Finished Mammen Coat

I am very pleased with how this coat turned out!  The embroidery was fun to do, and not that difficult.  It's all stem stitch, just like the original, done in silk.  I used a combination of filament and spun silks as that's what I had on hand, sticking fairly close to the original colors.  This is the second project where I've been able to use mainly filament and I must say I really do like it.  The difference in sheen is remarkable.  I did find that I needed to keep my nails in better order when working with the threads and that thread conditioner of some sort helped (no idea if they used this in period on silk or not).

The pattern for the coat is loosely based on the Eura gown.  It's sort of a mash-up of the standard Turkish coat and the Eura gown really.  I can't say how accurate this is, but it's a plausible way to cut this style of kaftan for a woman, as it would continue to fit as the body changed shape during pregnancy and it fits much better over layers of clothing than the loose standard t-tunic style method of cutting I had used for my last coat.  Both of those garments are men's shirts anyway, which I am beginning to think would not have been used for cutting women's garments but more on that latter.  The pattern is comfortable, has a nice drape to it, and uses only 2 and a half yards of fabric with no waste (I can get a full length gown out of just over 3 yards of fabric with no waste at all as well).

I fully lined the coat with a silk and linen blend herringbone twill, sewing the lining in as I made the coat itself, the same way many 18th century garments are made.  This made it a lot easier to ensure that the lining and the exterior fabric matched up and draped the same way and will keep everything in order as I wear the coat.  It also meant I only had to sew any given seam once rather than twice, making the sewing much faster.  The neck and cuff edges were then stab stitched closed and the hem will be turned and stitched.

The only tiny issue with how this project turned out is that the sleeves are perhaps an inch or so too long.  Really this isn't so bad, since I will be wearing the coat over other clothing and as a warm layer the extra length is probably a good thing, it just makes the thing looks like a monkey coat on the dress form.  I need to remember to make this adjustment next time I make a coat though, once I do the cuff embroidery it's very difficult to adjust the sleeve length.

This coat is part of my effort to re-do my Viking kit, since I have shrunk out of my old kit and it wasn't up to my current standards anyway.  I've now got two linen Eura gowns to wear under the coat, and will be cutting out a new apron gown based on the Kostrup find.  I got a warp-weighted loom for my birthday last month and will be weaving some leg wraps for myself on it as soon as I can get it warped.  I have lots of veils and headwraps, and got proper shoes at Pennsic this year, and will be done with my naalbound mittens shortly, so I should be in good shape by the end of the year, barring any major disasters or huge new distractions.  At some point I will need to make a new wool overgown as my old one, which I loved, had a laundry disaster and went to live with a teeny tiny friend who fits into it.  I have something that will serve in the meantime but it's a blend and if I am working over the fire it gets a bit uncomfortable.

Mammen Masks

I had so much fun making the elevation coat/caftan that I decided to make one for me.  This time I am using motifs from the Mammen embroidery to decorate the neck and cuffs.  The small masks will go on the neck edges down to where the brooch will sit, I could (and probably should) go all the way down the front but (a) I find that rather heavy looking on the lighter colored wool and (b) I am lazy.  I'll be using the acanthus vine motif on the cuffs, changing the color scheme just a little bit to correspond with the silks I have available.

The threads are a combination of filament silk and spun silk.  The filament looks much nicer and seems to wear better, you really can barely tell the difference between the spun and regular DMC cotton, which is deeply annoying to me but this is all left overs from other projects so it's not so bad.  I'm really happy with how this is looking so far.  The stitching is also going fairly quickly which is a nice change from some of my recent projects.

Sadly I don't have a picture of the totally done elevation coat, but you can get a general idea of what I did from the pictures.  I'm very pleased with the design I came up with for the cuffs.  My original plan for the neck was more elaborate and I think would have been more effective but the lady who received the coat was thrilled with it as is, so it all worked out.  Trying to sew a garment without measurements is bad enough, but when it's for something like a Laurel elevation, when it's going to be seen by literally EVERYONE and you really do want the person to be happy with it, it's a little scary.  I'm very glad she was so happy and that it fit so well.

Some good resources

Here are a couple of great links that some of you may be interested in -

For the late-period enthusiast, Drea Leed has made her out of print book on 16th century Flemish working-class costume the Well Dress'd Peasant available in PDF format at http://www.elizabethancostume.net/welldressdpeasant.pdf.

If you are interested in Vikings, the best research summation I have seen thus far on apron dresses and under-gowns can be found here - http://urd.priv.no/viking/  She's got a lot of other great links and resources as well, all grounded in good archaeology.

Spanish Fashion Victim

Because I leave for Pennsic in less than 5 days, I've decided I need a new dress.  Obviously.  :)  To be specific, I need an obnoxious parti-colored bias cut plaid dress, such as were popular for about 20 minutes in late 14th century Spain.  Leave it to the Spanish to come up with the craziest of fashion trends.

Anyway, I have the gown out and about half way put together, I'm doing this by machine partly because I have only a few days but mostly because the fabric is mainly cotton.  It was either that or heavy wool coating and I'm not about to wear heavy plaid wool in the middle of July in Pennsylvania.  The plaid is cotton and the solid kermit green is a cotton linen blend, since that is what they had at the fabric store in a decent selection of colors.  The colors remind me of Kermit and Miss. Piggy for some reason, I'm quite pleased with them even if the whole thing leans a bit towards the obnoxious (isn't that the point though?)

What I am trying to decide at the moment is how to close the front.  Based on the picture, it sort of looks like the gown is probably laced up either in front or down the sides and there does not seem to be a visible undergown.  It's a little hard to tell and I have not been able to find a higher res version of this image to see if there is any more detail.  Because the fabric is not so very sturdy I will be wearing a supportive layer underneath, I'm wondering how I ought to close this thing up.  I'm leaning towards buttons even though I really can't find any suggestion that this is how this sort of gown would have been closed that way.  It would certainly be easier for my purposes.  A laced overgown over a laced undergown sounds like a big PITA.

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!

Dog Barding

I've been wanting to try making barding for my chiweenie Molly for awhile, and finally got around to it today after much pondering, mulling over pictures of horse barding, trying to sort out the rather mysterious pattern for barding found in Alcega, and finally watching some actual horses in actual barding yesterday at Coronation.  For a first attempt I am pretty pleased with myself!  And yay for getting to put some of my quilt piecing skills to use in an SCA project!

The body of the barding looks a little odd largely because there should be a split between the checky section and the bit with the Marinus arms on the rump which would accommodate a saddle and rider.  Since Molly will not have a rider I left this out, so the join sort of looks funny to me.  It's not so bad when she's walking around, but I think for the next iteration of barding I will tweak how I place the heraldic elements so the balance is a little better without the dividing line of the rider/saddle.  The whole checky section needs to be shorter for one thing.   I also need to slightly alter the curve over her rump, it's not laying as neatly as I would like.

There is a belly band holding the whole thing in place rather than the saddle component which is being held in place with a bit of velcro.  This works great for small dogs, but is clearly not period so if I do this for an A&S entry I will need to find some small tack style buckles and soft leather to use to attach the whole thing.  I also used a snap at the neck, again not period, I should I have a buckle, but that's what I had on had and it's not really visible.  There's also a small leash opening along the center back seam to allow Molly's harness to attach to her leash, from what I've been able to see in period illustration dogs wore collars, not harnesses, but she tends to choke herself if I try to to walk her on a collar so we're sticking with the harness.

Molly will be wearing her fabulous new outfit next weekend at War of the Wings, hopefully I'll be able to get some better pictures of her there.  Trying to get a clear shot with my phone while the other two dogs were looking on and trying to sort out what she had one was tricky at best!

What to do next?

I cannot decide what to sew.  There isn't much going on around here until after Pennsic, but there are quite a few events coming up in the fall that I am going to need new cloths for.  Partly because I just need more cloths, and partly because I am (slowly) shrinking.  Finally.  Which is good, except that I can't very well work on supportive layers or really fitted things if I am changing shape, however slowly.  After just 15 pounds none of my supportive gowns are supporting and they are starting to look a little funny in the belly area too.

So, I want to sew something.  I have all of this lovely wool to work with (in the hot, humid Virginia summer of course!), but I don't know what I should work on.  I need to make a cyclas and gown from the Manesse Codex, and as those are not really fitted it would probably be a good place to start.  Plus there is the fun hat.  I have some lovely burgundy wool I want to use for the cyclas layer, and I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about the undergown.  It really should be wool, and I have cream and some gold wool that would work, but this is for an event in early November.  It could be cold, or it could be warm.  I'm thinking a linen undergown might be a better way to go for comfort, plus I would be able to get more use out of the outfit.  Of course I don't have any linen for that part.

I also have been wanting to make a transitional houppeland like the one in the Petrus Cristus painting at right.  As far as the outer layer is concerned, it's not that fitted so I would probably be safe making it now for fall events.  I have some dark pink wool in a herringbone pattern that will look quite lovely for this style of dress, in a more middle class/every-day sort of way.  I may have to pull it in a bit at some point through the shoulders, but if I use a modified G-63 pattern this should be fairly easy to do. I have some lovely black wool to do the collar and cuffs, and will probably use heavy linen as a hem guard.  Lining the whole dress is out of the question for the weather here, even in winter I would roast.

There is also the Mary of Hungry dress I've been researching.  I can certainly start on the smocking, and should have enough light weight linen to do that, but the supportive layer and overgown are both too fitted to bother with now.

So what to do first?  Cyclas?  Start the smock as an ongoing embroidery project?  Houppeland/proto Burgundian?  I really need to do something as a break from the weaving.  The loom is almost warped for the Perugia towel (I can't focus on it for much more than an hour at a stretch) and I know the pick-up portion for the weaving is going to be slow going plus I really need something portable other than my current brick stitch project.

Mary of Hungary

I'm in the process of planning my garb for 12th night this year, which is set at the court of Henry VIII early in his reign before he went all nutso and cranky.  Straight Tudor has very little appeal to me, and I had run across the Mary of Hungary gown awhile back so this seems like a good excuse to make it.  Plus there is smocking!  Yay smocking!

Anyway, the dress is supposedly dated to 1520, however the only other artistic representation of this style of gown I've been able to find so far is dated 1490.  It does sort of look like a cross between a late 15th century Burgundian gown and an early 16th century gown, so I'm wondering what the correct dating is.

I'm also not sure what the correct supportive undergarment would be for this.  My initial thought, given the 1520 dating, is a pair of bodies maybe with an attached petticoat, work under the smocked chemise.  Someone else suggested a 15th century style kirtle, and yet another person has suggested that the chemise is actually the body layer and the kirtle would then go over it.  Given the limited source material I have on this style, I'm not sure.  Wearing a chemise with silver embroidery on it next to the skin seems a little strange to me, as you can't really wash the embroidery.  Plus the stove tile that is my only other reference at this point appears to show the chemise without anything over it.

Has anyone seen any other references to this gown that might solve the dating/underwear questions?  So far I have the following-

Original article on Cynthia Virtue's site, with the stove tile image
Image gallery on Flight of Fancy
Project Diary/notes from Flight of Fancy - she mentioned two books as additional sources which I do not have access to
Hungarian National Museum description
Frazzeld Frau write-up
Pintrest board by Marion McNealy - the portraits here suggest an earlier dating (1475-90).  Marion has also told me that the museum is now dating the fabric to 1475, which given the images we have so far makes more sense.

Finished Apron

I finished my smocked apron just in time to take it to Ruby Joust last weekend.  I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and got lots of compliments on it at the event which always helps.  After wearing it all day, I'm very glad I used the shallower pleats.  The apron is made from a 36 inch square piece of fabric (maybe a little longer but not much) and pleated down to about 14 inches.  The proportions look like what is seen in the artwork, so I'm fairly confident that the originals would have been done with shallow pleats as well.  Of course this does make doing the actual smocking a little harder, but that's ok.

Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of me wering the apron, but you can still see how it turned out.  The whole thing is hand-sewn with linen thread through I did use modern poly sewing thread to do the pleating (mostly because I didn't waste my good linen on basting).  I'm looking forward to doing another one with a slightly more interesting smocking design.

More smocking

Following up on my last post, where I attempted smocking for the first time in preparation for a smocking apron a la The Lutrell Psalter, I managed to do a second swatch with shallower pleats this weekend.  This time I used a piece of cloth 10 inches long and pleated using the pick-up-the-dot method, rather than making cartridge pleats.  Both methods are described very well on the Pleatwork Embroidery website.

My dots were spaced 1/4 of an inch apart, resulting in 1/4 inch deep pleats on the first sample, and 1/8 inch deep pleats on the second.  My final bit of smocked fabric ended up being about 4 inches wide on the second sample, which means that my final apron will need to be only 36 inches wide at the hem, much better than the nearly 60 inches I would need using the cartridge pleats.  I also like the look of the smaller pleats better, even though they are a little harder to wrangle into place.  The large pleats give a more lush look to the piece, particularly in the honeycomb section, but  since I want to smock with more than just honeycomb (which is much stretchier than the other stitches), the top bit of the apron will end up a little tighter than the bottom section of smocking, an effect that will I think look well and control the fullness of the finished apron nicely without adding an absurd amount of bulk to the finished apron.  I may end up doing two aprons, in which case one will probably be plain honeycomb worked with deeper pleats.

I found that the pleats were easier to control if I ran my pleat/gathering lines closer together on the narrower pleats (no more than 1/4 inch apart), whereas I was able to do half as many lines of gathering on the deeper pleats.  I also found that by picking up the dots, I ended up with the dots on the surface of the pleats which created a nice straight line I could use as a guide for my first few lines of stitching.  This helped keep the second sample much neater looking than the first, and I had no need to draw in guide lines on the surface of the cloth.  I will need to make sure that whatever I use to mark the dots will wash out.  I used pencil on the sample, which tends not to come off the fine linen easily.  Somewhere I have some other fabric markers that should work better.

Smocking, attempt 1

Today I hosted a sewing circle for my local SCA group and used the time to work on my first ever smocking sample, in preparation for making a smocked apron similar to those seen in the Lutrell Psalter.  I've created a pin board on Pintrest to gather resources for this project, but you can see from the image to the left a long narrow apron with some kind of pleating at the top.  This particular style of apron seems to have been popular from the mid-14th century all the way through the 16th and to have eventually caught on with the wealthy.  You can see it in a number of portraits and German wood-cuts being worn by women of all social classes.

I was initially inspired to make one of these aprons after seeing the beautiful examples at Medieval Silkwork.  Isis and Machteld always do lovely work and once again managed to inspire me to try something new.  Here is my first-even attempt at smocking, done so I can figure out how much fabric I will need for the final apron.


You can see from the pictures that my first line of stitching got a bit wonky.  For some reason I had a very hard time stitching in a straight line.  I think if I chalk out some guide lines on top of my pleats I will be able to keep things looking a bit neater.  Some of the pleats themselves are not perfectly even either, which probably didn't help.  I cartridge pleated the pleats, and I think if I switch to the pick-up-the-dot method of pleating they may end up being a bit more even and easier to control (and also a little smaller, which I think will be a good thing).  I ended up pleating 29 inches of 3.5oz linen into 7 inches of smocking, which will end up making a very full apron.  I suspect I can eliminate a little fullness by making shallower pleats (I used 1/4 inch graphing paper to make a pleat template).  Since I want the apron to be fairly narrow, this will leave me with a 60 inch wide piece of fabric pleated into 14 inches.  I'll be doing another sample tonight or tomorrow with smaller pleats to see if I can  improve that pleating ratio a bit.

My only other concern with this project is the thread used for the smocking itself.  I used two strands of cotton embroidery floss on the sample, which worked well but could possibly be a little thicker.  I am assuming that silk or linen thread would have been used in period.  Linen thread will work better as it simplifies washing the finished apron (assuming I need to bleach or oxy-clean the apron, silk will not hold up), but the silk would make fuller stitches and cover better.  Finding suitable linen thread is challenging in this area to say the least.  I have some 20/2 weaving thread that might work, so I'll try that with my second sample.

Life and Hose From a Flat Pattern

Wow...what a crazy last few weeks (has it been a whole month?) it's been!  We decided to swap offices, which turned into a pretty major renovation on the garage/office (or groffice) which was become my sewing studio.  It was badly converted by the previous owner and the dogs and my former cat did some pretty major damage to the old carpet that had been glued (!!??!) with ever so much glue down.  So once all the stuff got moved out into various other parts of the house, including the dinning area and my loom room, the DH pulled out the stinky carpet and I went to work with stripper and a scraper.

Ugh.

Then I painted the walls, painted the floor (in the end, faster than putting down tiles or some sort and there are no cracks for any further doggie accidents, plus we can tile or linoleum over it) and moved in last weekend after a five day trip to Southern California to visit my grandmother for her 90th birthday, only no one had bothered to let me know she had been sick for all of March and was in a convalescent home until the week prior to the trip.  She's 90, so things starting to go is not that surprising but still it would be nice to know that she was *that* sick.

But I digress.

While out in CA, I visited one of my favorite wool shops, Village Spinning and Weaving, which is where I got my spinning wheel, and they placed a wholesale order for my knitting needle cases!  Hurray!  My very first wholesale account!  So in the midst of all this work space moving I've been trying to fill a wholesale order, stay current on the commission I have for later this month, and get the projects I have to do for events this month done.  All I  have to say about that is thank God my anxiety meds are working.  This is all very good stuff, but it's more than I have had on my plate at once time since the accident.

Anyhow, one of the commissions I have right now is for a pair of men's hose appropriate for a Norman persona.  The client is a member of my Viking living history group and lives in North Carolina, so the authenticity standard is high and the availability of his leg for fittings is low. I will see him next weekend, so that plan is have a mock up ready for him, and hopefully cut out and at least start assembling the hose (mostly by hand) at the reenactment event we will be at.  My usual method of draping a hose pattern clearly isn't going to work here, so I had to figure out how to flat pattern hose.  Luckily I found a hose drafting tutorial at the Medeival Tailor!  Hurray!  The only problem with it is that the foot shape isn't quite what I wanted for an early period set of hose, she's got a simplified version of the London hose with a flat, inset sole peice, which as it turns out is documentable, but the more typical shape for early period seems to the stirrup style you see in the original London hose, the Greenland finds, and even a pair of Roman hose.  There is a seam under the foot in this style of hose, which can be a little weird for modern feet to adjust to, but done in wool the seam would compact and not be a problem.

I decided to use my husband's linen hose and a set of wool hose for myself as a test to get the foot shaping right and what do you know but this is even easier than draping!  It helps that the pattern shaping is fundamentally simpler than the gore type hose I was making before, but I think you can see from the photo that it fits quite nicely.  This pair was made up after one fitting, after which the only modifications I had to make were to take in the toe area and adjust the curve of the heel.  I could have probably avoid the toe adjustment if I had taken more measurements of the foot, but I wanted to work with the measurements I had of my client.  Getting the heel curve right I suspect just takes some practice and a little adjustment, not a big deal.

I will have to write up how I did this, as TMT's directions are really only useful until you get to the bottom of the leg, once you get into the foot shaping things go a little funny if you want the seam under the foot sort of hose.  To give you some idea, I was able to get the pattern drafted, fit and a pair of hose constructed in less than 3 hours, as compared to the 6 it took when draping just to get a pattern.  I still need to hand finish the seams but that's a huge time-saver.

Grain lines and gussets

I've finally started working on the G-63 for the DH, after a great deal of deliberation.  So far so good.  I got everything cut out yesterday and put the body of the gown together, only to discover after going back to Woven into the Earth that I had put the grain lines on the body of the gown in the wrong places.  If you look at the diagram to the right (a marked up version of Marc Carlson's pattern illustration) the reddish lines indicate where the straight grain or selvedge edges should be.  Arranged this way, the original has two straight edges down the front and two biased edges down the back, all other seams being the convention straight-to-bias. I got as far as getting two straight grain edges down the front, but ended up my bias-to-bais seams under the arm.  I'm chalking this up to a modern sense of the symmetrical, we tend to want to hide the odd seam out someplace we would view as unobtrusive, even if that does not make structural sense, as in this case. The whole thing would hang better arranged as the original was.  At least the gores are not terribly wide so the problem isn't very obvious, and I have learned something for next time.

In the process of putting this together I also realized it's basically a scaled down version of the Zhorelecky houppeland I posted about awhile back.  The similarity in drape is quite remarkable, and probably not something I would have picked up on right away if I had not just been talking about the houppeland this weekend and if I did not have it pulled out and handy for comparison.  The business with grain lines is really what gives both garments the beautiful rippled edges at the hem line, not a huge volume of fabric.

The other (and major) weirdness of the G-63 is the sleeve. It's very similar to the way the sleeve on the Charles du Blois cotte, at least in so far as there is a vertical seam cutting in two at the elbow.  The funky little gusset at the elbow was giving me fits, I understand why they used gussets at the armscye, but why the elbow?  Maybe whoever made this just ran out of fabric and this is the only way they could cut the sleeves? It wouldn't be unheard of, and it's not like we have a whole heap of sleeves from which to make well-grounded conclusions about tailoring at the time.  Well, I ran across this really great article article explaining the elbow hinge on the Charles du Blois cotte, and had a long conversation with Mathilde, and decided to do the sleeves with all it's gussets intact before I attempted to draft anything out.

Oh boy am I glad I did, and am I glad I went back to the book to check on the grain lines!  For a baggy sleeve, that little gusset makes a huge difference in how the whole thing hangs and how it will ultimately fit.  Because the armscye is so deep, the little tricks used to allow the arm to move in a very tight sleeve are actually needed to keep the whole garment hanging correctly, hence the hinged sleeve construction.  That little extra bit of bias stretch gives just enough movement in the elbow that, along with the added curve from the gusset, the whole sleeve stays in place when you move around even with a great big 25 inch (the same size at the original, the DH fits those measurements almost perfectly) arm opening.  So yay!  It's a very clever bit of shaping, the same sort of thing we do around bust lines today really, only applied to sleeves.  One wonders where all this sleeve fitting brilliance got lost, the way this sleeve is constructed is much more three-dimensional than a modern sleeve pattern, and this much better fitting and more functional.

Sleeve sources

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

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

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.

A project for the DH

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.

The finished Venetian Coat and 12th Night report

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

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!

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?