This is the first of three posts about my adventures in making a first set of Renaissance Faire garb for my family. David said a few months ago, "Who wants to dress up for the Faire this year?" and the girls both shouted "Me!" so I pulled out my copy of The Tudor Tailor and got to work. I had already made the kirtle and waistcoat described below, thinking that only David and I would be up for it, but the girls actually got excited.
The Tudor Tailor, by Jane Malcolm-Davies and Ninya Mikhaila, is thrilling and dangerous and daunting all at once. The photographs are beautiful, and the erudition impressive, but you must scale up and draft the patterns yourself. I bought the book a few years ago at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, in anticipation of sewing my own gown, on the reassurances of the woman running the stall that the patterns were relatively easy to draft and sew oneself. Well, it is not for the faint-hearted, to be sure. If you are stubborn enough, though, you might get through all right.
(Yes, the Tudor Tailor website now offers full-size patterns. I had already spent some $35 on the book; I didn't feel I could justify the expense of a rather pricy pattern in addition to fabric, notions, etc.)The instructions are pretty basic, and assume a goodish amount of sewing experience. There is no advice in the book about where boning should go, for instance, so I had to kind of make it up, with reference to a few pictures cobbled together from various sources on the internet. I'm sure it is different for different women, but a few guidelines would have been helpful.
I made things more difficult for myself by falling in love with the side-opening bodice, which turned out to be quite a trial. How deep do you make the overlap? If it is only an inch or two, where do you put the boning? How do you accommodate the skirt opening? Etc. etc. etc. Lots of trials with self-fitting a bodice (not easy to do, but most of my sewing was done while the girls were at school) and stupid mistakes like attaching the boned interlining the wrong way round so that the bones were curving away from my body! But my mom and David were both on hand for the last tweaking of the pattern, and I managed to solve or disguise most of the problems, and get a wearable kirtle.
The fabric is Sew Classics Linen-Look from Jo-Ann's, in, I regret to say, "Potent Purple". This name does not do it justice at all. It is, I fancy, what the Elizabethans called murrey (mulberry), a rich reddish purple. Quite lovely, especially with a touch of black velvet ribbon trim, one narrow, one wide.
(The boning, I regret to say, does not hold up my bosom as well as I had hoped. This, I gather, is a common problem as many historical costumers refer to "slippage", which describes the effect perfectly.)
The bodice is self-lined with muslin interlining, and drill inter-interlining on the fronts only. I attached the skirts with box pleats, which I know now to be much more of a chore than knife pleats, but there was so much fabric, since I used three widths of fabric on my skirts, that I'm not sure knife pleats would have worked. Anyway, it looks really nice.
I also very much admired this waistcoat in the Tudor Tailor book --
this is a front view of it, from Ninya Mikhaila's website -- so I chose that to go over my kirtle, and used a black midweight cotton/poly blend, and a light black cotton lining. After the kirtle, this seemed a walk in the park. The godets went in very nicely with only a little bit of fuss at first, and I really like the effect -- here is another view of the Tudor Tailor one, since the black of mine is difficult to photograph --
The part that took the longest was in fact sewing the 21,748 pairs of hooks and eyes along the front of the waistcoat. No, I exaggerate a little -- but I really dislike sewing hooks and eyes, and although I really like the look, I will think twice about making something with this many again -- and not with black thread on black fabric in a hurry, either -- although I "cheated" sometimes and used brown thread so that I could see it! I probably could have got away with a smaller number of hooks-and-eyes, but there was little indication in the book about quantities, and the only photo of a finished one is this back view, so I wasn't to know. It took me from last midsummer to March to do them all!
But I am really enormously pleased with it. I like the wings and the godets, and the way that the collar of my smock shows above the lower rounded collar of the waistcoat, and the weirdly charming buttonless sleeve cuffs. It seems to suit my figure too, so that's definitely all right!
I also made a "Henrician brimmed coif", with the IL020 handkerchief-weight linen from Fabrics-Store.com. I suppose that the shaped-brim one would be more flattering, but I figured that this one would be better with the hat I had bought at the Faire when I first thought "I can sew myself a Ren-Faire costume!"
The hat is one of the more sober ones from Cora Hendershott of Wheat Goddesses, who has a booth at the Faire.
More kirtles to come ...
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