New Frilled Veil

Good grief I have not posted in a long time! Suffice it to say, Life Happened. I've moved 3 times since I wrote last, first to California, then again in California, and most recently to Oregon where I will hopefully be staying for a good long time. In the midst of all that, I have not been working on very many projects.

I did decided that I needed to make a new frilled veil. The first one that I did had a small frill which held up well without starch but it went all limp and sad after I washed it. I think it really does need to be starched after I wash it, so once I get some earplugs or something to put in the pleats I will give this a shot.

In the mean time I need a new one that will not need starching and hopefully hold up better to washing.  I also harbor a deep and not-so-secret desires for a ridiculous fluffy veil, but again being able to wash the thing once in awhile would be nice.  Cathrin at Katafalk made a lovely non-starched frilled veil a couple of years ago, which I am excited about as it is 1 - not starched and 2 - detachable!  Making the frill removable will help a lot with my washing issue, as I've found that the frill itself is not what gets dirty fastest, but the flat veil section.   Elina at Neulakko's version has somewhat deeper/larger frills (I have a big frill/buns problem as well) and it looks wonderful.

I have managed to cut out my frills and have been hemming and hemming and hemming.  I'm going for a four-layer look which seems to have been popular and should work well with my no-starch plan as the extra fabric will, hopefully, help to support itself.  It does seem that having frills front and back is a bit more common so that's what I'm planning to do. (check out my pintrest board for a collection of relevant images and links) This thing is going to be substantial!

For those of you new the whole frilled veil phenomenon, Isis Sturtewagen did a master's thesis on these as well as a number of other articles.

Kira's Shawl and some leg wraps

My second Queens Shawl weaving project was to be presented to HRM Kira at Pennsic last year.  The weft was hand spun by members of the spinning guild, and I wove the finished piece in a herringbone variant using Brown Sheep's Nature Spun sport at the warp.

Overall I am very pleased with how the finished shawl turned out.  It could have been a little longer and maybe a touch wider, but that's pretty knit-picky.  There were some interesting variations in the hand spun weft skeins that I tried to spread out through the shawl to create subtle textural stripes.  I think this worked out pretty well, there are no wide runs of any one skein so the finished cloth is fairly consistent and even.  It's also quite soft and warm.  Working with the thicker yarn this time around did produce a heavier shawl but it still has a nice drape.

I love the way the white and purple combined together.  By itself the purple was really bright.  When woven together with the white. it toned down quite a bit, resulting in some nice depth of color and just enough shimmer to stand out when HRM wears it.

I also wove some leg wraps for my early period/iron age kit.  The original plan had been to do this on my warp weighted loom, however I discovered that the alpaca/wool blend I was using as warp was far to stretchy to stand up to this week.  Also the very narrow strips were difficult to stabilize on the loom so I moved the project over to my table loom.

Just for future reference, I do NOT recommend moving warp from one loom to another mid-project.  I got it to work out but it was sloppiest warping job I have ever seen.  I think I set this as something around 36 EPI, maybe a little looser, but I was working with a lace weight warp so it's fairly tight.  The west is Nature Spun fingering, which I love and gives a very nice pack at a surprising rage of sets.

The finished wraps feel amazing!  They are soft, light, warm, and the cloth has a beautiful hand.  It would make a lovely garment.  They took forever to weave, each wrap is 15 feet long, but the end result was worth the effort.  I'm looking forward to doing more cloth in fine wools, it's such a joy to work with and the results are worth the extra effort to warp up all of the threads.

Needle case

 I've been wanting to make a Viking-style needle case that would suspend from one of my apron brooches for a very long time.  A number of these things have been found, most of which are just little tubs of metal with bits of wool shoved inside.  To hold needles, all you need to do is poke the needle into the wool.  Sometimes the needle case has nothing more than a small hole with a wire loop to suspend it from something, others have elaborate wire wrappings to make suspension loops.  There is a great write-up on needle cases here - http://www.stringpage.com/viking/needlecase.html and another even better and longer one that I now cannot find but will link to when I track it down again.

Anyway, what I've come up with isn't quite right but it will get the job done and is a reasonable approximation of what it should be.  I used a bit of metal tubing from the local hardware store and some jewelry wire to make thing, plus a bit of solder to keep the wire from sliding off the tube.  My wrapping is just not that great.  Instead of using a plain chain to suspend the case, I made a beaded chain with some beautiful lamp worked beads made by a local lamp-worker who was selling them at KASF this weekend.

What I find most entertaining about this particular needle case is that when suspended from my brooch, it ends up in exactly the place where I usually stick needles in my shirt.  I did not plan this but it's terribly convenient.  Also, you don't have the un-thread the needle when you put it away, you can just sort of wrap the thread around the end of the case, which actually makes it easier to get the needle out should you somehow shove it too far into the wool.  Some of the extant cases have a little cuff of wire around the end of the tube, which is pretty and decorative but also make doing this little bit of thread wrapping much easier.

Finished knit bag

The knit bag I last wrote about is done, complete with drawstrings, lining and tassels, just in time for out local 12th Night and the gift basket it is destined for.  Yay!

Overall, I'm fairly pleased with it though it has a few composition problems.  It's too long for one thing, and something about the color transitions bugs me.  It looks better in photographs than in person.  Possibly the problem is just that I had the wrong shade of green.  Whatever, it's not that bad and I don't think it will annoy anyone other than me.  I've already started another bag in wool, just to use up some of the wool I already have, and get a little more complex colorwork practice in before I jump into the silk or cotton.  Since the fine silks the original relic bags were knit with is so expensive, I'm thinking I may do one or two with pearl cotton first, or maybe bamboo, as practice, before I invest in lots of expensive silk.  We'll see, I have other things to get done before I get to that.

More needle books

Because I've been getting nothing much major done like a champ (hey, it happens), here are two more Elizabethan needle books.  Hurrah for small projects!  Both ended up in largess baskets this past weekend, one for the new baron and baroness of our local group and one for the king and queen.




I like the purple pansy much better than the strawberry/butterfly combo.  Something about the colors on the butterfly just bother me.  Somehow it looks more like a moth.  I've a seem another style of butterfly that's more top-down that I like better, I think it might look less moth-like, or perhaps if I made a smaller body.  This is why I'm doing these practice pieces!

I think I might be brave enough to try a smallish sweete bag next. Nothing like the super elaborate totally gold-filled ones you see in many of the museums, more a scaled-down version of one of the jacket patterns.  I think that would be more realistic and more in keeping with most of the clothing I wear from that period anyway.  I really like the pansy, primrose and acorn motifs, so perhaps something working with those would be fun.  And also bees, those are fun to do too.

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.

New turn shoes

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.