The Perils of Team Kit

Woke up on Sunday to find the sore throat and cough which has been creeping up on me again for the last week miraculously absent (possibly due to an overdose of Benylin which made me so hyper that I spent Saturday morning  running around like a mad thing before collapsing in heap until I woke up apparently cured. 

Anyhow, since I seemed well, I took myself off to North West Morris practice which was brilliant timing since they'd brought along kit for me to try. And it fitted! (Well, apart from the 4 inches I have to take the skirt up by because they've shortened the length of the skirts generally and not just because I'm a short-arse. Although mostly because I'm a short-arse).

The Gloriously Purple Kit

The blue thing is my new exploding laundry basket

 This is where things could get interesting since, because the kit belongs to the group, I have to adapt it without removing any material so that's going to be a heck of a hem and the frilly bit at the front adds a whole new dimension of awkwardness to the whole endeavour. 

At least the waistcoat fits (do not be mislead by the fit on Maud. Maud currently needs re-adjusting because, due to a combination of me changing weight and her getting bashed about in the cupboard, she is currently wider and shorter than me. Sort of me post cartoon piano-impact sort of thing)

Now I just need to get a 3/4 length sleeve black top, black tights, lots of long necklaces and put rubber soles on my clogs and I'll be ready to dance out. If only I could remember the dances...

I made a little bit of progress on my tatter coat for Border Morris too.

I sewed the first line of tatters onto the bottom edge of the black shirt I'm using as a base

Space Jellyfish

The tatters are just strips of different fabrics, about 10 inches long, cut with pinking shears in a desperate and, ultimately, doomed effort to stop them fraying. For this coat, I am using a variety of blacks with some forest greens (my first tatter coat was mostly greens with a little black)

The original Space Jellyfish

I'm doing things a little differently with this new coat. For starters, I've cut the sleeves off the base shirt instead of just shortening them

Sleevectomy

The pins are there to show where I'm going to cut the fabric back to so that I don't look like an american footballer. Although I'm quite fond of the sleeves on the green coat, I've decided to do away with them in this new one since a) I'm playing the fiddle and the tatters on the green coat have a tendency to try and get involved, b) I will have fewer tatters to cut and sew on which ties in nicely with c) I am lazy. 

In my defence, cutting the tatters is boring as anything and each row of tatters requires 2 rows of backstitch (I only did one row for each row of tatters on the green and, while not fragile, it is a little less robust than I would like) which I have to do by hand (my own fault for not being able to work a sewing machine with any degree of competency) and, unlike the green coat, where I used a green shirt and white thread on green and black tatters, this time, in my wisdom, I have for some reason decided to sew mostly black and dark green tatters to a black shirt using black thread and, just to make things a little more challenging, some of those tatters are stretch velvet. I hate stretch velvet. It's hideous to sew but it was cheap and so there it is. I can see me going quietly insane before I finish the second row. 

Speaking of which, the next step is to measure out and draw horizontal lines all around the shirt at measured intervals (I used a 4 inch gap on the green coat. I think I'm going to go for a 3 inch gap on this one so that the coverage is a little better and not just to up the insanity quotient) so that I can carefully pin on the next row of tatters in no order whatsoever. 

The reasons why I've been putting this off for so long seem to be coming back to me...

Maud

The Amazing Maud (The feathered thing on the windowsill that looks like a terrified bird/hedgehog hybrid is my Morris Hat...)

Meet Maud. She is my saviour and I love her to bits. (and she's also proof that I have managed to work the new camera!)

My history of clothes making can be divided into 2 eras: Before Maud (BM) and After Maud (AM) 

BM. 

I used to make clothes up from commercial patterns from the Big 3 (Butterick, McCalls and Simplicity). I had varying levels of success with these (mostly not much) partly due to the fact that, when measuring myself, I apparently swelled up half a size and grew half a foot and partly due to the fact that I was trying to achieve (at least in my mind) historical accuracy using patterns that weren't up for that at all (I particularly remember the pattern for C18th stays that had ease added into the pattern. For stays!).
Then I discovered 'The Medieval Tailor' by Sarah Thursfield (which I highly recommend and the author is very helpful too) and started trying to make more accurate C14th clothing using the instructions within. The shift went OK (They're supposed to be baggy) The fact that the cote went wrong is not the fault of the book (and I have made clothing using it since which has been fine) but due to me picking a peculiar material (a particularly friable, harsh, royal blue wool), not seeing the reason for finishing the seams properly and doing the whole thing in a hurry. The resulting item frayed constantly (you could track me round the camp-site by the trail of little blue threads), was so 'off-the-shoulder' it was practically on the floor due to a stunningly over-large neckline, hung strangely due to the fabric and, when my 6ft, big built, male friend tried it on as a joke, it fitted him perfectly; not ideal given that I'm a foot shorter than that and, while sturdy, am not huge. I washed it in hot water in a mad effort to shrink it and, contrary to all logic, the bloody thing actually got bigger and weirder and yet I wore it for a good 3 years. Then I applied to Kentwell and realised that I was not going to be able to get away with baggy clothing in the C16th century so I needed help.

Having looked through various web-sites and blogs, I realised I had 3 options: I could get a friend to fit a toile on me; I could get a friend to wrap me in duct tape to make a Dress Form; or I could buy a tailor's dummy. I cannot bear being touched so the first option was right out, as was the second given that someone would have to WRAP ME IN DUCT TAPE!!! This left the tailor's dummy and so I purchased Maud.

There can a couple of problems with using a tailor's dummy, one of the main ones being that pretty much nobody is completely symmetrical in shape like the dummy is, however, I, amazingly, appear to be close enough that it works for me and I can do little adjustments on myself (that is, to the clothing while I am wearing it, not to me physically) due to the fact that, despite being a hobbit in all other aspects, I have the arm length and general flexibility of an orang-utan. (I always knew it would come in useful one-day). The other main problem is that even modern dummies appear to have busts stuck in the Fifties. Maud was seriously pneumatic when she arrived which doesn't really fit with that lovely cylindrical Tudor shape. How then, to Tudorise her? Well, I had a saw...

Bilateral boobectomy

Yes, I sawed off her boobs (much to the horror of the neighbour who was in the garden and saw me in full operation.). However, now there was a further problem. I needed some kind of breastage in order to get the correct fit. The answer was...

Breastage achieved. Kind of.

A retired bra stuffed with retired socks. It shouldn't have worked and yet it does. Finished the whole caboodle by covering all the evidence with an old IVFDF T-shirt and, there she was, my new accomplice in the world of fitted clothing.

Anyhow, she seems relieved to have been dug out of the cupboard and repaid me tonight by frightening the life out of me as I walked into my darkened room and saw a figure in the corner...

I have no idea why I named her Maud. She just looked like one.

The Great Clear-Out (With Added Cat)

Achieved the Great Clear-out over the weekend having taken advantage of the fact that my flatmate is abroad for the weekend and there was no-one left in the house to inconvenience except said flatmate's cat who did her best to inconvenience me. Every time I tried to put stuff on a shelf, I kept finding it had developed a sudden cat. The low shelves anyway. A point in her favour is that she doesn't jump very high (or at all if she can manage it). I also ran into problems while trying to untangle one of the nests of linen thread from one of my drawers (Note to self - stop chucking thread reels into random drawers. Put them away properly!) and cat decided that this was a great game purely for her benefit and my, already complicated, thread tangle suddenly acquired a feline component who miaowed piteously while I then had to untangle her too, swearing all the way.


Still, I have chucked out much, I have found items that I've been looking for for ages and have put them away in different places that I won't remember and, most importantly, I have sorted all my fabric, it is now easily accessible and I have set up Maud again (Maud being my tailor's dummy with adapted chest without whom I would still be making sack-like clothing for someone 3 times my size and tying it together with belts. Not an ideal Tudor look...).

I have located and rationalised all my re-enactment accoutrements (mostly chucking my incredibly badly made and uncomfortable first pair of C15th boots of dubious authenticity and my disintegrating machine-made latchet shoes that have done good, if hard, service); I have untangled, tidied and gathered together in one place all my needles, threads, buttons, tape-measures, linen tape and whatnot; I have re-cycled my C18th petticoats and jackets (because, while the best I could do at the time, I can do far better now and would never wear them again through sheer embarrassment) and shifts of linen/polyester mix (similar) and have sent my off-the peg C15th kirtle to a more appreciative home and also bitten the bullet and donated 5m of a weird bright brown heavy wool (something mix I think) with a very pronounced twill weave to another friend. Gods alone know what he intends to do with it because I think it's the 1st fabric I bought when I got back into re-enactment at Tewkesbury in a fit of, well, I'm not sure what, but I remember it was a very hot weekend and I've hung on to it all these years. I didn't know what to do with it then and I've still no idea what to do with it now and I really, really don't have the space for it. No doubt, in the next couple of days I'll suddenly think of something that I desperately need it for no matter how unlikely it seems, but, ah well, tough! That said, I still have some other incredibly unlikely fabrics which were also presumably the result of bizarre early panic buying episodes including a strange dark blue wool/poly mix and what looks like a dark green upholstery fabric but these are less bulky then the brown stuff and so have a reprieve. I have also finally binned the teeny tiny scraps of linen and wool from previous projects that I have been saving as cabbage but am realistically never going to use. 

What is left, fabric wise, is a lot of linen (and I mean A LOT of linen. I buy linen as a reflex action in all weights, whether bleached or unbleached on the principle of 'you never know'. I don't think I'll ever need to buy any linen again. I still will of course...), some dark sheepy/poor black wools, various strange wools that I don't remember the reason for buying but for which I can see alternate plans developing, some mustard yellow wool that I bought back when I last did Kentwell before falling for the red/brown wool that I finally used for my kirtle but which now has Tudor kirtle written all over it, the gorgeous madder red wool I bought from the Tudor Tailors to make a petticoat and the super authenty various brown and grey russets and white say that I acquired from Historical Management Associates Ltd (I may have wasted quite a bit of time just sitting and petting these wools before putting them away). Plus I also have lots of water-damaged muslin and red Ikea linen (which I tried to bleach, somewhat unsuccessfully) for use in making up toiles and some lilac polyester and lots of green and black fabric scraps which are intended for, respectively, clog dancing kit and border morris kit. 

Anyhow, now that I'm sorted, I'm going to ease myself back in gently by finishing of my tatter coat (and redecorating my top hat and bells) for Morris. Not Tudor but easy and needs doing.

I have also bought a cheap digital camera for the purposes of documenting what I'm doing in the hope of breaking up the vast walls of text to which I am prone. First, however, I will have to learn how to work it. My relationship with technology is one of the reasons I'm so happy re-enacting so it could take a while...

WHY?

You probably didn't ask and almost certainly don't want to know but I need to kick this off somewhere.

I've been interested in the Border Reivers since I was tiny, mainly due to being born and bred in Northumberland in what would have been the English Middle March. I grew up with stories about various hell-raising relatives ( it's always fun to hear about family stealing sheep and generally causing havoc), the people they managed to upset (pretty much everyone depending on which branch) and the amazing Robert Carey who has been my hero as long as I can remember. Gradually my interest widened out from the borders to the rest of Elizabethan England through a suspect interest in Shakespeare (encouraged by my Mam who, at school, had portrayed such dignified Shakespearean roles as 'Falstaff' and 'Sir Toby Belch': it was an all girls school...) and an admiration of Elizabeth herself and other great characters of the time such as Walsingham, Lord Hunsdon and Bess of Hardwick and then I turned to re-enactment...

I started re-enactment very young and, I think, in an C11th group (I was young and getting to play with knives. I don't think much else penetrated. Apart from the occasional knife, obviously) then dropped out at around 12 when work at the stables and exams took over and didn't really give it much thought until my early twenties when I got dragged back in by a friend. Being as I was based in Scotland at this point, this resulted in me mostly doing early C14th and mid-C18th stuff (dates which, oddly enough, coincide with the Scottish Wars of Independence and the Jacobite Rebellion ...) with occasional forays into C15th for the Wars of the Roses. Far more importantly, for the first time I was now making my own clothes!

I may mention some of my earlier efforts in the future. Suffice to say that my first outfit was based on Meg of Wickham's get up in LWT's 'Robin of Sherwood' which I then followed up with various Butterick, McCall and Simplicity patterns, a lot of misplaced enthusiasm and a host of mis-sized, fraying seamed, works of wonky fantasy. Then I discovered the newly printed 'Tudor Tailor' and applied to live as a Tudor at Kentwell Hall and decided that, if I was going to make Tudor clothing, I was going to try and do it as well and as accurately as I could and do it all by hand (a decision that had absolutely nothing to do with my chronic inability to tame a sewing machine.)

I had great fun at Kentwell, and, on returning to Scotland managed to find a group re-enacting late C16th Border Reivers which I had a lot of fun with and got to wear my Tudor clothes a lot but then I moved to Oxford and the travelling up and down the country became too much. I also dance rapper sword with a group in Scotland and decided that I could travel up and down for either dancing or re-enactment but not both. Since rapper trumps everything in the universe, I started looking again at Kentwell; now a much closer prospect, however, I could never make the Compulsory Open Days due to dancing commitments (March is a bad month) and then it was a 'Early Year' (Kentwell changes the Tudor year they are portraying every year) and I have less interest in the Henrician stuff but, this year, this year is a late year (1578), I can make all the Open Days and I have a pair of hand-sewn, Elizabethan Kevin Garlick Latchet shoes which, due to the order going astray and not arriving until after the rapper decision, have never been worn in anger and they deserve to be: they're lovely. Anyhow, so I've applied. I may not get a place and I won't know till after March but, I need new Tudor clothing anyway (not least to use up some of the vast fabric hoard and it will finally lay to rest all of the little niggles that I had with my last outfit. The fact that I may not have anywhere to wear them is nether here nor there.)

The first step will take place this weekend when I finally get round to sorting out my room, disposing of all unnecessary stuff (I am, unsurprisingly, something of a squirrel) and locating all the copious fabric that I have secreted throughout the walk-in cupboard so that I can decide its fate (and work out if need to buy anymore. I always need to buy more. This is the way of the fabric hoarder)