One Afternoon Tutorials--Aprons!

Today's collection of one-afternoon projects is about aprons.

Aprons appear to have been made throughout history, and could be practical or ornamental (like the bronze ornamented one found upon the woman in the Eura grave in Viking age Finland, or the 16th-17th c. lace aprons worn in France and elsewhere in Europe).

Aprons come in a wide variety of styles and fabrics.  Work aprons can be as simple as a piece of cloth with a band sewn to the top, to tie around one's waist, but can also be full length overgarments.  There are a plethora of modern apron projects to be found on the Internet also; ruffled bib or half-aprons in cheerful colors or prints; silly "chef's aprons"; pinafore aprons for little girls; and more!  Because this is a historical blog, I have stuck to patterns/tutorials for historical designs instead of diving into the vast array of modern patterns of all types. 

Please don't assume that, because I have listed only one pattern for a period, that the pattern shows the only way aprons were made in that period!  Although I have not conducted detailed research on the subject, there appear to be a variety of different apron designs for every historical period, and no reason to believe that aprons didn't vary by region as well.

Because I am not (yet!) a reenactor and have no present need for a practical period apron, I have not tried out any of these designs (except for the Eura apron, which I did a bit differently).  As always, do your own research to ascertain whether a particular tutorial suggested here will work for you.

• Viking Apron Dress:  Viking apron dress designs are still conjectural, but two types have a substantial amount of evidence and support; the pleated-in-the-front tube (Kostrup) and the fitted tube (Hedeby).  The tutorial featured here is from the Handcrafted History blog and is a fairly typical fitted tube kind of pattern (though not necessarily what was used at Hedeby).   We don't know if the Vikings used the apron dress as we would an apron (to protect other clothing) but we do know that some aprons (notably lace aprons--17th-18th centuries) were worn for style purposes, so I am adding an apron-dress pattern to this list.  Note:  Making such a garment might take longer than a single afternoon if you stitch it entirely by hand.
• Eura (Finland):  Based upon an archaeological find near Eura in Finland that has been dated to about 1100 CE.  The apron appears to have been simply made of a length of cloth, belted to the body with a piece of tablet weaving, but it was clearly an ornamental garment because the bottom edges was decorated with designs crafted from small bronze coils.  Making and sewing on the coils would likely take the making of such an apron outside the range of a one-afternoon project, but finishing the apron by fringing the bottom and hemming the other edges is another possibility and would be fairly quick to do.  A diagram illustrating how archaeologists believe the Eura apron was made may be found here; the original blog site (which was used by a Finnish college student to house her thesis) is no longer live.   
• Medieval:  Here are several different types of medieval period apron.  Edyth Miller of The Compleatly Dressed Anachronist provides instruction on a type of late medieval apron associated with midwives--it's a full body overgarment.  Edyth's tutorial is here. 
• Medieval, part 2:  The second type of apron is a smocked top apron tied around the waist; you can find it in Matilda La Zouche's LiveJournal here. (Note:  If you have not done smocking before, you may wish to look for instruction on how to do smocking before you attempt this kind of apron.  Gina's Medieval Silkwork blog gives a list of smocked apron tutorials, with links, here.  She includes Matilda's tutorial, but you may wish to try some of the others, which give more detailed instruction about doing the actual smocking.)
• German Renaissance: (15th-16th centuries)  Genoveva has a video tutorial she claims will teach you how to do a smocked apron, much like the medieval ones above, in one hour!  Find it here.
• 18th c. work apron.  Burnley & Trowbridge have a series of three excellent clear videos demonstrating how to make a basic 18th century style work apron.  The set is in the "Sew Along" playlist; you can find the first one on YouTube here.
• Regency:  The blog Sewing Empire features two different apron styles for the Regency period:  this one for a quick waist-length apron, and a second one for an apron with full-body coverage.  
• Victorian:  Sew Historically has a tutorial on how to make a "pinner", an apron with a bib that pinned onto one's clothes. Find it here.
• Edwardian:  From a blog called Cranial Hiccups comes a tutorial for a rather plain and basic, full-body apron; find it here.
• 1920s:  Also from Cranial Hiccups comes this 1920s apron tutorial; yes, it's a period tutorial, complete with an image containing the actual period pattern!

Feel free to dive into the Internet (Pinterest is not a bad place to start) to look for other possible apron DIYs/how-tos/tutorials and patterns.  Have fun!

Elizabeth Tudor's Gown

Last night, I found this video on YouTube.  It tells the story of the survival of one of Elizabeth I's gowns--as an altar cloth in a church in Bacton, which is a town in Herefordshire, England.

The Bacton church was the burial place of Blanche Parry, Elizabeth's Head of the Privy Chamber in Elizabeth's later years.  Parry was buried in the church.  There was a fabric used as a altar cloth, for a time.  After that the vicar ended up storing it under his bed.  Very early in the 20th century, another Bacton vicar raised the money to have the cloth professionally framed and hung on the church wall, where it remained until recently when a woman, a scholar researching Tudor fashion, saw a picture of the Bacton altar cloth on line.  She visited the church and realized that the "altar cloth" had once been a dress.  A dress made from cloth of silver--something only a queen was likely to have.

Subsequent research confirmed that it had been a Tudor period dress, probably one owned and worn by Elizabeth I.  The cloth is currently on display at Hampton Court Palace, beside the famed Rainbow portrait, which the design on the fabric strongly resembles.  Is the former altar cloth the remains of that gown?  We may never know for certain, but it's still amazing that at least the fabric of the dress remains after more than 400 years.  Those who are interested and can't make it to England or view the video can check out this web page about the fabric and the project.

Paths Less Traveled

It's the middle of Summer where I am, so I figured it was time for something completely different.

Here are links to some very interesting websites containing information about historical clothing that is off the beaten track of ancient Rome/migration period/medieval England and France/Renaissance etc. costume.  Most of the historical periods covered by the websites below are hard for the beginning researcher to find information about. They should help people wanting to explore truly different areas of clothing history, and at the very least they are interesting to read!

1.  Clothing in the Netherlands, 1480-1610:    Between the two of them, Margaret and Karinne show the rest of us how people in the Netherlands dressed between the late 15th and early 17th centuries. I first met Karinne through the now-defunct MedCos forums, and her skills have, if anything, improved since then. Go here to explore Margaret and Karinne's creations and research.

2.  Sarmatian Costume:  Here's an interesting alternative to all those Elizabethans, Vikings, and Romans:  a Sarmatian persona!  The Sarmatians are a Central Asian people who migrated into Southern Russia and the Balkans and settled there between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE.   Jess Miller-Camp's blog, Sarmatian in the SCA, has interesting information about her research into Sarmatian culture, including her work on Sarmatian costume.  You can find the blog here.

3.  Middle Byzantine:  You may be familiar with Timothy Dawson's Middle Byzantine site, Levantia, but Anna, of Anachronistic and Impulsive, covers much of the same costuming ground from a somewhat different perspective.  The blog's home page is here.  As a side note:   Do not miss her post about making ancient Mesopotamian costumes for herself and her spouse!

4.  Medieval Korea:  This information about how a 16th century CE Gisaeng might have dressed is available due to the research skills of Rebecca Lucas LeGet.  Find it here.

5,  Medieval Japan:  There are a number of pages out there on medieval Japanese costume, but this one is fairly detailed and well-organized--for men's costume.  There are places for information about women's costume, but they have not been written yet.  You'll find the index here.

Enjoy the extra reading, and have a good summer (or winter, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere).

An Early Renaissance Outfit?

Painting of Mary Magdalen, attributed to the
workshop of the Master of the Mansi Magdalen 
(c.1490 – 1530 C.E.) Photo from 
http://www.lecoindelenigme.com/

Happy New Year!  I'm starting this New Year with something a bit different; a piece of period art showing a style of costume I have never encountered before.  Maybe one of my readers with better knowledge of early Renaissance costume can help me learn from what I'm seeing here.

I found the painting to the left on a Pinterest board, and chased the link to track down this larger copy of the image. The painting apparently is attributed to the workshop of the Master of the Mansi Magdalen. The Master of the Mansi Magdalen was a Flemish artist who painted at the very beginning of the 16th century.  Wikipedia reports the supposition that the artist's real name was Willem Meulenbroec, a pupil of Quentin Matsys. 

However, my concern is not with the artist, but with the subject's costume.  Although one cannot count upon pictures of saints to be wearing period fashions, they sometimes do, and the painters from the Low Countries were more likely to depict real clothing on saints or allegorical subjects.  

In addition, the outfit shown on the Magdalen has elements that appear in period art on real people. Her body-hugging gown is trimmed with fur and has long, hanging velvet sleeves and a broad sash. A diaphanous black veil hangs from the back of her oddly shaped but sumptuously jeweled hat. Similar elements appear in other late 15th century and early 16th century art--though not in quite these forms. For example, voluminous sleeves and fur-trimmed velvet gowns with close-fitting bodices, appear in the art of this period.  But I can't recall seeing another dress that features a close-fitting bodice with voluminous sleeves.  The hennin, a conical hat often worn with a sheer veil, is seen in art of the late 15th century.  But I've never before seen a hennin or other 15th-16th headdress that flared out so awkwardly over the ears, or had a black veil.

I would really like to hear from anyone who has any information about whether similar outfits appear in other early 16th century works by Flemish or Netherlandish painters, or whether there is other evidence for the wearing of a similar style in the real world at that time.  Also, does anyone have ideas about how such a gown might have been made?  Please, educate me in the comments!

A Tale of Two Reconstructions

Yesterday I found a fascinating article that (for once) for once, has nothing to do with Viking age or other early period clothing.  The citation of the article is:

Davidson, Hilary & Hodson, Anna.  Joining forces: the intersection of two replica garments, in Textiles and Text:  Re-establishing the Links between Archival and Object-based Research (Archetype Publications 2007), pp. 204-210.  

When I went back to post a link to the article, the PDF was no longer available, but interested readers may well be able to obtain the article by inter-library loan. The book is available expensively from the publisher and there are a few inexpensive used copies listed on Amazon.co.uk; it may be available from other sources as well.

The article describes the authors' experience with two different replicas of Early Modern clothing. One author made a "pair of bodys" (a corset-like garment) based on instructions in Juan Alcega's Tailor's Pattern Book of 1589, using period techniques and materials, while the other made a toile based upon a surviving early 17th century blackwork jacket, sewn by machine using modern materials. Later, they placed the garments on a mannequin, with the jacket toile over the bodice. To the authors' surprise, this conjunction of the two "replicas" (I'm using quotes because the toile is not a replica in the ordinary sense) was more enlightening about the cut and fit of the garments than either replica had been alone. Ms. Davidson and Ms. Hodson note that the bodice and jacket, when shown in the positions in which they would have been worn show that both garments have the same back waist length "and exactly reflects the proportionate back-waist lengths shown in sculptures" which was not clear from examining the jacket alone. (p. 208). The conjunction of the two garments also showed that the unusual neckline of the jacket made sense when it was worn over the bodice:

The top edge of the bodice threw into relief the natural meeting point of the two curved front sections. This was not evident when the jacket lay flat or when tried on a mannequin or model without a period undergarment. The apex of the curve matches the top of the bodice, after which the two front sections meet smoothly down the centre front. (p. 208)

Even more interestingly, the two garments together fit four different women of different proportions surprisingly well:

It has so far been worn by four women, and a mannequin, of different heights and proportions. Providing the back edges were laced fully closed, the bodice consistently achieved the required cone shape, as it gives structure independent of the natural shape of the body underneath. The busk creates a straight line from the waist to the bust that disregards the body’s curves. This refashioning provides a basic uniformity of shape and structure that can be exploited by external garments, like the jacket. On the same range of wearers, tested after realising this material relationship, the toile alone was ill-fitting and shapeless by comparison with the universal fit it achieved when relying on the bodice’s body-regulating framework. (p. 208)

I highly recommend this article to any of my readers not familiar with it, particularly readers interested in Early Modern costume. It is a marvelous illustration of the importance of undergarments in achieving period fit, as well as a powerful argument that recreations of garments that are sufficiently exact can, in and of themselves, provide researchers with much of the context they need to understand how the garments had to have been used.

Matthäus Schwarz's Book

The history of books documenting the evolution of costume has a history of its own, though that history is much shorter than the history of costume itself.  The first books documenting costume appeared during the Renaissance.

Today,  I found a BBC article about one such book, an interesting little tome commissioned by a wealthy German accountant, named Matthäus Schwarz in the 16th century. The BBC article may be found here. A slightly more in-depth article from the University of Cambridge's website may be found here.

Curiously, Schwarz's book includes illustrations showing his naked form ("I had become fat and large", he remarked, though he was only 29 when he posed for that particular image), as well as various outfits he wore at different times of his life. The book covers a 40-year period. It is a  a fascinating and possibly unique document, commissioned by a member of the middle class wealthy enough to commission a lavishly illustrated tome and interested enough in documenting his forays into high fashion to want to do so.

For whatever reason, the Schwarz book had not been studied in any depth until a few years ago, when Dr Ulinka Rublack, Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge, used it as a source for her work on Renaissance clothing, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford 2011).

In the video above, Dr. Rublack discusses the Schwarz book and describes a subsequent project:  recreating one of the more dramatic outfits from Schwarz's book.  (A shorter video, showing the process of dressing a model in the completed recreation outfit, appears with the BBC article).

I hope that, someday, a fascimile edition of the Schwarz book is also published--the few glimpses that appear in Dr. Rublack's video and the various news articles are tantalizing.

EDIT:  (7/12/2013)  Note Lara's comment below--there is a free PDF of the entire original Schwarz volume on line!

An Interesting Website On A Hard-to-Research Topic

I recently found this site on the subject of raised-heel and platform shoes in the 15th through 17th centuries CE in Europe, with special attention paid to 16th century Italy. It includes a nice selection of illustrations (from period artwork)  as well as documentation and recommendations about how to build your own shoes.  If Italian Renaissance is your period, it's very worthwhile.  I found this courtesy of the Italian Showcase; it's the page of Francis Classe who, with Sarah Lorraine, has a costume that is currently being featured on the page.