Largely About Largesse

Largesse examples from the Citadel of the Southern Pass,
in Ansteorra.  

The original meaning of largesse is, coins thrown to the populace on some great occasion, such as a wedding or a coronation.  E.g., during the wedding of Mary Stuart to the future François II (1558):

This is the best screencap I could find,
and it ain't great, but it's Col. Brandon
with a fistful of coins he's about to
throw to the crowd after his wedding.
(Sense and Sensibility, 1995)

"Then the heralds cried for a third time "Largesse!" and threw among the people a great number of gold and silver coins of all descriptions, as Henrys, ducats, crowns of the sun, pistolets, half-crowns, testons, and douzains.  Such a rush and outcry among the people followed, that nothing was ever heard like it, as they precipitated themselves one upon the other...During the offertory, pieces of gold and silver were again thrown among the people, in token of liberality and largesse."  (Lives of the Queens of Scotland, Agnes Strickland)

In the SCA context, though, it's taken on a meaning closer to the idea of tokens or gifts of favor (not favors, per se; I have a different rant about those)--a way for the Crown (or local barons, for that matter) to give an attaboy-in-passing, so to speak, outside of the formal awards & orders context, for any reason that moves them: you did them a service, you did something cool, they like your display or your performance or how you comport yourself on the field--any ol' thing.  This is a Great Idea and very medieval and I love it and I want to contribute to it.  But I have been perennially stuck on "how".

Disclaimer: I have some personal madness here; particularly I want to note that this madness is entirely personally-applied, and I do not have any mental wharrgarbl about anyone else's work or contributions but my own.

Very broadly speaking, it seems to me that there are two kinds of largesse; "high-end" (bigger or more expensive or more painstakingly crafted) one-off creations that might be given, for example, as gifts to other royalty; and the more, and understand that this is not said with any degree of denigration, "mass gift" items which are smaller and less expensive of money and effort to produce.   I haven't really been thinking about the high-end largesse, since I can barely keep up with my own big projects, but I should like to contribute to the other kind, the more so since there's more of a need for those.  But where I get stuck on is, what's appropriate for me to do?  For my craft, nearly everything I do is a hefty time investment, and I can't produce items quick enough to be useful in this context.

Well, let's cut to the nubbin of it: of course I could...if I wanted to machine sew / use non-period techniques / make other compromises.  For instance, one of the obvious items I thought of is to make small "relic"-size pouches.  None more medieval!  So appropriate, 

Relic purse from the Abbaye
de Saint-Maurice d'Agaune

and even useful!  Right the hell in my wheelhouse!  And you'd think, pretty quick to make...and you'd be right, generally speaking...but I have a bug up my butt about tablet-woven edges, and I'm still slow AF on that, so it'd take me an inefficient amount of time to finish even one, let alone several.  Is this stupid?  Will the recipient notice, or know, or care?  If my king gave me a nice little pouch to say "attagirl", would it bug me if the sides were sewn instead of having a tablet-woven edge? I'm pretty darn sure it wouldn't.[1]

I guess the core question is, what's the right balance between purity of work vs. actually producing things?  I am comfortable with that line for the various things I'm making for me, because I'm the only person it affects; but for largesse, it affects the honor of the Crown and the happiness of the recipient, neither of which I want to trifle with.  Possibly--yes, probably--I am overthinking the living shit out of this.  But I really don't want to create things that the Crown winces to give, or that the recipient winces to receive; and I don't where the generally accepted wince line is.

[1] Though if it was of neon green polyester with pink bunnies and a plastic draw cord, my eyebrow might rise more than somewhat.

There I Fixed It: Advancing Sleeves by 100 Years

but in a good way, not like this

At the (comparatively) last minute, by which I mean "about a fortnight ago", I decided to go to Coronation yesterday; and it being a genteel and courtly event, I wanted to be dressed all fancy-like...which of course, as I have just shared with you, is something of an issue for me[1].  The best option was to wear my 1540s Florentine silk gown, but I was feeling unusually Fussy™ about the sleeves; they had been wrong from the start, which I realized the first day I wore the dress, and my unhappiness had finally got to the point where I could not even with them any more.

What about them?  Well, let me illustrate, and then I'll explain how we got there.

Here's me (and my lovely & talented ronin-sister)
from the front.  Looks pretty OK, right?

Here's me, same day, from the side.  WTAF NOPE NOPE

So what happened?  As per usual, it was me plunging into a new technology without fully grokking the fundamentals thereof--partially due to time pressure, and partially due to not understanding the questions before they needed answers.  More specifically, I hadn't taken in how sleeve tech evolved between the 15th and 16th centuries; my chain of thought ran something like "the bodice of this dress is really quite like a gamurra in final shape, it's just that the seams are different; so I can use the same sleeve design I used for my gamurre."  Well, in fact, nope.  The gamurra has an inset armscye, which means you have a pretty dramatic shape change on your sleeve to get the thing to fit and still give you decent movement; it is rather like a sine wave, with the peak being at the top of your shoulder.  However, the 16th century dress, in a lot of cases, the sleeve isn't really part of the dress; it's a separate instance that you tie or pin or sometimes tack on, so if you have a massive amount of fabric up top, stupid things happen (as you see above)[2].

Eleanora di Toledo,
by Bronzino

The obvious answer is "make some new sleeves", but I don't have any of that silk left, so I took thought to how I could best frob them to better effect.  Step 1: look at some actual portraits, idiot (which I share a few of here for your delectation).

Anonymous lady,
by Pier Francesco Foschi

Bia de'Medici,
by Bronzino

The commonality I noticed is these ruffly bits at the top of the sleeve, which from that point are then attached to the shoulder of the dress in some wise.  Since much of my problem was "an excess of fabric at the top of the sleeve", I felt I could make something of this.  Of course, by the time I'd internalized all this information, it was the night before the event...

I started by running a gathering stitch along the point of the sleeve where the shape started getting all dramatic, and drew it in to make the sleeve's circumference about correct for my arm width, and pinned that solid.  I still had a goodly amount of fabric upstream, so I finger-pressed that to make a second ridge, and played around with that on my arm to see how it looked.  It was the right size, came up to an acceptable place on my arm, and gave about the right effect, so I sewed it all down.  

Lacking ribbon in any workable color, I took some acid-green silk dupioni and cut strips of it to serve as the sleeve ties. It's fraying like whoa, which is annoying, but I expected it; and once it finally gets fringed enough to stop dropping threads everywhere it will have a nice effect, I think.   And I finished it in just enough time to get properly dressed for the event.  YAY TIMING

We utterly failed to get any action shots of it on me, but here's it off of me:

a slightly different bow style is probably in order too

In retrospect, I might have done better to combine that extra fabric into a single pouf or valance instead of the two ridges; that's probably closer to most of what we see; but the silk, although stiff, may not have had enough weight to maintain that on its own.  In any case, it looks 100% better when I'm wearing it, and I'm pleased with the result considering the strictures I was operating under.

[1] I did cut out the blue silk under-dress last week!  It is, as they say, a start.

[2] On some other occasions we've tacked the sleeve to the back as well, which makes it somewhat less awful, but it still isn't great--the silk sticks out in all kinds of ungraceful ways.