A Little Pourpoint, A Few Museums

ahem

Following the head-clearing of the most recent post, I hitched up my belt and decided to just start somewhere; this is the test piece after all, and if it's not perfect, that's okay.  And since I am pretty clear on what's going on with the body pieces at least, that seemed like a good place to start.  

Marking the quilting lines on the
LB piece

I laid out my base linen and transferred the body pattern pieces[1] (left front, right front, upper back, lower back) onto it, incorporating the various notes and adjustments[2] from the muslin; a process that, once again, makes me long for a) a large table, b) a light-box, and/or at the very least c) pattern weights.  Then I moved it to the ironing board[3] and, just for the first piece I'm going to work (the lower back, which is the least significant piece) marked the seam allowance & quilting lines there.  Now, Gold Charlie's quilting lines are 3.4cm apart; this is about 1⅓ inches.  My gridded ruler doesn't do thirds, so I started with 1¼; that looked too narrow, so I went up to 1½. Once that was done, I got the whole linen length onto the frame.

if you think these lines look cock-
eyed, you are entirely correct

With some labor, I got the whole thing under good tension, and then looking at the LB piece I saw that the lines were quite uneven, in spite of using a gridded ruler to mark the center line (which instead wandered off to something more like Manhattan-north) and all my other careful efforts.  Grumble.  So, spent some time redoing that.  Then I cut out the fashion-fabric linen for the lower back.  This was the end of the evening on a Saturday, so I figured as how to leave it set up; get to bowing cotton on Sunday; and hopefully be able to quilt a bit several evenings of the week.

Unfortunately I did not take lessons from my wiser and more experienced friends; and I woke up to an Earth-Shattering Kaboom and learned that although this cat hammock could take one cat, it couldn't take both of them.

AHEM

I lost my momentum at this point and put the whole thing aside for several days.  About the time I was ready to buckle down again, I cleverly fell down our building's stairs and committed various indignities to my shoulder and wrists, which made bow operation impossible for several more days.  And now we're into the pre-holiday whirl.  Argh.  

That said, I did get some medieval head-feeding going on!  I went up to my sister's outside Boston for Thanksgiving, and she thoughtfully provided for my entertainment with a trip to the Peabody-Essex Museum, an institution I had been entirely unfamiliar with.  They are notable for having one of the best collections of Asian art in the US (including an entire Chinese house); but our trip was for an exhibition on shoes, put together by the V&A, with some local additions--the Peabody Essex also has a huge shoe collection (who knew?).  So I would have enjoyed the heck out of it to begin with; but imagine my surprise and delight to find some period shoon I hadn't seen before:

14th-century poulaine. That is one narrow-looking
sole if you ask me

Tudor shoe.  Note the nice big toe box. No bunions
for these guys.

And then, the weekend following, we went down to Baltimore to the Walters Art Museum, another institution I had been entirely unfamiliar with (do you sense a pattern?).  This trip was triggered in an unusual, possibly unique, manner; when we were at the V&A in October, a whole bunch of cases in their medieval rooms had little "sorry!" notes to state that this or that piece had been lent to the Walters for their "A Feast for the Senses" exhibition.  By the sixth or seventh of these, we looked at each other and said "well OK, I guess we're going to Baltimore"; and so we got us up a convoy and did so.  It develops that the Walters has one of the best medieval collections in the US (how the hell did I not know this?!), so even without the special exhibition it would have been entirely worth the trip.  But! The special exhibition is exceedingly well done, and I heartily recommend it to your attention, if you can fit it into your holiday schedule (it closes Jan. 8).  No photos, naturally, but the exhibition catalogue is nice.

[1] Does the fabric grain cease to matter (in a structural sense) in a case like this, because of all the padding & quilting holding everything in alignment?

[2] Marking on the ironing board was a horrible choice for a host of reasons, including "squishy board cover", "not being able to have the whole piece flat at the same time", and "insufficient light".  I should have done it on the floor, or possibly once the piece was stretched on the frame (which is where I ended up re-doing it).

[3] NB: I did not make any changes in the pattern pieces to account for the quilting.  On the test swatch, there was no difference side-to-side, and less than a half-inch top-to-bottom; and I expect to quilt the piece less fully than the swatch.  Let's see what happens!