What am I doing?

Well, since my last post I have been to Ireland. I have seen the hill of Tara, Newgrange, The Giants' Causeway, Dunluce castle, the charming summer town of Portruch, Rathcrogan where queen Maeve once ruled, Galway, the Cliffs of Moher, St Brighid's well, a hen party dressed as nuns, Carlow, Kildare and Dublin (where I noticed that the fabric store on Lower Liffey street has turned into a bar).

I have also tried to survive heat of around 30 degrees C in the shades and scorching sunlight. I am not made for this, and in Sweden we don't have AC in private homes, and our houses were built to retain heat, not to keep it out. Add menopausal heat flushes to that and you just want to die.
There has been quite a lot of swimming, though it takes energy to get to the lakes or sea by public transport.

I have visited a very old and big rural market (the real thing, not a hipster version), where I bought hippie trousers, a straw cap and a new backpack.

And I have,a s those who follow this blog on facebook knows, made a 1790s open robe from printed cotton.

I like this photo despite the modern background and my unco-operative hair. At least there was some wind.
When taking these photos I noticed that my stays and my petticoat were rather tight in the bust and over the rib cage. I have gained back some of the weight that I lost, mostly muscle (which is what makes them tighter over the rib cage), but also some fat (which gives a larger bust). Luckily this was easily fixed by unpicking a makeshift taking in of the stays that I had done last year, and by unpicking a dart on the petticoat.
I will wear it all on Sunday and hopefully get some nice photos at Gunnebo house. I have made a cap and a trimmed a straw hat for the occasion. And a bag for a croquet set that I'm bringing to amuse us with.

I also have sewing plans (of course) and last night I ordered fabric for them.

This will be a sleveless working dress, based on this fresco by Giusto de Menabuoi, in the Baptistry to the Duomo in Padua, from 1376-7.

I need to make a short sleeved smock too, but linen I can get easily her in Gothenburg.

In October the barony of Gotvik hold one of our annual events: Festivalo de Caderas. The theme for said event is purple. Since I am cooking feast I will spend most of the time in the kitchen. Our baroness and baron have chosen the Quattrocento as their time period (though not keeping to it quite as much as Måns and I kept to our period) so I will wear my green working class outfit:

I will, however, attend court, so I have decided to make it easy for myself to change into court garb:
I will take off the apron and my linen cap, smooth my hair and put on some other headwear, and throw on a giornea from plum silk brocade.

I need to buy lining for that too, but that will have to wait a while, until next salary or so.

I have recently started working 75% instead of 50% and we will have to see how much sewing I will have the energy for now.

Re-organizing

The list of costumes that I had actually made pages for ion the left side of the blog was becoming too long and unwieldy, so I decided to organize things better. Now there are links to categories there, where you see all the costumes that I have made pages for (and some others), and can click on the images to go to their page.

Next thing I should do is to write about all the other costumes that I have ;)

ETA: I also saw this as an opportunity to add photos of costumes that I've never made pages for

Happy Holidays!

Snow fight from the ca 1400 frescoes in the Eagle Tower of Castello Buonconsiglio in Trento, Italy.

Judging from their dress it's a rare occasion with snow, and probably not colder than around frezing, the kind of weather where you run out to have a snow fight, but don't have to put on thick winter clothes. It can't be much either, judging from the green brush showing through the snow. This is actually somethign that we're used to here in the southwest of Sweden, so I can relate :)

There's no snow here now, and while this is not that unusual, but the lack of snow further north is a worrying sign of the Climate Change cause by us humans. I am trying to limit my personal contribution to this by making most of my christmas presents, limiting my consumption in general (obviously not of fabric though ;) ), eat less meat and usually travel by public transport. So I hope for more Yule eve's with snow in the future.

I hope you all have a joyful and relaxed Yule, or whatever you celebrate - focusing on friends and family.  I might actually get some medieval sewing done - I've been very busy with making presents lately.

And finally, som photos from the Barony of Gotvik's Yule party last week. The surroundings were where un-medieval, but in candlelight you could ignore that :)

As you do...

So, a friend is moving and I bought her stash of gold trim, over 50 metres of it.

Two printed wool gowns from the late 13th-early 14th century

I have now written a rather long documentation on mine and my husband's printed wool gowns from c.1300.
Where you get to know all the things that aren't period correct about them, but also quite a lot about fabric printing in medieval Europe. You find it here.

 

Shaping woven trim around a neckline

Since I am very fond of the clothes shown in the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift the problem of applying broad, generally gold coloured, trim has been a part of my costuming life for a long time now.

The problem is of course that necklines in this period are round and woven trim is straight and not very flexible. You can of course cut out a shaped piece of fabric, but if it's patterned it may look a little off when the pattern doesn't follow the line of the neck opening.

Anyway, that's not what I was going to write about, but how to apply straight, woven trim. In this case a four centimetres wide "gold" trim that I bought at Passamaneria Valmar in Florence this spring.

First, if you have a thin main fabric, like the tropical weight wool twill I'm using for this gown you probably want to reinforce the place where the trim will be placed. This will stop the stiff trim from distorting the fabric. I use scraps of fairly thick fulled wool for this. The photo is taken after I sewed the trim to the gown, but you get the idea.

I do the same when I make buttonholes on thin wool: apply strips of felted wool to provide stability.

 Then cut off a piece of trim. Make sure that you have enough by measuring where the lower edge of your trim will be. And add some extra for safety.  Then you stitch a line of gathering stitches  on one edge of the ribbon. Pull the thread and shape the trim along the neckline.

When it has the right shape, iron it, with plenty of steam, and it might me a good idea to have a piece of cloth between the trim and the iron too. At least you won't get plastic on your iron if it melts. I pinned the lower edge of the trim first and then ironed the trim to the same shape as the neck opening, moving some of the gathers as needed.

Of course even the tiniest gathers will be visible when inspected closely, but with a good steamy ironing they are not easy to see from a couple of feets distance.

On this piece of trim I didn't place a fold at the shoulders, which you of course can do to. Then you get less gathers, but I thought that it shaped up so nicely even without a fold so I went for just gathering this time.

Free reading of 50 articles from "Costume" through July

To celebrate its 50th anniversary Costume - the journal of the costume society, one of the most important scholarly journals on the history of fashion and dress, is giving free access to 50 articles throughout July. Here's a link to it.

Unfortunataley mine from 2011, Women’s Dress in Sixteenth-Century Sweden, isn't one of them, but maybe you can access it through your library if you're lucky, since Costume is an e-journal also.

Transferring my costume web site

This blog is a way for me too try and make the information from my old costuming web page that I started over ten years ago more accessible. The fact is that I haven't been able to update it for a couple of years due to the programme that I used for making the web pages not working anymore. I am sure that given time I could figure out another way to do this, but it really is too much of a hassle, so the costumes and infromation about them will be here.

Keep in mind that many of these costumes were made over ten years ago, some even more than fifteen years ago, so not only has my knowledge on historic dress grown, but there are many more sources available to us these days. Still, if they ended up on the web page that means that I think that they're pretty okay.

I hope to also add new costumes of course.