Sempstress

My sweetie is involved with a faire Playtron group called The
Outlanders. They wanted to get together a group "look", and at some
point the idea that Dominic was (and still is) dating a seamstress came up.
After some talking and going back and forth on design possibilities (and vocabulary
— medieval is just not my period of expertise), we settled on doing the surcoats
in Ultrasuede and linen. Now, I know that a lot of people out there are really
opposed to faux-leathers for costuming purposes, but there are some serious
advantages. For one thing, unlike natural cows, Ultrasuede comes in a predictable
width and shape. There are no thin areas to work around. You can chuck it into
the wash. It never needs to be oiled. The colors are predictable and lightfast.
Did I mention the part about being able to chuck it into the wash? I do snuggle
up to one of these guys. Odor eradication is a serious consideration. ;)

All the fancy-pants insignia stuff if dome with reverse applique,
exposing a linen lining. Here’s a lesson worth learning from someone else’s
experience: always ask to see all the designs first. And insist that
you have the right to negotiate them. After this first batch of coats, I informed
everyone else in the group who wants one (yes, there are more coming) that there
would be an additional charge for heraldic beasts and arachnids. *grumble* Seriously.
Take a look at the pic on the far right. Sewing them was a challenge, but the
real hard part turned out to be cutting the darn things out without cutting
the backing. This turned out to be a serious foul language project. Since a
lot of my sewing time was gobbled up by hospital visits while I was trying to
get them done, my mother offered to help. I think she thought I was just pissing
about how annoying something so apparently simple could be. She learned, though.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard some of those words come out of my mother’s mouth
before…. They turned out well, though.

There were four surcoats in the original order. The fellow to
whom the scorpion belongs wasn’t there when I took the group shots. Hopefully,
I’ll have a picture of his soon. And there will be more coming, with pictures
to follow. And yes, at least one of those has a heraldic creature. :(

After a lot of sewing for other people, I wanted to sew for
me. I *needed* to sew for me. I’d been wearing the same dress most of the season.
It was driving me buggy. I’d started a new set of pretty undies a while back,
started a diary for them,
and gotten no where. In sort of a fit, I finished the corset and corded petticoat
— badly. In another sort of fit, I tore all the cording out of the corded petticoat,
which makes it a, well, petticoat. ‘Nuff Said. I also found out that things
had grown, and my corset no longer fit as designed. (It wasn’t my waist this
time, which I suppose is good.) I made up a nice, simple black kirtle (more
or less from my own draping
instructions — I really do things that way). The whole skirt is pleated
onto the bodice with knife pleats — singles in front, progressively more stacked
on top of each other as they approach the center back. It’s worn over my old
corded petticoat, and the newly uncorded one. I think the silhouette, especially
at the sides, turned out quite nicely.

The sleeves are actually the legs of a pair if ludicrously
small pants I bought forever ago (I really liked the silk jacquard, and they
were all of 5$). They’re caught with buttons and handstitched button-loops (all
bar-tacked — ain’t that fancy?). I swear I had a close-up of the sleeves taken,
but I can’t find it. That’s what happens when you let your web updates sit for
several months.

Yvonne approached me a while back looking for a costume that
was "easy to wear", with the same sort of shoulder treatment I used
on my black doublet. Strict authenticity was
not her biggest concern, so we settled on a kirtle with a built in corset, and
a doublet. (Here’s a note for those of you who insist you don’t want to wear
a separate corset, and that building the corset into the bodice is "just
the same"…. It’s really not. If the boning ends right where the skirts
attach to the bodice, the line of the skirt at the waist is affected. (By "affected",
I mean "destroyed". Not that I have any opinions on the matter.) This
is because the excess of the abdomen that poodges out where the corset ends
pushes the skirts out and slightly up — it looks like you’re wearing some sort
of skirt support or bum roll too high under your dress. It’s not flattering.
I mean, it literally makes women look larger, instead of smaller, in the waist.
So if you *really* want to build the corset into the bodice, you’ll want the
boned lining of the bodice to extend at least a half inch lower than the outer
layer of the bodice does. (You’ll be hand tacking the outer layer of bodice
fabric to the corset lining, which is basically fine, or binding over the join
between the outer layer of the bodice and the skirts, and leaving it free from
the corset lining along the bottom, which I think works slightly better. The
slightly longer boned lining holds the body down below where the skirts join
in, and the line of the skirts at the waist looks nicer.)

She also wanted a small bumroll for the costume. Now, y’all
know I have a couple problems with bum rolls. Ignoring any issues of historical
accuracy (or the complete lack of evidence therefore in the 1570s), there’s
another wee little problem: Women almost universally put them on too high. And
it’s not just the women at Bristol: Jean Hunnisett remarks upon the problem
as well. "Never leave pads on tapes to be put on by the dresser or artiste
as the nearly always pull them too tight, making the pad ride too high on the
waist." (Hunnisett, Period Costume for Stage and Screen, p.29) Fortunately
(or not, really),Yvonne and I are the same shade of blond when it comes to remembering
underthings for costumes, so the roll that supports the skirts is actually sewn
in to the bottom of the built in corset. Since the bodice opens to the back,
the roll is made in two pieces, which meet when the bodice is laced shut. Now,
she can’t forget the roll at home, and I don’t have to chase her around faire
and redress her. ;) (And yes, I have done that!)

The kirtle is relatively plain and made according to my kirtle
with fitted bodies directions. Well, ok, we all know I can’t even follow
my own directions, but that’s the basic idea behind it. The doublet was made
from the bodice pattern from the kirtle, with obvious extensions in the shoulder
area. This was actually my first go at altering a pattern for a bodice directly
into a doublet pattern, and it worked out well — yvonne has nearly perfect
measurements for that trick. The doublet is made of linen, with panes of linen
over silk. (Lots of panes, actually.) The little yellow lines are cording couched
down onto the top layer of the panes. Since I hate the look of zigzag stitches
over cording, getting the cording down was more annoying than it really needed
to be.

I like it, though. I think it turned out rather elegant, and
I’ve been wanting to try a doublet with all that paning for a while. (Speaking
of things I’ve wanted to do for a while, I’ve only been meaning to put together
a page for this for the last, erm, 6 months.)

Many thanks to the fabulous Stephanie and her sweet baboo for
the pictures. I’m sure I *should* have some of my own, but I don’t.

I started a diary for this dress forever ago. I promised to
explain the agressious visual pun I was committing. I’ll start there: It’s a
slightly pretensions middle class gown, in brown, accented with mustard yellow
and dill pickle green. Like a hamburger. I’m a ham-burghess. Har. Har har har.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…. I really did plan
to diary this. I did. Then I put it off, because I’m a shlump like that, and
the underthings were totally misbehaving. (Ok, technically, my own flesh was
the underthing that was misbehaving. It happens to the best, and the rest of
us as well.) Then there was this thing, where a couple of crazy
brits and my good friend sarah
were coming out to Bristol, and I swear, I Didn’t Have A Thing TO Wear ™.
So I had to finish a dress in a big gosh darned hurry, and I decided that I’d
have the best chance finishing the dress that was already begun. (That was hard
for me, since the dress had been started a year before and I was officially
Bored With It ™. It was a heavily trade-marked moment.) So, the day before
I was supposed to meet them all up at bristol, I got off my butt and started
sewing. (No, I’m not exaggerating.) I made the kirtle. I have no pictures of
that to put up yet, honestly, y’all should be happy enough that I’m finally
writing for the site again, so let’s not pick knits. ;) I’ll pull it out of
storage at some point and get pictures. (Silver lining moment: while I’m awful
at remembering to take pictures, I’m going to marry a man who is infinitely
fascinated by taking pictures of me doing sewing and crafty things. Honest.
I have the guy all picked out, and all we need to do is find a house. Then I’ll
be able to bombard the world with pictures of sewing! BwaHAHAHAHA! Oh, um, right,
ok, forgot the topic again….) It’s a back closing kirtle, which I almost never
do because I’m obsessed with being able to dress myself. It has trim across
and down the front, and around the skirt. It was a cheater jobby with ribbon
and flanged cord, but at least I didn’t stoop to fabric glue this time. (And
I wonder why people don’t always take me seriously as a historical costumer?
Oy.) Overall, it looks just like a kirtle because it *is* just like a kirtle.

The overdress is a little more impressive, because it’s hard
not to impress when you throw 5 yards of velveteen at something. I wanted a
paned doublet, sleeves, and a matching skirt. Ironically, there are no sleeves
present in the pictures because I finally got my FREAKING FABULOUS SHIRT from
Blackwerx, and it would have been a sin to cover the arms. It’s totally fab.
Look at the pictures. See all the grapes? The folks who run the business are
friends and know what inspires me. ;)

The doublet was an experiment. I mean, hey, if you’re trying
to impress people you’ve never met before, why not throw caution to the wind
and try experimental techniques the night before you need the costume? What
could possibly go wrong? Er… Ok, well, this time, fairly little actually did.
I was playing with the idea of panes as really gigantic button-holes, instead
of the normal ludicrously complicated pattern-made-of-many-little-strips method.
I mean, when you look at panes on the chest area of doublets in Arnold, you
seldom see a seam beneath them. That’s because there are things that you can
do with hand sewing that you just plain can’t do on a machine, but basically,
*basically*, distilled to it’s absolute essence, it’s a freakin’ button hole.
So that’s what I did. And that basically worked. I realized very quickly that
this was yet another occasion in life where a little sew-in interfacing would
have been a good idea, but I didn’t have any (read: I had no idea where mine
was), so I went along without it. The interfacing would have stiffened up the
panes a little and given them more body, and I think the overall effect would
have been nicer. Eh, live and learn, right? Right. And that’s all that.

Apologies for the slightly dopey look on my face. For myriad
reasons, when I’m at faire I tend to drink. When I’m visiting a faire other
than bristol, I tend to drink more. And when I’m there with my sweetie and his
friends, well, ok, shnockered about begins to cover it. So if you ever meet
me at some random faire, and I seem a little, well, you know, it’s probably
because I am. These really are the only vacations I get.