February 3: Kirtle Progress Update
I'm now about five months since my start date, give or take. Not that it's really taken that long, I've been stopping for research purposes and when I hit humps in my work, as I'll explain farther down.
It doesn't look all that great from the outside...
But it gets a little more impressive once you look under the hood. In keeping with the London archaeological finds, I'm using silk ribbon (strips of fabric in my case) to face the lacing edge as well as the neckline.
The silk adds quite a bit of substance to the lacing edge to give it some stability. With the facing and a (future) line of tablet weaving woven onto the edges, it should take quite a lot of strain.
And here's the neckline facing. I'll mention now that the ribbon is cut on the straight grain, but eased very nicely around the curved neckline.
I'm actually really proud of this. It looks just like the examples in Elizabeth Crowfoot's book, Textiles and Clothing.
Where I'm running into problems is in the armscye. The edging isn't working nearly as well as it was around the neckline, probably due to the interference of the linen layer and the fact that it's a closed circle. when I reach the 'end' of the pattern piece at the side seam, I have too much wool and not enough linen, and nothing I do seems to alleviate it. You can see how it's behaving well on the right side of this section, but twisting in on itself on the left.
It results in an ugly and unavoidable wrinkle in the top of the side seam.
While it pains me to do so (I've attached the first row of running stitches on both armscyes) I think I'm going to scrap the facings here and simply turn under the edge. I only really did them here in the first place because Textiles and Clothing said one of the fragments MIGHT be an armscye.
Once I motivate myself to get over this hump (it's been about three weeks since I put this down in frustration) the rest should be very straightforward. I have the makings of 12 gores which will probably take forever, and the sleeves which should hardly take any time at all.
With Kingdom A&S in May, I have the makings of three solid entries:
-My embroidered coif (done for over a year, suckas)
-this dress (maybe 30% done, and most of the hard stuff is passed)
-tablet weaving on this dress (it'll be like nothing anyone has ever seen, srsly) which I'm now pretty solidly in the research phase for
I have a few ideas for the other two, I just have to get motivated and do it.
