord that may be worked so this would be an excellent way to produce miles and miles of lacing cords.

Sources:
Crowfoot, Elizabeth. Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450 (Medieval Finds from Excavations in London). Boydell Press, 2001.

Myers, Cindy. Tubular Tablet-Weaving; Identifying and reconstructing the hanging cord from a 14th century embroidered purse. (http://www.silkewerk.com/tabletweaving/tubular.html) Last accessed Sept. 11, 2011. Originally published in Spring 2008 issue of TWIST.

Bag 8313-1863. 14th cen. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O115592/bag/

Natural Dye Book

2011-09-06T04:54:00.000-07:00

I actually have the first edition of Wild Color, by Jenny Dean, and was quite pleased this morning to find out that there is a new, revised edition out now as the first one had gone out of print. This is a wonderful introductory book on natural dyeing. If you can only get one book on natural dyes, this would be the one to get! This book has been indispensable for all my natural dying experiments.

That being said, the first edition had a few organizational issues which have hopefully been resolved in this new revision. I'm tempted to order the new version myself just to find out, the book really is that useful. A very nice chart telling you what mordants and assists work best with each plant is included on each page, with a color swatch giving you a general idea of what colors to expect from the plant, but in the first edition the key the symbols used was buried in a very strange place. The problem is easily solved with a bookmark or post it, but finding that key in the first place (or when you lose your post it) can be quite aggravating.

You also need to read all the general instructions first! I know, I know, you want to jump right in and start working with that madder you got at Pennsic, but reading the general instructions at the start of the book will save you a huge amount of pain and suffering later on. Then you can read up on the specifics of your dye plant, and get to work. Dean does a good job of explaining the chemistry behind natural dying, and you need to have a basic understanding of this before you jump in.

For the history buffs, there is a short chapter on the history of dyeing at the start of the book that is a good starting off point for future research, but this is really a how-to book, not an academic one. There is a lot of great historical information and period dye recipes available on the web to round out your A&S bibliography.

Not quite back

2011-09-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

My Greenland hood project and the finished lattice bag were picked up this morning and should be on their way to 30 Year where they will be included in the open A&S display on Sunday, rather than the triathlon on Saturday. It's not quite what I was hoping for, but at least people will still get to see my work, and hopefully give me some feedback, which is the whole point. And I am basically halfway there if I decide to do the pentathlon for KASF, which seems a whole lot less terrifying than it did last year at this time. My Laurel suggested that I try weaving some actual yardage, which I think would be a great project for that if I can find something within the right time period. Handweaving (at least on a 4 shaft loom) and the 15th century don't really go well together, unless I want to do more of the Greenland textiles. I'll think of something interesting to do, I just need to do it soon! With the holidays and all I want to get any big projects well in hand as soon as I can.

I'm terribly disappointed in myself for not being able to finish the documentation for the lampwork rosary I posted pictures of last week, but given how much pain I've been in since the surgery it's really not surprising. I don't know what I was thinking, expecting to write anything decent (or at all) while hopped up on percocet. Things are getting better though, so I expect the writing will start moving along soon. In the mean time, I've been doing some fairly mindless and totally modern knitting in between naps.

Brief hiatus

2011-08-25T03:37:00.000-07:00

I will be off-line, or at least not able to post much, for a bit as I am having my hip fixed this afternoon. It's a very good thing, and means I will be able to go to the mall *and* the grocery store like a normal youngish person again without paying for it for 3 days after, and also maybe walk the dogs and go to camping events. An uphill climb in my mobility rather than what I've been dealing with for the last two years sounds really wonderful.

Anyway, my plan, once I get off the drugs, is to get caught up on my A&S 50 documentation so hopefully I will be able to start posting that late next week. In the mean time, here is a preview of the Franciscan Crown rosary I made using beads I made myself (at least I made the green glass beads). If I can finish the documentation next week this will be one third of my entry for 50 year next weekend!

Really finally finished bag!

2011-08-19T17:15:00.000-07:00

It's done!! (picture me running/hobbling in circles flailing madly like Kermit and you will get a pretty good idea of my joy at typing that) The purse strings are fingerlooped, the tassels are tassels, and the linings is all attached and finished off. I'm really quite happy with how this turned out. The finished relic bag represents about 135 hours of work in total, but overall I think it was worth the effort.

I may still make a separate hanging string, the first bag I made has one, and that seems to be a common arrangement of strings where strings or any sort have survived. Plus it would make it easier to hang off my belt if I decided to actually wear it as a pouch. The only other change I may at some point make is to add the turks head knots to the tassels. I've been trying to teach myself how to make them and can do ok with twine or yarn, but the small silk I used for the tassels is a bit too much. If I can find something a little stiffer to work with that might help. I can always add them later once I get the hang of it.

Bag finishing - in progress!

2011-08-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

It's actually getting done, and I'm actually going to make it by the 30 year dead line! Hurray! I've got the lining put together and attached, the side seams stitched, and I'm 2/3rds of the way done with the braided seam finish. The original bag looks like it had a tablet woven edge down the sides, but I'm not that confident with my tablet weaving, so I've opted to the edge finishing I know I can do neatly. The top will get a narrow band of red silk folded over the raw edges, like I talked about in my last post. That band will have worked eyelets to hold the purse strings. Three tassels will finish off the bottom.

You can barely see from the pictures (or in person really) but the bag is faced with a mustard color silk. My original plan had been to use a bright blue to show behind the eyelet holes, but when I looking at it the blue made the whole piece look a little dark and the eyelets didn't pop. The mustard was much better. The Hubs, who insists he is no good at these things, was a huge help. He's actually really good at the whole color theory thing, even the medieval color theory, no matter what he says.

Here you can see a detail of the braided edging. I'm really happy with how the red looks, it's a nice contrast and brings out the small touches of red I already had worked into the design. I'm also very pleased with the pattern matching down the side seams, another feature you don't often see in the extant bags but to modern eyes not matching the pattern can be very off-putting. It's funny sometimes, the things we worry so much about that they just didn't concern themselves with.

Because I know someone will want to know, this type of edge finish is really quite simple to do. It's slow, and you have to be careful to work neatly, but it looks really sharp. Apparently it was used on things other than these bags too, like Viking hoods and such, though I don't have the documentation for that myself. There are a few differant ways to do it, but I follow these instructions. My only additional tips are to try to make your loops as long as they need to be so you don't have to join new ones half way through, and to wind them onto bobbins. The bobbins keep the extra thread neat, and give you some extra weight to keep the tension on the braid even, which is a huge help. You also need to be careful as you work not to pull things tightly or you will distort the edge of your piece.

Edited to add: I've been looking at the online images of the original bag to sort of drawstring placement and I think the top band is actually embroidered, not a sewn on ribbon or tablet weaving after all. If you zoom in on some of the black and white photos, you can see pretty clear plain brick stitch where the holes for the purse strings are, and sections of the ground cloth showing through in places where the embroidery has worn away. Unfortunately I placed my work on the fabric such that I could not do this, so I've gone with the band method seen in the V&S bag, but it is adds another set of options for finishing off the top. The side of bag is presenting a more interesting set of questions. It's hard to tell what's going on in the pictures but it kind of looks more like little buttons or knots running down the side of the bog than tablet weaving or a braided edge. You can sort of see what I mean in the picture to the left, it's more clear on the zoom-able version on RICH website. I'd love to get my hands (or at least my eyes) on the actual bag to see how this is all done, but that will have to wait. In the mean time, I shall proceed as planned. I'm kind of leaning towards leaving off the middle tassel at this point, but we'll see.

Bag finishing

2011-08-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

I've been mulling over how to finish my lattice bag for the last few days. The embroidery itself took such a long time, I really don't want to kill the whole piece with poor finishing. Some of the extant bags done in this particular style have the drawstrings threaded right through the embroidery, which is how I did the first bag I made, but the original lattice bag has some sort of band at the top that the strings go through. It's hard to tell from the pictures on line what this band is made from, so I'm trying to decide what will work best, look good, and still be true to the original.

I had come across the bag to the left when I researching the first bag and I think I have my answer! Yay! It's rather roughly finished, but the top has a binding of ribbon or fabric that folds over the top edge and is whipped stitched down on the front of the bag. It seems to have worked eyelets (boo) through which the strings would be threaded. From the picture, it looks like the band was put on in one continuous loop after the bag was assembled, leaving only one seam in the band piece, but it's hard to tell for certain. This particular bag is folded along the side edge rather than the bottom edge, so the construction is a little strange to begin with.

In digging through my fabric stash I found a big of dark red silk that sort of matches the silk I used for the red eyelets and the silk I have for the drawstrings and tassels (which don't exactly match each other but you can hardly tell). It's not a perfect match, the silk fabric is a little more of a rust than a blue-red, which is what I used for the embroidery, but I don't think I'm going to find anything better in the shops locally. The other red I have is way too bright, so the slightly rusty shade is probably going to be the best match. I thought I had some burgundy china silk someplace but I can't find it anywhere. Don't you hate that? I've got one place left to look, then I can start on the finishing tomorrow afternoon! Having a plan is good!

Something completely different

2011-08-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

I've been quite busy and productive this weekend, though not with anything textile or fiber related. Yesterday the husband was at a martial arts clinic (I didn't go because of the injury which will be getting fixed in my upcoming surgery) so I stayed home and got caught up on some totally modern jewelry making and did laundry. Today though, I canned jam! I haven't made jam since grade school so this was fun and exciting and I feel like a clever and accomplished and terribly thrifty homemaker. Even though since I had to actually buy the fruit, possibly it wasn't all that thrifty in the end.

So far, I've make 3 pints of pickles using cucumbers from the garden, 7 half pint jars of mixed fruit jam from a recipe I cobbled together from a list of things Himself decided he wanted in his jam, 5 pints of plum jam, and a couple of jars of lemon sage mustard. Tomorrow I'm going to do some pint jars of strawberries with the 4 pounds of berries I got on sale at the market. Normally I wouldn't bother canning with berries from the regular grocery store, but they must have got a shipment of really fresh ones or something because these strawberries are really good. I think we will have plenty of jam to last until next year, and a few jars to give away as gifts as well.

All this canning business has got me thinking about some of the period mustard recipes I've been playing around with. Most of them are better if you age them awhile, so they would benefit from being pasteurized and sealed in a sterile jar. I think I may try fiddling with some of the recipes so I can can a few of them and see how that works out. It's not exactly period, but it's safer than period food storage methods and would be easier to transport to events. Plus I wouldn't need to keep all the little jars and things in my fridge, I could just put them in the pantry.

Staffordshire Hoard in D.C.!

2011-08-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

I just found this article about an exhibition of a selection of more than a hundred pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard which will be on display in D.C. at the National Geographic Museum from October 29, 2011 to March 4, 2012! Yay! That's only 3 hours from home, and conveniently after the major recovery period from my surgery later this month! I should be able to walk through the museum with no problem!

If you are in to Anglo-Saxon stuff in general, and metal working in particular (go shiny bits!) this should be a really amazing exhibit, and not to be missed!

Finished bag

2011-08-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

The lattice bag is done! Hurray! Thanks to over 120 hours of work starting in October of last year (I stopped keeping track for awhile after 96 hours, my best guess at this point is that it took about 125 hours), the major work is finished. I still need to line and assemble to bag, and sort out how I will handle the cord band at the top, but that should not take more than another 8 or 10 hours of work. I hope.

Anyway, the finished bag is about 5.5 inches wide and 11.5 inches tall. It'll be folded in half, so when all is said and done the bag itself will be roughly square. It will be finished with a band at the top and tassels at the bottom so the final effect will be slightly more rectangular. There is a partial write-up on the bag availiable here as a PDF. Once the whole thing is done, it will get it's own documentation. Hopefully for Atlantia 30 Year, but as I will be having surgery a week before and thus not going myself I'm not stressing myself out about that.

I've already started a new brick stitch project based on a German box cover. This one is going to be a book cushion for the book which I won as a prize for the Greenland hood. I actually started at the very end of April, got as far as picking threads and a little embroidery, and then did nothing until yesterday. What you see below is about 10 to 12 hours worth of work, possibly as much as 15. It's much slower going when you have nothing at all on the cloth and have to count out over bare threads with no reference points. Whoever tries to tell you that counted thread work is easy has clearly never really tried it.

As far as the details of the project...again it's based on a 14th century box top and will eventually be a book cushion. The piece is quite large, so I'm working it in cotton rather than silk, over 28 count linen. So far I'm very happy with how it's turning out. The pattern is much simpler to work than the lattice bag, being just basic brick stitch, so my only challenge is counting out a larger pattern repeat than I'm used to dealing with. The first half-row of diamonds was quite a pain, but the the subsequent rows have been getting easier so I have hope. Usually once you get one pattern laid down you don't have to look back at the chart so much, you can just refer to the work itself to see what's next and that makes things move along faster. I am debating weather I want to try putting this in a frame or not, the excess cloth is really sort of a pain to deal with. It's a large enough piece that the frame itself might get in my way too though, so I'm not sure.

Lattice bag progress

2011-08-09T06:16:00.000-07:00

I spent most of yesterday watching Season 1 of Doctor Who and working on purple eyelets, and what you see here is the result. I'd say I got about 6 solid hours of work in on the bag, give or take. Taking pictures actually helps, I can see how far I've come in a day (or an hour) which makes the work less tedious. Filling in the corner also helped with the motivation, at least I can see now what the final bag will look like.

At the risk of sounding like a commercial, the OttLite is really helping. Before, the grey squares were much slower going than the yellow ones. They are still a little slower, but not by much. The only place where I notice much of a drop off in speed is along the edges and in the corners, where it's harder to see some of the half stitches along the edges. Had I thought about this, those squares should have been done in the yellow but oh well. Picking up some speed is all for the good and I'm really happy with how this is looking it's all for the good. With any luck, my next post will include a picture of the finished embroidery! Hurray!

Poor mans Ott Light

2011-08-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

I've been totally stalled on my eyelet brick stitch project, partly because other things keep getting in the way, but mainly because the light in my living room is pretty bad and it's hard to see the grey/silver lines I'm trying to work the eyelets in between. I do ok in bright daylight, but there's only a couple of hours of good light a day so progress is limited my those hours being otherwise unoccupied. Yesterday the hubs and I were at Michaels and he found Ott Light bulbs! Who knew? They also had inexpessive clip-on swing arm task lamps, so with my happy 40% coupon for about $35 I have a brand new, perfect for my work space, Ott light! Yay! It's a perfect solution, most of the lamps they make, aside from being hideously expensive, are ugly as sin and would not work well in the space we have (basically none). With this, I can move the lamp or the little table it clipped to to whichever side of the sofa I'm sitting on and I'm good. It's even reduced glare on the tv so we're all happier. Working on the embroidery this morning, I seem to be making better progress with less annoyance and eye strain so I think this will help a lot.

So that plan for today is to plug away on the lattice bag. I've managed to make pretty good progress so far, chipping away at it bit by bit. I figure at this point I have another 15 hours or solid work to go before the actual embroidery is done, then I have to do the finishing. The original plan was to tablet weave the edging, but I'm leaning towards the braided edging I did on the first bad, as I already know how to do that and I know it will look well. The only major issue I need to resolve is how to do finish the top edge. The original bag seems to have a narrowish band of either tablet weaving or cloth at the top edge, through which the purse strings are threaded. It could be more brick stitch, but the texture looks more like tablet weaving or something else to me. So, do I weave a band and attach it? Use fabric? Or lace through the bag itself? I think a band of red would look really pretty and bring out the red eyelets nicely, and I have a bit of red velvet that would work if I decide to use fabric. Plus there is plenty of silk for the purse strings and trimming to weave a bit of an edging if I decide to go that route.

Either way, I be very glad when this project is done. I'm heartily sick of stitching eylets.

Two new books!

2011-08-05T14:45:00.000-07:00

My darling husband bought me two new costuming books which came in the mail over the last couple of days. Yay! I've had time to look them over and am overall very pleased. Here are my thoughts in case any one is contemplating purchasing one or both of these books.

Fashion in the Middle Ages by Margaret Scott is a slender volume but packed with lots of great illustrations and content. The book is a companion to an exhibit on late medieval fashion as presented in illuminated manuscripts currently on display at the Getty in Los Angeles. The author and curators do a great job explaining how manuscript illuminations can be used as sources for costumes and where they fail as reliable information, even comparing the illuminations to similar extant garments in a couple of cases. She also talks about the typical visual cues and conventions used in the artwork and what they would have indicated to the viewers. Overall, this is a great book. There were quite a few illustrations I had not seen before and good details shots and explanations. It's a great source of inspiration for the price, especially if you are interested in the high middle ages.

I had very high hopes for Illuminating Fashion. This is a much larger book with literally TONS of wonderful illustrations, and like the Getty book is also a companion to a museum exhibit (this one at the Morgan Library in New York). The book has a narrower focus, looking at France and the Netherlands from 1325 through 1515, once again using illuminated manuscripts as the main source. The illustrations are great and there are enough of them in enough detail to justify the price, BUT the analysis is really rather poor. It's pretty clear that the book was written by an art historian and not a costume historian. The list of extant garments is incomplete, and the author makes some very strange and totally unsupported statements about construction that make this is a really bad source for a new costumer (things like the looser fitting sleeves of the 1330's being cut of a piece with the body of the gown, rather than cut separately and attached). She also identifies an obviously fur-lined hood a frilled veil in one illustration. Having so many wonderful illuminations with a narrow geographical focus laid out chronologically is really helpful and makes it much easier to see the rapid changes in fashion that were occurring during these years, so the book is a worthy addition if this is your area of interest, just be wary of the textual analysis.

Finished gowns

2011-08-03T07:08:00.000-07:00

The commission gowns I did as a fundraiser for my local SCA group as finally done! These took longer than I would have liked, my vacation got in the way a bit as did a major cold/flu/plague and some life interruptions on the clients end as well, but it's finally done! I still owe her a shift and pair of hose, but those can get done after Pennsic. With any luck I'll get the shift done while she is at Pennsic, and get the hose at least cut out so I can fit them when she gets back.

The kirtle is an oatmeal colored linen, with long sleeves that button to the elbow and spiral lacing up the front. Right now the lace is just a piece of ribbon. Eventually it will be a nice fingerlooped cord, the client has a friend who does this so I don't need to supply that. The eyelets are all hand-bound and the bodice seams are hand finished.

The over gown buttons down the front and has angel wing or trump sleeves which fold back a bit at the wrist to expose the kirtle sleeves. I ended up with some extra fabric in the sleeve head so rather than re-cutting the sleeves I made some small pleats in the back of the sleeves. I haven't seen this done on women's fitted gowns, but I have seen it on men's and it actually made the sleeve hand rather nicely so I'm ok with the small bit of pleating. It was a better solution that loosing length in the sleeves. The seams are machine finished on the inside, and everything is hand finished on the outside.

Award and Worth

2011-07-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

I've been tagged by Jessie over at Some Things I Have Made for the One Lovely Blog Award! She had just found my blog and tagged me, which is very sweet and came on sort of the perfect day (it's been a rough couple of weeks).

So, I am supposed to give five facts about myself and tag someone else, so here goes:

My undergraduate degree is in early modern British history, with a minor in costuming. Pretty much Ren Faire.
I have two dogs and an evil cat. The beagle is a step-dog, smelly and dumb as a box of rocks. The Chihuahua is scary smart and eats literally everything. Socks, shoes, mulch, wasabi, whatever, she eats it. The cat is just mean and we all live in fear. She also licks plastic bags, which is the most annoying things ever.
I love baking. Love it. Sadly, the hubs is not so into the fresh baked goodness and sees no point in home-baked bread. I can't get my head around that one at all, but it puts a major crimp in my baking activities. I can only eat so much bread on my own.
Before I moved to Virginia and went to law school, I worked in software testing in the San Francisco area for about seven years. Breaking stuff for a living was sort of fun, having the engineers fear me was the bomb.
I am dyslexic. This has made many things I have chosen to do in life more challenging, like law school, and probably blogging, but I love to read and write so I've done what I can to adapt. Just don't even ask me to sound out a word, that drives me nuts.

I'm passing this along to Katie Jacobs, a costuming blog with a later period focus that I usually do these days, but she does lovely work and is very inspiring and to Arachne's Blog which focuses primarily on historical textile arts.

On a totally random aside, I came across The House of Worth on Flickr, which if you are at all interested in 19th century clothing, Worth, or just pretty cloths in general you simply must check out. There are some truly drool-worthy gowns and very good quality images in the collection.

Wrap front gowns?

2011-07-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

I've been battling a nasty summer cold (no fun in a heat wave in Virginia) and haven't been overly productive since I got back from my trip to California. I have been reading though. While out at my parents house I found 4(!!) boxes of books from my undergrad days, mostly on Medieval and early modern history. I picked out enough to fill two large flat rate boxes and shipped them home so they would be waiting for me when I got back.

One of the books I shipped is on the history of private life in the middle ages. It's quite interesting, if you are into academic reading and social history (which I am). But what got me really excited was the picture on the cover. I can't find a citation for the cover image anywhere for some reason. What you see here is a small version of the cover. Amazon has a larger, though lower quality scan of the cover here Any ideas where this image comes from? What's interesting to me is the two ladies in the back who appear to be wearing wrap front gowns. The image to the right, a 15th century miniature by Jean Bourdichon seems to show a artisan's wife in a similar style dress (of course her arm is covering the bit of her gown that I really want to see, but she's also holding a distaff I'm ok with that).

We also have this image by my old friend Gerard David, which shows Mary Magdelan (in the cloak) wearing what might be a wrap front gown:

Unfortunately the clearest image I've found so far of this type of dress is the book cover I can't find any attribution for, but I'm intrigued. The ladies in the book cover look like attendants, the artisans wife is clearly at work, so perhaps this is some kind of working overgown? If I can find some more information about this style of dress, it would be a fun project. I don't think I've seen anyone wearing a wrapped gown like this.

Vacation Report

2011-07-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

I'm back from vacation in Southern California! I don't recommend air travel, Disneyland, or the Getty on a gimpy leg necessitating being pushed around like a luggage cart but it was still a good trip. My fabric haul was mostly quilt related, so not really applicable to this blog, but I did get to visit the Getty Villa, which has a wonderful collection of Greek and Roman art, great for my collection of source material on Roman clothing! Yay! Of course, they also have lots of images on line but there's something about seeing the pieces in person and in life-size that makes all the difference. Plus you can take pictures close up of whatever details you want and from odd angles.

I haven't uploaded my pictures yet, so these are all from the Getty's website, but will give you some idea of what's in the collection and what I found particularily inspiring:

A Portrait of a Woman as a Cybele is quite large and striking. I like how she has her palla draped leaving one arm bare, and the crown/diadem on her head (though that might be what sets her apart as a cybele). Something about her pose in the gallery was quite relaxing and natural. She just seemed comfortable, sitting there with her little critters.

Leda and the Swan not cloths, but her hair is pretty and for some reason I just love this piece. It's not huge in person, but strikingly beautiful and amazingly well preserved. Probably my most favorite sculpture in the villa.

Faustina the Elder another way to wear a palla, this time much more modestly. In person, it looked like the palla was tucked into the belt of her tunica somehow, which made me feel vindicated as I have done that myself to control the inside end of palla. I also like the hair piled up on top of her head.

Muse what you can't see from the museum's picture is that she's got her hair in a ponytail! The gallery this statue was in had several other muse's in it and at least one other was also working the ponytail look, which made me very happy. They both looked to have hair that hung to just below the shoulders, maybe the middle of the shoulder blades at the longest. Very cool on several levels, though again since it's a muse and no a portrait it's hard to say if a normal person would ever wear her hair that way.

Roman Necklace this was probably my most favorite piece of jewelry in the collection, it looks like something you could get today in a better jewelry store. They actually had a reproduction of it in the museum store ($250, which isn't really bad at all). They have a pretty good collection of jewelry and such, which you can look at here. Lots of rings, but there are some of lovely necklaces and burial diadems as well.

Waffle Towels

2011-07-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

I managed to finished the waffle towels just in time to get them washed (to bring up the waffle weave texture and pre-shrink them) and photographed before I had to get everything packed and ready to go for the surprise visit to California for my mom's birthday. The actual surprise will be at lunch time today, then we're going on a boat to watch the fireworks from the water. One of the nice things about being born on the 4th of July is everyone makes a big fuss about your birthday!

Anyway, here are the towels. I used cottolin from Webs, working at 24 ends per inch. This was my first experiment working with an actual pattern (which I modified a little bit of course!) and working with stripes of color. I did change the stripes, adding more colors. The original pattern would have just had the outside red stripe and one less cell of waffle in between. I wanted to add more colors to go with her kitchen so I added the yellow and brown. Once I get everything on the loom I realized it would have looked better with brown in between each stripe, not just in the middle, and that the whole striped section should have been placed another couple of cells in from the edge, but oh well. Next time.

The other interesting (?) feature of the towels is the hem. The pattern called for a one inch band of tabby weave at each end of each towel to make the hem. Which is all well and good and sounds just fine, until I realized that waffle weave draws in more on the loom than tabby does, and also shrinks up a huge amount more than tabby does. This is what gives it the fun waffle texture. So the band of tabby ends up making a weird wavy shape and sort of deforming the whole shape of the towel, which is pretty obvious in the pictures but not as bad when you see them in person. Very annoying. Next time I do this pattern I think I will leave off the tabby hem. Or possibly double up the weft somehow so it draws in a bit rather than fanning out.

In other news, both of the supportive gowns I was working on for myself are totally done. Yay! I still need to get pictures, but that will have to wait till I am back home and I can get someone to photograph me in them. I'm not going to be able to go to Pennsic after all so there won't be any event action shots for quite awhile (probably post-surgery). I'm very happy will how they turned out and my ability to fit the things on myself.

I also fixed my green hose, it turns out the major issue was having cut the foot portion on the bias. One of the extant hose that I had based the pattern on was done this way but it turned out not to work well with the combination of my foot and fabric choice. Turning the pattern piece back to the straight of the grain and taking the toe in a bit help tremendously. Now I know I can be a lot more aggressive in my fitting of the hose and it will still be fine. In fact it will fit better if I fit it more snugly to begin with.

The fundraiser project is going well (pictures, again, will be coming after I get home next week). I'm doing more fitted gowns. By all reports the client is very happy. The supportive undergown is nearly done, I just have to finish the hem and sew in the eyelets. There will be buttons and button holes down the sleeves, but the client is casting the buttons herself so that is going to have to wait till she has done the buttons. I've brought that with me so I can hopefully get the eyelets done while I'm visiting with my parents this week. The overgown is cut out (except for the sleeves) and should go together pretty quickly. That will be a button-front gown with modest trumpet sleeves, again with hand-cast buttons. I've still got to do hose and a shift, which should go pretty quickly, then it's all done! I'm hoping I can get her to wear a veil at least for pictures, even though that's not really her thing. It will complete the whole thing so nicely.

It looks like my next project will also be a commission, this time Italian. I'm in research mode, trying to decide how long I think the various parts will take and how best to construct things so the client will (a) be comfortable (b) be supported in the gown and (c) be able to get dressed on her own, all the while looking like she stepped out of a portrait. It looks like the gowns she likes close either down the side or in back, which makes putting on the supportive layer yourself next door to impossible. So I'm thinking and plotting and coming up with options.

Lacing points

2011-06-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

A quick post to ask for some collective advice on lacing points or chapes...I need some for the end of my nice fingerlooped cords I've done for my new kirltes and don't have any. I'm not sure where to get the thin craft metal to make them myself (I live in a craft store back-water, it's tragic) and the only place the I've found that sells them online domestically is Historic Enterprises and they were out of stock the other day when I checked (plus I'm not sure those are good ones? They don't have pre-drilled sewing holes so that's a problem).

Anyway, I'm guessing I should be able to find some at Pennsic, but in the mean time, what to do so I can lace myself up? Any thoughts or ideas? Here's what I have so far:

Heat shrink tubing - actually had a little left over in my corset supply stash and it worked ok, except that one pulled off already. I think this is fine as long as your eyelet to point ratio is not to snug. It also won't shrink to a very sharp point which is sort of an issue for that one inevitable smaller-than-planned eyelet.
Thread wrap (any maybe nail polish) - this worked with just thread on a soutach lace I have, so far it seems like the best option, though I wonder if it would be sturdy enough on a fingerlooped cord
Lots of glue - might not hold together well over several lacings
Tape - won't hold up in the wash
Something else?

I know these aren't period, I just need to be able to lace the gown and tuck the end of the lace into the dress so I can get to the merchants and find what I need, so it's a stop-gap.

Does anyone know of any other online resources for getting these things? I need some pretty small ones for the blue banded gown, the eyelets are small. I did come across some European sites with nice selections but they didn't give diameter measurements, and the prices were kind of high so I'm not sure that's the best solution.

Some updates

2011-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

What I week...I got some sort of Summer Plague and have been on antibiotics and generally miserable for the last week. No fun at all. I did manage to make it up to the William and Mary library last week as planned to get my alumni library card sorted out (yay for university library check out privileges!) and pick up some of the books I need for my 30 Year research before getting laid out by the Plague. It's been slow going getting my notes taken on the books, but I'm finally starting to feel better so I should be able to get caught up over the next few days.

The blue banded kirtle is done done done and looks pretty good. I even finished a new shift to wear with it. I'll need at least one more shift to be ready for Pennsic, with the new one I only have two with long sleeves and that won't get me too far. I decided to go ahead and modify the pattern to make a seamless straight-front kirtle as well, which is almost done. Modifying the pattern wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, it turned out to pretty fiddly to fit myself but I think now I have the general idea figured out. Fitting the gown itself was much easier than dealing with the pattern. The whole sewing of the dress has been slow going, probably because I've been sick, but all I have left to do is the sleeves, hem, hand-finishing of the seams and the eyelets.

I did all my pattern work for both dresses in cotton muslin, as that's what I had on hand, and ended up having to take the actual linen dress in a whole lot. Like over an inch. I've been taking patterns off muslins for a long time so I'm sure I didn't make that big a mistake in copying off the pattern and adding seam allowances. The only explanation I can come up with is that linen stretches a lot more than the muslin does. Or at least this linen does. Oh well, I suppose taking in the pattern would be a mistake, if I ever make a gown out of less stretchy fabric.

Once I get the straight front gown done, I have two more gowns to do as part of a fundraiser for our local barony (along with some underthings to go with them) before I can get back to my Pennsic sewing. In the mean time, I've got to warp up some dishtowels for my mom's birthday present. I'm going to do a waffle weave, not period as far as I know but I think she will like them.

I've managed to get a few other small things done, fixing my green kermit hose and making the fingerlooped cords for my kirtles (and learning two new patterns too). The cloak is cut out, and I've decided to finish at least the front and neck edges with a narrow silk facing like those seen in the MOL book, which I have cut out and ready to sew on. That should stabilize the lettuce edge and curved bit around the neck. The bottom hem I will just turn up and stitch.

So, lots to do! Now to get better, these afternoon naps are really not helping with getting stuff done.

Research tips

2011-06-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

When I was working on my undergraduate history degree my thesis adviser gave me lots of good advice. In addition to "Alcohol lubricates the brain" the other tidbit that has stuck with me and proved to be invaluable is "serendipity is your most valuable research tool." She was right then, I found many of my most helpful source material shelved next to the book I was actually looking for, and it's still true now in the internet age. A case in point...

Back in collage when I was active in the SCA the first time around (in Berkeley) I came across a picture of a tomb brass in a book of a lady in a funny loose gown with buttons all down the front, a silly hat, and a little dog. This gown fascinated me and seemed terribly comfortable for camping, so I worked with one of the local Laurels to come up with a plausible period method of drafting the pattern and made the dress. Soon after that I stopped playing and put the dress away. When I became active again, I pulled the dress out, but was unwilling to wear such an odd style without having the documentation for it to hand. I just couldn't remember where I had seen the picture, who it was of, or any details about it, nor could I find it in any of my own books. None of the research geeks in my new group had any ideas either when I tried to describe it, so I stuffed the dress away and moved on.

I was surfing around last night looking for images of cloaks and mantles, specifically 14th and 15th century cloaks and mantles, and I came across this site on 14th century ladies fashion, mostly from tomb monuments and brasses. Scrolling down the page, what do I happen upon but Lady Maylns, from Chinnor Church in Oxfordshir! The very same tomb brass that inspired my weird gown! Yay! So now I can wear my funny loose over gown with all the buttons again, and have yet another excuse to make a frilled veil.

Score another one for serendipity.

More mantels

2011-06-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

The kirtle being pretty much done (I have a few eyelets to finish yet, oh how I hates the eyelets), I've started looking at mantles. I've got my half circle mantle cut out, and decided to do a little bit of shaping through the shoulders, just to make the thing sit better and stay on. The pictures of women in mantles don't show a lot of bunching or folding in the back that you get if you don't shape the neck and shoulder (like what happens on a priest's cope), so I think it's a plausible thing to do.

Anyway, I'm in picture collecting made thing to decide how to treat the hems. I don't want to do heavy embroidery as that seems to be a more ecclesiastical thing, and I also don't really want to do a full lining as the wool is quit heavy and the lining would just make the whole thing unbearable. I'm leaning towards a wide interior facing of some sort, or maybe just a narrow edge binding in silk or really smooth linen. So far, the narrow binding seems like a more plausible finish than the facing, though the facing would give me a buffer between the back of my neck and the wool of the cloak, not that wool bothers me much.

First, we have Gerard David's Marriage at Cana. This picture makes me happy for a couple of reasons - there is a mantle on the bride, yes, AND Raymond's Quiet Press has a lovely reproduction of her cloak clasp, so that's a bonus. But the lady in the front with the funny white hood (yay for a white hood! The white hood is fun too) has a paternoster in her belt, and the seated woman facing her has a Perugia style towel used a lap napkin and a nifty circlet on her head - all things I'm working on in one way or another. Plus there's some fun silly hat action going. But back to the mantle. It's clearly lines in white, but it sort of looks like the white lining is coming around the red fabric of the body and binding the edge a bit, which suggests the binding idea might be on the right track.

The funeral brass of Joan Skerne shows a similar style mantle with a similar style closure (and another spiff hat), but there's not enough detail on the brass to tell how the edge of the mantle was finished. There really isn't enough detail any of the brasses I've been able to find to tell how the edge might have been finished, except to rule out major embroidery. So I tent to think women wore simpler mantles. It certaily makes scence to me that the sort of things that have survived, namely church vestments and the odd ceremonial rode, would be rather on the exceptional side and not the kind of thing one would wear every day, even if one was wealthy. The way the mantle hangs on Joan suggests to me that it is at least somewhat shaped through the shoulders though - there is certainly neck shaping. The cone neck you would end up with without shaping the neck would really get in the way of the hats and veils fashionable at the time.

We then have another guy from the Manesse Codex, who is a man but is wearing a cloak with a contrast lining and what appears to be some sort of contrast binding or trim a the edge. It's a little to hard to tell if this is artistic license, done so you can see the folds of the cloth, or actually a bit of detail thrown in for good measure. The fellow in the fur lined cloak also seems to have a bit of a white edging on his, which might just be the fur lining but could be some kind of binding/edging. The detail isn't great in these manuscripts though so sometimes it's hard to tell what the artist is or is not getting at. I've got to do a bit more digging around but from the what I can remember of the other painting I have seen, there's nothing much that's conclusive one way or the other. I thought I saw something that looked pretty clearly like a line of trim or cord on outside of the mantle, just inside from the edge of the front opening, but I can't find the painting just now (figures).

Doing something to the edge is definitely necessary, both to protect the wool from wear and to stabilize it. It may be thick and well-fulled but it still wants to stretch itself all out of shape and a bit of something less mooshy will help the front edge keep it's shape and hang neatly without going all lettucy on me. I just want to make sure it's as authentic a finish as it can be, somewhere in the back of my head I harbor not-so-secret thoughts about doing more serious reenacting one of these days (the kind with actual authenticity standards) and I don't want to have to re-do my whole kit if I can avoid it. Plus, authenticity is fun!

Banded kirtle

2011-06-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Here is the banded kirtle (or so I've decided to call it) so far. As was pointed out, the front should dip down a little bit to more closely match at least the air filter hat picture, and probably also the Descent from the Cross gown as well, though that one is at an odd angle so it's harder to tell. I went with a square neck for this as that will work better under the gown this will eventually go under, and it also seemed a little easier to focus on one point of wierdness at a time (in this case the banding and the sleeve thing). The next iteration of this gown will have the dipped/sweetheart neck, now that I think I have the banding figured out.

You can see on the front that the line from the facing and strap is extending right into the underarm, giving the effect of a raglan seam. The sleeve is a normal sleeve shape, the trick to the raglan line is lining up the strap with the top facing bit and the armscye just right. To make that work the front neckline has to be high enough but as it turns out once the girls are lifted up and well-supported the neckline will end up in the right place.

The back did not line up with the top facing quite as well - I need to shift it down to get it to line up right but by the time I realized it was not right fixing it would have been far more trouble than I can go through without extra fabric to re-cut anything if I need to. I think if I think more about how I put the sleeve and facings and shoulder bands together I could avoid this issue next time, but again you can see where the raglan line is coming from. It's just the shoulder strap.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this has come out. I still need to do the eyelets down the front and fingerloop a lacing cord, then once I can lace the whole thing up I can level the hem and finish it up. The strap thing was fairly easy to work out and fit on myself, though it would have been easier to do some of the tweaking in back with an extra set of hands (duh). One nice thing about this particular design is that you can get a really wide neck and still have useful and secure shoulder straps. Even with the sleeves in and the skirt on, nothing is shifting around or slipping off and I still have a nice wide, open neckline, which will be nice with later houppelands and early Burgundian styles.

Medieval flashers

2011-06-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

One of the things on my list to do before surgery in Septermber (and really, I need to get this done before Pennsic) is make a cloak. So I was duitifully looking up pictures of ladies matles last night in between eylets, and came across the following page from the Manesse Codex:

If you look closely, you can totally see through the men's tunics. Good thing he seems to have all his proper under things on.

I wonder if they were being presented in a state of semi-undress, or if they really did wear semi-sheer tunics? Either way, I'm not letting my husband see this one, he doesn't need to get any more strange ideas for hot events.

Supportive kirtle, attempt 1

2011-06-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

In a fit of stubborn productivity, I managed to get my supportive kirtle fitted on myself! I think I got the sleeve/shoulder strap thing sorted out too. As you can see from the pictures, I need to rotate the sleeve cap back a little bit and add a little bit of width at the bicep (my poor chubby arms), but other than than I am happy with how everything is looking. And I can move my arm! Yay! This is a huge step up from the last (somewhat) supportive dress I did which had numerous sleeve problems. It's very hard to get and out of that dress. This one should be much better.

The diagonal stitching line at the neck edge is where the strap attaches and where the facing will be at top neck edge. So far, the plan is to attach the facing directly to the bodice. That should work better than having it stick up from the main body of the bodice, and be easier to put together. Plus it will serve to reinforce the edge a bit, which is all for the good. A little more structural integrity at that top edge will help hold the girls in place, not that they are trying to escape or anything but I'm planning to cook and do work in this gown so the sturdier the better.

My only real issue the whole thing is that I'm still not getting the raglan-ish line under the arm. I think this might be because my neckline is lower than it should be, but the painting don't seem to be a whole lot higher than I have this in relation to the bust line. Maybe I need to get the bust higher up for that to work? The general idea that the underarm seam is somehow extending into the facing seam does seem to play out, if you look at the picture above, the problem is just where the neckline is, which is putting the facing seam lower down. The back looks right anyway (I couldn't get a good picture of that with me in it).

As far as actually putting the whole thing together goes, I think I will sew the sleeve into the underarm then attach the shoulder straps and facings. That's going to involve more handsewing in that area than I wanted to do, but it will look neater in the end. The whole thing is now cut out, complete with trapezoidal skirt pieces and lining. The plan is get the interior seams on the bodice machine stitched today, tweak the fit, and flat fell the seams by hand before I attach the skirt. I'll probably just machine french seam the skirt, flat felling seems like overkill.

More kirtle fun

2011-06-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

I think I've got the pattern for my supporting kirtle sorted out (all by myself too! yay! And no free-range boobs!) I've decided to give the funky shoulder strap thing I posted about a couple of weeks ago a try, as this is an interesting problem and I really do like the look of the facing/strap/whatever around the neck opening.

I came across this picture which threw a bit of a wrench into things though:

The detail is taken from the Braque Family Triptych, another van der Weyden, dated about 1450. If you look closely at the shoulder area, it looks like she's working the raglan sleeve seam again, but also a shoulder seam running down the top of the sleeve of the kirlte. Which is weird. This funny top seam doesn't extent into the shoulder strap section as far as I can tell, so it might just be some strange piecing in the sleeve? But there's a bit of white shift poking out, so maybe the kirtle is sleeveless and the seam is the shoulder seam and the strap is just a facing?

As far as the shoulder strap idea goes, that's working out pretty well so far. I'm actually getting something fairly close to the raglan type line at the underarm, where the armscye scoops up to the strap. It's not as pronounced on my pattern but if I were to raise to neckline up a bit it would be (or at least it could be if I fiddle with things a bit, I'll take some pictures later once I have things as point where it's descent).

I'm trying to decide what the best way to attach the facing at the top of the bodice to the strap and the main body of the bodice is - so far the bodice has a smooth line across the top until it dips down for the armscye. I think the easiest way to attach the straps so it looks neat and like the pictures would be to make up the top facing bit with the straps attached to that and sew them on to the top of the bodice as a single piece to finish the neck, then attach the sleeve. Or, put another way, treat the band at the top of the bodice as an actual facing and not as an extension of the bodice. It might be easier to put the sleeve in first, then sew in the facing and the shoulder band. Huh. Now I've confused myself.

Largess Napkins

2011-06-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite sure what possessed me to volunteer to do this but I've decided to weave a pair of napkins for the Pennsic largess basket this year. I think I was partly inspired by our kingdom having gotten Caid, which is where I went to my very first ever SCA event back when I was still a wide-eyed high school kid. So it's a little bit nostalgic, and really, how many napkins do I need?

The napkins are being woven in cottolin, as I had some and it looks nice and is easy to take care of, in natural and a weird sort of light grass green that I'm really not fond of by itself. It's working up very nicely though. I'm still surprised by what colors do when you weave with them. The draft is the rosette twill from Northern European Textiles (which can be found here). I'll be writing up more extensive documentation on the draft when I'm done, as this is part of my A&S 50 list too, but so far it's going very well. I managed to get the loom threaded without any mistakes, and my first attempt at using a floating selvedge is going pretty well (if a little slowly at first).

Here's the start of my actual weaving:

The slight lumpiness in the closeup seems to be resolving itself as I'm weaving, I didn't have my warp under quite enough tension when I started weaving and the result is what you see. The bit I have woven since I took these pictures is much more even and smooth. I think once everything comes off the loom and gets washed it will even out just fine. I have found that I need to be much more careful when I am weaving this as the pattern and colors show mistakes very clearly, and since I'm presenting these to foreign royalty and all we can't have too many obvious errors. As I did with the elevation towel, I made my warp long enough that I should be able to pick the better of 3 or 4 napkins once I am done though.

It turns out this weave is quite similar to the diamond patterned background used on several of the Perugia towels, so this is turning out to be good practice for my next big project. Warping up the fine linen for that still scares me a little bit, but I think I can manage. I just have to find some good movies to watch on the laptop while I'm threading and I'll be fine.

Finished Roman!

2011-06-06T05:52:00.000-07:00

I wore the new Roman for half a day at Sapphire last weekend, but it got a proper first-day-out this weekend at our local Baronial Birthday event. I still need to make a tunica interior, and I think I am going to turn the Pink-Palla-of-Doom I wore at Sapphire with a silk palla. The smaller silk veil I wore this weekend was much more comfortable and moved better. Plus I don't look like Hello Kitty Roman Matron.

Overall the gown did very well. I had some problems with my mamillare (the bust band that keeps the girls from going all free-range on me, like chickens). I found this page today, which is from a class at Pennsic a couple of years ago, and I think I've been wrapping it backwards. This morning I decided to test out the start in front method and so far it working much better. The girls can't get out the top of the band and nothing seems to be shifting downwards, which was the problem over the weekend. Yay!

For the stolla, I want to get some better hardware for the straps. The current version just has purchased trim sewn on, some of the artwork looks like there is jewelry of some kind holding the gown together at the shoulders. One looks like large round buttons or small brooches, which would be a nice option and give me different ways of wearing the stolla since I could pin the pleats however I wanted that day. The Pink Palla of Doom is going to become a tunica I think, which I could wear as a stolla if I wanted to go the Hello Kitty route. Once I make a couple of tunica interiors I will have pretty decent Roman wardrobe for those hot humid events!

A&S 50 16: Learn Naalbinding: Oslo Stitch

2011-06-03T09:08:00.000-07:00

Nalebinding (or naalbinding) is an ancient form of needlework related to and often mistaken for knitting and crochet. It is worked with a single needle and short sections of yarn which are stitched into looped to form a stretchy, dense fabric quit similar to knitting. Nalbinding was in use in Bronze Age Europe and was used by the Viking to make shoe liners, short socks and mittens.

Several variants of Nalbinding stitches are known to have been used in Viking Age Europe, the simplest of them being the Oslo stitch (so called for an eleventh century mitten worked in this stitch found in the Oslo excavations). This seems to have been a fairly common stitch and at least three extant mittens have been found worked in this manner. As this stitch is fairly simple, was commonly used, and I knew someone who could teach it me, I elected to learn this stitch first.

I had attempted to teach myself Nalbinding from a book and various text and illustration based instructions several years prior to this with very little success. My second attempt with a live instructor was more successful and after a few bumps I was able to produce a passable tube of nalbound fabric. After some problems with maintaining even tension, I was able to start on my first sock.

Viking age socks were more like shoe liners than modern socks, coming up only to the ankle. These would have provided an extra layer of warmth and padding over cloth stockings of some sort and under leather shoes. Surviving socks seem to have been constructed from the toe up, unlike my socks which I worked from the top down to simplify the starting row. I plan to work future socks in the more historically accurate toe-up manner once I am more comfortable with the techniques involved.

Sources:
Walton, Penelope. Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fiber from 16-22 Coppergate. York Archeological Trust 1989.

Hald, Margrethe. Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials: A Comparative Study of Costume and Iron Age Textiles, trans. Jean Olsen. Archaeological-Historical Series Vol. XXI. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark, 1980.

Schmitt, Larry.Lessons in Nalbinding: Mittens, Mittens, Mittens! Lawrence W. Schmitt, 1997

Schmitt, Larry.Lessons in Nalbinding: Scarves, Wimples and More. Lawrence W. Schmitt, 1999.

Priest-Dorman, Carolyn. Nalebinding Techniques in the Viking Age. (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/nalebind.html) Last accessed June 2, 2011.

Lewins, Shelagh. Nalbinding Socks: Methods of Construction (http://www.shelaghlewins.com/reenactment/naalbinding/sock_construction.htm) Last accessed June 2, 2011.

For instruction on the actual stitch, YouTube is a great resource! Just do a search for “nalbinding” and you will find lots of helpful instructional videos, one of which will explain in a way that works for you. I found the videos available from http://www.youtube.com/user/senshisteph to be helpful with Oslo stitch but there are many others.

Weekend report

2011-06-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went to Sapphire Joust, a notoriously hot and humid event near Richmond. Overall, it was fun, though my hip and leg gave me a lot of trouble and I ended up packing out earlier on Sunday than I had planned too. Oh well, could have been worse. I did some good shopping, talked with friends, and won the Arts and Sciences competition I had knit the Monmouth cap and mittens for! yay! The prize was a really gorgeous spindle, which was perfect for a "Best use of Raw Wool" competition. This was the last competition I had as Baronial Champion, and it was nice to go out with a successful one. I've posted a link to the documentation to the right, and will be writing up the pattern for the mitten in the next week or so. The hat pattern, as I mentioned in my last post, needs some work, so that will be coming as soon as I get it worked out to my satisfaction.

I wore the green hose all day on Saturday, with mundane clogs, and they worked pretty well. I need to re-cut the feet and take them in a little bit through the leg and ankle to meet with my own particular standards (which are a little OCD, I will admit), but they are comfortable and look pretty good as is. Bias cutting the foot was definitely a mistake. this might have worked in wool, but it make for way too much stretching in the linen, and lots of strange bunching around the ball of my foot. Luckily it all sort of bunched up in a way that was not a problem in my shoe, but I can do better than that.

The blue houppeland was a big hit and looked great, even after a car trip and less than ideal storage in my tent. And it was comfortable. I wore it for late-afternoon court on Saturday, sitting in the sun and was quite comfortable. The hood made for a very nice sun-shade when I flipped the brim forward, though I apparently looked a little bit like a Sith apprentice or something.

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures, but I will be trotting my new Roman out next weekend for our local birthday event and will hopefully get some pictures of that then. If I am feeling ambitions I may change into the houppland for feast and for court, but we shall see.

Now I must buckle down and finish the brick stitch bag for Pennsic, and get some more undies made so that if I am able to go (more on that later, I'm going in for hip surgery so that may get in the way of camping plans) I will have enough clothes. And get my stuff for 30 Year done (definitely not going to that as my surgery is slated for the week before, but my entries will be there without me)

Monmouth Cap and MOL Mittens

2011-05-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

Here they are in their glory! I will post the documentation as soon as it gets a once over from a fresh set of eyes. This is my entry for this weekend's raw wool challenge. I spun the wool quite awhile ago, and just did the dying (my latest experiments with madder which I posted about recently).

I like that the hat and mittens are more functional and less fashionable, things an ordinary working person might have had. Or a kid out for a romp in the snow. In this case, an over-sized kid, but certainly not the little lordling I'm usually trying to dress. The mittens are ambidextrous too, which just goes to show that Elizabeth Zimmerman's suggestion to knit mittens in sets of 3's might have been around for a good long while. We have this one because a kid dropped it in a field after all.

Now I should just have time to get to activities night tonight and get myself packed up for the weekend in the morning without a huge rush! Or at least not any more than the usual amount of rush. Thankfully the doctors appointment that was scheduled for tomorrow late in the afternoon got moved to yesterday, so I am free to leave whenever I am ready and will be able to beat some of the traffic. As long as I get there in time to set the tent up in daylight I will be doing ok.

Knitting frustration

2011-05-25T04:36:00.000-07:00

A quick post to say that my project for this weekend's event (hah, nothing like the last minute you say?) is, in typical form, not going well. The mitten portion is done and looks wonderful, the hat is giving me grief. I was going to do a flat cap and got halfway done with the crown (those buggers take For.Ev.Er. to knit BTW) when I realized I wasn't going to have enough yarn to finish no matter what I did. Gah. So, I frogged the whole thing yesterday and started on a Monmouth cap. Still a hat, still a different gauge than the patterns out there so it's not a too-easy knitting part of the project, and I should be able to get it done pretty fast and not run out of yarn this time.

It's also still boring as hell to knit, like most period European knit (except the Sion bags), and means I have to start over on my hat portion of the documentation. Sigh. I can do this, right? It's not a huge A&S event, I don't need a 20 page opus or anything and there's the spinning and dying and wool processing part to talk about and that none of that has changed. Just the knitting.

Did I mention it was boring to knit? Just round after round of boring old stockinette. Sure, there's some vaguely interesting construction with the brim but I've done that sort of thing before so it's rather lost it's glamor and besides which, that's hardly enough to make a vast expanse of stockinette interesting. It would probably be soothing and mindless if I didn't have to worry about writing up the documentation as well.

Finished ave beads

2011-05-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

Somehow or another I've got the hang of this lampworking thing well enough to finish the ave beads for my paternoster project! I ended up being able to produce enough 7-9mm beads for a Seraphic rosary, or Franciscan Crown, which has seven decades (72 beads in all once you add the bit at the end). Yay!

I'm super excited about this for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's a really interesting form of paternoster and one of the few that can be documented to a specific time period. Franciscan historians date it to 1422 (see http://www.shrinesf.org/rosary.htm), when a young friar had a vision of the Virgin. Second, the focus is on the joys of the Mary rather than the more common (at least today) sorrows or wounds that you tend to see in "special" forms of the devotion (though if you do the standard 15 mysteries only 5 of those are sorrowful). I'm all about some extra joy right now, so I find this particular form of the prayer really appealing. Lastly, I really like St. Francis. My grandmother, who was a huge force in my early life had a particular affinity for St. Francis and when I visited Assisi in high school I found the experience particularly moving. I wasn't even Catholic yet, but I found it to be one of the most peaceful and prayerful places I've ever visited. The brothers that we met there were some of the kindest, warmest people I have had the honor to met.

When I set out to make the beads for a paternoster I was really hoping I would be able to do a Franciscan Crown, but I wasn't sure if the actual glass working was going to go well. I took the time to practice, and didn't try to do anything more ambitious that 72 simple beads that are more or less the same size (which is, I hope, ambition enough for my eventual judges), but so far it's looking really good. Here you can see everything laid out, waiting for the gauds. I found that if I sorted the decades into similar sizes you notice the variations in size much less.

The plan is to find some nice 12mm (or so) silver beads for the gauds, and order a cross or some other medal from The Rosary Workshop. Hearts were quite popular and they have a couple of suitable sacred hearts that should be about the right size. I'd like to avoid a tassel, though if I don't find a cross or something else that goes well with whatever gauds I end up with that's what I'll use. I had planned to tablet weave the cord for the beads, as something similar is shown in one of the MOL books, but the hole in the beads is a little too small so I'll thread them on a heavy linen cord.

More fun with fire

2011-05-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

The lampworking thing is sort of addictive! I've been practicing, with an aim towards producing uniform, round beads so that I can eventually make a paternoster. I think I'm ready to start working with the actual glass I want to use, it seems that each color rod behaves a little differently, which makes sense since different metals and minerals are used to make the colors and each one melts and burns at a different temperature. They also seem to wind onto the mandrels a little differently. If I was good at this, I would be working all the glass at the coolest possible temperatures but I've got to figure out what that is for the glass I want to work as I am not good at this yet.

Anyway, the result of my practice is, as you see, a lovely Viking-ish bead swag! With some dangley bits of things that went terribly wrong but I could not bear to throw away.

And some close ups:

The stacked beads in the center are the first beads my husband and I made (he made the silvery blue one and I made the red one). I'm pretty pleased with the clear one with red spots and the amber one with a black stripe, my first attempts at embellishing. The whole thing has been a learning process but it's fun and oddly relaxing.

Flemmish kercheif/coif/head thingie

2011-05-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

I'm posty-mcposty-pants today. Oh well.

While waiting for my yarn to dye, I decided to make a Flemmish style kerchief or cap to go with my as-yet-unsewn kirtle. The general idea of the head covering comes from several pictures, but they pretty much all look like this one from from the Hours of Charles of Angouleme:

The Medieval Tailors Assistant has a pattern for such a cap which is tailed. Sort of a coif with long flaps, rather like lappets, cut on the bias, which one wraps round the head and ties. See http://www.gelfling.dds.nl/tailed%20cap.html for the one remaining website (and some broken links to sites with construction details, le sigh) about this method of making this head covering. This makes no sense to me as it's highly wasteful of fabric, and for nothing more than a do-rag. Besides which, it sort of looks like you can accomplish the same thing with a rectangular cut veil.

So, I found http://www.heatherspages.net/flemish-kerchief.html which shows an alternate way of arranging a Flemish style kerchief and http://lynnehurstinvites.com/edyth/notes/veil.html which gave me another set of instructions and some dimensions for the thing. I set to cutting and hemming (oh how I hates the hemming) and then pinning and flipping and low and behold it worked! Here you see the results:

I played around with how I arranged the kerchief a bit and discovered that if I fold back the brim, twist the ends and bring them up to the top of my head, it ends up looking just like the picture! As seen here:

I think I need to make the whole thing just a little wider for this to work perfectly, maybe only an inch or so on either side of the brim, but it looks right and makes a lot more sense to me than the tailed cap approach. Plus, you can wear this in several ways, which seems more economical and practical.

Madder dying results, and fun with fire

2011-05-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

Here are the results of my latest attempts to dye with madder:

The small skein in between the silk and the wool is from the original, pickle-tainted attempt, to show the differance in color. It's actually pretty close to how the skeins came out of the dye pot, so I'm thinking the pickle jar ended up not making that big a difference in the end. I did end up using an iron modifier on the wool, just briefly, as they skeins came out pretty bright and orangy-red to begin with. The color is a sort of terracotta/rust red now, which is pretty but still not quite what I was going for. I will be able to wear it as a flat cap though, with a buffer of linen cap, which is the main thing.

So, I am no closer to understanding how to get a true red from madder. It may be that with alum, you just don't get a true red, more of an orange based red. Maybe I need to change my mordant? Possibly it's the water from my tap and I need to check the Ph and/or mineral content there? Or maybe I'm doing something wrong? I kept the temperatures low, and according to my book if it had got too high the color would have gone dull, which it certainly did not, so I'm pretty sure that wasn't my problem. Maybe madder just gives you an orange based red and I need to accept that?

The yarn ended up fulling a bit in the dye pot as well, which is rather to be expected but a major pain to deal with. Since there are bit of madder root floating around in there too, they got all stuck to the yarn and it's been no fun trying to wind the stuff into balls. Maybe less stirring next time? Though if I stir less, I'm not sure I would get such an even color on the yarn.

I was quite surprised by the color I ended up with on the silk - it's a really pretty champagne/orange, which I like but was not at all what I was expecting to get (the silk did not go in the iron modifier). The silk will probably get used for some tablet woven garters, which will look lovely in that color. I'm guessing to get red, or even just brighter color on silk, you need to either use a different mordant or leave it in the dye longer. Or possibly use a different dye altogether.

And as a total random aside, here are my first six attempts are making lampwork beads. The seventh bead got stuck on the mandrel and had to be smashed with a hammer. The process is quite exciting, what with the large flame and all, if a little scary. Hopefully I will get the hang of the technique well enough to make enough beads for my paternoster project. These will probably end up on a Viking bead swag (or garland as I prefer to call them):

More Madder

2011-05-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

My madder vat is on the stove! Yay! After a few of hours of slow simmering, it looks like I'm getting a decent red this time, rather than the orangey color I got the first time I tried dying with madder (the result of soaking my root in a plastic jar which had previously been home to pickles). The silk I threw in for good measure is orange though. Sort of a brownish orange, heading towards salmon, but still orange. I'm not really sad about this, I suspect the silk would take the color differently but I'm surprised. It guess that explains the difference in some of the period dye recipes for silk (duh), many of them add other dyestuffs to get a good red, or don't use madder at all.

I've got the let this first round got for awhile longer yet before I know how good a red I've got on my wool. Depending on the orange tones, I may try a little bit of an iron modifier on the wool. It's destined to be a flat cap and the trim band on a pair of mittens, both of which I hope to be able to wear. Since I will have at least a linen cap on between the flat cap and my face, I can stand a little orange in the red, but the super orange I ended up with last time is really not flattering at all. According to my dye book, I should get a nice tone with the iron and lose most of the orange. We shall see.

I have 12 ounces of oatmeal colored handspun CVM to toss into the exhaust bath once this first round is done. The current plan is to try that with the mordant-and-dye-in-one-go method and see how that works. And use the iron for sure on that, just for fun. I have no particular plans for that fiber, it's been sitting around in my pile of spun wool waiting for something so I figured it might get used if I dyed it.

Hose, attempt one

2011-05-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here's my fist attempt at hose, using my fabulous new leg to drape and fit (sort of) the pattern. I used the 16th century pattern from Textiles and Clothing (the MOL book) as that particular set of hose had no seams under the foot. I have, as a result of a car accident almost 2 years ago, developed some less than fun problems with my feet and having seams running under the arch of my foot seems like it might be a bad plan. Probably less so with wool hose, but as I want to make linen hose for now (I live in Virginia, it gets humid and I die) seams under my arch are right out.

Anyway, here are the results. I'm not 100% happy with the fit of the foot but overall they came out pretty well. Certainly they are wearable and fit as well the ready-made pair I bought at 12th Night.

I made one mistake/change in drafting the pattern that I need to go back and correct before I cut out the next pair (which will be yellow!) - I cut the sole and side gussets in one piece and cut the whole bottom of the foot on the bias. There is another pair of extant hose where the foot is constructed in this way, but the pair from London has the gussets and sole cut separately and on the straight grain. I think this will work better on my foot. Also, the heel seam needs to extend UNDER my heel a bit, which I did not do to avoid a seem under my foot, but I think the hose will sit better on the leg if the seam goes all the way around the curve of the heel the way the original hose to. I also want to tighten up the fit around the lower leg and ankle just a bit.

I'm also wondering if they made these footed - i.e. for right and left feet, or if they were ambidextrous. The way the seams were sewn on the original would allow you to wear it either side out, so I suppose you could fit it more closely and effectively have a left and right foot. I didn't want (and still don't) to have footed socks, as that's just one more thing to think about before my coffee, but does argue in favor of hand sewing and careful finishing. I think if I snug the whole thing up I will eliminate most of the bagging thats resulting from making the foot right/left neutral but this is something I'm really curious about now.

Overall I'm pretty happy with these as a first attempt. Having never made cloth hose before, it went pretty well and I'm pleased with when I ended up with. They aren't perfect but I learned a lot and feel a lot more confident going into the next pair.

Know thy strength

2011-05-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

I got some madder root last night from my laurel to use for a A&S entry coming up at the end of the month, and since I really need to get moving on the project, I started prepping the root this morning. For those of you not familiar with the madder root dyeing process, the roots come in pretty big pieces which you have to crush up into small bits, so as to expose maximum surface area to your dye liquid, and then soak the little bits for a day or two before you can start dyeing. Chopping up the roots can be pretty tough business, you have to either grind them up in a food process or use a mortar or something similar. Some of the larger bits can be really hard to deal with.

One of the larger, tough bits broke my small food processor (it was a P.O.C. anyway, so this is not surprising). This is what happened after some vigorous smashing with my just-for-dyestuff mortar:

A Third Leg

2011-05-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

After much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair, and some discussion with various people (all whom have the audacity to be non-local and thus of no immediate help) I think I have, thanks to a suggestion from Edith over at The Compleatly Dressed Anachronist stumbled across a solution to my hose fitting problem! Meet my Duct Tape Leg Double!

This was actually quite easy to make, even on myself. I think it would be easier to do with some help, but it's totally doable on your own. For those of you wanting to make hose on your own, here's what I did:

Supplies:
Cling wrap
1 Roll duct tape
1 16oz bag stuffing (minimum)
Scissors

1. Wrapped you leg in plastic wrap. Get the good stuff, the cheep kind won't cling well and you will end up taping to your leg. Ouch! Wrap all the way up to your mid-thigh, you want the leg form to go above the knee, higher that your finished hose will go (better too high than not high enough). Secure the cling wrap with a small bit of tape.
2. Cut some strips of duct tape about 8 inches long with scissors you do not care about (the tape will gum up your scissors pretty bad so don't use your good ones)
3. Start taping at the bottom of your foot, keeping your ankle in a bent position as though standing. I found this was easiest to do if I sat down and kept my foot on the ground, checking my wrapping as I went by standing up after I placed every couple of pieces of tape. The tape should be as smooth as you can make it and snug, but don't wrap too tightly or you will cut off the circulation to your foot.
4. Keep wrapping with short bits of tape up your leg, keeping it in a standing position, until you have one layer of tape from your foot to wherever you want your form to stop (thigh high is probably good). Don't make it tight at the top or it won't be an accurate fit.
5. Build up a second layer of tape over the first, with the tape strips going in the opposite direction.
6. Cut the form off your leg CAREFULLY and remove from your foot. I cut down the inside of my leg to my foot rather than down the back, as I was doing this alone and could not reach the back of my leg and cut safely. Do whatever works, just don't cut yourself and try to keep the cutting line straight. This is the hardest part of the whole process.
7. Tape the cut line back together but only up to the top of the ankle. Stuff the foot and ankle firmly with whatever you are using to stuff. I used plastic grocery bags for the foot and poly fiber fill for the rest. Get a good firm stuff on the foot and ankle to support to the rest of the form.
8. Tape the rest of the leg and finish stuffing.

9. Cut on oval of cardboard out to fit the top opening of your leg form. Insert this to cover the stuffing, and tape it in place, covering it with tape.

10. Go back and add one more layer of tape over the whole form, paying particular attention to weak spots like the ankle and behind the knee. You can tweak the measurements a bit at this stage, building up or pulling in spots are not quite the right size.
11. Admire your work and make beautiful hose!

A couple of quick notes:
- I stuffed the foot with plastic bags, which seemed to give me a firmer pack. This is a good thing. More weight might also be good, so if you can add something to weight the foot so the whole thing stands on it's own, put that in the foot stuffing.
- If I do this again I will try that expanding foam insulation stuff they have at the hardware store
- A dowel or some other rigid support might be useful to support the ankle. Mine is a little wobbly, which is not a huge issue as I don't anticipate this thing lasting that long but if you want to use it for many pairs of hose the extra rigidity might help.

Another mystery

2011-05-08T06:16:00.000-07:00

I'm getting ready for my next sewing project (other than the blasted hose, which hardly rise to the level of a project IMO, except in the whole finding-help-with-pattern aspect of the thing), which will be a kirtle. So far the plan is to do this in linen, as linen is less expensive than wool, will be comfy at Pennsic, and I have some I am willing to commit to a gown at my current size.

Anyway, I've pretty well decided to go with the waist-seam method of doing this, with trapezoidal skirt panels similar to those shown in the MOL book, as that will be much easier to fit on my self with minimal-to-no outside help. Which brings me to the questions. The bodice. I've been looking at paintings to get the best idea I can of where all the seam lines should be and have run across something strange (to me anyway). In nearly all of the artwork there is a facing or something around the neck that I don't tend to see included on the reproductions of these gowns. You can see it quite clearly here, in a detail from Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross:

It also looks like there is a small raglan-type seam at the arm. I can't be quite sure if it's just in the facing piece, or if that's actually actually how the sleeve is shaped. It (the raglan-looking seam I mean) would actually make sense if the facing bit was a narrow shoulder strap extending from the back, or cut separately and attached to both front and back, rather like what you see on some later period bodices. In a larger view of the picture, you can see the same angled seam front and back. One thing there clearly is NOT is a seam at the top of the shoulder. Again, this isn't the only place I've seen this sort of seaming in paintings, it seems rather more typical than exceptional, though I've found examples showing a regular shoulder seam as well. (the other thing I really like about this picture is that is appears she's using both eyelets AND lacing rings, with the transition between the two at the waist)

Here's a good back view of this sort of gown, another van der Wyden, this one a detail from "The Presentation at the Temple." Here you can see that the angled seem goes down all the way into the armscye at least:

So, what does all this mean? Is it a sort of raglan sleeve? Or just a separate strap bit? Is the seam around the neck a facing or just a line of stitching or something else? If the strap is separate, I can see where the extra bit around the neck opening would be helpful (it would be helpful regardless really). Should I try this? Or just do the easy seam-over-shoulder bodice?

Cloth hose dilema

2011-05-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

I need to make, among other things, several pairs of cloth hose for myself. I have one pair which I purchased that fit pretty well, but the foot is not 100% accurate. I don't know if I care about this or not, the design seems pretty easy to deal with and more of the extant examples I've looked at have some really odd, fiddly things going on in the heel or ankle. I'm sure there's a reason for this, and that once I got a pattern sorted it would all make sense, but this brings me to the problem...

Patterning. Specifically, patterning something that really needs to be done while on the body. From what I've been able to find so far, to get hose to fit well, you really have to fit them carefully on the foot and leg for which they are being made. Since they will be on my leg, this is going to be tricky. Coordinating with someone who has the skills to do this for me is going to be very tricky.

So, do I give up on well-fitted hose and go with a commercial pattern,doing what I can on my own and accepting a certain amount of bagginess? Or copy the pair I have and accept a known amount of bagginess? Copying the instep piece is going to be a little tricky without taking the whole thing apart but not any worse than starting from scratch. It really would be nice to have a good pattern, I need several pairs and the pattern will serve me well for a long time once I get it sorted out.

What's doing

2011-05-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

I freely admit that I'm a project collector. One of the email lists I'm on has been discussing this, and it would seem I'm not alone, but I never really bothered to really think about this before. I counted last night and had no less four in-progress projects within arms reach of where I was sitting and another four or five within easy reach in the same room (not counting anything spinning related). My poor husband. Our living room has been totally taken over. Oh well. At least most of them are pretty small things.

For the things that have deadlines and aren't distractions or just hemming sorts of things (veils and bits of Roman garb), here's what I'm currently working on:

For A&S 30 Triathlon:

Finishing the eyelet brick stitch bag (making some good progress here actually)
Perugia towel (research and supply collecting phase)
Lampwork Rosary (as above, need to schedule a work-day)

For Sapphire raw-wool challenge:

MOL mitten (can be seen here)
Flat cap (the plan for this event, which is creeping up on a little faster than I would like, is to madder dye some wool I spun from a fleece to make the hat and the little contrast band on the mitten. Otherwise it's a supper-dull project. I'm planning on going to Maryland Sheep and Wool this weekend, so I should be able to get some madder root there, or get some from my Laurel (who I'm going with) and do the dying next week, then I can knit and be done with that)

Other:

Weave napkin for auction/raffle fundraiser (really lacking motivation here for several silly reasons)
Get A&S 50 documentation up to date
Make clothes for Pennsic (mostly underwear, but I need at least one supportive gown. I need fabric for this)
Finish knitting protective bags for feast gear
a totally modern alpaca sweater
Finish spinning gotland wool for weaving warp
Finish sorting and washing Hog Island fleece

Now that I've listed all this out, I feel bad posting about it. I should get to work! How can I be board with this much to do? My level of productivity over the next few months will be largely governed by whether or not my surgeon decides to proceed with fixing my hip. If he does, lots of the big stuff that involves standing for any period of time will have to get done soon or put off till after I've recovered from surgery. Sadly it's my right leg, so I'm not sure how much spinning and weaving I will be able to get done during the early stages of recovery. At least I will have embroidery and hand-sewing to keep my busy, and maybe I can finally get some of the more complex tablet weaving I've been wanting to try figured out, if I can sort out a way to warp.

A&S 50 7: Tablet Weave Two Colored Striped Band from London Dig MOL Braid 449

2011-05-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

The original band was woven in two colors of plied silk, pink and pale yellow (possibly originally white) and had bronze bar mounts attached to it. Twelve tablets were used, making a fairly narrow band of 8.5 millimeters. Each tablet was threaded with two colors of silk threaded in groups of three, SSSZZZSSSZZZ and turned continuously in one direction to create a striped pattern. The band shows one reversal of the turning direction, probably to un-twist the remaining warps.

The cards as threaded in two colors as shown below:

A
B
C
D
	S	S	S	Z	Z	Z	S	S	S	Z	Z	Z
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12

The cards turn continually forward. The original band shows one reversal of direction. When enough twist has built up in the warp to prevent smooth turning of the cards, reverse direction to untwist the warp and continue turning backwards.

I had selected this band as my first attempt at tablet weaving as it seemed like a fairly simple threading and turning pattern. For this first attempt, I used size 3 crochet cotton from DMC in two colors, a light blue and grey. Threading the warp was quite simple using the continuous warping method described by Crocket and Lewins. Actual weaving proceeded smoothly, with some allowance given for the learning process. The start of the band is a great deal looser and wider than the end, which can be attributed to my inexperience. By the finish of the band I figured out how to beat the weft down to get a smooth surface and maintain an even band width.

Overall, I am quite pleased with how this band works up and am looking forward to using the design again, perhaps for a belt or set of garters in silk, using the original pink and yellow.

Sources:

Crowfoot, Elizabeth. Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450 (Medieval Finds from Excavations in London). Boydell Press, 2001.

Carolyn Priest-Dorman. Three Recipes for Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Tablet Weaving. (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/3recipes.html) Last accessed Aug. 31 2010.

Crocket, Candace. Card Weaving. Interweave Press, 1991.

Lewins, Shelagh. The Ancient Craft of Tablet Weaving: Getting Started (http://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm) Last accessed Nov. 18, 2010.

A&S 50 Six: Tablet Weave Satin Effect Band from London Dig MOL 423

2011-05-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

The original braid was woven in fine silk and found attached to a bronze strap end which would have been used with a girdle. Braids of this type gained in popularity and were used for belts up to the early Tudor period. The satin pattern in accomplished by card idling – only some of the cards are turned with each pick. While this is quite simple to do the process is actually quite time consuming and I found it very difficult to keep track of where I was in my pattern.

The cards are all threaded with four stands of plied silk, alternating Z and S. 39 cards were used for the original band. For my initial attempt at this band, I used size 3 DMC pearle cotton in a salmon pink and black and 24 cards total as I only had 24 cards of the same size at the time. The cards were from Halcyon Yards, and measured 3 ¼ inches square. The first two and last two cards were threaded in black, and the remaining 20 cards were threaded in the salmon pink, then all the cards were arranged so they alternated Z and S, as in the threading diagram below:

1
2
3
4
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S	Z	S

The cards are turned as followed:

Cards 1, 2, 23, and 24 turn forward every turn

First turn: All remaining even cards turn forward

Second turn: All odd card turn forward

I found this band problematic for a number of reasons. First, I had a great deal of difficulty keeping track of where I was in the pattern when I left my weaving (and even sometimes when I simply looked away). A more experienced weaver might have fewer problems with this. I suspect part of the issue is that it takes two turns for any sort of pattern to being to emerge, so it is more difficult to read your weaving and figure out which turn you are on.

Second, the cards were far too large for my hands, making the turning much more difficult. Smaller cards would make working with two packs easier.

Third, I could not sort out an efficient way of handling two packs of cards. Separating the packs out (one in front and one in back) seems the most efficient but I had trouble getting a clear shed, and again because the cards were large I still had trouble manipulating them. I ended up turning each card individually which was quite tedious.

Lastly, the pattern does not show at all well in cotton. I ended up weaving only a few inches of this band because of the difficult I had with the cards and weaving itself, and the poor appearance of the band in the fiber I had chosen. I plan to try again using silk now that I have smaller cards and a better idea of how to work with two packs of cards.

Sources:

Crowfoot, Elizabeth. Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450 (Medieval Finds from Excavations in London). Boydell Press, 2001.

Carolyn Priest-Dorman. Three Recipes for Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Tablet Weaving. (http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~capriest/3recipes.html) Last accessed Aug. 31 2010.

The finished Houppeland!

2011-04-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here it is, in all it's smurfy glory! I am really pleased with how this gown turned out. The linen ended up working well, and the gown is very comfortable. It's very, very blue, but oh well.

I really need to make a wider belt and a better undergown/scarf/partlet thing for the neck area, but other than that I am quite happy. As far as the neck filler-inner bit, I had a great deal of trouble with a straight cut scarf. It kept bunching up funny. I ended up using a square veil and folding it on the bias kerchief style, which worked well but looked quite bulky. I think either a partlet type thing or a v-neck under shift will work better in future.

New projects

2011-04-27T15:16:00.000-07:00

Labor day weekend will be a pretty major event for the SCA kingdom I'm currently living in - the 30 year celebration - so of course there will be an A&S competition. We finally got the official word as what the competition format would be yesterday, and as I've been sitting here watching TV and hemming I've been mulling over what I might do for my Triathlon entry. This one is particularly ugly in that I will actually have to do something from three different categories, not just two, so I can't really double up on anything and play to my strengths. But then again, no one else can either so that sort of works out.

My current plan, given the time constraints and with some consideration to my A&S 50 goals, is as follows:
1. The eyelet brick stitch bag of doom
2. Perugia towel with hand-dyed indigo bits
3. lampwork glass rosary, of the seraphic variety (if I can manage to make that many beads that match)

All of these things date to the early part of the 15th century, which is just about perfect for my actual persona.

The only real issue here is the lampwork rosary. Lampwork isn't exactly period, though you can apparently produce a period glass bead that way. I know nothing about period glass work, or bead making in period or out, so this will be a new set of skills, but should be fun and interesting. I do know they made rosaries out of glass, so that at least is not a problem.

Almost done!

2011-04-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

The linen smurf houppeland is almost done! The collar went together very smoothly yesterday, after some brief debate/argument with myself about how to shape the back. The later Burgundian style gowns have a pointed collar in back, but as far as I can tell the houppelands do not. Since this is a transitional style, I have no idea what's going on in back. Looking at the artwork, it seems to me that the shawl collar is a sort of outgrowth of the fur lining - as the v-neck style starts to appear you see just a narrow bit of fur from the lining that gradually becomes wider and eventually you get a shawl collar. It makes more sense to me at least for this to happen naturally by just turning things back, especially since in at least one of the examples I posted earlier it looked like there was a small stand-up fur collar on the gown, and the Zhorlecky houppeland has a stand-up collar as well. So, the rounded back shawl collar won out and the dress is done. Except for the hem. I hate hems. Instead of the hem, I made a small open hood to wear turban-style as seen in the Seven Sacraments alterpeice. All I have left to do with that is finish stab stitching the edges. Which I hate less than hemming.

Anyway, the plan for today is to hem the gown and finish the stab stitching on the open hood. Because of my slight mistake in cutting the triangles, I ended up with less length than I had planed and am going to have to bind the hem for the gown to hit the ground in front. This is fine, as most of the artwork seems to show the lining wrapping around the front of the hem anyway. I'm doing this in linen rather than the velvet as the velvet will make the dress stand out funny around the bottom. The linen should give just a little extra body though, which coupled with the under gown will make the whole thing hang quite nicely once it's on.

What you can't see from the pictures is that once I got the collar attached, I found that I won't need a hook and eye or any closures to keep the dress shut and neat in front! Yay! The only thing I loath more than hemming is sewing in hooks and eyes. No idea what that's all about, but there it is. The whole thing stays neatly in place with just the weight of the dress and the belt the hold it. It's kind of a miracle. I think it has to do with the triangles falling from the neck the way they do, but the weight of the gown is very evenly distributed and not at all cumbersome, unlike my full-circle cut houppeland. I am going to need a wider and shorter belt to wear with this. The current plan it to tablet weave something, but I'm not sure yet what. I really like the wide red belt in the Seven Sacrements detail, but those of you in the SCA know that red belts can be problematic (less so on women in my current Kingdom than where I started out, but that's another subject)

Molly the dog thought I was trying to take pictures of her and kindly obliged by sitting still, for once, so for your edification:

A little progress and some sheep

2011-04-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to spend as much time sewing over the weekend as I had hoped. Saturday wasn't overly productive as I ended up getting dragged to the office by the hubbs after lunch, then vigil mass in the evening, which pretty well took care of the day. All I did was fiddle with the back of neck, which I cut a little too wide. Luckily the collar will cover my fix and now I know to cut the back narrower than I think it needs to be for next time. Sunday I did manage to get the sleeves adjusted and sewn, the velvet cuffs attached, and one sleeve set in before we had to go to the in-laws for dinner and head up to Williamsburg for the Last Aikido Class of the Academic Year (and there was much rejoicing!).

I sewed the lining down on the one sleeves and took some pictures this morning. What a difference the sleeve makes to the drape! I really am pleased with how this is coming out. For outdoor events, this should work out to being a very comfortable gown.

Here is the front view with the sleeve attached. The center is still caving into the cavity of the dress form, but the draping is working out pretty well:

And the back. You can see how the gown is folding and rippling better without the caving in issue, and also were I made a little tuck in each side of the neck to narrow it a bit:

On our way to aikido on Sunday we stopped by one of the sheep enclosures in the Williamsburg historic section. Some of the Leicester longwools have lambed and the lambs were out. I'm not sure if it's common to the breed, but the ewe's seem to have all twined this year. There were 2 mamma sheep and 4 lambs in this particular enclosure. One of the lambs was trying to chew on the a brick wall, which reminded me a little of my dog Molly (a Chihuahua mix who is famous for eating many strange non-food items, and also wasabi). Sweaters-on-the-hoof are always fun to watch!

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Medieval Threads

Sleeve sources

The 12 Hour Gown

Pouting

Perugia brainwaves

MOL Band 142 Redux

Perugia towel research

A&S 50: 47- Indigo dye silk and cotton - modern method

A project for the DH

A&S 50: 43 MOL band 142

A&S 50: 33-Rosette Twill

A&S 50: 14 Learn Fingerloop Braiding

The finished Venetian Coat and 12th Night report

Coat Progress and new costume resource

Turkish Coat Progress!

New turn shoes

Venetian Coat Sleeves

Acid dye fun and Venetian dresses

*ded*

Our new baby

Rewind please?

Hat problem solved!

Advice

More hat pondering

Duchie Award!

12th Night Planning

Rijksmuseum digital exhibition

Healing!

Distractions

A&S 50: Nine: Learn to Weave – Basic Tabby Structure, Rigid Heddle Loom

A&S 50 Eight: Learn Tubular Tablet Weaving

Natural Dye Book

Not quite back

Brief hiatus

Really finally finished bag!

Bag finishing - in progress!

Bag finishing

Something completely different

Staffordshire Hoard in D.C.!

Finished bag

Lattice bag progress

Poor mans Ott Light

Two new books!

Finished gowns

Award and Worth

Wrap front gowns?

Vacation Report

Waffle Towels

Lacing points

Some updates

Research tips

More mantels

Banded kirtle

Medieval flashers

Supportive kirtle, attempt 1

More kirtle fun

Largess Napkins

Finished Roman!

A&S 50 16: Learn Naalbinding: Oslo Stitch

Weekend report

Monmouth Cap and MOL Mittens

Knitting frustration

Finished ave beads

More fun with fire

Flemmish kercheif/coif/head thingie

Madder dying results, and fun with fire

More Madder

Hose, attempt one

Know thy strength

A Third Leg

Another mystery

Cloth hose dilema

What's doing

A&S 50 7: Tablet Weave Two Colored Striped Band from London Dig MOL Braid 449

A&S 50 Six: Tablet Weave Satin Effect Band from London Dig MOL 423

The finished Houppeland!

New projects

Almost done!

A little progress and some sheep

ded

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