Sunday, March 27, 2016

Banner Project I Redux: It Ain't Over Til It's Over

You may recall, about six months ago, I completed a rather large banner undertaking; or, I thought I had, anyways.  There were details I wished I had done, or done better, but for better or worse the thing was launched and in the possession of its owner, and I figured that was that. 



Now, in the interim, news came over the wires that there would be an heraldic display competition at Mudthaw (as I mentioned in passing a few posts ago).  At the time I was full of large ideas about now making a banner for myself, and I started digging into that thought, though getting mired in the dilemma over whether to do a painted one or a fabric one; and then suddenly, brain said HEY IDIOT YOU JUST SPENT A ZILLION HOURS ON A HERALDIC BANNER WHY NOT SHOW THAT RIGHT NOW AND NOT KILL YOURSELF MAKING ANOTHER ONE IN FIVE WEEKS WHEN YOU ARE ALREADY FRIED.

This seemed like a reasonable suggestion from my ordinarily unreasonable brain; so I wrote the owner, and she kindly & enthusiastically shipped the banner to me.  I figured I'd just tidy up any messy bits and close up the bottom seam, and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle.

ha ha ha no

You see, the daisies bugged me.  They bugged me a lot.  Not only because they were kinda pooched, on account of only having had time to tack them down instead of properly appliquèing them; but I'd really intended to outline the petals in silver cord, so that each petal actually looked like, y'know, a separate petal.  This would not only look better, but also be much more appropriate.  (And also because it would make the banner shinier.  SHINY! shiny.)   And now I had the opportunity.  PERFECT!~  THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS PLAN

Well, except, consider: there are eighteen daisies on this banner.  Each daisy has somewhere between 24 and 32 petals.  (Most are closer to 32.)  That's, let us say, 580 petals to outline (and they're pretty tight curves, being narrow petals, so not a fast couching job at all).  



But I was determined, and I plunged in.  I must say, it's looking really good, and makes a big difference.  (There would be an example photo here, except that apparently I deleted the one I took with my phone a couple weeks ago?)   It is, however, going as slowly as I feared; I usually don't even finish a single daisy in an evening, unless I stay up way later than I ought to.   And the time pressure is further increased by the fact that I had a pre-scheduled long weekend away, and this is by no means a traveling project.  So that removed four days of possible work, including two weekend days (though it isn't entirely lost time, as I'm presently sitting in the airport writing my documentation as well as this blog post).

I was getting increasingly worried about my ability to finish it all before the event, so I started doing every other daisy, so that if I do run out of time it'll at least look kinda deliberate.  (I mean, I'd specify in the documentation anyways that it's a work in progress; but there is a subconscious effect on the viewer if it looks regular and intentional, regardless of what the intellect knows.)  

Of course, I'll have to make time to re-attach the lining now, since of course I had to cut open the side seams to do this work.  And I may have to jettison (or at least postpone) my original plan of getting some fringe-y trim to put along the outside edges, which you see a lot in extant banners.  But the end result will, I think, be worth it.

Also it's giving me a chance to binge-re-watch Babylon 5.  Particularly Season 3.  Because Marcus.  <3


Someone please make a "hey girl" meme out of Marcus.
please.


Sunday, March 6, 2016

Je Ne Comprends Pas Des Pantalons

No Pants Zone

Although having been a lifelong jeans-wearer (indeed, I went through a pretty long anti-dress phase in my youth), I had not until fairly recently taken thought to bifurcated nether-garments from a construction perspective.  I attempted to knock out a couple pair a few years back as Pennsic-wear, and although they were serviceable for purpose, I wasn't particularly thrilled with the results, either for fit, function, or beauty; and I chucked the whole concept into the disused lumber-room of my mind.

This of course changed when I picked up an Elizabethan gentleman, and became acquainted willy-nilly with the world of trunk-hose, cannions, slops, Venetian hose, and so on.  (We aren't even gonna get into pluderhosen.)  I was at least armed with a copy of The Tudor Tailor, and starting with that (and consultation with the client), fit a pattern for Venetians that I ran off two black wool copies of.  I measured, I fit, I measured again, I was careful and meticulous...and imagine my woe when he wore them at an event and we had to bring out emergency giant safety pins to avoid wardrobe malfunctions.


Nothing daunted (and used to suffering failure between measurement and product), I took them home, I took one pair apart, I re-measured...and the measurement was the same as what I'd measured in the first place.  So, a failure in execution, perhaps?  Very well.  I re-gathered the waist of the pants, I reattached the waistband, I checked the measurement; and the pants were worn with the same result of falling-down-ness.


As is so often the case, there are several melodies of fail in my symphony of woe.  The first is that I measured across the subject's natural waist.  This tends to work on women; that is the narrowest point, usually; things will not fall down from there, because hips are in the way--particularly on me, having an hourglass figure (even if, right now, it's more of an hour-and-a-half glass).   But, as the song says, don't you know that it's different for girls?  Menfolk tend to be built in more of a straight line, and indeed depending on how they carry their avoirdupois, the natural waist may actually be the largest circumference.  This is why belts are a thing in the modern masculine wardrobe.  

Pattern in the Tudor Tailor shop.
You can see the lacing holes in the
waistband of the Venetians, there.
I find that many (most?) doublet-and-hose suits in period were also fitted with lacing holes and tied together around the waist.  My next-round attempt, which was to make Himself a modest linen suit for field wear (the creation of which pre-dated my enlightenments in the previous paragraph), included that feature; but the client indicated that he had a certain feeling of wardrobe insecurity around the waist, and that it was a damn nuisance to get into and out of the suit.  (There was a thread not long after on the Elizabethan Costume FB group that most of the gentlemen who wear this look just leave the pieces laced together most of the way around, and got into & out of it rather like a onesie.  So that may help.)

Based on these, it would seem that if I a) fit the waistband of the hose to where the subject's jeans most comfortably fall, and b) make sure that all tops and bottoms are fitted with lacing holes, the primary issues should be resolved.  So, that's where we are going next.  This may require some after-market editing on pre-existing doublets.

Quaere: would this lacing the tops-and-bottoms together also have been found among working men, who would be taking their outer layers off to work in their shirts?   Do we have enough evidence to make a call?

Mind you, I still have some other problems to work out; the patterns for Venetians all have little openings at the bottom, which are meant to be closed with hooks-and-eyes, and I couldn't grok from the patterns what was going on, so on all three pairs that's worked out very weirdly.  I realized afterwards that the idea is to have something which can close snugly around just below the knee, capturing the stockings or nether-hose underneath.  But anyways, I think I just didn't make them long enough.  That may call for later editing, or maybe I'll just leave 'em and make the next pair better.

On a final note, I am somewhat comforted that a fellow who does this stuff for a living has also struggled with his Venetians.






Thursday, March 3, 2016

Project Inflation: The Blackwork Shirt

The original vision (well, a simpler version thereof).
V&A, acc. no. T.112-1972
I had an idea for a small, contained, comparatively-quick-gratification project.  I wanted to learn blackwork*, for the betterment of my dashing consort's wardrobe; he is (as I may have mentioned previously) wearing Elizabethan, and they were all into the monochrome embroideries; so it seemed good to me to do a simple set of embroidered cuffs and collar to apply to his best shirt.  (Eventually I'd like to work my way up to making him one of the super-fancy nightcaps**...but that will be a long time coming, thankyouverymuch.)  

Although I haven't dipped my toe into anything like this before, I do know that there are a number of sources for needlework patterns that were used in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century--there are even some collections that were printed in that time, and reproduced today, conveniently enough.  So, I wasn't really concerned about that; I was more worried about how to scale a counted pattern to be sure it would fit on, say, a sleeve cuff of X inches.  And then I started frelling about which specific patterns would be used on an Englishman's clothes of the time.  And then I started frelling in circles; so, as any mature adult would do in these circumstances, I whined about it on Facebook.  Happily for me, the doyenne of blackwork took note of and pity upon my haplessness, and talked me through some of my thoughts (and also unconsciously triggered by association my memory that oh, yes, actually, I do own Patterns of Fashion 4 now).  The takeaway of most immediate significance, however, was the fact that this simple collar-and-cuffs, counted work / geometric, monochrome embroidery was not actually the fashion any more by Elizabethan times, based on the extant shirts. 

Capt. Thomas Lee, 1594;
an extreme example.
(Tate Britain acc no. T03028)
The embroidered shirts remaining (there are also a very few plain ones with only lace decoration) have embroidery on cuffs and collar, yes; but also in vertical stripes down the front and back of the torso, down the length of the sleeves, and often around the sides and hem as well. And, rather than being counted work, they are most often free-embroidery of curled vine motifs with other, naturalistic (flowers, birds, insects, etc) motifs in the loops and swirls formed.  Indeed, some of them just have flowers or plants sprinkled all over.


A much simpler smock (albeit a woman's,
but there's not a huge stylistic difference
between the genders).  Museum of London,
acc. no. A21968, 1600-1620
As a side note, it's interesting to me that so much effort was spent in places where it wouldn't be seen.  Captain Lee over here notwithstanding, most of the period portraiture has everyone completely covered in layers of expensive doublets &c; the only thing you can see in most of them is the cuffs (even the collars are usually superseded by ruffs).  The Museum of London flags their shirt of this ilk as a nightshirt**, specifically; and maybe the rest of them were, too; but this sails a frail boat of theory rather far out into the murky seas of supposition.

The good news is, free embroidery should be a lot easier to fit to the spaces I want to embroider.  Cut out the shirt pieces, lay them out, design the vine to be vinous in the space allotted, and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle.   And moreover, it will be perfectly in keeping with the aesthetic of the age to be as whimsical as I like in choosing the animals or vegetables to go inside the vines. 

All of that being said, I don't intend to leap into action immediately; the priorities previously stated are still in place (i.e., "let's make sure his pants don't fall down").  Ideally, I'd still like a smaller scale project to cut my teeth on, but the Elizabethans didn't appear to be into embroidering hankies or anything like that (lace trimmed hankies, yes; embroidered, no).  There is an extant sampler from 1598, but honestly, I'm not so over-burdened with free time that I hadn't rather do something that could serve a practical purpose.  (Napkins?  I don't see any evidence that those were decorated in this fashion, but on the other hand, fiat experimentum in corpore vili.)

* "Blackwork" isn't always black.  A lot of it was, which is I guess why it got labeled that in the modern idiom; but the Elizabethans were perfectly happy to do the same work in blue, or red, or pink.
** Nightcaps and nightshirts were not necessarily worn to sleep in, the way clothing with that label is today.  They were garments you wore informally at home (often at the end of the day); I think it's not wrong to relate them to the dressing gown of "jazz-colored peacocks" that Lord Peter Wimsey receives morning or late-evening unexpected guests in.