Manesse Codex Hat

I've been super busy this last month with all kind of baronial regalia ridiculousness, sewing for other people, and getting ready for a craft show which was last weekend, which has left precious little time for working on any of my fun (period) medieval stuff or updating my blog.  I am bad blogger but as things seem to be settling  down just a bit, that will hopefully be getting better.  I hope.

This weekend is out local baronial investiture and I am quite excited about it.  The couple who are being invested as out baron and baroness are really wonderful people, which is a big help, and the theme of the event is the Manesse Codex, which makes me happy as I've been wanting to do a gown from that period for a long time.   Mostly so I can make a silly hat.  Because really, it's all about the silly hats.  Somewhere along the line I lost my gorram mind and decided to hand-sew the whole thing, so this project has taken longer than I would have liked but it's finally at least wearable.  I still have some seam finishing to do on the undergown, but at least I can get out the door on Saturday without getting around to that if it doesn't happen.

Pictures of the gown itself will come later, but for now, the silly hat!  The pie-plate fillet or whatever you want to call it, is the (in my opinion) quintessential Manesse hat.  It's also fairly mysterious.  Some people have constructed these like coffee filters, some people just box-pleat a ruffle on the top of a band of linen, neither version looks anything like the fluted pie-edge you see in the illustrations.  I've also seen a range of thing used as understructure for the hat, from nothing at all, to lots of folded linen, to buckram, all of which have their issues.

Not being even remotely satisfied with any of the reconstructions of the hat I have seen, I decided to toss them all aside and start from scratch.  The main points I took into consideration were as follows:

• the hat is a smooth, slightly flaring band that sits on the head with a ruffled thing around the edge
• the band is stiff but does not appear to be terribly bulky
• hats work better if they are light and the bands are not bulky.  Whatever material is used to keep this stiff should be as thin as possible, and flexible so as to conform to the head comfortable and not give one a headache while at the same time being strong around to support a veil as seen in some of the illustrations
• the whole affair appears to be open at the top, but this could be wrong as suggested by at least one funeral effigy (don't have the source at the moment but I will find it and post it later)
• materials available in period should be used as much as possible - i.e. natural fibers and natural stiffening agents.  They did have sizing afterall, so why not use it?
• this whole thing looks an awful lot like a goffered viel, so using some of what we know about those from Isis's research might be a good idea
• Needs to be easy to maintain in to actual real-world conditions

From this, it became clear very quickly that using layers of folded linen or nothing more than sized linen would not work at all, as the hat would be too bulky or too fragile.  Also, buckram seemed like an unsuitable option for the interior frame as the glues and sizings used to keep it stiff are too stiff and the edges really need to be wired in order of the thing to maintain it's shape.  So I opted to use felt.  Heavily fulled wool was certainly available in period, there are many contemporary illustrations of hats that appear to be made out of stiffly shaped wool, and it takes sizing well, so this seemed reasonable.  All I had on had was craft felt, so I didn't need to size anything but a simple fax seed or  gelatin sizing would have worked and both were available in period.  A glue would also work well.

The nice thing about the felt/wool option is that the whole frame of the hat is very lightweight, thin and flexible.  Plus you can steam it or press it if it gets bent out of shape, making the hat fairly resilient to actual wear.  I'm not sure about washing it if it gets really dirty, but we will cross that bridge when we get there.  I think spot-cleaning will work for everything except Pennsic levels of gross.


The frame was covered with linen, though it is possible the hats shown were covered in silk (the more I think about this the more likely I think it is they were silk, these look like rich ladies after all).  The ruffled edge is a strip of linen about 3.5 times as long as the top width of the hat,  folded over and box pleated to fit along the top edge of the hat.  Once sewn into place, the front covering of the hat was sewn down to conceal the raw edge of the pleated band.

I should have taken a picture of this step, since this is where what I did differs from what I've seen most people do.  Rather than just leave the box pleated edge sticking straight up, I stitched the bottom part of the pleat down to the front edge of the hat, about 1/4 of an inch down.  This is what gives the fun icing-like effect to the pleats.

When wearing the hat, you wear a chin-band, which not only keeps your hair in place but keeps the hat on remarkably well without any extra attachments needed.  I had initially thought I would need to pin the hat to the chin band at the sides, but I was able to run around the house, picking up the dogs and doing all kinds of things without anything slipping at all.  My hair is exceptionally slippery so I think people with easier to manage hair would have no problem with this coming off at all.

I will post pictures of the whole outfit on me after the weekend!

Hat problem solved!

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. 

More hat pondering

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. 

12th Night Planning

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.

Silly Hats

I am a huge fan of the silly hats.  Whole outfits have been worked around the wearing of silly hats.  This particular hat is not only silly but mysterious.  It looks like it's fur, but one could knit and full such a hat just as easily (in fact I think I saw someone at a Ren Faire once with just such a hat, though slightly smaller than the one in the portrait).  As I am planning to go to Pennsic this year anyway, I need more cloths, and starting with a silly hat makes as much sense as anything else, so here goes.  Now to figure out how it's constructed and what the best way to reconstruct it will be.

More information on the original portrait can be found at the National Gallery.

There's also this hat:

which to me looks like a mini version of one of these:

They both like a variation on a knit and fulled beret, or possibly a brimless wool flat cap like you see later on.  Of course the top lady is English and the bottom one is German, and a few decades apart, but the basic shape looks pretty similar.

Here's another portrait with a fabulous hairdo and headpiece I sort of love and may have to copy and thus work a whole outfit around as well (maybe the same outfit).  This one should be much cooler (duh) than the one above, and gives me a good reason to not cut off my hair.  I am sort of wondering if it's a beaded piece or a metal band though.  Beading would be far easier for me to do, as I already know how to do that.