Genevieve's Journeys

Years ago I made a lovely Cranach gown (materials donated by thorngrove)  with an underdress, all assembled with Lady Anne of Wokyngham's patient help. (just ignore my expression - didn't know I looked so sour!) It was my first effort at mounting fabric on a backing and then sewing it, cartridge pleating, adding a lining to the skirt hem only (to add weight for a better drape, and to resist fraying)...whole sets of skills I'd never known of.

After several years service, the canvas support of the bodice has shrunk inside the fabric (not prewashed to same extent as gown fabric). It had pulled away from the seams, so it's not giving the same shape as before.

I've held off making it new, because it has two side seams, that need dozens of lacing holes. My favourite....not. I considered replacing only the lining, but it didn't really seem feasible with the wear on the outer fabric.

But I want it to wear at 20 year, so...

So over the long weekend I took it apart to remind myself the assembly, unpicked it from the skirt, and checked the size compared to the pattern from 5 years ago. Remarkably the outer fabric had hardly changed shape at all.

I now have some linen canvas so I used that to mount a new linen outer fabric, and a lightweight linen lining. It's coming together beautifully.

It's odd because my memory of making this gown was that it took ages and ages to make; combination of not knowing the process at all, and fitting, which takes awhile when you are working from scratch.

But making from a pattern - it's taken one afternoon and evening to cut and mount most of the pieces, put three pieces together and start adding the lining.

Old gown - supervised by Haggis




Old bodice: I can't seem to keep my gowns from wrinkling round the upper tum, but otherwise they fit very well.


Pieces cut from a cream linen and mounted on canvas. I couldn't find the same lovely twill linen as for  but this is quite a nice weight. Middle piece looks a bit uneven - I left the selvedge in place.



Linen lining pinned in. There's no fabric lining the lacing placket so I only have 3 layers of fabric to put holes through...



Back piece, mounted and lining pinned in.



Note stray heraldic projects lying about - this is the latest round of our shire bunting in progress.

It's quite hard to take pictures in the house without some cat butt appearing.

Also evidence of gaming: noone tell the College of Heralds please.

The Tudor Child, written by Jane Huggett and Ninya Mikhaila, ed Jane Malcolm-Davies, is a delight. My copy arrived this week because I ordered in advance for a small discount. What a treat!

The same careful research, beautiful photos and well chosen examples go into this book as the previous ones, with a quick review of techniques familiar from the Tudor Tailor and the servants' books. It's the same page count and size as the Tudor Tailor - apparently it grew in the writing, from a small book to a sturdy one and took longer to assemble than planned.

Some highlights:
- photos of Ninya in two different high-Elizabethan outfits, non-pregnant and then at 7 months pregnant, to illustrate how existing outfits were modified to accommodate pregnancy (looser lacing, new plackets and stomachers) - she looks just like the portraits of pregnant women.

- photo series illustrating how to swaddle an infant (under 3 months) and the result is exactly as shown in portraits, with the baby looking eerily like a lifesize doll. Beautiful. The discussion of swaddling and of toilet training, is intriguing. Great outline of a 16th c layette set.

- wonderfully thorough study of surviving portraiture and accounts, to support their discussion of what you dressed children in - what was considered the minimum requirements for even the poorest children. They now divide the discussion into lower, middle, and elite class needs. When you dress boys and girls the same, you can only distinguish them in portraits by their accessories - hats, belts, swords, and kerchiefs. For some portraits w/out named sitters, they just describe the figures as 'infant' or 'child', because there's no real telling them apart.

- Great quotes from the Lisle letters, of the 'tween' daughter (around 13) being fostered in Paris, writing to ask for money for 'things that you just don't need when living in England, but you, like, *totally* need if you're living in France'.

- pictures illustrating all the sets of clothes, including Master Paul's love-child! a boy dressed in tweedy breeches, woolly hose, a blue doublet and a flat cap. All he needs is a high-pitched giggle.

- knitting patterns! for hose with garter-stitch heels, a shirt (like the one in MoL, or in the painting of the Madonna knitting in the round), caps and mittens - a different mitten than the one in MoL! I was thrilled to see a different mitten option for knitters. All the items are very fine-gauge. I haven't read the patterns closely yet but am looking forward to doing so, because I have acres of double-knitting yarn to use up.

The patterns and line drawings look familiar from previous books (hose, doublets, gowns, kirtles) but are new - scaled to childrens' bodies and shapes.

The elite clothing patterns includes two of the best known Elizabethan child outfits: Edward Tudor as a boy, and Elizabeth Tudor as a teenager, in their respective finery.

And for those in the costume and filk-fan-con world - Teddy has a credit, as he and Ninya designed the fashion doll on the cover. I saw the doll, in fact, at Teddy and Tom's place, not realising it would be so prominent in the book. And there's a pattern for it.

Overall, the pictures of children in the reconstructions are a delight - a balance between careful sober portraits, imitating the originals, and children laughing and being children. The back cover shows a detail of a beautiful bodice and skirt on a child...who has her thumb in her mouth.

My only reservations - and these are quite small, given how much I like the book:
- the authors cite the 1560 Breugel painting 'children's games' several times - I wish there'd been one, single illustration of the whole painting. There are detail pics of different figures, but I'd love to see the whole.
- I've love a list of suppliers, to find out who provided what materials. The silks, brocades and velvets are just sumptuous, and I don't think I've ever seen the equivalent, so I'd love to know where to find them. Presumeably if you're a Tudor Tailor follower you know a lot of suppliers already, but I almost want cites at the bottom of the picture like in fashion magazines: Silk by Chatelaine silks, linen by Classic Textiles, hair model's own...

If you like clothes, knitting, or children, or some combination of these - it's worth the price of the book to have for yourself.

HLady liadethorneggecame through with pictures, and only one of them is slightly tipsy-looking.

Pics are huge, so you an enjoy them in all their splendour! Also, it was a lovely day.

Aside from being happy that it came out the way I pictured it, I was really pleased with the silly hat. It has a wire form inside to provide the shape - there's precedent for wire forms for the pointy gabled hoods, so I suspect the use has been plausibly extended to this earlier pointy bonnet shape. The silk ended up draping very well - better than I expected - and it's all pinned to a headband.

The rosary beads were a gift from Lord Logan, who made occasional trips to the holy land; the sash is a silk pashmina from Lord John, chequey's squire, who came back from Af'stan with a bag full of beautiful textiles for Robert and me. I'm hoping to trim it to make a more manageable sash, and still have a lovely scarf to wear.

When really finished, it'll be hooks and eyes all up the front - as is, there's H&E to the waist, then I stitched up the rest of the bodice.

I still have wrinkles round my middle, but at least these ones are documentable - they look just like the ones in a painting shown in the Queen's Servants.

( Gown of great shinyness )

...because even early 16th c clothing is a journey of many many steps, when you're trying to follow pattern instructions.

Should look splendid, if I can find enough hours in the day to do the hand finishing. I spent all free hours over Jubilee weekend on this gown. I'm beginning to hanker for t-tunics.

However: one awesome aspect has been using cross and dot pattern paper for the first time - not just scrabbling together cardboard and recycled paper, but large sheets of paper printed with crosses and dots like giant fill-in-your-own graph paper. 

It made drafting the bodice, back, sleeve and bonnet patterns crisp and precise (two seam edges meet, and match in length! who knew it was possible? parallel lines, for real!) than previous saved-muslin patterns. I'm totally sold on this stuff (even in its non-optimal metric gauge).

I think playing with paper patterns for trousers primed me to tackle medieval-clothing patterns with paper, and doing it with enthusiasm.

The pink gown is finished and even documented with pics, to be posted.

Have I taken a single photo of the amazing beautiful overgown? Of course not. Sigh. I'll never make a real blogger like liadethornegge.

Thanks for your encouraging remarks about the gown.
maryf and kirieldp commented about the undergown. I'll be honest, I don't know if German noble ladies wore undergowns as a matter of course.
The idea developed with milady Anne of Wokyngham's help, as she was the more knowledgeable of the two of us about 16th c. clothing, but she's the first to say she knows English, not German, clothes.
But there's a good argument based on her research. 16th c. English folk very reliably wear linen underclothes, and then two layers of clothing. The terminology isn't consistent, but 'kirtles' (underneath) and 'gowns' (over top) are used by the Tudor Tailor authors.
The kirtles tend to provide the support and shaping, the gowns provide lush layers to display. This convention goes back to previous periods, at least in England.
Looking at paintings, 99% of women wearing this style had a white underlayer, that showed up the lacing across the stomach. (There's one portrait where it's black.)
So what is the visible white bit? The options are:
- a chemise: in which case there's only one layer of gown providing support and shape, and the German ladies are exposing their tummies to the elements covered only with linen or silk.
This struck me as unlikely. For one thing, chemises are puffy and ruffly, and these ladies tums are uniformly smooth, whereas the puffy and pleated parts of their chemises are clearly illustrated quite beautifully. If you wore an ordinary chemise under a gown that had an open space around the tum, surely it would puff out between the lacings?
- a kirtle or petticoat with a white bodice, possibly with the heavy cartridge-pleat skirts attached. Lady Anneke suggested this option to me, and it makes a lot of sense. A doublet over it, with the odd bust-band, would then be decorative, not supportive.
If I did this gown over, I think I might go this route - though then I'd have to find a way to keep the doublet from riding up, because it's cut quite short and snug.
- a kirtle or petticoat of any colour, with a white 'stomacher' pinned in - like mine. English ladies wore assorted parts of their gowns pinned together (stomachers, partlets, sleeves, skirts), so the pinning is quite plausible.

What clinched it for me is some paintings by Cranach featuring the woman caught in adultery, dated around 1540s. There are several, with the same basic composition, and the woman is always wearing a peach or vermilion gown that is unlaced, though the details vary - sometimes the angry crowd around her are in armour, sometimes in civilian clothing.
(Notes from the Met Museum say there are over 15 versions - must have been the hit of his corner of Germany.)
Christ and the adulteress, detail, Cranach elder, 1532
Same image, full image
ETA: found one source, it's in the Met.
Christ and the adulteress, Cranach the elder, 1540s accession no. 1982.60.35
(small copy is in my scrapbook, but go look at the Met Museum site, you can zoom brilliantly! Very cool).
The adulteress has presumeably been hustled straight from the offending bed, with no time to even lace up her gown.
Her chemise is, I think, showing as a ruffled layer across her bust, and then there's a white triangular space between the two sides of the gown, that has loose lacing over it. I'm not certain if the line around her neck is a dark necklace, or possibly a finished edge of an extremely fine translucent chemise or partlet, as fine and see-through as her veil.
But if that's the chemise, what's the ruffly bit over the boobs?
In the Met zoomed version, you can clearly see boobs through the ruffled shirt.
AND you can see that the white bit extends around her shoulders, just short of the black edge of the outer gown.
(You can also see the beautiful delicate blackwork in her veil - it must have looked like it was just floating free over her face, unattached to anything, the linen is so fine.)
This white line, to me, suggests that the white bit between the two 'lapels' of the doublet isn't just chemise, but is a layer of gown, one that continues under the orange one. So increasingly, the white kirtle is looking like a good option.
This adulteress' gown doesn't seem to include a bust band - either styles had moved on from the Saxon princess era, or the lady was swept from her room before she could grab it. Not certain!

So: that's why I'm wearing an underdress for this outfit. YMMV.

Remembering that I want to look like princess no. 2 here, I've finished the 2-part sleeves, with guidance and patterning by milady Anne of Wokyingham. I'm pretty pleased with the result, and hope to heck they fit in the finished product!
Hopefully, hopefully, to be modelled at Crown at the end of the month.

	3 Saxon Princesses, by Cranach
	Cranach sleeves, finished Backs of sleeves, showing silk lining. Black Velveteen and gold patterned silk brocade is mounted on a calico internlining, and lined with yellow silk. Both pieces have two rows of slashed velveteen at the top and one at the bottom. The slashes are not lined or finished - they fray, but not overly much - an interpretation of the costly extravagance of the clothing.
	Cranach sleeves, finished, fronts