Rolling With The Punches

it me

I am feeling a little hard-done-by presently.  The blue silk dress is mostly finished--just need to fell the armhole seams, do the skirt center front seam[1], and hem it; but when I tried it on with the sleeves attached, I realized that it really is too tight to wear (by about 5lbs worth, if you see what I mean) and I would feel both physically and psycho-emotionally uncomfortable wearing it at present.  So, that's irritating.  On the bright side, it means I am not going to make myself crazy trying to finish it and redo the surcoat for Saturday.

Which is probably for the best; because although the antibiotics finally knocked out my sinus infection, I have had an adverse reaction to them which made me break out in giant itchy hives all over my body for the last several days[2].  I'm kept functional by Hulk-appropriate doses of antihistamine, but it's not conducive to sewing, far less being creative.

pricked und pounced

I did manage to fulfill my commitment to make a favor for the youth fighting on Saturday.  I have a personal dislike of the giant rectangle belt favors much...favored...by tradition, so I figured to do the narrow kind you can tie around the warrior's arm.  Since my colors are blue-and-gold, and I have all these handy blue silk scraps from the dress, I cut a strip from the waste to embroider my badge on.  I transferred the design with the prick-and-pounce technique I learned at last year's embroidery academy (using baby powder instead of lampblack, and an estoile from the Traceable Art Project).  This worked pretty well, except the silk was so thin I couldn't put it in a hoop, and my thumb kept smudging the lines. 

finished object

I outlined the whole estoile in stem stitch with golden silk floss.  Since my badge is blue-and-gold, and I had this lovely blue ground already, there was no point in embroidering that half; I just filled the gold half of the estoile with the same silk floss.  In stem stitch as well--which is not a filling stitch, I know, but I thought it would work well enough for something this small.  [Narrator's voice: It didn't.]  (Well, it did, but it was a pain in the butt and not as nice as it could be.)   In general, I do need more practice with stem stitch--I couldn't get the outline, even, as crisp and exact as I wanted.  Add it to the list of things to work on.  -_-   I also made a fundamental error in spec'ing out the project; I cut the silk strip with the thought of just hemming the edges, but of course it actually needed to be folded over so as to protect (and make invisible) the wrong side of the embroidery.  So I had to tinker with it a good deal to make it work and get it hemmed, which also means that the estoile goes a leeeetle too far to the edge, but whatcha gonna do?.  The next one will be better.

It's coming to the time where I have to plan and, more to the point, prioritize the summer sewing (in conjunction with my other obligations).  There's going to be more learning experiences, sigh, since I am intending to make my dashing consort a proper 14th-century kit: braies, shirt, hose, tunic, cap (and hood if I have time), none of which I've done before--well, the shirt is easy, and I've made hose for myself but that was years ago--.  Plus, I need to take in the two dresses I finished for last year, because I do not enjoy my boobs wandering down somewhere around my navel.   And, of course, the mending.  Ugh.



[1] I think I need to start the eyelets further down, too.  Trying to decide if that means I have to cobble together additional facing.  I don't think so, since it's not load-bearing?  Because it would be a fucking nightmare to do at this point.
[2] and they started a day after I finished the antibiotics.  Is that fair?  I ask you.

The Pourpoint Commission: Setbacks and Re-Orientation

here's me

With my usual timing, I came down ill last Wednesday and, for the following several days, wasn't up to anything but laying on the couch moaning.  Today I'm much more myself, but of course I am lacking an iron, which is, as project managers say, a blocker.  (Fun fact: you cannot get any iron at all with the "Get it Today!" button on Amazon.)  This will be rectified tomorrow, but I'm more than somewhat annoyed by losing most of a week of work.

On the bright side!  Things that have arrived include my 5lbs of raw cotton, and my ILL of Janet Arnold's article on the Black Prince's jupon!  Which is a downloadable PDF!  I NEVER HAVE TO GIVE IT BACK!  MOO HOO HA HA!

ahem

I haven't un-vacuum-sealed the cotton yet because I don't want to start getting fibers everywhere before I'm ready to address them, but I've torn into the article like a kid on Christmas morning.  Here are our takeaways (with the disclaimers that Saint Janet had to examine the garment through the conservation net, with the possible inaccuracies this introduces):

• It has a linen lining, cotton wadding for padding, and the silk velvet (linen weft) fashion fabric (already appliquéd, as previously noted).
• The fleurs-de-lis were done in the "part-of-the-ground-fabric" style of semy, rather than all as complete charges.  On the other hand, the leopards of the English arms were carefully sized for the space available in order to be entirely complete charges. Not relevant to today's project, but interesting to note for future reference.  
• What is not clear to me is whether the silver label of cadency was just appliquéd on top of the ground devices. Seems like a hell of a waste of goldwork if it was, and a bunch of extra work if it wasn't.
• As I'd theorized from looking at it, the quilting happened after the layers were assembled.
• There's fragmentary linen binding around the neckline, with a few remaining thread bits to suggest there was velvet there too (but it's not clear from the article if, like the garment itself, this is the remaining linen warp of the velvet, or whether there was a linen layer and then a velvet layer over top of it).
• The quilting seems to've been done with silk thread.
• There was twisted red-and-blue silk cord lain over the seams joining the heraldic quarters.  Quaere: is this purely to ease the visual transition, or would it be something fun to do to ornament any seam?
• She does talk about Red Charlie and Gold Charlie[1], but not at the comparison level I need, namely on the padding differences.  Though she does kindly include the quilting lines on each of them.

This is all very cool, though for the most part not immediately helpful on the how-to front, but for some reason I feel a greater level of confidence for having it in my pocket.  On the down side, I feel the chances of having the test linen garment done in two weeks are vanishingly small; so I expect my entry may end up being more about explorations on the padding/quilting front.  And that's OK too.

[1] this is how we are officially designating Charles VI's and Charles de Blois' pourpoints respectively.  Please take note for future correspondence.

London Arts Pilgrimage: There Were Some Embroideries

YAAAAASSSSS

As I mentioned previously, there's this little exhibit on at the V&A, and we put on our scallop shells and filled our scrips with travel rations and fared forth to see it.  If at all you can go, you should; and if you can't, you should still order the exhibition catalogue, which is entirely the bomb.  (Let me note, however, that the current sorry state of the pound sterling means that the catalogue is $45 if you buy it at the museum bookstore, and $75 if you get it from Amazon.  So if you go in person, you are SAVING MONEY.  Who loves you and is watching out for your well-being?  That's right.)

Anyways.

So yes, as anticipated, photography was strictly verboten.  The exhibition catalogue is almost good enough that it's OK, but I snuck the above photo of the Black Prince's jupon anyways, because it is THE BLACK PRINCE'S JUPON and I was never going to be that close to it again.  Regrettably, even with my nose pressed against the glass like a Dickensian street urchin outside a pudding shop, the net they've put over the garment to preserve it keeps you from seeing any additional construction detail...and it's so worn away there's not a lot left to see...but it was still a Religious Moment for me.  Fun fact: they clearly spent all this time and expense doing metal-work appliqué onto velvet...and then just ran the quilting channels right the hell over it.  Well OK then.

Wool intarsia seal bag with
embroidered border, c. 1280.
Westminster Abbey, WAM 1494

There are about 80 objects in the exhibition altogether, and a lot of them are the Greatest Hits of Religious Garments you'd expect, like the Syon Cope (which the light in its case wasn't working the day we went, heck of a job there, Brownie) and the Butler-Bowdon cope; but they did a great job rounding up what few surviving secular and semi-secular articles were out there.  So not only did I get to drool on the jupon, I also got to get real up-close and personal with the Cluny's horse trappings (and not just the usual big piece with the leopards of England on them, but some smaller scraps that still have their pearled bits intact!) and a royal seal bag that's of particular interest because it's wool appliqué with no metal-work, which is something we know existed but very little has survived (the Tristan Hanging is one, though it's onlaid rather than inlaid like this little guy) and a fascinating little heraldic number, now in the form of a burse (a case for carrying a cloth used in the Mass), showing a shield with the arms of Stafford impaled with the Woodstock differenced version of the royal arms (so it had something to do with the marriage of Edmund, Earl of Stafford, with Anne Plantagenet in 1398)--but what it was cut down from is entirely unclear.  The exhibition people think it's from a banner, but my reading this summer suggests that you never saw arms on a shield shape used on banners, so my money's on some kind of domestic textile.

Other Moments:

• Beth's contention that half our problems recreating these works are because we can't get the fineness/tightness of linen that the originals were created on
• likewise, silk twill, Y U NO
• Unexpected couched-and-laidwork on the Clare Chasuble
• Crawling on the floor in front of the Syon Cope to look at the stitchery around the hem in the reflected light from the video playing across the room
• Being blinded by the 100% intact cloth-of-gold of the Fishmongers' Pall
• PEARLS ON THINGS
• Seeing the strong repetition of motifs; not just "it's a cope and it's gotta have the Annunciation on it and that means a lily in a pot", but the almost carbon-copy design details across the board
• The interlace patterns on the Hólar Vestments, which really need to be turned into trim

And then there was everything else we looked at. Even after cherry-picking all their special stuff for the exhibition, the V&A has a ridiculous amount of textiles; and we spent some quality time in the Museum of London and the National Gallery too.  (And Buckingham Palace, but that was about QE2's Wardrobe Unlock'd, not QE1.)  I haven't started processing the photos with any seriousness yet, but here are a couple of teasers:

TIL tablet-woven edges are still
around in Elizabethan sweet-bags

Elizabethan blackwork handkerchief.
They must've had some serious
colds, is all I can say.

Silk fragment, Byzantine, 900-1100.
Shows noticeable design similarities
to Chinese-produced textiles

Banner Project I Redux: Well, That's Done (Mostly)

Outlining the petals does make a
huge difference, as you see

By dint of diligent (obsessive?) effort every night for the past oh god don't ask weeks, I managed to finish the last daisy petal about 11pm Friday night.  Whereupon I suddenly remembered I had some final clean-up on the documentation; so I packed my consort off to bed and finished that up too.  I figured that, since all I had to do was tidy up one small stretch of the cord along the bend and close up the sides of the banner, I could easily do that in the morning before we left for the event (particularly since it was only about 30-40min away, traffic depending).

ha ha ha where have we heard this kind of delusion before

In the cold hard light of retrospection, I know what I should have done: completely taken apart the lining from the banner (no matter how tidily I'd done the pole loop previously nor how proud of it I was) and just start from flat.  But!  That's so much more work, amirite?  Let's just sew back the seams I'd ripped, starting from right where they were.

Finished result, with bonus cat.  The
puckering is not due to him, though.

An hour and a half later, covered in thread bits after ripping them out twice more, we were already closing in on the You Absolutely Must Leave By Now Or Miss Everything hour and I still didn't have a lined banner.  I ripped the sides completely open, released the end parts of the pole loop, and worked from there; but I was still doing it on the fly, on the ironing board, and under stress (tears were happening by now). I got the sides closed, and then (after some clothing drama) got together and out the door, and I sewed the bottom closed and a few other cleaning-up bits in the car. As a result, when I hung it in the display*, the ground was puckered and not tidy, and the sides were even curling back slightly; didn't hang straight at all.  I'm not proud of that fact, but on the other hand, the work was good enough to tie me for first place in the Intermediate Division** of the competition.  So, there's that.

I'm going to step away from the project for a few days, but before I send it back to the owner, I'm going to take the lining off completely and Do It Right.  (Ideally I'll find some fringe trim so I can just sandwich-line it instead of bag-lining, which will make the job a little easier, too.)

NEVER. AGAIN.  until next time

* which I didn't get any pictures of, derp.  That said, groveling thanks to Beth and Briony for bringing poles & c. so I could hang it properly.
** disclaimer: there were only three entrants. 

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.

Banner Project I: Mission Accomplished

Working As Designed

After a frenzied amount of work Thursday and Friday evenings, there was no more time to whiten the sepulchre, and so the banner was launched on Saturday morning.  In the photo above, you can see it hanging in front of the vigil tent.  

It bugs me that you can see a tiny bit of the lining hanging down--I wanted to hang it overnight to get the fabric weights worked out, and then tack the lower edge of the lining out of sight.  However, we had a bunch of emergency sewing to do for the ceremony itself, and therefore I downgraded this requirement from "important" to "nice to have", whereupon it fell right off the back of the project truck.

Anyways, the recipient expressed her great happiness with the banner, and that's the important thing.  (You can read her account of the whole day here.  In fact, just read her blog.  You need more 16th century French in your life.)

Lessons learned:

• Always apply some form of fray-checking.
• With multi-layer motifs like the daisies, attach the center before basting the outer parts.  Ended up with a lot of pooched daisy petals.
• ...but still baste before going over the outer edges of a motif.
• I need to pad my time estimates even more than I have been.  -_-;;;;
• It's as helpful to have an embroidery frame for something this scale as it does for fine work.  (Though, you couldn't use a traditional hoop because it would mark the velvet; so it'd have to be the thing where you baste it to backing fabric and lace THAT to a frame.  What a *$@& pain.)

Next up: making an 1840s ball gown for me, and a Napoleonic-era 95th Rifles uniform for my lovin' man, for a Halloween wedding we are attending.  D:

Banner Project I: Down To The Wire

All heraldic elements in place, woo.  OKAY SOME ARE PINNED ON STILL SHUT UP

It's been a little while since I've joined you, Gentle Readers, because I've been on the hop.  I went away for the weekend for an Intense Sewing Experience...which yes, happened to be at the beach...but I'm happy to say that much work was done; not only on this here project, but other elements of this coming weekend's festivities.

I had a slight setback when I sewed the first daisy on, discovering that it doesn't matter how tidy and fine your blanket stitch is, it's not going to stand up to the fraying power of poly-cotton brocade, let alone a thick pile cotton velvet.  So, I had to stop production and prepare strange unguents which I then brushed along every. edge. of. every. daisy. and daisy. center. with the tip of my finger; and then set them all to dry.

Meantime, I worked on the needle.  I cut it out of a really lovely blue silk taffeta, but wanted it to have a bit more dimensionality, so padded it with two layers of a fairly close blue linen (cut off an old dress I'm never going to remake) (and the skirt of which is going to be the banner backing, thank you).  I couched silver cord around it and then--I'm rather smug about this--used a thick twist of embroidery floss as the "thread" inside the needle.  

There's still a little trimming to do, too.

The main challenge here was trying to get it all to lie flat, while simultaneously having to bunch the work up so I could actually reach the part I was sewing (naturally right at the middle of the piece).  A big-ass frame would have helped a lot here.  The result is that the silk is visibly pooched in places, which does not delight me.

Artistically, I think it would have looked better to have the needle lying at the same angle as the bend; but that's not what the heraldry says, so there you go.  Take the lesson when registering your arms, people.

Once that was complete, the daisies were dry and I started stitching them down.  This was mostly just a tacking job to keep the petals from curling around, because a) the stitching of the daisy centers would be more than enough to keep the flower itself in place, and b) ideally I will go back and either blanket-stitch or couch a shiny around the petals.  This is the point at which I also realized I had somehow failed to fray-check two of the daisies.  -_-;;;  I left those for the moment, not having more Elmer's unguents to hand, and continued on with the daisy centers.

SHINY i like the shiny

These are, as previously noted, cut out of a tawny gold-colored velvet that is a veteran of another banner.  I couched around the edge of each one with a doubled gold cord, for a bit of that extra sparkly richness.  As of last night, I had completed about half of them; the rest I can do tonight, and that leaves tomorrow (before leaving for the three-hour drive, wah) to attach the banner backing and create the pole pocket.  I'm calling that Minimum Viable Product.

Once the fun is over, I'll take the thing back, do a proper job on the daisy petals, and get a nice cord to attach along the sides of the banner.

Then I can start on the big project that's due by Halloween.  ora pro me

Banner Project I: The Devil In The Details

"Perhaps you'd consider changing your arms slightly?"

Here are the topics I'm currently chewing on:

1. Initial digging indicates that most banners of this ilk were appliquéd by laying a cord along the edge where the charge meets the ground fabric, and couching that down to attach the layers (rather than using blanket stitch or the like).  Shall I use gold cord for the whole thing, or a plain-colored cord for some parts of the motif? Gold would sure be shiny, though I'm not sure I have enough for all those gorram daisy petals.
2. Semy (semée), the powdering of charges across a field, can be depicted in one of two ways: either pretending as if the charges are part of the ground fabric, so that if the spacing means that you're cutting a charge in half, then you only put half the charge there; or by treating them as whole charges so that if one would get cut off based on the pattern + the edge of the ground, you just don't put anything there.  Both styles are found in period (here's an article, if you're curious to know more).  I feel as if the part-of-ground-fabric method is more Frenchified--classically, the old arms of France which are a semée-de-lis (rather than the three fleur-de-lis we're used to now) are usually depicted in that style--but I'm a little worried about my capability to make that work neatly along the edges of the fabric, so I'm presently inclined to stick to full charges only.
3. The threaded needle looks awfully lonely on the central bend.  A charge, if not blazoned otherwise, is depicted "proper", which in the case of a needle is "straight up and down".  I can increase its visual impact by giving it more of a thread tail artistically dangling, and I will, but I am flagging it as a concern.
4. I wonder if I oughtn't put some kind of weight (another rod pocket, or a strip of heavy canvas as interfacing, or something) along the bottom of the banner to help keep it hanging straight?



The arms of France until 1376

5. Dear OmniGraffle: your documentation for how to evenly space objects across a canvas is shit.  This is a basic function.  Get with it.

Today's docket is chiefly full of housekeeping chores (read: put a whole bunch of crap we never use into tubs and shift it into the building's shared storage space; also get a jump on the week's food production) so I don't know if I shall make any production headway today, but ideally I'd like to at least position and start attaching the bend.

Banner Project I: A Field of Daisies

I could say that I swear all heraldic art I do will be done cheerfully, but I would be a horrible liar.

As usually happens, we come back from Pennsic and are immediately plunged head-over-heels into another project.  This year, it is one of our nearest & dearest being inducted into the Order of the Laurel, and I have committed to make a banner of her coat-of-arms for this grand occasion.  

Banners are awesome.
(Pennsic 44 opening ceremonies; photo by Simon Pride)

I haven't made a banner before, though I have helped with the execution of several (like a certain muckin' big red one with a muckin' big white escarbuncle on it, ahem).  Banner-making has been on my list for some time, as it's a wonderful opportunity for Proper Medieval Display, but it's kept getting pushed to the bottom of the queue by other projects.  (Also, in my youthful exuberance I registered stupidly complicated arms.  Great job, Past Me.)

To return to the current task--the arms to be displayed are Azure, semy of marguerites argent seeded, on a bend Or a needle threaded azure.  For those of you who do not speak herald, that means a blue background with a wide gold diagonal bar across it; a blue threaded needle on that gold bar; and the rest of the blue background is sprinkled with white daisies that have gold centers.

Speaking of complicated.

Appliquéd trumpet banner, Charles II of England, 1660

Since the lady being honored is of early 16th-century France and specializes in the courtly garments of that time and place, and since this is a high ceremonial occasion, I am making a sumptuous banner for indoor display.   That means I'm choosing rich, heavy fabrics--were it a banner for outside use, like the ones in the photo above, I'd make it of painted silk instead so it could be all fluttery-in-the-breeze-ish.  I have lined up a sapphire-blue cotton velvet for the ground fabric, yellow-gold cotton brocade for the bar, and gold cotton velvet for the daisy centers.  (Cotton isn't exactly rich, no, but we are none of us so wealthy we can afford silk velvet or damask.)  I have some white brocade I could use for the daisy petals, but I have to haul it out of the stash and see what I think of the look of it with the other materials.  I have to decide what to use for the blue needle (quaere: would it be acceptable to embroider the needle onto the bend?) and choose something appropriate to back the banner with once the devices have been attached.  

I'll do a sketch using Visio or OmniGraffle to get a good layout of all the design elements.  Then the construction steps run something like this:

1. Trim the ground fabric to the right size plus seam allowance, making sure there's enough room at the top to loop over to hold a banner pole!
2. Chalk the designs onto the ground fabric.
3. Cut out the gold bend, appliqué it to the ground fabric
4. Cut out the blue threaded needle, appliqué it to the gold bend
5. Cut out the daisies, appliqué them to the ground fabric 
6. Use a contrasting thread to outline and delineate the daisy petals.  (Heraldic daisies have a lot of petals, so I'm not cutting them out individually.)
7. Cut out the yellow daisy centers, appliqué them to the daisies
8. Attach the backing fabric
9. Make the pole loop along the top of the banner
10. Make or acquire a pole and cord to use to hang the banner.  

If I have time, I'll couch gold cord to outline the gold bend and possibly the daisy centers in between steps 7 and 8.   If I have lots of time, I'll find some way to stick some pearls in...

Oh, and this has to be done by Labor Day weekend.  aheheheheh.