I am utterly distracted. I forgot that I needed to do some work for the San Japan demo at the end of this week. I pulled my usual demo dress out and it has rust stains all over the white satin skirt. ARGH!!!
So, different dress, move on. Other dress will need a ruff made and I need to repair my horribly abused hoop skirt. If I CAN make a new one before the weekend, great. The odds aren't good though. I'll also need a mask for Friday night's masked ball.
The mask I made is a quicky version of Belphoeb's vizard. Instead of a backram base I just hot glued cotton velveteen to a plastic commercially available craft mask. I don't have the drying time right now to do it the way she did, but I'll give it a try later when I'm not on a time crunch.
I'm using Noel Gieleghem's document on how to produce a 1570's stand alone ruff for my directions on How-To. As I have already failed everyone by using the cotton muslin I have in my stash to make the thing, I doubt I'll show him any pictures. My supply of cotton lace has vanished on me and I'm just tossing bobbins and thread around like crazy.
Pictures will occur later if there's anything worth looking at.
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Canaples progress- Kirtle Questions
It's been a busy week but I've got a bit of progress to report on the Madame Canaples dress.
First of all: Embroidery!
I did a line of overlapping scallops, inverted and drawn out so that the longer legs made a little diamond when they touched. To get the perfect half circle, I traced around a shotglass that has a picture on it. From one side of the picture to the other was exactly the right shape for the space. I used 3 strands of DMC black cotton embroidery floss and I worked it in backstitch without a hoop because it was faster. I really like how the pattern came out, it was easy to visualize and break down into working steps. I haven't added the leafy bits yet because I'm still debating how much of them I want to do.
In the picture it looks like three small projections from the top and bottom of each half circle. Is that center bit a triangle shape? Are those vines? The extra bits don't look like blackwork to me exactly, but I don't know if satin stitch was mixed with blackwork in 1525. I would err on the side of 'no', so it's going to be more time with a magnifying lens to figure those bits out. Also, I'm about to start couching the gold cord I have around the top edge of the smock today. I have a plastic gold filament thread to tack it down and I'll probably use a very tiny whip stitch to get it in place.
Secondly: Pattern drafting!
I have a friend, Simona della Luna, who has attended several of Matthew Gagny's bara workshops and she has walked me through the process a few times. I'm still not 100% sure I took down the information correctly because I feel like I get a different shape off the body block every time I do this. However! I do recommend it for getting a basic flat pattern that you can fiddle with very easily. I ALWAYS remeasure if it's been more than 3 months since I last built something. Don't know about you, but my body can move a lot of weight around in 3 months and with something close-fitting like a bodice, it's going to matter. That's why I put the date on all my pattern pieces every time as well as "front', 'back', 'left arm' or whatever. You THINK you'll remember, but I never do.
So, I grabbed an old mostly cotton sheet and cut out the first of a few drafts. It used to be that I would cut my pattern out of the lining right from the start, but I want to make SURE this one fits better before I take up the scissors against my linen. These are my striped baby steps from the front and from the back.
Thoughts so far:
For a draft that supposedly had no seam allowance, that's really big. It does fit over the smock, so yay. But...really big.
I need to make some temporary tack-in lacing strips so I can test how it will look when it's held on with lacing instead of pins. That's not a huge deal yet ( 1st draft!) but they'l come in handy shortly.
Dang, those are some slender sexy straps on that gorgeously wide neckline! I hope that high back will keep everything on the shoulders properly.
Last time I posted I had some questions about the kirtle opening. I asked my questions (poorly) in a wonderful Facebook group, The Elizabethan Costumers, and got some GREAT feedback. Those gentlebeings really know their stuff. What it boiled down to is there might be 3 layers ( smock, kirtle, gown) or there might be four layers ( smock, stomacher, kirtle, gown). There's a bunch of different ways to describe what we're looking at but until we find a picture of Madame with her top layer off we not going to know for sure. Because I'm trying several new-to-me techniques for this particular outfit, I'm going to go against the portrait slightly.
I'm going to make this kirtle with a fairly low neckline, bringing it down below the neck of the gown, but keep the lacing at the sideback( suggested by Kimiko Small, all praise her brain!). That will allow me to padstitch the front of the kirtle heavily because the support I'm going to need is no small thing. My upper deck requires extra mooring so I'm also going to make sure to lightly pad and bone the front of the gown as well. Simona is trying to talk me into using bonding straw/ canes for that top layer and the more I think about it the more I like the idea. *plot, plot, plot*
One of the biggest things I have to keep reminding myself about is that there is NO TIME LIMIT on this dress. It's not a sprint, no one is waiting on it. I can take my time and work out all the details so I'll be actually happy with it when I'm done. Settle down ADD brain, we've got plenty of tiny details to obsess over!
Which is why I'm in the middle of making a hat too. It just had to happen, no I don't think I can wear it with this dress because it's super Castilian. I'm doing it anyway because it makes me happy. I borrowed the idea from Stanzi in Lochac. She did one after staring at this picture for awhile and I agree with her.
I've been looking for hats with better sunblocking power since I got my first round of skin cancer. I think might do nicely.
ScatterBrain, AWAY!
First of all: Embroidery!
I did a line of overlapping scallops, inverted and drawn out so that the longer legs made a little diamond when they touched. To get the perfect half circle, I traced around a shotglass that has a picture on it. From one side of the picture to the other was exactly the right shape for the space. I used 3 strands of DMC black cotton embroidery floss and I worked it in backstitch without a hoop because it was faster. I really like how the pattern came out, it was easy to visualize and break down into working steps. I haven't added the leafy bits yet because I'm still debating how much of them I want to do.
Secondly: Pattern drafting!
I have a friend, Simona della Luna, who has attended several of Matthew Gagny's bara workshops and she has walked me through the process a few times. I'm still not 100% sure I took down the information correctly because I feel like I get a different shape off the body block every time I do this. However! I do recommend it for getting a basic flat pattern that you can fiddle with very easily. I ALWAYS remeasure if it's been more than 3 months since I last built something. Don't know about you, but my body can move a lot of weight around in 3 months and with something close-fitting like a bodice, it's going to matter. That's why I put the date on all my pattern pieces every time as well as "front', 'back', 'left arm' or whatever. You THINK you'll remember, but I never do.
So, I grabbed an old mostly cotton sheet and cut out the first of a few drafts. It used to be that I would cut my pattern out of the lining right from the start, but I want to make SURE this one fits better before I take up the scissors against my linen. These are my striped baby steps from the front and from the back.
Thoughts so far:
For a draft that supposedly had no seam allowance, that's really big. It does fit over the smock, so yay. But...really big.
I need to make some temporary tack-in lacing strips so I can test how it will look when it's held on with lacing instead of pins. That's not a huge deal yet ( 1st draft!) but they'l come in handy shortly.
Dang, those are some slender sexy straps on that gorgeously wide neckline! I hope that high back will keep everything on the shoulders properly.
Last time I posted I had some questions about the kirtle opening. I asked my questions (poorly) in a wonderful Facebook group, The Elizabethan Costumers, and got some GREAT feedback. Those gentlebeings really know their stuff. What it boiled down to is there might be 3 layers ( smock, kirtle, gown) or there might be four layers ( smock, stomacher, kirtle, gown). There's a bunch of different ways to describe what we're looking at but until we find a picture of Madame with her top layer off we not going to know for sure. Because I'm trying several new-to-me techniques for this particular outfit, I'm going to go against the portrait slightly.
I'm going to make this kirtle with a fairly low neckline, bringing it down below the neck of the gown, but keep the lacing at the sideback( suggested by Kimiko Small, all praise her brain!). That will allow me to padstitch the front of the kirtle heavily because the support I'm going to need is no small thing. My upper deck requires extra mooring so I'm also going to make sure to lightly pad and bone the front of the gown as well. Simona is trying to talk me into using bonding straw/ canes for that top layer and the more I think about it the more I like the idea. *plot, plot, plot*
One of the biggest things I have to keep reminding myself about is that there is NO TIME LIMIT on this dress. It's not a sprint, no one is waiting on it. I can take my time and work out all the details so I'll be actually happy with it when I'm done. Settle down ADD brain, we've got plenty of tiny details to obsess over!
Which is why I'm in the middle of making a hat too. It just had to happen, no I don't think I can wear it with this dress because it's super Castilian. I'm doing it anyway because it makes me happy. I borrowed the idea from Stanzi in Lochac. She did one after staring at this picture for awhile and I agree with her.
ScatterBrain, AWAY!
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Madame de Canaples- 1525
Things happened, Life occurred. We appear to have stabilized, although the current house has much less crafting space. Let's take on a big big project and find out how that's going to affect things.
This is Marie d'Assigny, Madame de Canaples painted by Jean Clouet in (roughly) 1525.
Every now and then one of those "Who were you in history?" quizzes crosses my media and I always get this picture. Admittedly, we share a similar number of chins and something around the cheekbones. I've been trying to stay in the 1490-1500 range for awhile, but that dress really does look sharp. So I lost my mind and started working out how to build it.
What I see in the portrait is three layers.
Layer One: I see a square necked smock/ camicia/ shirt thing with a blackwork band and a gold edging. I made a smock using the pattern for a 16th century Venetian camicia found here: Realm of Venus
It was fast! It required very little math! It was... gathered into a neckband that couldn't disguise it's lumpy, bumpy weirdness. This was NOT the fault of the pattern. I figured out I skipped a step in the gathering stage and didn't tack it down and sew it flat BEFORE I put the neckband on. Still not sure how I missed that step, but it had to change. I pulled the neckband off, smoothed my gathers into pleats, tacked them all down and reattached the neckband.
Currently I'm in the process of marking out the blackwork on the neckband. The embroidery doesn't look very hard to do. It appears to me to be a series of half circles, superimposed on one another, with leafy bits added. Like so...
Layer Two: This is the layer that is giving me stress. From what I have read, this should be a supporting layer, a boned and structured kirtle that will provide the support needed and smooth things out to create that conical shape so beloved of the period. In the English portraits of about that same time period, the kirtle clearly is either a side or back lacing gown with all the support built into the front.
See the yellow kirtle under Anne Cresacre's 1527 gown here:
However, Madame's kirtle is pretty clearly a front laced kirtle. Not only that, but the lacing is WIIIIIDDDDEEE apart in the front. I don't think it even comes over as far as her nipple-line in fact. It's possibly built like a German or Venetian gown of roughly the same period, but I just can't tell.
And then there's this 1490 Portuguese lady dressed in black with the super-wide lacing dress as well:
Layer Three: The outer layer of the dress is a dusty rose large patterned brocade. The dress looks like a version of the Queen Jane dress with it's structured, lightly-boned front-lacing bodice that has a pinned stomacher over it and the excessive two or three part sleeves.
I've already done a version of this dress years ago and with much less information on how it was supposed to go together so I'm not very worried about that top layer.
This is a picture from 2011 of the Six Queens event I co-hosted. I'm the one in all red. Yep, that dress is all kinds of wrong now that I look at it, but I was very proud of it then. I keep it to remind myself that I can be proud of older work too, even if I always try to do better the next time.
I haven't really gotten into the hoops/ no hoops issue on this dress yet. My research says HOOPS, my desire to have it all done and wearable says NO! Hoops will probably win, but I'll grump about it.
Let's see what happens!
This is Marie d'Assigny, Madame de Canaples painted by Jean Clouet in (roughly) 1525.
Every now and then one of those "Who were you in history?" quizzes crosses my media and I always get this picture. Admittedly, we share a similar number of chins and something around the cheekbones. I've been trying to stay in the 1490-1500 range for awhile, but that dress really does look sharp. So I lost my mind and started working out how to build it.
What I see in the portrait is three layers.
Layer One: I see a square necked smock/ camicia/ shirt thing with a blackwork band and a gold edging. I made a smock using the pattern for a 16th century Venetian camicia found here: Realm of Venus
It was fast! It required very little math! It was... gathered into a neckband that couldn't disguise it's lumpy, bumpy weirdness. This was NOT the fault of the pattern. I figured out I skipped a step in the gathering stage and didn't tack it down and sew it flat BEFORE I put the neckband on. Still not sure how I missed that step, but it had to change. I pulled the neckband off, smoothed my gathers into pleats, tacked them all down and reattached the neckband.
Currently I'm in the process of marking out the blackwork on the neckband. The embroidery doesn't look very hard to do. It appears to me to be a series of half circles, superimposed on one another, with leafy bits added. Like so...
Layer Two: This is the layer that is giving me stress. From what I have read, this should be a supporting layer, a boned and structured kirtle that will provide the support needed and smooth things out to create that conical shape so beloved of the period. In the English portraits of about that same time period, the kirtle clearly is either a side or back lacing gown with all the support built into the front.
See the yellow kirtle under Anne Cresacre's 1527 gown here:
However, Madame's kirtle is pretty clearly a front laced kirtle. Not only that, but the lacing is WIIIIIDDDDEEE apart in the front. I don't think it even comes over as far as her nipple-line in fact. It's possibly built like a German or Venetian gown of roughly the same period, but I just can't tell.
And then there's this 1490 Portuguese lady dressed in black with the super-wide lacing dress as well:
Layer Three: The outer layer of the dress is a dusty rose large patterned brocade. The dress looks like a version of the Queen Jane dress with it's structured, lightly-boned front-lacing bodice that has a pinned stomacher over it and the excessive two or three part sleeves.
I've already done a version of this dress years ago and with much less information on how it was supposed to go together so I'm not very worried about that top layer.
I haven't really gotten into the hoops/ no hoops issue on this dress yet. My research says HOOPS, my desire to have it all done and wearable says NO! Hoops will probably win, but I'll grump about it.
Let's see what happens!
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