A Bluestocking Knits

Straw-bale Tomato Bed: Week 1

A number of things combined to lead us into trying something new this spring: straw-bale gardening.  We ended up with a number of tomato volunteers growing near our compost bin but no more space in the two prepared beds we have already planted -- my mom clipped out a newspaper blurb on a book about straw-bale gardening -- and we have easy access to straw bales at the place where Julia takes riding lessons.  David stopped by there with his pickup truck on the way home from work last week, and bought a bale for us.

I'm following the preparation instructions from Grow and Make, so Days 1-3 were simply watering the bale.  On Days 4-6, we sprinkled the bale with a half-cup of bone meal and watered it in well. 

On Days 7 and 8, we reduced the bone meal to a quarter cup, still watering it in well.

Preparing the bale with this method takes about eleven days, so that the inside of the bale has begun decomposing but has cooled off enough to plant.  You can see in this "Day 8" photo that the top of the bale is looking a little peaky.  It's noticeably warm inside, although it isn't especially easy to poke into, since of course the bale is packed very tightly.  I had thoughts of actually taking its temperature (!), but my food thermometer starts at 130° F. (ideal composting temperature is 135°-160°) and I don't think the probe is really long enough anyway.  On Day 11 I will make a bigger hole anyway, in preparation for planting.

The downside is that the little gnatty flies like it, too.

Elizabethan Garb: A Swedish Man's Jerkin

David, stout fellow, said that he was game for pretty much anything, Faire-garb-wise, and so I decided to combine two of my interests, genealogy and historical clothing, and kit him out like a 16th-century Swede.  My inspiration ended up being mostly this --

which happens to be Nils Dacke (ca.1510-1543), leader of a 16th-century peasant revolt in southern Sweden.  The jerkin is almost exactly, bar the red piping, like the one in The Tudor Tailor, and the location and period are spot on.

I used Sew-Classics Linen-Look again for this jerkin, this time in "Calla Green", about 4 yds altogether, I think. The amount of fabric given in the book was not enough by about a 1/2 yard, but possibly this is because David is noticeably bigger, upon reflection, than the Tudor Tailor model -- that Swedish ancestry again!

I had more problems with this jerkin pattern than the girls' kirtles, not sure why.  Maybe it is because David's shape and size is more different, as it were, from the Tudor Tailor model than the girls' are.  I ended up drafting a completely different sleeve pattern, using a tutorial from The Curious Frau, which gave me less trouble than the Tudor Tailor one, but David and I both decided that we like the shaped sleeve a little better, and so I slashed and curved the workable straight sleeve pattern to make a shaped one.

The lining is unbleached muslin -- I liked the way that the sandy-beige of the muslin contrasted with the calla green.

I added a collar at the last minute when David said, "Is there a collar? I like collars" -- so this one is a very simple folded strip of fabric attached to the rounded neckline of the jerkin.

The skirt is about 1.75 times the width of the waist, roughly the proportion of the pattern in the book, but it looks to my eye a little too much, a little girly perhaps. I suppose one needs a good bit of room in the skirts to move one's legs, though, so the proof will be in the wearing.

I sewed all sixteen buttonholes by hand. This was not entirely my original plan, but for some reason, the machine or me, I can't do good buttonholes with the machine. The zigzag stitches tend to overlap in the middle, despite being well within the parameters given in the manual, and pop right out the moment the slit is cut. I made all of the buttonholes on the machine, then decided to hand-sew over them, one at a time, and cut only what I was going to do immediately, so that if I didn't have time or it was a howling failure, I could simply leave them uncut, as I expect David will wear the jerkin mostly unbuttoned anyway. This was in fact a very good plan, as I didn't feel compelled or daunted by the thought of sixteen hand-sewn buttonholes in front of me. The first one, after a few experiments on a piece of scrap with the same number of layers, took about an hour, and is pretty wonky, but I got noticeably better and quicker on the second one. I do recommend strong light and strong tea to hand, though. I also had the unpopped stitches as a guideline to help both in stabilizing the edge of the hole and to measure my stitches, as well as a dab of Fray-Check to keep the random threads at bay. Next time I will make the stitches smaller.

They won't win any prizes, but I didn't think I could do it at all, and so I'm fairly proud of the results since in that light they're really not too bad.

The buttons are 5/8-inch forms from Dritz -- I got sixteen buttons out of three packages of five each, because one package had an extra back and another had an extra button! -- and so I decided to go with the paired-buttons arrangement instead of laying them out evenly spaced, although this is not quite the usual for jerkins, apparently.  I just like it.

There is great debate in historical-costuming circles as to whether trousers are acceptable, but the gist of it seems to be that for the most part only peasants and soldiers wore them, as if a man could afford hose, that is what he wore.  Nils Dacke was, of course, both peasant and soldier, in a way, and according to the author of a Swedish historical costuming blog I've recently discovered, Swedish peasants used to wear buckled garters on the outside of their trousers, just below the knee -- just like those in the drawing of Nils Dacke.  So, considering that Mikael's focus in traditional Swedish costume being in the Mora/Orsa area of Dalarna, where David's Swedish ancestors were also from, I made some very quick garters from pieces of sky-blue grosgrain.  I regret that I haven't had time to make some proper trousers, so David is wearing a worn-out pair of chinos instead, but the jerkin covers the most non-period part, the zipper and waist!  Those attention-getting garters may distract anyone from noticing, anyway.

I also made him a carry-sack to the instructions posted by Albrechts Bössor, a Swedish re-enactment group, which mediaeval carry-sack is based on this charming detail of the 14th-century carving of the "Flight into Egypt" at the church in Martebo, in Gotland --

For this carry-sack, I used a piece of 100% linen from Fabrics-Store.com -- I think it's the IL019 mid-weight in "Blue Bonnet", a beautiful deep blue that I had originally intended for an apron.  I used some leftover white linen for the facing, which I'm sure will be quite impractical in a carry-sack, but I didn't want to mix linen with something else that might not wash in quite the same way.

I've really enjoyed this project of clothing my family for the Renaissance Faire, both the research and the decision-making, and the sewing.  I've learned a lot about myself,

as well as about sewing and clothing construction.

A good pattern and a good fabric will get much better results than indifferent ones.

Rushing is almost always a bad idea. 

In fact, I think that this is the best lesson I've carried away from this project -- that although I could literally feel myself wanting if not instant gratification, then at least in-less-than-an-hour, taking my time and doing this carefully is much more satisfying, and saves an enormous amount of bother and disappointment.  I have much more confidence in my abilities than I did when I started -- though there is still a long way to go, certainly!

I regret that I didn't get a photograph of all four of us together -- but there is always next year!

Elizabethan Garb: Two Girls' Smocks and Kirtles

These two kirtles are made to patterns from The Tudor Tailor in Sew Classics Linen-Look from Jo-Ann's, respectively "Potting Soil", a much nicer-looking color than it sounds, a lovely chocolatey-brown, and "Natural" and "Clear Lake", which is a rather tealish-green. I like this fabric a lot - - it is a linen/rayon blend, machine-washable and dryable, and looks and behaves halfway between linen and wool. The rayon keeps it from wrinkling as easily as 100% linen does -- in fact it is pretty much wearable straight out of the tumble dryer sometimes.  (Curiously, the brown has a slightly different hand from the tan or the teal, which looks the most linen-y of the three.)

Julia's smock is from an old top sheet; I was hoping to be frugal and not buy something when I had this nearly-endless supply of white cotton, but it was perhaps not the best choice, as it turns out to be a bit stiff when made up into a smock, and the underarm gussets are rather more ungainly than my usual middling attempts. I used a "simple smock" pattern found on the internet, but made the sleeves short for Julia's comfort, and added a bit of chain stitch embroidery both to disguise the neck facing and to pretty it up a bit. The neck is too big, I'm afraid, but there wasn't time to make another one.

My inspiration was mostly this,

Bouguereau's 1884 "Little Knitter".  Not the right period, of course, but not completely wrong, either -- and as it happened, the idea was reinforced by a woodcut in a book of an Elizabethan toddler in a similarly short-sleeved smock.  I figured that Julia would certainly be much more comfortable on a California summery-spring day in short sleeves!

The trim is some "antique blue" grosgrain ribbon, which went on surprisingly easily - - 3/8-inch on the bodice and 7/8-inch around the bottom of the skirt. I really like the blue and brown combination, which is one of the reasons that I chose the dark-blue quilting cotton to line the bodice as well, giving it a little secret dash of color in relief from the brown.

The bodice is interlined with some drill-like stuff I had sitting around, much of which I used to make a sloper for the same kirtle, but there is no boning as Julia is still slim enough not to need it.

My sewing machine was absolutely not up to buttonholes through two layers of linen, two of muslin lining, and one of drill interlining, and I did not listen to either my own inner voice or my husband telling me that something was wrong with them, so I cut them all open and watched, dismayed, as the stitches popped right and left. I sewed around them with zigzag stitch and, on some of them, used some extremely wonky hand-sewn buttonhole stitch, to little avail. Luckily, they are at the side and under Julia's arm, so perhaps will not be noticed except by the more eagle-eyed viewer. The cord is made of some I hope distractingly pretty sapphire-blue crochet cotton, five very long strands twisted for hours until they folded back upon themselves and made a very handsome lacing cord.

The skirts are knife-pleated along the waist, and the Linen-Look, which is very forgiving of amateur stitching anyway, takes this beautifully.

Laura's smock is also made to the Tudor Tailor pattern, with bleached muslin and lace I knitted from crochet cotton. Now, this last is absolutely not "period", as knitted lace didn't come into general use for a couple more centuries, I think, after the Elizabethans, but well, it's just too pretty not to do it. I suspected that Laura would be a little disappointed not to get a gown like, say, this --

and she would certainly not mind as much as I would that her smock is not strictly period, so I went for prettiness and a vaguely-historical look instead. This is the pattern for the lace:

Faggoted Picot Edging

Cast on 6 sts.

Rows 1, 2, and 3: Sl1, K2, yo, K2tog, K1.
Row 4: [K1, P1] 3 times into 1st st (6 sts), sl the 5 sts just made (beg with first st) one at a time over last st -- 6-st picot, K2, yo, K2tog, K1.

Rep rows 1-4 until desired length.

I cut the sleeves for Laura's smock to the "narrow" version -- these are pleasantly full, but not "puffy," which Laura said she didn't like. The sleeve and collar ruffles are about 1 1/2 times the length of the cuff and collar, to give a nice fullness but still show off the lace.

The bodice took about 2/3 of a yard of the tan fabric, and the skirts two 45-inch lengths of the teal, using the full width of the fabric. The bodice is lined with unbleached muslin. The pattern is really splendid -- the V-back is very flattering anyway, but the extra seams make it much easier to get a really snug fit, darts not being historically accurate.

Laura's bodice is also unboned, but I used a slightly different method of interlining, following a suggestion in The Tudor Tailor. I used a piece of quite heavy chambray from my stash, and sewed it to a piece of muslin (which I also topped with a piece of the tan linen to keep the blue from showing through) -- this made a pleasingly stiff bodice that when laced up is quite supportive for Laura's slim figure.

The hand-sewn eyelets on Julia's bodice were such a failure that I didn't even try with Laura's, but took it straight to our local shoe-repair shop and had them put in grommets. I still feel strangely guilty about this, having read for years, I guess, those more historically-rigorous costumers who decry with various levels of vociferousness the wench/Ren-Faire look more suited to Oktoberfest than historical re-enactment. "No grommets!"  Oh, well. If I'm up to it, I might sew over them with thread to disguise the tell-tale glint of aluminum. I put in a piece of boning (actually cable-tie, trimmed) at the very edges for stability -- of course, the use of boning at that place is historically-accurate, though cable-tie not so much!

I took someone's suggestion of setting the grommets a half-inch from the edge of the fabric, making it easier to lace the bodice tighter or looser as needed.

The lacing is a pretty sort of taupe cord, whipped at the ends with regular sewing thread to compensate for not having aglets. The whipping might not be sturdy enough to take much abuse, so I coated it quite thoroughly with Fray-Check.

Laura's skirts are also knife-pleated.  The girls' hats are from Cora Hendershot of Wheat Goddesses, at the Faire.

Huzzah!

Elizabethan Garb: A Woman's Kirtle and Waistcoat

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 ...

Thoughts on the "Good Dame Eve's Cap"

Part of David's Renaisssance Faire garb for this year -- for I wasn't the only one this year who wanted to dress for it, so I am at the moment sewing like a madwoman -- is to include what is generally known as a Tudor or Elizabethan flat cap.  Of course I had seen the July/August 2012 issue of Piecework with the "Good Dame Eve's Cap" pattern written up by Joanne Watson, "inspired by a Tudor cap from Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, England".  I promptly sent off for two skeins of the Manos del Uruguay Clasica, and began to knit.  Unfortunately, as I've said elsewhere, I got to the end of the wool before I got to the end of the hat: I then shook my fist and ordered another skein from Jimmy Beans, wh. arrived within a few days, and the hat was done the next afternoon. 

I suspect now that this is why I ran short --

I weighed the new skein just out of curiosity -- glad I did now.  So as it turned out, the finished hat weighed before felting 193g -- which not coincidentally would be 2 skeins' worth if the skeins had actually weighed 100g, so it's not the pattern -- I used 26g of the third skein, which by my calculations makes the first two skeins more or less 83.5g each.  I used every bit of wool in the first two skeins, as well -- spliced the joins and wove in the ends -- so it's all there.

When the new skein arrived and had been balled up and ready to go, I realized that I didn't much like the narrow-on-one-side, wide-on-the-other brim in the magazine photograph,

which doesn't really show up if you only look at it and think "Tudor hat, great!" like I did, and don't examine it carefully -- so I worked the alternate version of the pattern, the folded-brim one.

The only modification I made was to use a three-needle bind-off, instead of binding off and sewing down the turned edge.  Since I already had put in a "life line" at the beginning of the brim, picking up a row of stitches at that point was fairly simple.  I don't know much about the period accuracy of a three-needle bind-off in this manner, but there it is.  It makes a lovely sharp crease there, just where one is wanted.  I might have put a purl row at the point where the hat part goes from increasing to decreasing, if I'd felt more devil-may-care about authenticity, actually.

(Notice the color difference between the skeins of the Clasica.  Pity the lighter one wasn't the third skein.  Oh well.)

The shape of the finished hat is a little irregular, due to the straight section at the start (just above the brim).  This gives it a sort of mushroom-y shape, not with the sharp increase-section/decrease-section look that you see in some paintings -- more like the third hat in the paintings below than the second one.

I pressed and steamed it like anything to try and get it to lie flatter on the top than the spiral decreases really wanted to do, as I'd had in mind something rather flatter, more I guess like this one from the Museum of London --

but the Good Dame Eve's Cap is a quick knit (with enough wool ...) and makes a good choice for impulsive Ren-Faire garb.

Notice in the Museum of London hat that the brim is split, which to my eye makes a very fetching hat.  I can't help looking at this one and thinking, "hmm, finer wool of course, irregularly-spaced decreases at the crown," and wondering what I've got in my stash that I could tinker with.  There are probably dozens of flat hats like this in the Museum of London alone, many photographed like this one, and of course the flat hat appears again and again in paintings.  One of the reasons for its popularity was, I suspect, the ease with which the style lends itself to variations.  Here are a few I've found --

Ludger tom Ring, "Portrait of a Man" (1566). Interesting that part of the cap seems to have been painted out.  It looks like the brim is fur and the top is not -- velvet, perhaps? and thus eminently scrunchable, as this man seems to have done.  (I am fascinated by the detail in this portrait: the button loops, the lines of silver embroidery on the doublet, the visible stitching on the white lining of the jacket.)

Oh, here is the artist, in fact --

Ludger tom Ring (German, not Dutch as I'd suspected) in a 1547 self-portrait.  Isn't it interesting how you find faces that seem to cross the centuries.  This is partly his looking straight at the viewer, I think -- it gives the portrait a modern directness.

John Bettes, "Portrait of a Man" (1545).  This man wears his cap much lower on his head than the first two men.

Hans Holbein the Younger, "Portrait of Thomas Cromwell" (1532-33).  Difficult to see, with the black against a dark background, but I suspect it is the same type of flat hat, worn pulled down low over his forehead.

In Which We Sing the Praises of Araucania Nature Wool; Or, This Rough Magic

I ended up somehow with a drawer-full of this lovely stuff, Araucania Nature Wool, a dozen skeins or so in four colors -- the old Tall Mouse craft store in Yorba Linda used to every so often have sock yarn or something else that wasn't a novelty yarn, and I picked up one of these skeins in amazement one day, and then every few months bought another, because nobody else did, until the supply was gone.

The colors are rich and varied, as you would expect from kettle-dyed skeins, the red especially vivid.

The wool has a slightly rough softness to it, so that you know you're wearing wool but you like it.

Alas, both Tall Mouse and Nature Wool are no more.  What to do with my drawer-full of wool?  It felts beautifully, I heard, and so I decided to make placemats in a random-stripe pattern.  Here are the first two --