My first clothing attempt.
Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2006 9:35 pm
Not sure if this belongs here, but I think it does as I am looking for criticism.
I havn't posted here for a while, or been very active, but fear not, for I have not been a total slacker. With our transportation down for the majority of the summer, and with no place to work on armour in our cramped little apartment, I was forced to turn my mind and my hand towards my soft kit.
With the help of my very loving and patient (and soon to be teacher) fiance, I have been learning how to sew, both by hand, and on the machine.
My chosen period is late fourteenth century, though I have not yet pinned down either an exact date, or place. The clothing I picked out to construct roughly fits in with this choice as near as I can tell from the admittedly small ammount of research.
For the projects listed, I had two types of fabric to work with. The first was a nice light weight green wool that I bought from James B. on the armour archive. I am a little ashamed to say that I have no idea what kind of wool, or what weight it is. The other type of fabric was a 3.5oz bleached linen from http://www.fabrics-store.com.
The first project that I started was a set of seperated hosen made from the green wool. I tried to use a few patterns that I found on the internet, but many of them didn't make any sense to me. Kristin and I eventually ended up reverse-engineering a pair of hosen that we bought from http://medievaldesign.com/calzeeng.html. This was my first project, and I was full of energy so I decided to handsew the entire thing. It took a while to mostly complete the one leg, but I'm glad that I took the extra effort. All I need to do now is complete the hemming, and create the holes for the points, oh and fix the other leg which I somehow made too small.
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/hosen1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/hosen2.jpg[/img]
The next project was an undershirt made from the linen. I got the pattern from Kass' website at http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/be ... shirt.html
and I remain impressed by the simplicity of her design. Due to a desire to finish up a little quicker, I decided to machine stitch this shirt, it is after all an undershirt. With Kristin's help, it was a fairly easy process with the only real problems coming while putting the inserts (gussets?) into the underarms. It came out great, I need to finish hemming, and reinforcing the corner seams in the armpits.
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/undershirt1.jpg[/img]
The last project, also using the linen, was the pair of braies seen in figure 3 here http://thescholarsgarret.com/artifact/braies/ this was by far the easiest of the three projects, involving two quick seams. All that is left on these is to finish up the hemming (do you detect a pattern here?)
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/braes1.jpg[/img]
Whats next? I plan to make a woolen over tunic using this pattern http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/be ... Louis.html and maybe a hood of some sort for headgear.
All in all, I think that this will be a pretty nice first attempt to garb myself, and hopefully I wont look like a complete fool. One thing that I have found, is that the clothes are remarkably comfortable, whether that is because of design or material, I have not decided yet. Please give me your thoughts, what did I do right, how can I improve? And heck thanks for just reading through a long boring post about clothes.
I havn't posted here for a while, or been very active, but fear not, for I have not been a total slacker. With our transportation down for the majority of the summer, and with no place to work on armour in our cramped little apartment, I was forced to turn my mind and my hand towards my soft kit.
With the help of my very loving and patient (and soon to be teacher) fiance, I have been learning how to sew, both by hand, and on the machine.
My chosen period is late fourteenth century, though I have not yet pinned down either an exact date, or place. The clothing I picked out to construct roughly fits in with this choice as near as I can tell from the admittedly small ammount of research.
For the projects listed, I had two types of fabric to work with. The first was a nice light weight green wool that I bought from James B. on the armour archive. I am a little ashamed to say that I have no idea what kind of wool, or what weight it is. The other type of fabric was a 3.5oz bleached linen from http://www.fabrics-store.com.
The first project that I started was a set of seperated hosen made from the green wool. I tried to use a few patterns that I found on the internet, but many of them didn't make any sense to me. Kristin and I eventually ended up reverse-engineering a pair of hosen that we bought from http://medievaldesign.com/calzeeng.html. This was my first project, and I was full of energy so I decided to handsew the entire thing. It took a while to mostly complete the one leg, but I'm glad that I took the extra effort. All I need to do now is complete the hemming, and create the holes for the points, oh and fix the other leg which I somehow made too small.
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/hosen1.jpg[/img]
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/hosen2.jpg[/img]
The next project was an undershirt made from the linen. I got the pattern from Kass' website at http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/be ... shirt.html
and I remain impressed by the simplicity of her design. Due to a desire to finish up a little quicker, I decided to machine stitch this shirt, it is after all an undershirt. With Kristin's help, it was a fairly easy process with the only real problems coming while putting the inserts (gussets?) into the underarms. It came out great, I need to finish hemming, and reinforcing the corner seams in the armpits.
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/undershirt1.jpg[/img]
The last project, also using the linen, was the pair of braies seen in figure 3 here http://thescholarsgarret.com/artifact/braies/ this was by far the easiest of the three projects, involving two quick seams. All that is left on these is to finish up the hemming (do you detect a pattern here?)
[img]http://corey.greenkri.com/braes1.jpg[/img]
Whats next? I plan to make a woolen over tunic using this pattern http://www.reconstructinghistory.com/be ... Louis.html and maybe a hood of some sort for headgear.
All in all, I think that this will be a pretty nice first attempt to garb myself, and hopefully I wont look like a complete fool. One thing that I have found, is that the clothes are remarkably comfortable, whether that is because of design or material, I have not decided yet. Please give me your thoughts, what did I do right, how can I improve? And heck thanks for just reading through a long boring post about clothes.
