We're going to Coronation on Saturday, so I'm going to show the scarletworked shirt in the A&S display (since we had to give the EK A&S competition event a miss). I've put together five pages of documentation, which with illustrations might lengthen to 8 pages. I think I've managed to justify my choices concisely, and I've treated it, as with my previous SCA documentation, like a slightly-less-formal journal article. Am not generally worried about my documentation; I know I can do research.

Am not entirely certain how I'd like to display the shirt. I do have a dressform, but that sounds kind of creepy for a man's garment, plus I don't want to transport it. Shall probably just lay it out on the table.

The lady in charge of the display has encouraged me to include some of my spinning in addition to the shirt, though. Might bring along the teeny thread I made, and maybe one or two balls of yarn, if I can whip up documentation before then.

thirteen_letter is so lucky that this shirt is too big for me, else I might be tempted to keep it for myself. ;)

Have all the pieces together again, having done them in a second iteration of the insertion stitch seams--though I have yet to do the actual interlacing. Have also done most of the buttonhole stitch outlining of the shirt in general, so there's really very little left to do on this shirt.

I think it looks fantastic.

Progress is obvious, at this point, for which I'm grateful.

Have finished and attached the new collar panels to the rest of the collar. They look a little strange up close, but less so from a bit further away. Still berating self for making the original too small. Will get photos of that once I attach the collar to the body. Have also sewn the shoulder seams that weren't in the original, and inserted the neck gussets.

Have mostly been putting together the sleeves, though. As you can see, at right, I've taken liadethornegge's suggestion for hemstitching, though with a variation. The very wrist end of the sleeves had a bit more fabric left over, so I've edged it a little differently to minimise the visual impact by drawing out threads at 3 and 7 threads away from the embroidery, but only hemstitched the outer (doing both looked kind of funny--ought to have drawn two neighbouring threads--learn and live). Like I mentioned earlier, each cuff was too long, but rather than unpick Holbein stitch or cut the embroidery, I've just folded the edges under to keep structural integrity. It's edged in buttonhole stitch.

I'd thought to gather with an obvious thread because the original Pemberton portrait has little speckles where I assume the cuff joins the sleeve. Gathered the ends of the sleeves by stitching to the count of 6 threads, then pulling the fabric to be the same length as the cuffs. Tied off, ironed--and whipstitched the cuff over the gathering thread because it didn't look that much like the original. I think the stitching is just decorative, now, rather than functioning for gathering. Oh, well. Also whipstitched the sleeve to the cuff on the inside, too, as this particular cuff doesn't fold over to hide the "wrong" side, like the cuffs do in the Warwick shirt. My embroidery is too reversible to hide the wrong side.

The underarm seam I'd intended to be interlaced insertion stitch, as I'd heard from the WMS, who have sent me a .pdf of their accession records that is quite descriptive of the shirt in question. Have made the stitches too close together for anything more than single-herringbone stitch to look good, though, which is somewhat awkward and cause for unpicking my attempt at double-herringbone without the interlace, but it's still pretty shiny.

Have sewn the ties on a little prematurely, just to give you an idea what the finished sleeve will look like. I'm rather happy with it, even if I've deviated from my plans by rather a lot at this point. May need to call it something other than Warwick, as I've really not used many of the Warwick techniques for it.

I've finished all of the constituent pieces that go into the shirt. The front/back of the original was all one piece, but in order to use my fabric more efficiently I cut mine slightly differently.

Have tracked down the original at the Warwickshire County Museum, and requested more information than they list on their site. Pending what they tell me, I may not edge the individual pieces before sewing them all together, as "interlaced insertion stitch" does the job of outlining the seams pretty well on their own. Also, need to consider whether thirteenletters would want the bobbin lace of the original, or whether I might finish the front opening differently.

Oh, how spiffy is this? I took liadethornegge's advice, drew the fourth thread out from the embroidery, and hemstitched the edges. The result is, indeed, quite sexy.

As of Sunday, in Knoxville and still rather addled by flu, I was rather afraid of cutting into the linen on which I'd embroidered, for fear of disrupting well over a hundred hours' worth of work. Well, I got over it. It wasn't until I got back to NJ that I really figured out hemstitching, but I have since finished the collar, and it looks absolutely lovely.

Have hit the snag/fuckup for this project, however. In embroidering, either I'd gotten my measurements a little strange, or I'd simply figured someone else would solve the problem, as I seem not to have appropriate sizes for each of the pieces. The collar, e.g., is probably around 10/12 cm too short to go comfortably around his neck, while the cuffs are each about that length too long. (Yeah, I don't know what I was up to.) Am solving the cuffs by just tucking the excess under and not worrying too much about it, but I may have to add length to the collar by some means. Whatever I manage, I'm sure it'll eventually look like a feature. ;)

Back all those months ago when I was doing up scarletwork collar and cuffs, I'd been anticipating that incorporating these reversible pieces into a shirt would be someone else's problem. Silly girl--ought to have known better and thought this through!

Because the design I'd worked with was from an English miniature (done by Holbein, but never mind that) I figured I'd go with the Warwick shirt, since Jane did up such a gorgeous version. She used a folded-over strip to secure the pleats at the collar and cuffs, though, and her collar/cuffs weren't reversible. Dilemma. Never having had to cope with reversible collar and cuffs I can't quite get my head around how best to get them to play nicely with the rest of the shirt.

Am probably going to do as Jane did, and finish each individual constituent piece of the shirt, complete with outlining, then attach them all together with that sexy-looking insertion stitch. I may be able to get away with adding the collar/cuffs with less visual jar that way, but that still leaves the problem of how to gather the collar and cuffs. From quite a bit of squinting at the source miniature, am now thinking Mrs. Pemberton's collar wasn't entirely reversible, while the cuffs seem to have been, so that's most unhelpful to the problem at hand.

Worst case scenario, I think I've left enough space between the motifs to fold over if I have to, but it'll be close at best.

ETA: Lia did something similar to what I'd like to accomplish for the collar of her Sture shirt, but I'd have to get my head around it.

Bother. I may need to make two extra ties, too.

Having installed an aiglet on the lace today, I've put my finished dress to the test by wearing it about the house. The lacing went much, much more easily with the aiglet, and will take about half the time as sewing the dress up would. The lace and eyelets look handsome together, though the seam no longer extends straight down my front (oh, well) but curves around the breast a bit. The top of the lace doesn't need much in the way of securing, so I've just used a slip stop and tucked in the end; the loop left makes me want to hang something pretty from it, but I think that's the Viking aesthetic coming through.

Tried to get a photo of the finished seam, but it's dark as twilight out (it's lashing down rain) and none of the light in the house (or the flash) is good enough to get good focus...except for maybe the task lights, and they're down in the cellar for the great hole.

Lots of work, hopefully worth it.

Over the past several days, I've turned out about 1.75 m of tubular card woven red cord for a dress lace. I used 12 Z-threaded cards with two opposing strings in each, turned 180º forward each turn, with a warp twined left to right.

I like the result. The cord is has both good tensile strength and a bit of stiffness. The weave is rather elegant, though a bit too tiny to capture with the not-great macro setting on my Kodak. The look is surprisingly modern, nearly like rat-tail cord, but the coefficient of friction in my cord is higher, and it doesn't slip so freakishly easily as rat-tail cord, which I consider definitely to be a feature.

To anchor the bottom of the cord inside the dress, I've used a slip knot that tightens toward the end of the cord to form a stable loop, and passed the working end of the cord through that loop. This created a rather easy way to fix the cord without worrying that a knot would pull through the eyelet and cause social difficulties at awkward moments (because Murphy's an Irishman, and if there's a poster child for sod's law, it's me).

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to lace the dress the whole way up with the new lace, yet, as the knot at the end has been difficult to get through the eyelets; I've already broken one of my lovely bone needles trying to poke the knot through this many holes. Am hoping to drive down to South River* tomorrow to get a metal aiglet that will fit the tip of the cord, so that lacing the dress will not, as I feared last night, take twice as long to lace as it did to sew it shut every time.

Overall appraisal--should be great, with the right technology.

*Grannd Companies is advertising etched silver aiglets for extremely reasonable prices, and they should be less than an hour's drive from here.

Have finished all 71 hand-whipped eyelets, and the dress laces nicely. Not entirely certain how I ended up with 71,* but that's what fit along the opening, and I can't complain too much. During test-lacing there was only a slight bit of gapping between the two bottom-most pairs of eyelets, which may simply have been due to having laced the very bottom backwards; shall see if this corrects itself with truer lacing. Otherwise, devreux' recommendation of cm spacing was spot-on, as the edges butt nicely together. The lacing itself lays a little more regularly than is shown at right; I was dodging cat claws, as I hadn't shoved the excess lacing into my dress to keep it from enticing catly mischief.

...which brings me to several questions.
1. In order to lace myself in comfortably--i.e. thread the lace loosely for 10 holes, then tighten for support--I'm going to need about 180 cm of lace, which is probably around half a metre longer than I really need for the finished lacing. Does everyone else just use a shorter lace, or do you hide the excess somewhere (and how, for bog's sake)?
2. What's the best way to anchor the stationary end of the lace?
3. catlins2busy, you'd mentioned top-down lacing being more useful for those of us who are well-endowed; was this just in the later-period dresses Her Excellency was making?
4. Also, I need to figure out the optimum lace itself. I've done my practice lacing with a bit of scrap cotton 2 mm in diameter and 2 m in length, and while it will stay laced without even knotting the top pair of eyelets together, it does not come undone easily at all. Want to experiment with a lace done up from the same thread with which I whipped the eyelets, and from Crowfoot et al., I've come up with the idea to do a tubular card-woven lace, with 12 cards threaded each with 2 threads and given a 180º turn each iteration. Has anyone experimented with cord-making this way, or does everyone use either finger-looped cords, or boughten string?

*I have a theory that involves the sheer mass of my rather abundant cleavage bending the fabric of space due to gravitational pull, but it remains just a theory.

The fact that I haven't finished the eyelets for my red dress has been preying on my mind, but I wanted to do it correctly, and this meant a little bit of research.

I'd designed the dress to have straight seams, following the c. 1395 Kent funeral brass of Lady Cobham, but the funeral effigy of the Countess of Warwick, dated c. 1370-1375, is a little bit closer to the date from a number of the other elements of the dress, which broadly date from 1325-1365. I'm under the impression that a lot of the mid-14th-century dress interpretations out there are Warwick-based--and I tend to prefer less widely-disseminated interpretations of dress (see my latest 10th-cen West Norse outfit!)--but I have a good photo of the effigy and can't complain too much, I suppose.

Catherine Beauchamp's dress is spiral-laced, with the same number of holes per side (26 visible per, but her arm is in the way of some). The bottom-most and top-most pairs of eyelets are parallel, while the rest of the eyelets are staggered evenly up the front closure. I think I'll be sewing the eyelets in the manner described in Crowfoot et al.'s Textiles and Clothing, offset about a cm apart though I've never been exactingly precise in my other spaced closures.

Any suggestions on how best to know what size to make the eyelets, though?

(Note to self: this is starting to look an awful lot like the dress on the effigy of Philippa of Hainult. Maybe attempt the headdress, too?)

From the warp threads left over after I made my latest card woven band, I started on a pair of socks in yellow and a couple shades of red/orange, as I've mentioned in stickn_with_it. Am doing these in Oslo stitch like a lot of my recent naalbound projects. Having tried the Uppsala heel variant in my last pair of socks, I think I'm going to go back to the York heel. Not using the needle my Dad made me, this time, as the stitches are tiny (deceptively not so in the photo, but they are).

Am debating how high to make these, once I turn the heel and stitch up the ankle. May try knee-high socks like the pair from 12th century Switzerland, even if they need cross-garters to stay up.

So it would seem I don't suck entirely. I have absolutely no idea what I was doing wrong yesterday when I couldn't get this pattern to work (that part of the band not pictured, but it was oogly) but I've gotten it through several repeats and am rather happy with the design. Intend in the finished project, as per the top of the turning diagram, to add a border at the edges.

Still haven't decided whether I'm going to do this up in yellow and blue, like Shelagh did, or in onion yellow and madder red with a black outer edge, to match the colours in my heraldry and coordinate with the trim I already have on that apron dress, which is black and the bottom edge embroidered with thin bands of yellow and red. That decision will affect whether I dye with indigo tomorrow or wait for a bit on that. Yellow/blue may look better on a different piece, now that I think about it.

Managed yesterday to finish all the facings for my cotehardie/GFD, so it's back to the order it was while previously being worn. Am going to take a break from it before I tackle the many, many eyelets I'm intending to sew--especially as I need to wrap my head around the predictability of the diameter of a finger-looped cord from a particular gauge of thread. I figured in the meantime that I'd update one of my apron dresses with card-woven trim done in woollen yarn I'd spun and dyed, instead of the as-bought string I've been using.

While going through a re-enacting contact's lovely gallery of card weaving several months ago, I happened across a band she'd done from one of Egon Hansen's designs. I'd found a similar motif from an extant bit of brocaded card weave a couple days ago from (IIRC) R.A. Hall's Book of Viking York, which I've sketched out on squared paper, and had wondered how to go about it without the brocaded technique. Not havng access to Hansen's book any time soon, I've been extrapolating from her scanned band, from advice from Phiala, and from experience with a similarly-flavoured motif how I might use both changes in turning direction and twists around the z-axis to achieve smooth lines in the finished product. I've mapped out a handful of turning sequences so far, and have managed to correct my pattern fairly well--all I have to do is manage the reversal of the motif as it repeats, and I should be set. I hope.

I am, unfortunately, at that awkward intermediate stage well beyond the "basics" theory pages every other SCAdian lady seems to have webbed, but not entirely experienced enough to draft easily from extant pieces. I can double-face easily enough, but smooth lines are hit-or-miss unless I've checked my work against someone else's. Luckily, this pattern is only five cards wide (seven as Shelagh's done it), so I can practice in cotton until I have a corrected pattern. Having taken Phiala's Snartemo-drafting class has helped get my head around the theory, though I've yet to understand precisely how one might determine the threading pattern from the design, rather than basing the design on the threading pattern.

Am intending to do up some more blue yarn with indigo I'd gotten from Lettice's Still Room, now that I have the necessary reducing agents. Having done this once before under guidance (admittedly back in 2003), I'm not entirely willing to do this indoors if I can help it due to the smell, so I may sneak down to Trenton and use one of the outdoor furnaces at the Barracks. If it goes well I may eventually see if I could talk "Uncle" Wayne into a natural dyes demo, possibly next spring, though were that to happen I'd have to add usage of dyes in the American colonial period to what I know of usage in the European Dark Ages.

I've been making some slow progress on reworking my red linen dress, especially now that I've finished the drywall mud and paint in the bathroom closet. The two new panels are in, and are apparent in their newness only to me, according to Himself. I've done finishing work on all the seams that don't require facings, hemmed the front, and have pressed the neckline and front openings as prep for sewing the facings. The front hem hangs as low as it used to, from what I can tell, so I'm quite happy.

Am partway through sewing in the neckline facing--have finished the line of stitches closest to the opening and am currently partway through the median-line of stitching, and hope to finish the outer edge with a hem stitch tonight, as this is the technique I used for the facing when I first made the dress, and is what I'd been able to document from the late 14th-century London textiles I saw last year.

Shall only stitch the inner- and outermost edges of the facing for the front opening, I think, and possibly to either side of the eyelets, as I've seen that technique in silk for woollen ground for that period in London. Even small eyelets may get in the way of a third line of stitching through the midline of the the facing, like I had when I was sewing the dress closed. The extant eyelet facing on which I took notes had eyelets 22 mm apart, which is rather wider than I anticipate using, but I think that may be a logical difference between linen and woollen fabric, or possibly between inner and outer layers of clothing.

Once I get the facings in it'll be wearable again as per its previous state when I sewed myself into it. This state, hopefully, is not far off.

Hindsight is a bear. So, in assessing the wear and cut damage to my red cotehardie/gothic fitted dress (what's the current jargon? And I thought the switch from Hiberno-Norse to Hiberno-Scandinavian was awkward....) I've decided that had I the wherewithal to have switched around the neckline a bit, I could very well have altered the dress from a sew-up to a laced style with minimal effort. Oh, well.

At least I have discovered the weirdness that was going on underneath the neckline facing at the front seam while I wasn't looking: some of the fabric had begun to fray, but I imagine that's because it kept pulling in odd directions as I worked the dress on and off. Have also sewed up a couple seam pops at the arm gussets behind the shoulders. Those had come undone a bit also during the awkward off/on procedure, I think. May try reinforcing those later with some topstitching (or whatever else I can think of) to keep that from happening in future.

Doing a quick comparison of the well-loved dress to what I have left of the original fabric, the red seems to be wash/light-fast, so this process will be slightly less painful than anticipated. Shall iron that fabric out soon. May have "probably" enough to switch out the two long front panels as planned. Once I unpick the seams from these two panels, I'm planning on using them to cut pattern pieces instead of the original toile, as I lost a considerable amount of weight after the toile was made up. If I can find the muslin, too, I'll trace out the pieces for additional future use.

Am figuring on using approximately the same seam allowances as in the sewn-up version, as the centre front was already turned back and faced and fitted rather well (except for the one odd spot where we had the "puppet show" thing going on [if you weren't at H3M for Pennsic, you probably don't know what I'm talking about]). May try pulling the right side seam in about 3 mm to see if it prevents aforementioned weirdness.

Unpicking the facings at present. Shall save them for reuse, as they're still good and not showing much wear at all.

Have finally gotten through my memory card's worth of photos and have stored my Pennsic XXXVI photos here.

No, devreux, you're not the last to complete the mass Pennsic infodump. I've been terribly lax. Admittedly, we came home to an in-progress series of house remodels (one of which had taken the shower out of commission until today) so I've had to cope with that, too, but I've been loath to reacquaint myself with technology. Except for the air conditioning.

This year's war was stormy and wet, with periods of humid heat. Irreparable frizz engulfed my head. Some people spent Sunday to Friday being damp. Luckily, in the 2.5m-tall tight canvas A-frame we finally purchased this year, smarriveurr and I stayed pretty well dry, barring the ambient humidity. The double-high air mattress did fail, though, and spectacularly, so that we ended up sleeping sitting up later in the week. Ick.

As far as classes went, I took a few dance classes, a few other artsy ones, and teaching seemed to go well (Himself was remarked to that I "knew my stuff", which I ought after a Ph.D. I'd think). Did much more socialising this year than I have in past years, though this may have been because I got myself stuck out of camp during several of the frequent rains. Watched an awful lot of rapier as thirteen_letter was in the Queen's Rapier Champions' Tourney &c. Met a bunch of wonderful people. Drank enough to be silly.

Good war.

Am trying to decide whether 18 figures over 10 pages is long enough of a handout for an hour. Bibliography for said handout, referencing only the images I've presented and not including tracking down references for everything I might say from my 40-plus pages of Ph.D. bibliography, is already a page in itself.

I've a 3-isch page outline, which, in my experience extemporizing from an outline, for me roughly equates to an hour's lecture period with time for questions. May want to provide myself with FAQ for question time so that I'll be able to get those out of the way quickly--though the only question I'm fairly certain I'll get is about lavatory/sanitation facilities.

And, yes, I have the answer to that.

Have been spending what I feel is really an inordinate amount of time revising this class on Viking houses, but I'd like for it to live up to my usual high standards in lecturing. Nearly all my illustrations are scanned, but I keep switching their ordering in the handout. Thus, I keep having to switch sections of my outline, which is slowly making me think I ought to just print it out, cut the sheets into bits, and edit it that way, but that wastes paper and slowly erodes my sanity.

I think the most logical way to present the information is to divide it into "spatial organisation" and "construction techniques." The former will deal with a quick look at typical settlement layouts and more in-depth information on typical floor-plans and building/room specialisation in both rural and urban contexts. For construction techniques, I've got some good schematics of rooves, walls, interior divisions and the like from very certain sites, but I'm actually really dreading having to present that information. Shall have to think of an intelligent way in which to drive home the fact that the availability of this kind of information is the exception rather than the norm, and that a fair bit of the information I have for house elements more than 30 cm or so above ground-level is entirely conjectural. I just know I'm going to get one of Those Students who goes off on a half-hour tangent about door jambs in Novgorod because the Saga of Billy-Bjorn Nedbjornsson said they had purple cows on, and I'm going to hate myself for weeks.

...and if any of you come to my class and reference the Saga of Billy-Bjorn Nedbjornsson just to annoy me, so help me you'll answer to the Wooden Spoon of Righteous Justice.

It's 35° here today, with enough humidity to keep my hair under a veil lest I scare the neighbours with my Medusa-like locks, and what am I doing? Ironing several metres of linen. I really am dumb, sometimes.

Have made definite decisions that I'll be doing a spiral-laced green cotehardie/kirtle/whatever (thank you so much, devreux, for basically letting me think out loud at you). I seriously doubt, however, that I'd have it finished before Pennsic, so I think I'll just work up some alterations to the garb I already use to update it for this War. I'm going to do something somewhat uncharacteristic for the garb-addicted and not stress myself out trying to finish an entirely new hand-sewn dress, even as fabulous as I'm sure it would be, in less than a month.

Ooh, I could make a new tunic for smarriveurr....