After 8 months of no updates I suppose an update is well over-due. Also, welcome to the new site!
That’s the first update – sewing time turned into site creation time. I’m really excited about this new guise, with a co-author (yay!) and the ability to do more interesting things now that we’re self-hosted. For instance, I’ve worked out how to do galleries, so that’s made some of the resources more interesting, and better designed. You can see them in the updated Leiden style pages, as well as the gallery of all my projects and all of Margaret’s projects.
Men’s clothing
At La Prova Dura tournament in Adelaide, photo by Holly Taylor, used with permission. G is in the blue – not the herald.
As planned in May, I did spend much of last year slowly working on an early 1500s yeoman’s ensemble for G, as seen in the picture on the left. I’m quite happy with the cut and some of the design decision, including the genius solution to the twin problem of G wanting LOTS of shoulder mobility (he does an weight lifter impression every time I ask him to test if he’s happy with a garment, as if that’s one of his usual poses…) and me cutting the armscrye too large – sleeves attached at only the top point of the shoulder! You see this in a number of artworks from this era, and they were so easy to make! It’s still a curved sleeve head, but only the top inch of the sleeve is attached, by whip-stitch.
He wore it all weekend with nary a complaint – so that’s a bonus.
The garment is based on a variety of images of men in France in the 1490s and 1500s. One of the best ones is a gentleman in the background of this image of Anne of Brittany:
Poetic Epistle of Anne of Brittany and Louis XII. Illuminated by Bourdichon. F. 58v: Illustration to Epistle 5. Early 16th century. From “Western European Illuminated Manuscripts 8th to 16th Centuries”
Image from scan by Kimiko Small, I do own this book and it has some great sources for the turn of the 16th century in France and the Low Countries – get a copy if you can.
It’s made of linen lined with damask cotton, to give the weight of wool but to not overheat someone who already has a high internal thermostat. It’s closed with hidden lacing rings running up the centre front seam. The skirt is a circle.
Dabbling in the 14th Century
The other thing we did last year was join a 14th century living history group: The Company of the Staple, known for their excellent research into 14th century crafts, and their excellent food. They portray English merchants in Calais, which is ostensibly in the Low Countries so that’s alright 😉
We pledged to help out with a major medieval show in September so that meant I delved back into my early roots – cotehardies. It was heaps of fun, and a cotehardie is so much easier to churn out than a pleated skirt kirtle – if you don’t mind multitudes of eyelets. This is me in the pink dress in the background, doing crowd control in the drizzle at 8am, with my friends Annabel and Jon (our musican and herald respectively).
I also made G a pair of separated wool hose, which was a fun adventure as well. They worked for most of the weekend, but somehow I’d cut the ankle as a curve rather than a straight and so they slowly worked their way under his heel over the course of the weekend. That’s now fixed. Also, I now understand the need for a long apprenticeship in men’s hose – they’re tricksy things to make. Now we have that pattern sorted, and the shorts pattern sorted, maybe I can combine them for the 15th & 16th century joined hose.
