Toggle SlidingBar Area

Found the culprit

Last year, when I was working on my blackworked half smock, I had a horrible shock when I washed the embroidered panels before assembling the smock – the black thread leaked a dark & murky purple.

Luckily, the purple mostly rinsed out, and the half smock looks OK.

Today, I was sorting through my studio stuff, and ran across a bag of the black silk threads I’d used, and decided to see if I could identify which one leaked dye. There were two kinds – Eterna, and a Chinese hand-dyed silk that I’d bought from Miriam’s at Pennsic (a Society for Creative Anachronism event).

I soaked each one in a small amount of water.

The culprit was the Eterna silk. Within a few minutes, the ten-centimeter length I used ran purple. I was truly horrified – and surprised. Eterna is lovely to work with and has an excellent reputation. Possibly an “off” lot – the ends were tied oddly, and left undyed spots in several places, which isn’t something I’d expect from Eterna. Sadly, it’s no longer in production, so I can’t buy another skein & see if it leaks too.

Silk floss from Miriam, soaked overnight, leaking pale yellow

I’d kinda expected it to be the Chinese hand-dyed silk from Miriam’s! It did leak a faint yellow – when I left a whole skein to soak overnight.

From now on, when I’m setting up to embroider something that will need washing, I’ll test the threads for leaking. And, just to be sure, will treat them with Raycafix, which somehow stabilizes the dye and keeps it from leaking.

By | April 8th, 2023|dyes, embroidery, silk|Comments Off on Found the culprit
Read More

The blackworked half smock

The blackwork

In sixteenth century Europe, blackwork was the most fashionable and go-to style of embroidery for linens. The relatively simple materials required – linen, a contrasting fine fiber, and the ability to count threads – saw a veritable blooming of this intricate style of embroidery. Surviving examples include smocks, sleeves, coifs, forehead cloths, the occasional cushion, at least one skirt1, and many, many portraits.

Remaining examples of early medieval designs are highly geometric. There’s a strong resemblance between blackwork and a monochrome Middle Eastern embroidery technique which may have migrated to Europe from Egypt via Moorish Spain.

The example below is 13th-15th century, from Egypt2.

It was once thought that blackwork came to England with Catherine of Aragon, who arrived there in 1501. However, it was in use much earlier. One of the earliest literary appearances of blackwork can be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400. His description of the miller’s wife’s smock sounds like the classic double running stitch used in blackwork, where the pattern is the same on both sides3 :

Of white, too, was the dainty smock she wore, embroidered at the collar all about with coalblack silk, alike within and out.

Blackwork evolved rapidly to include a wide range of patterns; from intricate geometric repeats to an almost freeform style, lively with critters and fanciful flora.

Like the collar of the miller’s wife’s smock, the geometric motifs are sometimes reversible. A double running stitch and thread counting can permit the pattern to be the same on both sides. This method of blackwork embroidery is also known as Holbein stitch4 because of its frequent appearance in his portraits. It’s one of the few kinds of embroidery that follows the (totally unrealistic) Victorian conceit that embroidery should be as tidy on the back as on the front!

The cuff on the left in the image below5 is from the 1530 Holbein portrait of Jane Seymour. The embroidery painstakingly painted illustrates counted stitch blackwork being used to produce an intricate and delicate geometric pattern.

On the right is the slightly later portrait of Queen Elizabeth’s sleeve (from an unknown artist in 1590). Compared to the cuff, the sleeve demonstrates the evolution of blackwork from the early geometric style to the later freeform style.

The design

The collar, plackets, and cuffs of my linen waist smock are embroidered in the later, freeform style. The design was inspired by the front panels of the smock worn by Europa Anguissola in her sister Sofonisba’s painting The Chess Game6:

The motifs are an adaptation of those on this coif in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston7:

I adapted the design, adjusted the scale, redrew it, and added pea pods & snails for whimsy.

The finishing trim and ties are an adaptation in black of the crisp whipstitched cord edging and ties on the collar of this shirt from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, which I also used as a model for the cut. I have used the rectangular cut8 of a shirt because, as the half smock only goes to the waist, it doesn’t need the hip width provided by the triangular gores that are used in women’s full-length smocks. The shirt is also shown in the well-loved Janet Arnold tome: Patterns of Fashion 4.9

For my half smock, the ground fabric is white handkerchief linen, and the thread is loosely-twisted black filament silk. The embroidery is mostly executed in stem stitch, with a sprinkling of others – such as spiderweb, stippling, blanket stitch, and herringbone – where the motif suggests it.

Assembly

For the main seams, the individual pieces are hemmed and assembled with a faggoting stitch. The other seams are clean-finished using whip stitch, slip stitch, or flat felled, where appropriate.

The strings at the neck and cuffs are fingerloop braided from buttonhole-weight spun silk. To keep the front panels in line, I made a hook and sewed it in below the placket. It’s made of 18 gauge brass wire, formed with pliers, and work hardened in a tumbler. It fastens with a thread loop, which is less likely to unhook than a matching metal one would be.

Comments Regarding Blackwork and The Internet

Today, April 13th, 2022, searching for “blackwork embroidery” on the web brought up 2,780,000 hits. I included “embroidery” in the search terms because just “blackwork” brings up a lot of tattoo pages, which are sometimes interesting, but usually irrelevant. Many of the “embroidery” pages are also irrelevant to research: touting clothing, commercial embroidery services, supply sales, kits etc. However, if you have the patience to wade through the distractions, there is a lot of good, solid information and research out there. A very deep rabbit hole – easy to lose an afternoon in.

  1. The Museum of London, accession # 59.77b. [↩]
  2. Textile Museum of Canada, accession # T88.0029, retrieved from https://collections.textilemuseum.ca/collection/4957/ [↩]
  3. The Canterbury Tales, 1435, Duke Classics, eBook, ISBN 978-1-62013-113-8, P. 324 [↩]
  4. Eaton, Jan. Mary Thomas’s Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches, Revised by Jan Eaton. London: Hodder&Stoughton, 1989. ISBN 0-340-51075-7 [↩]
  5. Image from Wikimedia Commons; supplied by By PKM – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5793298 [↩]
  6. Image from Wikimedia Commons; supplied by the National Museum in Poznań, https //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_Chess_(Sofonisba_Anguissola) [↩]
  7. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Accession Number 1996.51 [↩]
  8. Victoria and Albert Museum, Accession Number T.112-1972 [↩]
  9. Arnold, Janet et. al., Patterns of Fashion 4 c. 1540-1660, The cut and construction of linen shirts, smocks, neckwear, headwear and accessories for men and women, Macmillan, London, ISBN 878-0-333-57082-1, 2008, p. 17 [↩]
By | April 13th, 2022|costume, embroidery, linen, Pent, silk|Comments Off on The blackworked half smock
Read More

SO much easier…

My pretty blue fustian sottana was sideswiped by Covid. I’ve gained weight, and, if I didn’t alter it, I’d either have had to lace it up excruciatingly tight, or wear a stomacher.

While I could actually get the front edges to meet – for a few seconds  – it was way ridiculously too uncomfortably tight. And stomachers don’t appear to have been a thing in late 16th century Italy. Or, at least, I haven’t found a reference to one, or an image.

So alteration it was. Which is where the beauty of 16th century garment assembly came to the fore.

When I originally made the sottana, I used 16th century techniques, finishing each component – the two fronts, the back, and the skirt – completely before final assembly. I’d catch stitched the seam allowances of the fashion fabric to the canvas interfacings, and slip stitched the bodies linings in. The skirt is flatlined, and I and stitched the raw edges of the skirt lining under to hide the raggedy shuttleless loom selvedges. Then I whip stitched the seams of the bodies, applied the trim, stitched the skirt to the bodies, and, finally, sewed the trim to the bottom of the skirt.

Lots of hand sewing, and a clean finish all around, which made adding the extra SO much easier. (And easily reversible, if I ever lose the weight! )

Rather than having a bunch of raw edges to contend with when I unpicked the seam where I wanted to add the extra fabric, there was a nice, clean, finish, all ready to pop the extensions in.

It needed about 2.5 centimetres/1 inch  width added on each side. I had plenty of fabric left to make the alterations – almost a meter of the fustian, and lots of the washed canvas & muslin that I’d used for the interlining and lining.

Since the added piece was such a simple shape, I didn’t bother with making a pattern – I measured it out on the canvas, cut it out, and cut the fustian around the canvas, adding seam allowances. Then I followed the same process as with the original construction – catch stitching the seam allowances to the canvas interfacing, slip stitching the lining in, and whip stitching the finished extensions into place.

Alterations - the top of the insertion, with the seam allowances catch stitched to the interlining
Lining side of completed inserts for sottana bodies
Right side of completed inserts for sottana bodies
Whip stitch in progress
Inside view of fustian sottana bodies, showing alteration - strips sewn in to add girth

Once that was done, I tried the sottana on just to be sure the alteration fit. It does; and I put it up on my judy to photograph it. Kinda disappointing. It looked OK; just … OK.

So I had a dig through my stash to see if I had some of the original tape that I’d used as trim left to cover the extra seam in the bodies. I did, but not enough, so I went to Mokuba to see if they still carry it. They do – and they have a narrower version, which is in even better proportion. I splurged a kingly $2.49 for a meter.

Because the sottana is made to be washable, and I’d pre-shrunk all the elements, I soaked the tape in hot water, then dried it in the sun. Once it was dry, I ironed it and sewed it on over the extra seams.

Luckily, to sew the skirt back on, I didn’t have to re-gather it – cartridge pleats are flexible, and I’d stabilized them with lots of stitching on the inside. All I had to do was pick back the stitches joining the skirt to the bodies a few centimetres either side of where I added the width, and the cartridge pleats graciously agreed to expand enough to accommodate the extra girth.

All in all, the “finish each part, then assemble the whole” method of construction makes alterations SO much easier. I didn’t have to contend with clipped seam allowances, raw edges, re-gathering the skirt, or the general messiness of tidying the whole thing up. All I had to do was unpick two seams and a bit of a third, make the extensions, sew them in, and re-attach the skirt.

I suspect it also would make repurposing parts of worn-out clothing a lot easier. I haven’t seen any examples, but I wonder if there were some Frankenstein garments out there, with the front from one, the back from another, the sleeves from a third, and so on.

Fabric was precious; people wanted to get as much mileage out of it as possible, so it wouldn’t surprise me! Not at all!

By | September 19th, 2021|alterations, costume, cotton, linen, Renaissance, repairs, the stash|Comments Off on SO much easier…
Read More

At last, The Stockings

My Eleonora of Toledo-inspired stockings have been an adventure – with more than its share of misadventure – but they’re done and I’m delighted! [1]

After a couple trial runs, I started work on them five years ago. Though there’s an excellent pattern available on Ravelry [2], it’s in a heavier gauge than I wanted. It’s also faithful to the surface design of the originals, and I wanted to tweak a couple of details.

So I developed my own pattern. Most of it is based it on information gleaned from the Medici Archive, who hold the actual stockings. At the time, they had high-resolution images available on their website. [3]

As I intend to wear the stockings, they are not a line-for-line copy.

  • the originals are silk; mine are wool, which I prefer because of its resilience, knitting qualities, comfort – and ease of repair
  • the original stockings look baggy in the calf and foot. The decreases for the calf are far too low on the leg to fit me, and the feet are too thick. Perhaps, after at least eleven pregnancies, Eleonora’s feet and ankles were somewhat the worse for wear. Whatever the issues, the stockings wouldn’t have been practical in their original form, so I adjusted the shaping.

In a period-consistent manner, I tweaked minor details of the surface patterning that didn’t appeal to me

  • on the cuff, I used purl squares instead of eyelets in the centre of the diamond pattern and omitted the second zigag at the edge
  • on the widest leg panel, I substituted a chequerboard pattern for the ladder effect of the originals
  • And finally, though the original stockings may have been knit flat and seamed up the back [4], I knit them in the round. Strictly personal preference. By the sixteenth century, knitting in the round was known – the Virgin Mary, in this 15th century painting by Master Bertram of Minden, is clearly knitting a garment in the round

  • The heels and feet are mostly educated guesswork. Unfortunately, all the available detailed images were of the stockings in profile. None showed the back of the stocking or the sole face-on, so I based the shaping on Richard Rutt’s diagram of feet of 16th century knitted silk stockings.[5]

That heel pattern has an odd little quirk – since the heel flap is rectangular, there’s a small nub left sticking out when it’s worn. My daughter, who modelled the stockings for the pics, tells me she didn’t even feel it. It’s kinda cute, though I expect it’ll eventually flatten & felt into the sole with wear & sweat.

From the Medici Archive images of the stockings, I guesstimated that the originals were knit at ~18-20 stitches per 2.5cm, and found a cobweb-weight yarn in wool white that knits up at 18st/2.5cm on 1mm needles over one of the leg patterns.

I scoured the yarn, dyed it with madder, then overdyed it with cochineal, made a gauge swatch and started knitting.

The first stocking went smoothly. It took about six months, which I felt pretty good about, seeing as I was knitting a complicated pattern on tiny needles in my “spare” time.

With the second stocking, the “adventure” set in.

First of all, when I got the yarn out, I discovered that, for some reason that still eludes me, about half the remaining yarn was darker than the yarn I’d knit the first stocking with. No idea how or why – it was the same dye lot of the same yarn, scoured and dyed at the same time, and had looked the same when I started knitting.

Rather than have an abrupt colour change somewhere, I decided to knit alternating the two shades throughout the stocking, even though it would make the second stocking a bit darker than the first one.

Then I went in for foot surgery, and continued knitting while convalescing.

Big mistake.

Never, ever, work on anything more complex than a garter stitch dishcloth when under the influence of heavy-duty painkillers! I’d nearly finished the second stocking when I realized I’d knit the foot off the wrong side – since the stocking is shaped at the calf, it matters which side the foot comes off of! I ripped it back, reestablished the pattern, and decided to put it away until I was less annoyed with myself.

Life happened, and it was a couple of years before I picked the project up again. At which point I discovered that, though I thought I’d packed it away carefully, moths had gotten at it. I wrapped it up & stuck it in the freezer, where it sat for a year or so.

Finally, I picked it up a couple of months ago, and started darning the moth holes. That took a while – darning many, many, moth holes can be tiresome. Luckily, the surface pattern is so busy that the darns barely show!

When the darning was done, I started knitting the foot again, and discovered that my notes from the first stocking were vague in spots, so I had to reinvent the toe decreases.

My daughter modelled the stockings so that I could take the pics. In the process, a couple more moth-weakened strands gave way, so there was some more darning.

And now the stockings are done. Despite all the mistakes, mends and imperfections, I’m thoroughly pleased with them and  eagerly waiting for a suitable SCA[6] event to wear them to!

And just for the fun of it, here’s a pic of the sole. Turned out that the stitch count worked out so that I was able to continue the pattern all the way around the foot!

[1] Because of copyright concerns, I haven’t included an image of the original Eleonora of Toledo stockings. If you want to see an image, and more information, have a look at this article; they’re on page four: https://kemeresearch.com/files/ATR_60_2018_pp3-9_Malcolm-Davies_FINAL.pdf

[2] https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/eleonora-di-toledo-stockings-first-edition

[3] The images I used are no longer available on the Medici Archive project at https://www.medici.org/ . I have no idea why.

[4] Currently, there doesn’t seem to be information available on some details of the stockings, including what the gauge is, how the feet were made, and whether they were knit flat or in the round. So, while it’s not 100% certain that they were knit flat, the interpretive text at the Palazzo Pitti, where they’re displayed, said “The closure seam is at the centre back”, and Richard Rutt’s text indicates that 16th century stockings were sewn up the back, so I went with that. Or rather, decided not to go with that.

[5] Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting, Loveland, Colorado, Interweave Press, 1987, p.74

[6] Society for Creative Anachronism

By | April 21st, 2021|clothes moths, cochineal, damage, dyes, fibers, knitting, madder, mistakes, Pent, repairs, SCA, scouring, wool|Comments Off on At last, The Stockings
Read More

The Fustian Chronicles – part one

In the late middle ages and Renaissance, “fustian” meant an affordable fabric woven of two kinds of fibre – cotton & linen, or cotton & wool, or linen & wool.[1]

A lot of historical novels I’ve read mentioned fustian. It’s one of those words, like “curricle” or “cotehardie” that writers use to position their work in past time. It’s not something you’ll find in a present-day fabric shop unless it’s one that specializes in textiles for historical reenactors.

Last summer at Pennsic, a reenactment event that features a marketplace full of supplies for reenactors, I found a generous remnant of cotton/linen fustian and decided to make an “everyday” sottana of it, loosely based on what the women in Vincenzo Campi’s  lively kitchen scene are wearing.

All of the materials I used would have been available in the late Renaissance, aside from a package of olive green iDye and a meter or so of synthetic whalebone.[2]

The materials:

  • blue fustian fashion fabric
  • “natural” cotton canvas interlining
  • “natural” cotton muslin bodice lining
  • lightweight linen for the skirt lining, dyed olive green [3]
  • synthetic whalebone to reinforce the front edges of the bodice
  • a small remnant (aka cabbage)[4] of silk for reinforcing the corners of the front neckline
  • 21 brass aiglets. 20 are for the points tying the sleeves on, and the 21st is a tiny one for the lacing cord. I made that one myself . It’s my first attempt at making an aiglet, and I’m quite pleased with it. The lacing holes came out very, very small, and the purchased aiglets I have are too big to pass through them without using pliers
  • a largish piece of cabbage of lightweight olive green wool for the sleeves
  • cotton and linen threads for assembly, and, for touch of luxury, silk threads to make the eyelets and the lacing cord
  • two kinds of black cotton braid – herringbone-patterned for the trim, and plain tabby weave for the sleeve points. Sewing the herringbone braid on, I discovered it has a tendency to pick up dust & cat hair. Luckily, it cleans up easily with a lint roller!

Except for the fustian and the braids for trim, all of the materials, including the packet of iDye, were from my stash! (Though I did have to buy some salt to add to the dye.)

For the bodice pattern, I used one that I had drafted a while ago. It was designed to side lace, but that was an easy fix – I turned the lacing edges into seams and created a centre-front opening. Then I made a muslin out of sturdy cotton canvas, tweaked the fit, and used the muslin as the underlining of the bodice.

Instead of bag-lining the bodice, I assembled it Renaissance-style. To minimize bulk at the shoulders, I sewed the shoulder straps in position and trimmed the excess fabric. Then I catch stitched the seam allowances over the canvas underlining, and slip stitched the lining in.

Once that was done, I whip stitched the pieces together and made the eyelets.

There’s no pattern for the skirt – it’s two full widths of the fustian, flat-lined, seamed at the centre front and back, and with the front seam left open for about thirty centimeters at the top so that I can get into the garment.

On the right hand side of the skirt I’ve made a fitchet – an opening so that I can reach my tie-on pocket. The edges of the fitchet are bound with a piece of navy blue linen from my cabbage basket.

To gather the skirt to fit the bodice, I used cartridge pleats. I like cartridge pleats a lot, and use them whenever they’re appropriate.

For the hem, I tried an experiment. I like padded hems; I like the way they make a skirt hang & move. For padding, I usually use wool felt. This time, because I want this sottana to be washable, and wool felt shrinks and gets lumpy, I used multiple layers of the fustian – seven if I remember correctly. It works as well as the felt!

The sottana is fully lined, and, aside from the long seams on the skirt and sleeves, it’s hand-sewn. Up to and including flat-felling the sleeve seams and the skirt seams where the raggedy shuttleless loom selvedges showed.

Between catch stitching the seam allowances, sewing in the linings, whip stitching the pieces together, clean-finishing the seams, hemming the top&bottom of the sleeves, making the eyelets, making the points, and sewing on the trim, it was a LOT of hand sewing!

Luckily, I enjoy hand sewing, and, all in all, I’m satisfied with how this project turned out!

[1]the meaning of “fustian” has changed with time – in the late middle ages/Renaissance it meant a fabric woven of two kinds of fibre. By the nineteenth century, “fustian” meant cotton fabrics with a short, brushed pile, like corduroy. By the late 20th century, the word had become an archaism.

[2] I’m ignoring the fact that the materials were made with present-day processes rather than being organically grown, hand-harvested, plant dyed, etc. etc. And, though I’m not against all use of animal products, hunting whales is inexcusable in today’s world – therefore the synthetic whalebone.

[3] originally, this lining linen was bright egg yolk yellow. Linen is heavy, so when I found this cheap & lightweight linen, I bought a lot of it even though it’s a colour I wouldn’t usually choose – yellow is easy to overdye. Which I did. With iDye. In the washing machine.

[4] “cabbage” was the medieval/renaissance term for the fabric left over from making a garment, and the tailor got to keep it!

By | March 27th, 2020|costume, cotton, Italy, linen, Renaissance, SCA, the stash|1 Comment
Read More

The Viking coat – Part 1

My Viking coat is finished!

Blue Viking coat with green bordersIt’s been a journey; I’ve been working on the coat since spring. It came together from three sources: weather, a stalled project, and a pattern I bought so long ago that it now turns up in listings of vintage patterns on Etsy and eBay.

The weather:

Several years ago I was horribly cold at an SCA * camping event. There was frost overnight and, while daytime was warmer, it was still crisp.

It wasn’t the first time I had been cold at an event, just the worst, and I thought it would be nice to have a seriously warm Viking-style coat.

The stalled project:

During the years people were donating their furs to Goodwill, I got a full-length black mink coat that I intended to use to line a cloth winter coat. I found the ideal tweed for the coat shell, got the interlining fabric and studied much information on how to sew furs. And stalled there, intimidated by the idea of cutting into a fully-functional mink coat.

That was more than ten years ago. Finally, I figured this was ridiculous and decided to take the indirect route – to make a fur-lined Viking coat to get experience in handling that much fur.

Due largely to the lack of surviving physical evidence, there’s been a lot of discussion on whether the Vikings used much fur and whether they used it for linings. I think they did, and I agree with archaeologist Tuija Kirkinen. In her paper on the ritual use of fur, she stated that “the use of pelts and furs for clothing is self-evident in a region at the edge of the taiga”. ** While I don’t live at the edge of the taiga, the weather, even in southern Canada, can get ridiculously cold, and I’ve found that furs (and I include sheepskin) are best at keeping me warm when the temperature dips below -30C (-22 Fahrenheit).

The pattern:

The Turkish Coat is one of the first patterns Folkwear published. I don’t remember exactly when I bought it – sometime around 1974. And I’ve been meaning to make it ever since.

The Viking coat was the perfect opportunity. From surviving fragments and images, it appears the coats Viking men wore might have been constructed in a similar way.Folkwear Turkish Coat back view drawing

Granted, it’s a “male” garment, and the existing evidence shows women mainly in shawls. Which I’ve tried, and discovered that to keep warm in seriously cold weather, I’d have to wrap myself up in many, many layers.

Nope. For the sake of sanity and mobility, I decided on a coat.

The materials:

The fabrics: since this was going to be an experiment, I wanted to spend as little as possible on it, so I dug through my stash and found two yardages that worked well together – a medium“indigo” blue  and a vivid apple green  wool.

Apple green fulled wool swatch

 

 

 

While they’re both commercially dyed, both are colours that are possible with natural dyes that were available to the Vikings.

The blue is easy – woad, which contains indigotin. Woad seeds were found on the Oseberg ship.

On the other hand, green can be dyed many different ways, so the possible dye sources are guesswork. Maybe woad plus weld or broom – or one of the many other sources of yellow.

Coincidentally, a friend – textile artist Jaclyn Paltanen – just did an experiment on dyeing woad-based greens on wool and got a lovely range, including that apple green!

Both fabrics are pure wool, and they’re fulled. The apple green is a lightly-fulled 2/1 twill; the blue is more heavily fulled so I’m not sure what the weave is.

There’s still occasional discussion about whether Vikings fulled their wools, but apparently archaeologist Inga Hägg has documented the existence of fulled wools in Viking-era finds in Hedeby in her Die Textilfunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu***.  Fulled wool is not appropriate for every kind of garment – but for a coat intended for Canadian winters it most definitely is!

The lining: this is where I spent some money – $35 if I remember correctly. When I bought the donor coat for the lining, I wasn’t sure what the fur was (and neither was the man who owns the secondhand shop where I bought it). We guessed it was some sort of water critter – maybe beaver or otter – or maybe marten, all of which were available to the Vikings **.

To my surprise, when I took out the lining, I discovered it was fur seal."fur seal" stamp on skin side of fur coat used for lining It’s not at all like what I know as seal!

Turns out the fur seal is a southern hemisphere beastie, so it’s improbable that a Viking-era coat maker would have had access to it. However, I’m taking a pass on “authenticity” here; the furs I thought it might be – beaver or otter or marten – would all have been available. We do the best we can!

Making the coat:

The first step was figuring out how to allow for the thickness of the fur lining. While I got over 48 million hits the last time I googled “fur sewing”, the vast majority handled fur in the present-day convention – as something to show on the outside of the garment. Finding information on working out how to allow for a fur lining took some digging. The clearest I found was on a Threads Magazine forum post from 2010:

“Take a length of the fur and wrap it around your middle with the fur facing inward, safety pinning it closed. Using a tape measure, measure around the outside of the fur. Take off the fur and measure around at the same spot. The difference between the two measurements will be your “fur adjustment.”

So that’s what I did, and it worked!

Viking coat muslinTo check the size and length, I made a muslin ****, trying it on over a wool Viking-style gown and a heavy sweater.

After I cut and assembled the shell fabrics I gathered my courage and started on the fur coat.

Taking it apart, I was reminded of the amazing amount of hand work that goes into furs! Even though the pelts are now sewn together by machine, the garment assembly is largely manual. hand stitching on inside of fur coat used for liningThe edgings and the lining were sewn in by hand, and there was a grid of long, loose hand stitches anchoring the pelts to the underlining throughout the coat.

Once I’d disassembled the coat, I realized I’d been lucky. The body of the coat was very close to the shape & size of the body of the Folkwear pattern, with only one significant difference: the original fur coat had a straight up-and-down overlap, while the pattern’s fronts are at an angle that’s supposed to keep the coat closed without fasteners. All I needed to do was stitch in two triangular sections at the centre fronts to add the overlap – and luckily again, the front facings which I had removed were big enough to cut the triangles from.

The sleeves were another matter. Originally, I intended to use the fur sleeves to line the fabric wool twill sleeve liningssleeve, but I found that the combination of the fur and the fulled wool fabric was too bulky for comfort. So back to the stash, where I found a medium-light woolen twill remnant that worked to line the sleeves.

pocketRegarding authenticity, I made two decisions to be deliberately inauthentic, and the first was pockets. The Folkwear pattern has no pockets – just pocket slits, which are probably Viking-appropriate. But with a fur-lined coat intended for brutally cold weather, making pocket slits that would have been convenient openings for weather to get in seemed self-defeating. So I added pockets. Gotta have somewhere to stash those kleenexes!

My other “inauthentic” decision was to underline the coat with a lightweight cotton, much as the underlinigpresent-day fur coats are. I wanted to make this coat look good and last as long as possible, and the underlining helps with both. It keeps the internal stitching – and there’s a lot of it – from pulling on the outer fabric and showing through to the right side.

If cotton made it to Scandinavia at all during the Viking era it would have been a wildly exotic fibre, and way too expensive to use as an underlining.

I could have used linen, which was available then, but the 3.5oz linen I have in my stash would have added a lot of weight – and the coat is heavy enough as it is. There may be some super-fine linens that wouldn’t have been so heavy, but from what I’ve seen on the web they’re also super-expensive. Which is where reality cuts in – this is a coat to wear, not a museum-quality interpretation.

Final details and a decison:

Once the coat was “finished” and wearable, I decided that, having put so much thought and work into, it would be worth going the extra mile and spending a bit more time and money on trim and fasteners.

Which is another post!

* Society for Creative Anachronism – a world-wide reenactment group that focuses on pre-1700 CE history

** Tuija Kirkinen The role of wild animals in death rituals: furs and animal skins in the late iron age inhumation burials in southeastern Fennoscandia. Fennoscandia archaeologica XXXII, 2015

*** Inga Hägg Textilfunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu (The textile finds from the harbour of Hedeby) Neumünster, K. Wachholtz, 1984, ©1985

****I use 1/4″ gingham for muslins – the gridded weave of gingham makes the grain lines obvious. (And yes, there’s only one sleeve – I took the other one off to use as a pattern for the sleeve lining.)

By | October 19th, 2018|costume, dyes, fibers, fur, indigo, SCA, the stash, Viking costume, woad, wool|1 Comment
Read More

Right fabric, wrong colour

Us makers of “historically accurate” clothing are inveterate bargain hunters. Appropriate fabrics are expensive, and sometimes that bargain is the right fibre and weight, but the wrong colour, so we are often also experimental dyers.

A note on historical accuracy: to be totally accurate, one would have to use fabrics that are hand-woven of hand-spun natural fibre, dyed with natural dyes and hand-finished. While this is theoretically possible, it would be nosebleed expensive, and beyond the time and/or money budgets of most historical costumers.

In my practice, I do my best, but there are many compromises. I try to use natural-fibre fabric, but occasionally a wool mixed with probably-synthetic “unknown fibre” creeps in. I burn test when shopping, but current textile treatments seem to be making burn tests less reliable, and bargain hunting makes taking a snip home & seeing if it dissolves in bleach impractical.

And dyes; I use natural dyes for small pieces and yarns, but fabric lengths need a big & complicated contraption to natural-dye evenly, which I don’t have & don’t have room for. So I dye lengths in the washing machine, using present-day dyes.

In the last week, I had a couple of surprises when I changed the colour of four fabrics!

The first is an elderly length rescued from the basement of King Textiles when they moved. The second is one my favourite salesperson at Archie Fine Wools dug out for me – again from the basement – a few days before the shop closed. The other two I bought at the Textile Museum of Canada’s marvellous Yardage Sale.

  • A burn test suggested that the King Textiles one is a wool/cellulose-fibre mixture, but diamond twill is a rare find in commercial fabrics, so I bought it in spite of the suspect fibre content. And in spite of the unfortunate colour, which was an anaemic salmon pink on a grubby cream background. Another compromise – right weave, semi-wrong fibre, wrong colour.
  • The bolt for the second one – a faint blue plaid on a tan background – was labelled “wool” (I don’t remember the mill name), and a burn test confirmed it.
  • The third – a bluish pistachio length – has “pure new wool” woven into the selvedge; a burn test suggested a wool/cellulose fibre blend.
  • The fourth one – a sad, dusty, plum-purple one – has “Kadylaine” woven into the selvedge. This might be a brand of pure wool (“laine” = wool, in French), but might also be a trademark for a wool blend. The burn test also suggested a wool/cellulose fibre blend.

With the apparent blends, I console myself that, at least, if they are actually blends rather than wool treated with something that misleads burn tests, rayon is the most probable cellulose fibre to be mixed with wool, and rayon isn’t reprocessed oil!

The diamond twill from King Textiles Pale blue & grey diamond twill

The bolt had been lurking in their storage, likely for a decade or three. Last year I tried dyeing it with “periwinkle” acid dye from G&S Dyes, and didn’t take a “before” picture. The diamonds (presumably the wool component) came out a pretty shade of pale blue on a silvery grey background (the “possibly rayon” component).

However, the colour was uneven, which I’ve never had happen before when dyeing in the washing machine. Not blotches, but broad stripes of deeper blue. I suspect that, in its long time on the shelf, either friction from being shuffled around, or absorption of the acid from the cardboard it was wrapped around, or both, made parts of the fabric more receptive to the dye. In those places, it took more heavily, hence the “stripes”.

I tried dyeing it again, but no luck. It just got a little darker, but the stripes didn’t budge. I was disappointed, and the fabric joined the UFO pile.

This week, since my washing machine was occupied by dyeing projects, I finally got some colour remover and had a go at removing the colour, hoping to take out enough to have another go at dyeing the length. And hoping that the chemical beating it took from the colour remover would make the whole piece more evenly dyeable.

The surprise? The colour didn’t shift much. It’s still the pretty pale blue – what I think the Elizabethan colour “watchet” may have been – on silver grey. BUT the “stripes” are mostly gone, and I can work around what’s left.

It looks like the colour remover selectively took out just the excess the dye!

The wool from Archie Fine Tan tweed overdyed with blue

Tan tweed, before dyeingThis one was feather-light, with a beautiful, butter-soft hand, and was ridiculously cheap for a  quality wool, ($3/yard, if I remember correctly), but the colour was unfortunate – the precise shade of tan that turns my skin sallow and blotchy. It’s possibly even older than the diamond twill – only 32″ wide, which is a width I haven’t seen new since the 1960s!

I overdyed it with “periwinkle” acid dye from G&S Dyes, which seems to be turning into my go-to dye for shifting unbecoming colours of wool. It came out a lovely, tweedy stone green, with the faint bluish plaid popping to a clear sapphire blue. It also shrank about 30%, which adds to my suspicion that it’s an old yardage – the two more recent wools that I dyed shrank maybe 5%!

The shrinkage also thickened it, so it’s no longer feather-light, and the hand is a little woolier, but that’s OK. I’m going to use it for a Viking apron dress, and the change has transitioned it from Mid-20th Century Men’s Lightweight Suiting to Plausibly Viking.

The bluish pistachio length 

The blueish pistachio length - original colourWith this one I was aiming at bright spring green, so I overdyed it with yellow. Since the burn test indicated a cellulose component and I had Dylon for cellulose on hand, I tried that. It improved the colour marginally, but not to the green I was aiming for.

Not too surprising; if it is actually wool, as the selvedge says, since the Dylon I used isn’t designed to work on wool. So I got some yellow acid dye & had another go. That bumped it up to a lively green.

I’m still not sure about the fibre content. From the way the acid dye took it from a barely-perceptible change to strong spring green, I suspect it actually is 100% wool – but with some kind of finish that confuses simple burn tests.

The sad, dusty plum purple one 

Purple wool, before washingThis one was another happy surprise: when I pre-washed it for dyeing – I was going to aim at a deep, deep blue – the sad, dusty look vanished and it lightened a couple of shades. It may have been under-rinsed in the original dyeing process, or just plain dirty.

Whatever the cause, washing left a lovely violet shade, which is just too pretty to change.

I’m going to make a kirtle out of it, and be damned to the idea that purple is for royalty only!

 

 

 

 

By | June 3rd, 2017|dyes, wool|Comments Off on Right fabric, wrong colour
Read More

The Apron and the Scoggers – an unexpected project

I’m going to be taking a potentially messy pigments class at Fruits of our Labours (better known as FOOL) a Society for Creative Anachronism event on the May long weekend.

As I’ll be wearing 16th century garb, it struck me that I’ll seriously want to protect my clothes. Which raised the question of aprons.

Almost all the many aprons in 16th century art – and earlier, for that matter – start at the waist and cover the front of the skirt. That’s always puzzled me. I’ve never noticed that splatters and splashes conscientiously restrain themselves to landing below the waist. Surely “women’s work” was just as messy in the middle ages & renaissance as it is now, so where are the full frontal coverage aprons?

I had a faint tickle of memory that I had seen at least one image of such an apron, but I couldn’t pin it down, so I sent out a plea on themedieval washerwoman wearing apron marvelous Elizabethan Costume facebook page. The membership came to my rescue with a number of images, including this one.

Then one of the members had the brilliant suggestion that a pair of scoggers (sleeve protectors) might be a good idea as well. A good idea indeed! Thank you, Tracie!

The construction of the apron is guesswork. From the images, it looks like the aprons were made from two rectangles, and the necklines range from a simple casing with a strap threaded through it to many fine gathers anchored down somehow, with a separate strip sewn on as a casing. I suspect the gathers are the back side of smocking. Even using a very sturdy thread, unsupported gathering lines would eventually break, which would make for a truly annoying mending job.

With the width of fabric needed to cover my skirt & leave enough room to walk freely, the simple-casing design Detail of reverse-smocked yokewould have been ridiculously bunchy & ugly, so I went with the reverse side of smocking. It’s still a serious volume of fabric, but at least it behaves itself!

The scoggers are just sewn & hemmed tubes, with a pair of eyelets at each end for a drawstring.scoggers - eyelets & drawstring

I did cheat a little with the drawstrings – the visible parts are linen tape, but I spliced a piece of elastic into each one blue "this way up" stitchesso that I could get the scoggers on & off by myself. With just the linen tape, I’d have to have had someone tie me into them each time!

I also added a few stitches in blue linen embroidery floss on the inside top so that I wouldn’t have to figure out which way is up each time I put them on!

The is is probably the shortest garb project I’ve ever made. Even with doing everything but the long seams by hand – including felling down the apron seam allowances – I got it done in the few odd corners of time available in two very busy weeks!

Yay rectangles, straight seams and one-size-fits-most!

 

By | May 10th, 2017|costume, linen, smocking|2 Comments
Read More

A really, very, thoroughly, annoying mistake

I was in the home stretch of knitting the second Eleonora-style stocking, when I put it on to check whether the foot was long enough to start the final decreases.

And found I’d put the heel on the wrong side – the calf decreases were down the FRONT of my leg!!!!!

Aaaargh!

Much unraveling to do – complicated by the fact that for some reason, even though they were the same dye lot and dyed at the same time, two of the skeins had taken the madder slightly differently and were a shade browner.

Because I was down to half of the last brighter red ball and was concerned that I’d run out before finishing the stocking ( I would have), I was alternating rows of the brighter red with rows of the faintly browner red to avoid an abrupt transition.

This worked fine – but makes unraveling weirdly complicated because of the way I crossed the yarns at the end of each row to avoid gaps.

My only excuse is that I was working on the stocking while stuck in bed and on pain killers after foot surgery. That’ll teach me to knit while distracted!

By | March 29th, 2017|knitting, madder, madder, mistakes, wool|Comments Off on A really, very, thoroughly, annoying mistake
Read More

Indigo in progress

So, for the next step of the Great Wisteria Exploration, I’m aiming to make a smallish furoshiki (wrapping cloth) with a wisteria weft and a hemp warp, dyed with natural indigo.

And, as a small exploration of indigo in the Japanese mode, I wanted to grow some Polygonum Tinctorium, the plant traditionally used as an indigo source in Japan. (Most of the indigo on the market is derived from Indigofera Tinctoria, an entirely different plant).

The initial challenge was finding seed, and then getting it to sprout – as I grumbled about in my post on June 20th last year.

Image of a pot of Japanese indigo growingOnce it had finally sprouted, my tiny crop of PT grew slowly. Unlike its cousin, Japanese knotweed, it made no attempt to take over the garden; in fact, it seemed to be a little unhappy. I don’t know whether this was because of the weather, or the quality of the light or the soil – or just because it preferred to grow in crowds & was lonely for company.

 

However, it did grow, and late in the fall, when I had pretty much given up on having seed to save for next year, it flowered.

I held off harvesting until the first serious frost warning. Then I cut the plants at ground level, snipped off the (hopefully ripe) flower heads and winnowed them for seed, then stripped the leaves off the stems and put them to dry.

To process the leaves, I’m using Dorothy Miller’s fermentation technique, as described in her Indigo from seed to dye. It’s going to be a challenge, as my “crop” is tiny – just enough to plump out a snack-size Ziploc bag.

One of the nice things about her method is that, once the leaves are dry,  the next step can wait if Life intervenes!

Which it did, for a while. When I finally got back to it last week, I promptly ran into a couple of challenges; two of the materials took a bit of finding – some hay and a plastic “burlap” bag (the woven kind that rice, beans, nuts etc. are often shipped in).

Luckily, a community garden near my brother’s had a few handfuls of hay to spare, and one of the local merchants, who sells nuts, beans and grains in bulk, kindly saved one for me.

It was from cranberry beans, and there were three left in the bottom. You can see them above on top of the small bag I made for the indigo.

Now that I’ve assembled the materials, cut & sewn a tiny “burlap” bag, and made the obligatory mess in the kitchen, here goes.

  • put the dried leaves into the miniature plastic “burlap” bag

 

 

 

  • wet it thoroughly

 

 

 

 

  • nest the bag in a bed of hay

 

 

 

 

  • cover it with plastic and weigh it down with a stone, or a brick, or a log. Since even a brick is too big for this little indigo, I used a bag of pebbles from the local dollar store
  • put it someplace warm, with good air circulation
  • stir at 5 days & 10 days
  • if it isn’t done at 100 days, stir & keep checking periodically

I have no idea how long this small a mass of indigo will take to ferment. Actually, I’ll be very happy if it turns out to be big enough to achieve critical mass for fermentation!

In any case, it won’t be enough to dye the furoshiki – though there may be enough to dye one of the samples from my initial wisteria experiments!

Next: spinning more wisteria fibre

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By | January 28th, 2017|dyes, indigo, Japan, wisteria|Comments Off on Indigo in progress
Read More