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The Caid Crown Tourney Blue and White Reconfiguration! August 20th 2008
Ok, I knew there was something wrong when there was no reaction to it. That's unusual for me- not garnishing a response. After the event, on the way to the airport, Brianna turned to me and asked why I had cut it that way. I responded that I did it because of a future project I was planning-the Tudor project - I wanted to see if the style would work for me (that style being the straight cut waist of the doublet). Brianna gave me the finger. She waggled it at me. "Never, ever do it that way again" which was preceded by a short, poignant criticism, detailing everything that was wrong with it, with valid reasoning and accurate historical contextual evidence. Oh, and ways to correct it too. On the freeway- doing 70- and she was driving... waggle, waggle, waggle. I took notes. Lot's of mental notes (which is a difficult task, as my memory is shot). When I got home I went to bed. But the next day I spent quality time with my pattern and made the necessary adjustments to it. Then, I promptly forgot about it...I got lost in other projects (see the Middle Eastern from the Coathardie Pattern Fiasco). So, on the 20th of August I decided that I needed to reconfigure my blue and white failure into something usable. Didn't take long (maybe 5 or 10 minutes) before I realized that it would take less time and less work to just build a new doublet. Ok- I didn't actually have a concept or design. I only had a limited amount of time (it was the 20th and the event was on the 23rd). One of those nights I had available to me I had to teach (clients and students pay the bills in my modern life). I was, for all intents and purposes, screwed. Not really, I'm just being melodramatic- you know, for effect. I had corrected pattern. I had enough material to pull it off. I just needed to organize my time. It was a busy week in the modern life- but you know the old saying "If you want something done correctly in a timely manner, give it to a busy person" So, I had a nice off-white brocade. It
didn't match the brocade of the former doublet or the pants, but I was
hoping people wouldn't notice. They didn't. I was happy. I took my pattern and cut the fabric fearlessly! It's amazing how coffee, confidence, and high energy music can make one fearless. I still had very little idea on what I was going to do, but I was pretty confident that it would come to me. I grabbed my Tudor plans and sneaked a quick peak to gain some inspiration. It came and I slashed like nobody's business! Nice long longitudal slices in the fabric. Why? In her instructional mode on the way to the airport, Brianna mentioned that the way I had the original constructed made my otherwise long, lean , and beautiful torso look short and fat. So, nice long longitudal slashes. This is the picture of the back with the marks for cutting. There are a total of six slashes in the back and 4 slashes in the front. Me and and my Gingers made short work of that brocade, I tell you that! Ok, so I am using the construction I learned from Caelfind (Heather) in Darach. She is truly groovy and I am sorry that I haven't made it down to Darach in quite sometime to visit... So I cut the fashion fabric, cut the lining (my blue dupioni) and the interlining (some poly/cotton mix which reminded me vaguely of linen, but the heck- it wasn't going to be seen and it didn't stretch). I sewed the lining and interlining to one another because I didn't want to deal with to many different pieces of cloth. This turned out to be a mistake- not a fatal one, but it would have been better if I had done it differently. The began the process of decoration.
This is a picture of the "guts" of the
shell with the epaulets laid on to be pinned. You can see the blues strips
of dupioni where the slashes are. All this, of course, is on the wrong
side of the fashion fabric. The strips are approximately 6 inches wide and
two inches longer then the slashes themselves. I learned an important lesson with this one! To the other side is a picture of how I originally conceived it looking like. Didn't look to bad to me on the table. In the picture I tacked together were I was going to bead it. Alana makes beautiful necklaces and she had some spare large fresh water pearls which I used originally- though I didn't have enough, and so the center of the slash is actually beaded with lapis lazuli. It made for a nice contrast in very Caidan colors. Perfect for Crown tourney! Tacking the edges together worked out really well. As it happened I ran out of time and so I had to bead it in the car on the way to the event. With the tacking in place, I knew exactly where to put the beads, making for a very nice even spaces, making beading exponentially easier. After all the pretty work was done on the fashion fabric, it was time to assemble the whole thing as per my normal Modus Opperandi. Thanks to Caelfind, I have a very systematic, logical, and easy way to construct these things. I've done it many, many times, and the process never changes. Sew the shoulder seams together or both the fashion fabric and the lining. Lay out the fashion fabric, wrong side out, place the epaulets (as the picture above indicates) good faces together, lay the lining on top of the conglomerate (wrong side up), pin the armsyce with epaulets and run a line of stitching. Verify the stitching and then pin the collar the same way around the necksyce. Pin the opening in the front and sew the entire lineup the front around the neck and down the other side. Flip it right out in and iron it down pretty sew the side seams by matching fashion fabric front the fashion fabric back and the same with the lining. Run a long seam, iron it flat and turn it right side out. iron it down again and attach the picadillis.
I have my own way sewing the picadillis. I used to sew them directly to the garment. That took a lot of time in pinning, trying to match everything up, pinning it into place, sewing it down, just to find out my fabric was shifted and now my skirting was all funky looking. So, one day I decided I wanted to attach a band to the inside of my doublets so that I would be able to attach my hose or venetians to my doublet without having string all over the place. It only made sense to me to sew the skirting to that band and then attach the whole thing to the doublet. No use in dealing with more pieces of cloth then necessary, right? Little did I know that was going to cut down my time dramatically in attaching the little buggers! Not only that, but when sewing the lining down at the end, it was much easier and cleaner looking to sew it to the strap the it was to try to sew it down to 14 over lapping piccadillies! Now, I have discovered a new love for covered button, but I didn't have time to cover ten more buttons, so I had to make use of what I had. Enter the old doublet. It had brocade covered buttons. The problem was the buttons were done in white brocade, not the off white brocade of the new doublet. I made myself a cup of Irish tea. Not that I like Irish tea. It upsets my tummy. But the buttons- they loved the Irish tea! I turned them the practically perfect shade of off white! So, I through it all together let it hang, pin the lining down, sew the button holes, and gather all the parts to sew the next day in the car. It took the whole 2.5 hours and several hours at the event to finish the hand sewing I needed to finish. But here is the finished product:
I got comments this time. Lots of them. All good! And I even got a compliment out of Brianna, So I accomplished my two goals: make a good go of correcting the previous failure and make Brianna proud. Yeah me! 10/19/08 So, for GWW XI, I decided I needed to
rework the Blue dupioni pants as well. So I ripped them apart and re-cut That was a mistake. Not replacing them, but replacing them with the quickie version. See, you can buy pre made buttons all set to be covered. But what I didn't realize until later- when they began to fall apart- thin fabrics don't hold the buttons as well as thick fabrics. Dupioni is, of course, a thin fabric. Therefore, somewhere at GWW, there is the top of one of my covered button still onsite. Sigh... Now, once I can get pictures of the finalized form, I will post them. 11/22/08 Well, I did some more work on this outfit. mainly what I did was add eyelets to both the doublet and the pants. I couldn't finish the Henries in time for Calafian Anniversary, so I cleaned up the Blue and White a bit- some minor repair work and solved the gathering problem I was having with the doublet in the back. Did you catch it in the picture above? It resolved its self simply by me adding a few eyelets and anchoring the bloody thing to the breeches. I'm just upset I had to use cording instead of ribbon. Feh.
I figured I had that band at the base for some reason :-) Aren't they pretty? I think I'm finally getting proficiant!
And here is the version for the pants. Amazingly enough the holes almost matched up perfectly! I was very excited! 11/23/08 Many, many thanks go out to Henri le Juif
was kind enough to snap a couple of photos from the feast of my little
Frankestienian reconstruction. The original photos can be viewed on his
website: http://www.rgbar. I abhor, truly loath, taking posed photos, much preferring to be photographed in my element, and Henri did just that! Thank you again, my friend!
Ok, so seriously- which would you prefer: A or B?
A B I now understand very clearly what all the finger waggling was about that day in the car- at 70 miles an hour, on the freeway to the airport, in Sand Diego, on Sunday evening. Thank you, Brianna, for being patient with me. Sometimes it really does take a deftly wielded sledgehammer to get through my skull. Things I have learned from this Project: 1) When slashing the fashion fabric, I learned, amazingly enough, that it adds like four inches to the over all width. Why? Because the slashes spread open (as the should). So I either have to tack into place the various slashed panels to the rest of the garment, do multiple small slashes instead one long slash, or I have to add in a control piece of interlining. This control piece is a piece of non stretchy interlining cut to the pattern which is used to ensure the shell holds it's shape. So, create the shell to look exactly the way you want it to look. that includes all slashing, finishings, embroidery, trim, beading- everything! And then sewing the control piece to the shell to ensure that the shell goes back to it's original cut shape. That way your pattern will still work. And if you need to anchor anything to something more substantial than your fashion fabric- silks can be too thin and brocades have a bad habit of unraveling at the cut ends-you can. Trigger or duct cloth works really well for this, but any tight weave, non stretchy material will be just fine. 2) Slashes are grand! But if you want them to puff- to actually puff- it not only needs to be wider than the opening, but longer too. Gather in the edges, sew it down, and the pull through the opening on the right side of the fabric. The way I did it gave no end to the amusement of all of those people who tried to puff my slashes on the top and found the bottom puff disappears! 3) The pattern is almost perfect. It hits exactly on my waste- which means it has a tendency to ride up a bit if I'm sitting or moving about, so I have to keep pulling it down. Since I have the band to attach it to my pants, I really need to do it, or I need to modify the pattern to make it hit just below the waist line, which may solve the issue. Not sure if it will, so maybe just adding the points will be sufficient. That's more my style anyways! 4) Adding points was sufficient! I recommend it to anyone!
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Well, this is the original blue and white I
did. I put it together for Leadomus of Thebes tourney in Calafia to match
the pants I made to get attention at CP Prize (When I was making the GWW
XI announcements at opening court. If you don't get the crowds attention
in the very beginning, something as boring as an event announcement will
put the crowd off, and probably set the tone for the rest of court. it
worked like a charm!)
I
slashed the doublet and bound the edges in off white light cotton
broadcloth. I then sewed strips of blue dupioni to the inside of the
slashes, closing off the opening created by the slashes. My goal was to
create puffs and not to just line the slashes. It almost worked...
them. I removed the brocade racing stripes, leg bands and waistband and
replaced them with dupioni counterparts. I also replaced the original
covered buttons with new blue dupioni covered buttons.
