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!

Research on Sewing Kits

A few years ago, inspired by some research done by pearl, I assembled a plausible Viking-era sewing box and wrote about it here.

A few days ago, I was thinking about sewing kits (i.e., assemblages of sewing equipment kept in a special container) again. This time, it occurred to me that there are pages about period sewing equipment other than pearl's sewing box project (which can be found here) and it might be a public service for me to list some of them.

For example, this site features research by Jennifer Baker, including photographs of period textile tools, for the late Anglo-Saxon period. Here, someone whose SCA persona name is Coblaith Muimnech has written about assembling inexpensive medieval sewing kits to use as gifts.

For anyone who wants to assemble their own sewing kit and document it from scratch, Karen Larsdatter provides links to a wide range of images of sewing and photographs of actual surviving Early Period sewing kits and sewing equipment here.  Over here, there is a sketch and other information about a 7th century C.E. Anglo-Saxon box that might also have been used as a sewing kit.

It's important to remember that sewing kits come in all shapes and sizes, and probably always have done so.  For example, Penelope Walton Rogers notes, in her book Cloth And Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, AD 450-700* that it's possible to deduce that women in early Anglo-Saxon England often wore soft bags at their waists from the number of archaeological finds of small lumps of sewing materials--needles, balls of thread, etc.--found close to the skeleton between waist and thigh level:

Clusters of objects are often found between the waist and thigh in women's graves, generally on the left-hand side, and sometimes as low as the knee or calf. These were probably suspended from the belt, either individually or in a bag, and are therefore termed 'girdle groups' or 'purse groups'. ... The bags themselves may be represented by ivory rings, 100-150 mm across, which formed a frame for the bag mouth; or by a variety of iron and copper-alloy rings, which may be from smaller, sock-like bags. Other metal rings, however, are clearly for the suspension of objects such as keys, while further examples seem to be part of the general bric-a-brac kept in the bag. This bric-a-brac includes broken brooches, clews of thread, textile hand-tools, beads, amulets, glass cullet, and all sorts of objets trouvés.

Page 134 (internal citations omitted). So at least in early Anglo-Saxon England, "workbags" are period.  Some of these bags apparently had rings to control the opening.  I think such bags worked somewhat like this kind of medieval bag design.

After the Middle Ages, intact and partially intact sewing kits are more likely to be found.  Eighteenth-century kits were likely to be assembled in a fabric pouch or wallet, as with the example of a reenactor's kit and research here. Such kits were called "housewives" or some variation of that word and were still being made and used as of the American Civil War; a photograph of a surviving housewife may be found here. World War II servicemen in the Canadian army received a strikingly similar kit, a picture of an original appears here.

How sewing tools were kept during a particular period doesn't really tell us much about the history of clothing, but it does tell us much about how sewing was regarded, how valuable the tools were, and who was doing it.  In later periods, for example, military men were issued sewing kits because it was not practical for them to have someone else repair their clothing in the field so they needed to be able to conveniently carry sewing tools with themselves.  One wonders why Anglo-Saxon women carried their textile tools with them, and whether Viking women did keep thread and sewing tools that could not easily be hung from brooches in special bags, baskets, or boxes.  It would be hard to believe that they did not, but until a seamstress's equivalent of the Mastermyr box is found, we won't know for sure.

EDIT: (7/21/2013) I was wrong about the absence of Viking sewing box finds. I just learned from Carolyn Priest-Dorman that there are archaeological finds of Viking era sewing boxes. At least one, a wooden box with iron bands, was found in the Viking era cemetery in Cumwhitton, Cumbria in England. A copy of the journal in which an illustrated article about the box was published may be downloaded here.

* I looked up Cloth and Clothing in Anglo-Saxon England on Amazon to confirm that I'd gotten the title right before tracking down my copy to reproduce the quote. When I did so I learned, to my sorrow, that copies are selling on Amazon Marketplace at prices ranging from $325.00 USD to $900.00 USD. Apparently, Cloth and Clothing in Anglo-Saxon England is already out of print; I paid about $35.00 USD for my copy when it first came out in 2007. Sigh.

Free PDFs from the Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has made out-of-print museum publications (such as out-of-print catalogs) available on line as downloadable PDFs here, on their "Met Publications" page. The page is set up to permit the interested researcher to search for publications in particular areas of interest. 

The Met's Costume Institute primarily features costumes from the 18th century to the present. If you are interested in those eras, the Met Publications page may be of interest to you. I have found several lovely catalogs with full-color photographs of gorgeous 18th and 19th century gowns and a few 18th century men's suits, and there is at least one catalog featuring costumes from the Ching Dynasty.  Have fun!