Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Frustrated!

So one of the classes I took at Pennsic was Constructing a French Hood. Fitting the pattern and creating the hat part of the hood went well. The problem is that the class included absolutely no instruction on how to do the veil/drape/hood part of the french hood other than the instructor casually mentioning that it could be done as a tube or a loose veil. The instructor did bring several of her hoods but seemed reluctant to let us touch them. She basically just used them as examples for color and packed them away before I had the opportunity to really look at them and see how the veil was attached. I believe the artwork shows a tube so that's what I chose to do. Not having a clue I simply stitched the length of fabric provided in the kit into a tube and stitched it into the opening only to find that it was waaaay to large. I set the project aside until I was able to pop in to another session of the class at the end of the week. Still not letting me look at her hoods (I'm a visual learner. Don't just tell me how to do something. Show me an example or drawing.) the instructor told me I needed to stitch the tube on differently. So I made the tube smaller and reattached it and it didn't look too bad but I didn't like how the inside bottom edge hung lower than the outside bottom edge. After returning home I looked through The Tudor Tailor and saw that their pattern for the veil had a shaped top edge allowing the hem to hang straight. So I removed the veil tube yet again and used the TT pattern to recut it. Fine and dandy except that the TT veil pattern ended up being too small to fit the base from this class. So I have wasted 3-4 hours on this veil only to end up with a useless tube of fabric. I need to buy some fabric and start over. UUURRRRRRRGGGGH!

2 comments:

Artemisia Moltabocca said...

Would this help?
http://www.elizabethancostume.net/headwear/fhoodmake.html

Anonymous said...

I wish I had seen this post earlier. You can pleat the top of the larger tube to fit the size you have, or you can put your seam at the underside and open it a few inches near the base of your head so you can fit it onto the back of the head.

And that's frustrating about not being allowed to hold or touch the actual French hoods. It's not like they fall apart that easy or are antiques.