Ivory Wool Tunic or Cote

After Tom nearly froze his tushie off at Fall Harvest I decided it needed to make him something warm to wear for cold weather SCA events. All he had were warm weather RenFest clothes: a few cotton and linen shirts and one pair of knee length pants. He didn't own any kind of doublet or jacket and I didn't feel that I had the skills or patience to try to make him one. We settled on a generic wool tunic or "man's basic cote" using the cutting diagram in The Medieval Tailor's Assistant.
This was supposed to be a quick and easy project so we chose an inexpensive wool blend fabric. I cut the pieces and quickly assembled them by machine. I follow the no *visible* machine stitching school of thought so planned to do all of the hems by hand. I expected to just pink the seam allowances and call it good but, unfortunately, the inexpense fabric ravelled like crazy! Deciding that felled seams would be too thick and bulky I chose to turn under each seam allowance and stitch it down with a running stitch. It's a good thing we ended up not going to Winter Revel in January because all of that hand stitching took me forever to finish. I did get it finshed in time for Val Day by hemming in the car on the way to the airport for the cruise.
In the interest of full disclosure (and because I share my mistakes so others than learn from them LOL) I did NOT know what I was doing when sewing in the split center front gores and totally screwed the top point up. Fortunately my mistake was hidden under Tom's belt because I also made the split a bit too high. And I did do a better job on the back. I didn't do a facing for the neck but simply turned the edge under and stitched it down. I may at some point in the future turn it into a keyhole neck and add some trim.


Side

Back

Front

Here's how it looked after we got home around midnight (which is my excuse for the crappy pics). I'm also posting a crappy mirror shot of my outfit because I never seem to remember to get pics of me in my garb.

New Sleeves

I finished the new sleeves last night and sewed them in this morning. I think they look much better than the first sleeves and look very similar to the portrait. What do you think?

Time to eat my words.

Okay, so a while back I posted that as much as I liked the look of Kat's zimarra and used it as the inspiration for mine I hadn't seen any examples of a short puff sleeve on a loose gown.


Look what I found today while browsing the Portrait of the Month archives at The Realm of Venus.

Domenico Riccio (Il Brusasorci), before 1567: Portrait of a Lady

Off the change those elbow length sleeves now. :D

Finished Coat

I mentioned in a previous post that I am really bad with the sewing machine. I had quickly sewn the lining into the coat/loose gown/zimarra by machine so that I could wear it in Frankenmuth but it looked really bad. I ended up picking it all out and resewing it by hand. It looks sooo much better. I briefly toyed with the idea of using glass beads as buttons similar to the Woman with a dog portrait on page 112 of Moda a Firenze but had trouble finding the right beads and realized glass beads would probably be too heavy anyway. I ordered some very plain frogs off the internet and finished sewing them on yesterday. I think this project is done unless I decide to change the sleeves at some point.

Photos for April 5

A few photos of my complete ensemble as worn to Frankenfeast.

It's Done!

I finished up the sleeves this morning so the loose gown/zimarra is ready to be worn. I opted to go with elbow length sleeves and trimmed them with strips of the gold embroidered trim. I am very pleased with how they came out considering that I had no idea what I was doing! LOL The Tudor Tailor book just told me to put the sleeves in without really explaining how to do it. So I finished the armholes, finished the tops of the sleeves, gathered the sleeves as best I could in bewtween the stiff trim, pinned the sleves into the holes, and whipstitched them together. I don't know if that was the correct way or not but it worked.

Sigh

Trial and error. Learn as you go. Learn things the hard way. Yup! That's me! This loose gown coat thingy is finally starting to look like something but, um, that something is crap! I thought I was being so clever and saving myself some time. I pinned all the trim to the black shell last night and machine stitched it all down along the inside edge. Then I folded in the edges of both the shell and the lining and machine stitched them together catching the outer edge of the trim at the same time. What may (or may not) have been a good idea in theory doesn't look so good in practice. I need to pick it all loose, hem the shell and lining seperately, and sew the front edges together by hand. It is good enough to wear in Frankenmuth if I run out of time to redo it before we go but I know I'll not be happy with it until I fix these things. For now I'm going to move on to the sleeves so it will actually be wearable.

ETA: While it still would have looked better if I had taken the time to handstitch it, it does look much better and the hem hangs correctly after a pressing. Yes I am my own worst critic.

The A.D.D. Costumer!

Okay, so I keep changing my mind. Remember that pink satin I was going to turn into a "medieval fantasy gown"? It became the lining of a zimarra/loose gown/ren coat instead. Since FrankenFeast is only a week-and-a-half away and we are still getting snow I thought it might be a good idea to have some kind of coat to wear while traipsing through the streets of Frankenmuth. (That and I got to wondering of I really wanted to sweat to death in a poly satin gown in the July heat at Silverleaf. It got to be nearly 100 degrees the weekend of the jousting tournament last year.)

I really like the look of Kat's Zimarra over her Florentine gown so I used that as my inspiration. Not finding any brocade that I like locally, and not having the patience to search online, I ended up buying some inexpensive pinwhale cotton corduroy that looks like velvet 'til you get right up on it. Following Signora Katrina's example I used the loose gown pattern from the Tudor Tailor book and sketched it out on some interfacing I had on hand. This was my first experience with scaling up a pattern drawing and it went rather well because luckily the scaled drawing fits my size 12 shoulders and is loose enough that I didn't need to make any adjustments for my size 18 chest. I cut and assembled the corduroy shell and satin lining yesterday and, only pinning them together at the shoulder, I put them on Bertha to wait for the hems to drop. After only being there overnight I can see that the sides of the stin have dropped a good two inches longer than the corduroy. I am waiting for today's mail to see if the trims I ordered will be delivered. I've ordered some 1 3/8" wide gold on black trim that I want to run across the outside of the collar, down the fronts, and around the hem.

I haven't cut the sleeves yet because I am still not sure what I want to do. Kat has short paned puffed sleeves on her zimarra but, looking at several paintings for reference, it seemes to me that the loose gowns generally have long sleeves while the short puff sleeves are generally found on more fitted gowns. I do like the idea of having part of the sleeve of the gown show, though, so I am leaning toward a compromise of elbow length sleeves with a few bands of trim running down them instead of doing slashes or panes. I guess I will wait until I actually have the trim in hand before I make a decision and cut the sleeve fabric.





And remember the sage/seafoam green wool? I bought that with the intention of making a simple side-lacing gown from it but, now that it has been announced that the new Mid Michigan Renaissance Festival set to debut this October has an English/German theme, I am thinking that I might use the green wool along with some very dark green velveteen in my stash to make a German Kampfrau gown. Then again..... that blue skirt with the navy velveteen welts that I made last year could pass as German with the addition of a suitable bodice and sleeves and I do have yards and yards of the blue wool/silk twill left............. Ah...the possibilities.......