My Fellow Students

My fellow students: a wonderful group of talented 20-somethings, so around my son's age. We're mostly pretty quiet as we concentrate on our projects, but not when we go for a Friday after-work pint to the pub across the street! One has offered to dye my hair in a modern pastel shade (think: purple? pink? blue?) and the others agree. I just might do it...

Sofia 

Emily

Alex 

Alice

Kas

Jess

Minnie

Shirt, Doublet, Hose (more serious...)

In the past two weeks I did also finish three toiles (shirt, hose, doublet) and the 'real' linen shirt. A few pictures:

Toile for shirt 

The real thing, in Irish linen

A bit of simple running-stitch embroidery
at neckline and other stress points
for beauty and reinforcement

Doublet on the stand - I was pretty pleased with it!

Back view of James in entire outfit.
Only one sleeve - these are just pinned on
for the fitting

Front view - jacket a bit too long,
but the rest fit well!

Oops - will have to add a bit to those canions (lower leg).
That's what fittings are for!

Guess what this is?

Mystery object.... 

Yep, you're right - a codpiece.

Pieter Breugel - check the two fellows in the foreground, left and right... 

 I had an idle moment last week and so put one together, just to see. Starting point:

Mine joined a few others on the wall (held up by sticky-tack):

James - the model for whom I'm making the outfit and was in for a fitting on Friday, looked a little startled when first presented with it as part of the ensemble, but then got into the spirit. I still have to add the fastenings to attach it. It does look at little more in place with doublet and hose!

Tudor Trunk Hose (a.k.a. 'balloon pants')

We spent the last three days - Thursday, Friday, Monday - making up the toile for Tudor 'Trunk Hose' (google images with the term if you want some fine examples, or check out this link: Historic Tudor Dress). Our goal: some version of this:

We started with a pattern that was just a page in a book - and ended up with an architecturally amazing structure (see the last part of this post) which must rank among the most uncomfortable clothing in the world. What WERE those Tudors thinking?

Some of the steps, with pictures:

Drafting the pattern (from The Tudor Tailor): enlarging the pattern from its small-grid model to the appropriate size, using plain white paper. Lessons learned in the process:
a) it is unnecessary to completely grid the paper, just mark the sides accurately and then measure strategic points;
b) any problem in the model is compounded when it is enlarged;
c) trust your common sense in following the pattern, because patterns can be wrong!!!

Pattern to be enlarged, on paper
(unnecessarily) gridded by me

Great to have a roomy work-space.
On the left my new Swedish friend Sofia.
We live close so we walk home together after class every day.

Next, cutting out the pattern pieces in muslin to make the toile used for fitting - and practice construction, of course. It's amazing how many things a person can and (if you're me) do do wrong the first time.

The luxury of unrolling meters of fabric!

Finally learning to use carbon paper...
trace the seam and eyeball the seam allowance.
They don't teach you that in Home Ec! 

Layer #3 (of 4, not counting linings) is padded with quilt batting -
works better than one imagines, putting darts into quilted fabric.

Here's the part about the pants that blew us away: the "balloon" section of the pants are held out NOT ONLY with a) quilt batting and b) numerous darts to make it "pouf", BUT ALSO... what is called a "sausage" in the pattern but we dubbed a "croissant." See the picture below: 

"Croissants" waiting to be installed.

These are a 21" square of batting, folded into a triangle once, then rolled up croissant style. Where does it go, you ask? Well - tucked inside the bottom of the ballon, with the points ending under the crotch and the fat part of the croissant filling out the outside of the leg.

Balloon part of hose (top) with tight-fitting under-hose (bottom)
separated by "the croissant" (inside view of hose) 

As I said: what WERE those people thinking? what part of the male anatomy is supposed to be enhanced and made more desirable through padding THERE?

And then try doing the stitching, even on an above average home-sewing type of machine:

I used a size 18 needle, and even then had to resort to
hand-stitching the most difficult parts.

But eventually everyone powers through - here is Pauline modelling the first ones finished, by Jessica (another Canadian):

Jessica and Pauline

My toile version looks really quite terrible - it's really the worst-constructed garment I've every made. But it will do the job of fitting. And I'm hoping my second one, in good fabric, will be better!

Costuming Course: First Three Days

Goodness gracious - I had anticipated working hard, and I was right! I'm loving it and learning lots.

The College itself is on the 2nd (CDN 3rd) floor of an old building on Market Street in the city (CDN downtown) of York. The interior space is well-lit and genteely shabby, a sort of old-world version of the space we Yellowknifer fibre-folk occupy in the Guild building. There are essentially two rooms - one for "the main work" and the other for sitting/ironing/serging/changing, with a little bathroom to one side.

The little sign behind which lurk great things

The drafting and cutting tables

More dressmakers dummies and the library

The wonderful Pauline Chambers in our seating area

The essential sewing machine is a Bernina 1008 - not exactly new but a powerful little workhorse that seems to be able to take the procession of users and hours of sewing it's been subjected to over the years. I suspect that it's mostly metal, judging by the way it sounds when operated at high speeds - and this is good!

My work station with the Bernina 1008. Note the great windows!

There's also an industrial overlocker (CDN serger), which sounds like a jack-hammer when operated at full speed (probably the table lights rattling), but whizzes fabric through like a hot knife through butter:

The serger - it's a five-spool Singer
operated with on/off buttons under the table,
not unlike a table saw.

There are seven of us in the course (the eighth withdrew the week before the course), the other six all young women in their 20s, is my best guess. One is from Sweden, two of us from Canada, the other four from England. So far it seems that the variety of backgrounds we bring to the work has us working at pretty well even pace - more details about that work in a later post. I'll just add a picture of Emily, who was the first finished with a toile (calico or unbleached cotton mock-up) of the Tudor men's smock we completed on day 2:

Emily in her smock

So judging by the first three days my basic day is going to look like this: morning routine at home, walk a half hour 'to the city' to arrive shortly after 9:00, work until well after 6:00 with a few breaks, walk home again, cook a meal and relax a bit, sleep. I'm loving it so far!

More on nuts and bolts of the actual costume work in later posts.

Settling in in York

I had anticipated that my four days of settling in would not involve any fibre-related explorations, but how wrong that proved to be...

From a fabric store around the corner

Obviously buying buttons in York will be easy-peasy!

From "Buttons at Duttons" haberdashery... 

Ok, now to actually settling in... I arrived on the hottest day on record, July 1, and made my way via "the tube" from Heathrow 4 to London King's Cross, where I caught a train to York. That this plan would work was not a given, after all - it was so hot that all trains to Leeds (not that far from York) were cancelled because track integrity could not be guaranteed in the heat. Wow! 

The City of York is beautiful, preserving in its large core a swath of history that goes back 2000 years to the Romans - Constantine visited in 305 - but also bears evidence of Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Normans, and just about every English king on historical record. It's hard to do justice to it in a blog post by a neophyte (moi). You'd best google it, to see all the wonderful buildings and the narrow cobbled maze of streets, but here are a few teasers as I've encountered them.

My best route to The College - options are walk, cycle, bus - takes me through Monk Bar (gates in the medieval city wall are called "bars"), underneath a museum dedicated to Richard III.  It's part of the city wall - York has more intact city wall than any city in England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_city_walls), much of which can be walked, providing magnificent views of the city centre.

Monk Bar and Richard III Museum

City Wall Walkway

Especially the magnificent Minster, York's pride and joy, can be seen to advantage:

View of the Minster from the Wall

There will be more for me to do than I'll have time to do it - The Fairfax House, the Jorvik Viking Centre, The Quilt Museum (Kaffe Fasset exhibition!), churches, numerous other historic houses and buildings, a boat tour on the Ouse, maybe an outing to the North York Moors National Park. I've also checked out a whiskey tour on the Scottish island of Islay, but though it has me licking my chops, so to speak, I don't think I want to spend the roughly $2,000 it would cost at this time (the dollar/pound exchange is not favouring dollar owners).

At the moment settling in, for me, is less about sightseeing than getting oriented - so that's mainly what I've been doing for the last four days. I've located the College, figured out the route to get there, discovered where to get what groceries (and what groceries there are - every country is different), how to do that without a car (talk about reversion to grad student days!), set up my morning coffee routine, did laundry etc. etc. My room is in a turn-of-the-century duplex on Stockton Lane, rented from retired hotelier couple Wendy and David and their lovely old golden retriever Lily. My room overlooks the back garden, which is nothing short of magnificent:

Classic English garden beautifully tended by David

Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. the course starts -- yeah! Tonight I'm having a drink (ales - York apparently makes great craft ales) with a woman named Martha Welland, who did the course three years ago and sings its praises. I've not actually met her yet, but I know that she is now a freelance milliner of note (http://www.stagejobspro.com/uk/theatre-professional/profile/martha-welland), specializing in period headwear of all sorts for theatre and film. Amazing how things go, in life. My first drink with a milliner!

"Acupictores": "Needle Painting" in the Middle Ages

In Utrecht I visited "Secrets of the Middle Ages in Goldwork and Silk," the Catharijneconvent Museum's amazing exhibit of medieval liturgical garments. The two images below have been borrowed from the Museum's website for the exhibition. I encourage you to visit: the English link gives you the basics:
https://www.catharijneconvent.nl/english/the-secret-of-the-middle-ages/,
the Dutch more detail:
https://www.catharijneconvent.nl/bezoek-ons/tentoonstellingen/Het-geheim-van-de-Middeleeuwen/. Certainly the photos speak all languages. Coincidentally, I had just taken a goldwork course via the Embroiderers Guild in London Ontario, so it was especially exciting to see these amazing works.

Goldwork is a form of embroidery using - you guessed it - gold threads, or more accurately some sort of fibre wrapped in some form of gold to make various types of gold thread. This gold thread is laid on the fabric and stitched down (called "couching") in the desired pattern. For example, in the detail below, the pearls (also couched) serve to edge gold thread couched with red, further set off by blue embroidery.

The chasuble below is an example of the various richly brocaded fabric imported from Italy (as all expensive fabric seems to have been and still is - see my post on the Utrecht fabric market!), to which was added a goldworked "Koelner Borte" - the band with embroidered images. Do check the Catharijneconvent website and hover your mouse over the images to enlarge these beautiful details! Apparently a full set of such liturgical garments, four in all, could cost more than major renovations to the building, or a new organ, and were counted among a church's most valuable possessions.    

There's an interesting twist to the role of these garments in religious history. During the iconoclastic riots in the Protestant Netherlands much religious art was destroyed - stained glass windows, statues, paintings. The garments, however, could be and were more easily rescued. Because they were not really used until Catholicism was once again openly permitted (mid-19th century), they did not wear out and disappear as they had in other countries. And so the Netherlands has one of the largest collections of medieval religious garments in Europe.