This is my apartment this morning
All that white stuff on the far right? More white linen. As usual, too much fabric, NOT enough space.
I finally drew up an actual plan for William’s shirt:
I based on the Nils Sture shirt and the 1535 boy’s shirt in the V&A (the first one in PoF 4). I am cheating slightly– instead of making the ruffles as separate pieces, it’s going to be an integral frill, mostly to save time. Finding references for shirt cuff styles was a pain (the Germans apparently did not like removing their wams/waffenrocs) but I did find some.
This is in more of my favorite cambric linen from Burnley and Trowbridge, although this batch weirdly had some weaving errors and some unbleached/natural linen slubs, so it wasn’t quite as nice as the last batch I got. Still, to get anything similar in quality I’d have to drop 2-4x at Britex so I’ll live.
The embroidery features pelicans in their piety, as he is joining the order of the Pelican and therefore can wear that restricted symbol!
I originally planned on basing this on the pelicans in a voided piece in the Cooper Hewitt collection– the pelicans are a detail in a wide band with harpies and urns. I did a test of those and these simpler pelicans from a brick stitch piece and thought this was better for the small scale
The bottom two were my test motifs, and then for the actual band I invented some twiddly things based on a band from the Jane Bostocke sampler, as Having Empty Space Is Not Period.
The cuffs will also be embroidered, but probably with something simpler and geometric.
In other news, my black Spanish 1520s dress is done other than the hem.
It has very full sleeves gathered into cuffs, mostly inspired by this sketch
If I had thought of it earlier I would’ve done cuttes but by the time I wanted to it was too late and I’d need to disassemble the whole sleeve. Getting it in there was enough of a pain I really didn’t want to redo it.
It’s trimmed with black satin ribbon and the cuffs close with the same ribbon with reproduction aglets. I also got a repro 16th C Spanish dragon pendant to wear with it!
The hem is waiting until I make the farthingale, and I’m not yet entire sure how I’m going to do that…..
Not Another Costuming Blog 