Cuffs Finished!

...Though they are still not quite usable.  I still have to plan out and execute the smock, including some further blackwork (in white!) for the neckline.  But the cuffs themselves are all finished and only need to be gathered, trimmed, and sewn to their final resting place.

The first step after the embroidery proper was finished was putting the smallest possible rolled hem around the edges. For this I used 100/3 Londonderry linen thread waxed with some beeswax.

Then came the needle lace -- though it's a pretty generous term for what is basically a variant on a blanket stitch.  This has the double benefit of giving a nice finished edge to the cuffs (and the neckline, when that gets finished) as well as giving some strength to the linen edge, since it's basically tied in double knots every eight threads.

And here's the finished cuffs after a quick hot water wash and some pressing.  From here they'll be mounted on a mat board for competition and display until they are ready to actually become clothing.

Part of me is still just glad and sort of amazed that I actually managed to finish them.

Jane Seymore Cuffs: Embroidery Done!

In less than a year, too!  My speed seems to be improving!

That's 36 total inches, accomplished during the few bits of motivated spare time I've had since mid-January.  Next on the docket is to trim off all the extra linen, give it the tiniest possible rolled hem I can muster, and do some simple needlelace on the ends.

My previous screwup with the design ended up being perfect for learning and practicing a stitch that would work for the edges. I got the basic needlelace stitch (itself a variation of a blanket stitch) from this tutorial but added my own extra step to give it the bumpiness that exists in Holbein's painting.  It's maybe not quite exactly the same, but it seems really close and plausible.

The neckline embroidery may very well end up going much faster since the design is pretty basic, but it's something I'll have to chart out myself and execute in white...so maybe sixes after all is said and done.

Proof that I Can Finish Something: Blue Wool 15th century Dress, and Red Hood

Both items have been finished for quite a while, but my husband's photography assignments have given me the excuse to put everything on and get some decent documentary pictures.

The blue wool dress has been a regular part of the wardrobe rotation for well over a year.  I need to track down my documentation for it, but it's an entirely handsewn waisted kirtle based mostly on museum of london finds.  It's blue wool with a flat fell lining of white linen

I'm wearing it with my white linen smock and linen birgitta cap (which are largely machine sewn), and in the photo I'm fiddling with my hand spinning

I don't quite remember when I finished the last buttonhole on my red wool hood, but it was a very good day.  It's red wool lined in plaid wool, completely handsewn and largely based on the Museum of London hood (though I took a few liberties with the pattern).

And the whole thing!  I fell silly after the fact for not throwing on some sleeves, but we were fighting against time for the light.

Enjoy!

Screwups, Explosions, and Other Matters Relating to Embroidery

The embroidery is coming along, though a bit slower than I was hoping for.  First of all, I did several inches of the second line completely wrong.

...and this was how much I did before I realized it, because that's how I roll, apparently.  Even though it's quite a bit, it's less than a quarter of the motif's total appearance on both cuffs, so it was more worth it to start over than do the remainder of the design knowing it was wrong.

Pulling it out was remarkably painless.

And the actual design turned out to be much easier to execute in double running stitch, so I may have saved myself time in the long run.

It was the third row that nearly killed me.

The poor fabric just couldn't keep up with my repeated attempts to unpick stitches, and combusted spontaneously.  At least it was close enough to the edge that I could fix it fairly easily.

The third photo is the back, which is slightly ugly due to having to tack down the tiny little threads leftover after clipping.  From here I can start over as if it never happened.

The design worked up much better after I got that screw-up out of the way. I suppose my offering to the embroidery gods was pleasing.

I have a lot more of this in my immediate future.  Upward and onward!

2013 at a glance, and looking ahead.

2013 was a bit of a wash, it seems, blog-wise. Making things did in fact happen in 2013 -- I did a Japanese feast back in March:

In the middle of planning this feast I ended up working two jobs and hardly ever sleeping, so it's probably the most seat-of-my-pants meal I've ever done. People seemed to like it all the same, though.I wasn't able to realize my dream of having the whole hall sit on pillows at low tables, we had a nod to that with our central show table (they paid a little extra and got their own feast gear in the deal).

I also finished a completely hand-sewn 14th century hood with a completely rediculous amount of hand-sewn buttons and button holes. It's red wool lined in plaid wool, sewn with silk thread. I really like how it turned out, though I don't think I was looking closely enough at the Museum of London patterns when I made it -- the gores are a little too shallow, they should be going right to the chin line. By the time I figured it out I'd already sewn all four of them so I just plowed ahead. I also learned some basic bookbinding at our kingdom's big summer event, which inspired me to make a velvet-bound sketch book for a swap back in December.

 

I used reclaimed book boards and some very polyester thrift-store velvet that turned out to be completely perfect for the application -- the poly backing let it stick to the glue without soaking it up, and the pile was nice enough that you couldn't tell once it was finished.

2013 doesn't seem quite so unproductive now that I think about it.

As for 2014, I'm finding myself with a little more hands-free time, so I've decided I need to do some blackwork again. I decided to go with the Jane Seymour cuffs, a pattern that I'd actually started on aida cloth way back in my earliest days of the SCA but never actually completed or used. Amanda Marksdottir has done a really great job creating an updated chart for the design.  I also have the benefit of some of the lighter-weight linen that Dharma Trading Company started carrying thanks to a dropoff from Santa (thanks Mom!).  I'm doing the embroidery in Guterman silk sewing thread -- it gives a good line for this kind of work and it's literally across the street from my apartment at the local Joann.

I'm more-or-less doing both cuffs at once, and after a week I've finished Row 1 and am now well into tackling Row 2.

It always amuses me how the half-done stuff looks just a little bit pixilated.

And the finished motifs all close-like.

Still a long ways off from this, I'll admit.

In other news, I've gotten word that our area's Arts and Sciences championship is moving from May to July this year. With that slightly extended deadline and all of the things that I've been working on over the last few years, I think I might actually be able to bring five objects worth competing with, but we'll see what happens.

It *Has* Gotten Dusty in Here...

Good lord, nearly a year since my last post.  And what on earth have I been up to in that time?

Well, not a whole lot, to be honest.  I don't think I've sewn a thing since I set down that bodice from last November (it had some strap issues and I just sort of put it down in frustration and then never took it back up).  I didn't even make the Steampunk costume I'd finally had an excuse for over the summer.  I put my loom with its barely-started brocade in a place where I see it every day, but it doesn't motivate me to start working on it again...

This sort of blah feeling about my projects transferred to my SCA attendance.  I didn't leave the SCA for any particular reason, it just sort of happened.  Drew and I went to about three events  total over the last year, mostly due to costs of the big events like Uprising and some Real Life that seemed to keep getting in the way.  I think I might have also gotten a bit depressed.  I've also found an alternate hobby to keep me engaged that has nothing whatsoever to do with history or sewing (weird, huh?) and that's been a bit of a time/money suck as well.

In the meantime, though, I've moved, to a much nicer, though smaller apartment, which made me do a serious clean-out of a great many fabric and crafting bits that were just taking up space and re-assess just what I want to keep and focus on.  At the moment, it's all of my "good" fabrics (linens, silks, wools, etc) and several things that I'm halfway finished with anyway (a tudor dress that's begging for completion, a mock-up for a St. Birgitta cap, and quite a few other things).  That got rid of a *lot* of stuff.

I still sort of follow the local SCA goings-on on Facebook and I see all the great things that my friends are doing and accomplishing, and I start to want to be a part of it again, going to events where I can hang out with such amazingly talented people and engage in the mutual showing-off.  Slowly I've started coming back to our local fighter practice and found the group, as always, to be very warm and welcoming of a wayward soul like me, so I've been trying to come more often and get back in the swing of things.  I want to really try to go to Uprising next year, and possibly (POSSIBLY) try to save up for the 2016 50-year anniversary event, which means I have about 3 years to get my act together.  :D

I want to make things again, but for some reason I'm still finding it difficult to get back into the swing of things.  I want to finish my Margot de Valois dress, because damn it the sleeves look *great* and it's just like me to just quit halfway through.  I want to submit a full complement of awesome things to Kingdom A&S, things that I've done the legwork and research for, that now I just need to *do*.  I'm still finding it hard.  I've misplaced my motivation, it seems, and I'm trying to find where exactly I put it.

I hope to start writing again, and to actually have projects that I can report on.  I want to talk about how I actually finished my handsewn 15th century kirtle, though I've since torn out a few seams in the sleeves that need some work (they are a bit overly tight at the moment so I'm trying to figure out what to do about them).  I want to find my camera (!) and finish documenting that properly.

I also found Pinterest!  Feel free to look me up here.  It's pretty sparse at the moment, but I hope to have more there as time goes on.

So that's where I am now!  Not incredibly interesting, I suppose, but hopefully there's some hope for the future.

Productive Weekend? Maybe

I had plans to really bang out my bodice this weekend, but here's how it went down:

Wednesday:  Get off work early, help my friend who's hosting thanksgiving make pies, and set up the turkey brine.  Dream about tasty pies.

Thursday:  Cut out bodice front.  Feel like a boss.  Make trifle and creamed corn and use oven for casseroles and bacon. Feel stuffy in the evening, which is not a good sign.

BTW, here's the bodice all cut out, two layers of cotton canvas, and one of cotton batting:

 

Friday:  Wake up stuffed and congested.  Sit at sewing machine to quilt together bodice layers, only to have the machine not working.  Remember the morning of Collegium, when in a pre-event rush the broken-spring foot pedal was left to run the machine on full power for twenty minutes.  Curse.  Take offending pedal to Bernina shop, where they miraculously had an identical spring to replace the broken one.  Sit at sewing machine a second time, only to find that the fixed-spring pedal is still broken.  Electrics are probably fried, which is a much worse situation than a broken spring.  Curse.  Determine to hell with it, the bodice is getting quilted tonight, and look up pad stitching.  Nurse an entire roll of toilet paper throughout the day, play a bit of Mario Kart with friend's family.  Try not to spread too many germs.  Finally get Mucinex at 10:00 pm so sleep can be possible.

Saturday:  Finish quilting bodice.  Feel like a handsewing boss.

Take machine back to bernina shop, pay $25 for a new universal presser foot retrofitted with the original wiring of the sewing machine.  Express love and devotion to the awesome professionals at the bernina shop.  Go to Zupa's for soup.  Go home intending to work on bodice, but sleep for four hours instead.

ACC: Sleeves

The wheels of progress move slowly, but they do move.  This, as you may recall, is what I was going for:

Margot de Valois, 1560 (from Wikipedia)

I decided on DMC memory thread for the decorative elements on the sleeves and front.  It's a fine cotton/viscose thread wrapped around a cotton and copper wire core.  It's also fairly cheap, readily available, and, conceptually speaking, fairly period to at least the 17th century (Tricia of Thistle Threads offers a silk thread-wrapped pearl purl as part of her 17th century kits that was way out of my price range, but it gave me the initial idea).  I looked into metallic threads but the cost was pretty severe in the amounts I was looking for; plus, I never really decided whether to commit to gold or silver jewelry, so I could still do either further down the process.

DMC Memory Thread.  The little plastic doohickies are useless

I worked on the sleeves for the last month or so; two weeks of actually embroidering, and several more of being completely unmotivated.  I finished the last knot today:

Couched Sleeves, DMC Memory Thread (white) on silk with silk thread

I love the effect, though it was hard to work with such a large piece of fabric without everything kinking up.

A quick note on the sleeves:  I usually do sleeves with the seam running down the back of the arm instead of the more modern technique of running it from the armpit because it's a more accurate cut for the 16th century.  But trying to figure placement for the vertical lines was making my brain explode, so I went with the symmetrical sleeve pattern for easy ruling.

I'm thinking at this point that I will actually make the bodice of the dress first before trying the more complicated filigree embroidery on it, just to ensure that everything will work out with the fit and construction.  Fortunately for me, I have a nice long weekend to make that happen.

Tablet Weaving Angst

You may recall my original pattern for a brocaded pair of garters, using a weaving diagram from Il Burato:

I did a small repeat of the pattern in the silk months ago and haven't touched it since because the pattern, to my mind, wasn't working the way that I wanted it to.  Most of the lines were too narrow, the blue tails didn't read well, and the flowers were overly complicated and frail.  Brocading really seems to work best with strong diagonal lines of 2 threads or greater, which meant that the backs of the birds were reading very well (I loved how that part was turning out) but the rest was just kind of blah.

So, after looking at it in my apartment for months, I'm finally trying to come up with solutions.  The benefits of brocading are in its flexibility.  I can start over at any point with a completely new design if i so chose.  I started by strengthening some of the lines on the magpie and making the whole outline black instead of black and blue.

Then, I played around with the idea of taking out the 3-flower motif completely, as it had the thinnest lines and had more complication than I was really willing to put the effort into as a result.  The resulting bird-small flower-bird was too bottom heavy to use on its own, so I tried a bit of inverted tiling:

I thought I'd love this, but I merely like it.  It has nice strong diagonals, but I found I missed the larger flower motif.  So I tried to fill out the design a little more, while not making it quite as compact since that was making the weaving process with two colors difficult.  The results:

I think this might work.  There is a lot more white space (re: space I don't have to weave) which makes it a little simpler while still maintaining most of the integrity of the original design  Several of the lines are thicker to keep it from being so frail.  I won't really know until I start weaving it, but I'm hoping this will be a winner.

I'm also considering playing around with having a thicker line of brocading thread by waxing and doubling up the black and blue strands so they'd act a little more like a ribbon and better fill the space.  I'm searching for my motivation to do so, but it'll come.  Hopefully.

Petticoat Bits

Since I was working on a few updates anyway for the ACC, I'll go ahead and explain some of my documentation for the petticoat, as well as a few detail shots that I took today.

In my prowl looking for extant garments, I was elated when I found this beautiful painted cotton petticoat in my search of "1500-1600" in the V&A collections, but I'm convinced that 1570 as the starting year is incorrect or possibly even transposed (as in, it should read 1750).  The East India Company stamp indicates 17th century at the absolute earliest, and the design bears something of an 18th century aesthetic.  Nevertheless, Laura Mellin's instructions on making a 16th century petticoat produced a remarkably similar garment, so I'm willing to think that the basic nature of this item (hopefully) indicates some common lines of construction through time.  It's made in four panels and totals 4x my waist measurement along the width.

My cartridge pleating has no gathering stitches -- don't ask me why, but I was just too paranoid about lining them up well to even try that technique.  Instead, I marked a small hash mark every inch on the skirt and every 1/4 inch on the waistband, and used that as a guide as I whipstitched it together.

The seams and hem were all done by machine, with the gold silk guard covering up the line of stitching at the hem.  I was paranoid about having an overly wobbly line on the guard, so I pulled a thread in the fabric of the skirt for the top edge.  It was kind of a nightmare to follow, but it did end up nice and straight as a result.

ACC: Petticoat Bodies

Just to show that I can in fact take a hint, I finally got motivated to wear my new petticoat bodies to fighter practice and take a few mug shots next to the gym.

Now for me to nitpick everything wrong with it:

 

The petticoat ended too big around the waist so it's sagging a bit, but it only needs a a few extra eyelets to pick up the slack.  Doing all of the eyelets to match the ones on the tabs is looking mighty tempting, just for the potential for cute little bows all around the waist.

 Also, because of the eleventh hour necessity to split it up the back, the bottom of the backmost tabs are taking way too much strain and so can't lace well.  It's kind of my own fault for having such a dramatic bit of shaping at the side back seam, but it doesn't effect the overall look too much.

Those issues aside, I am tickled to death with how it turned out.  It is exactly what I envisioned when I put the two fabrics together.  I wore it for the better part of the afternoon and there were not any screaming comfort issues.

Also, at two years after I'd finished my lovely embroidered coif, I finally have an excuse to wear it.

 As much as I love the attack laurel coif patterns, I have to admit that they are really big on me.  My hair's long but fine, so my only hope for tying it on was to do two braids over the top of my head to give the cord something to pull against.  It worked pretty well while the knot in the cord held, but it was too slippery (it's my silk tablet woven hairtie) to stay in long-term, and after a few attempts and the pictures I just stopped bothering with it.

Closing in

I haven't written in a while, but I've been the busy little seamstress.  It's just been slow going due to a lot of hand work lately.  I am very, *very* close on my petticoat bodies.  I was having a crisis for a while because I wanted to use the gold silk from the corset binding for a guard around the bottom, but was mightily paranoid about having enough.  The gold silk came to me courtesy of Mistress Bianca, and largely consisted of one or two large pieces (that I hacked into greedily for the corset binding) and several much smaller bias-cut triangles.  I ended up sewing all of the triangles together into a super bias trapezoid in an effort to eke as much length from it as possible, and I managed to get all I needed with some to spare.  The corset still needs a small amount of binding around the inside of the armhole, but I'm waiting on it until I can really test out the wear to see if there needs to be any adjustment first.  The petticoat just needs a few eyelets to fasten in the front to be functional, and I'm suddenly on the fence on whether or not I want to do eyelets all the way around the waist to correspond with those on the corset tabs.  It might just be more trouble than its worth.

I do love it though.  The gold silk looks fantastic against the green linen, and the skirt itself is very full (4x my waist measurement).  I can easily rock out the sort of wenchy bodice look in my corset-and-petticoat, and I'm very eager (after the challenge) to make an elizabethan-style jacket out of some lovely green shetland wool I got a while ago to make it respectably middle class.

With all of the effort into my underwear and with less than 100 days until the end of the challenge, I'm seriously considering calling my petticoat bodies my "intermediate" layer and foregoing the loose gown.  That way I can devote my time and attention to the blue silk gown and all of the necessary frippery without having another garment hanging over me.

Here's to pictures as soon as I finish the last bits and find my camera!

I survived hand binding!

I think the fifth sewing circle of hell is hand-binding corset tabs into eternity.

I'm pretty ashamed of the inconsistent job I did on this binding, but I grit my teeth and did it and now it's done and other than a very small amount of adjustment I'm just going to have to live with it.

I do have to give my friend Karena some mad props for saving my sanity on this.  While I was at fighter practice bitching about sewing down this stupidly frustrating binding, she offered to take it on in exchange for some consultation and drafting work on her own Elizabethan outfit.  In my weakness (I think I said something about oh please take it away just make the pain stop) I took her up on it.  She ended up getting waylaid by her own sewing deadline for a wedding, so i ended up doing most of it anyway, but it was enough that i could rediscover my motivation and push through it.  THANK YOU!  It still needs 9 sets of eyelets around the waist, a bit of boning adjustment, and binding around the armscye.  I'm waiting on that until last because I might need to make adjustments to the armscye for comfort, and I've found the best way to figure that out is to wear it for reals once or twice.

If you've been following this you might have seen that my original pattern was for a one-piece corset with lacing only up the front in similitude of the effigy bodies, but the boning made it shrink to the point where it was *really* overly busty in the front.  The back was split and eyelets added (criss-cross style instead of spiral, because I know from experience the limitations of my dresser/husband) and the effect was perfect once I gave the girls a little more room.

I also looked closely at the gold silk bits that made up the original binding, and I *think* I'll have enough for two 1" rings of guards around the bottom of the matching petticoat.  I'll be reacquainting myself with my rotary cutter shortly to find out for sure.

Warped

The problem with doing so much handwork is that there really isn't much to blog about.  I've been working for weeks on the bottom edge binding around my corset, and it's finally done (pics to follow shortly) but today I was feeling particularly inspired so I started setting up the warp for my magpie garters.  And, in my grand tradition of trying things for the first time, I decided to try my hand at circular warping.

As far as supplies are concerned, I found a really great source for silk weaving thread, so I bought two cones thinking it would be more than I ever needed:

To do a continuous warp for tablet weaving, I needed four cones.  so I cut each in half with the help of my fancy pants warping board.

 My husband built it, and it measures and holds an almost infinite amount of thread easily measurable increments (every pass from peg to peg is one yard, and the pegs on top help count each pass).  With the help of this the job of cutting down my cones into four roughly equal parts was very easy.

Why yes those are toilet paper rolls, and yes that is a spoon taped to the wall.  They're hung on the wall with a dowel and threaded through the spoon's 'eye' to assist in the warping process.  Don't ask me why I had to do it in the most white trash way possible, though.

 

This part was really tricky to try to photograph as it involved all of my hands, but the method of continuous warp makes warping cards incredibly fast, because you thread the entire pack, and then separate out the cards as you warp it up.  Once again, the warping board was invaluable.  I ended up with perfectly strung cards that were pretty much all the same length, saving time and minimizing waste in the warping process. 

Now it came time to pull out my newest favorite thing:

Drew's keen eye found this antique Structo loom at DI and it was love at first sight.  The heddles and reed were easy enough to remove, and could still be re-attached easily:

So I had a simple ratchet setup, identical to my earlier idea pertaining to box looms (scroll down) based on examples from illuminated manuscripts.

So far, the idea seems to have merit:

And I'm very pleased with how much tension the loom provides as well.  I hope to start brocading tomorrow.