Simplicity, McCalls, and Burda costume patterns and are they period? Or at least Close? Part 2 – Butterick
So iIm not as wordy about these, but they’re not patterns that really inspire words – Butterick’s ‘Historical’ patterns leave MUCH to be desired.
Butterick 5440
Decent and would work for Renaissance faires. Not so much for SCA. Less ornate, maybe take off the tabs and change up the sleeves and it might work for tudor. The ruff and cuff patterns might work, but really, not so much. Not even the headdress, unfortunately.
Butterick 5733
All of these little pretties would work. The armbands and glove thingy would have to be made better for armor, but for looks, it’s all pretty nice. Just steer clear of the fringes… 
Butterick 6196
Make a different chemise, and this would work for a commoners outfit.
Butterick 5371
All would work for pretty little accessories I love accessory patterns!
Butterick 5008
The top two views would work beautifully for a woman’s chemise as well as a mans shirt – make it longer for the chemise, and maybe add some blackwork around the collar and cuffs for both men and women to make it more beautiful 
Butterick 4827
Absolutely lovely – nice for early period. The seamlines aren’t correct but it’d look period from ten feet away, so who cares?
Buttterick 4669
The top right one isn’t even close, but the rest, if you get rid of the little beard at the bottom, would work nicely for bodices. The one on the bottom right has a bit too much lacing, but if you like it, you like it. Try spiral or ladder lacing rather than crisscross. It’ll look better and it’s soo much easier to deal with
Butterick 4574
Take the hideous collar off the undershirt and avoid the hat, and this isn’t a bad mens outfit. Not great, but none of the menswear from these pattern companies are very good..
Butterick 4486
The first view would work if you didn’t lace up the front, you tie it. The others, not so much.
Butterick 4377
Cloak is nice. Not sure about the dress – it’s pretty, and it might work.
Butterick 4254
The top view corsets would work for tudor and elizabethan. More for the elizabethan, though. The bottom two are victorian and totally not period.
Tablet Weaving is FUN :D
I finally learned to tablet weave last night - nice simple design. I’ve found a number of them, but my favorite is the ones by Eqos on Deviant art… Here they are, because it’s hard to find them all in her gallery. Now, i’d totally suggest going here http://eqos.deviantart.com/ and going through her galleries cos she’s got tons of goodies
Simplicity, McCalls, and Burda costume patterns and are they period? Or at least Close? Part 1 – Simplicity
in Patterns
as garb, patterns, SCA, tips, Tudor
Sometimes, people are like me – I can’t make something decent looking without some kind of pattern. You should see my sideless surcotes… And I had help with those…
Now, if you’ve got Margo Anderson, Lynn McMasters, Period Patterns, Reconstructing History Patterns, AlterYears patterns, patterns sold at http://www.patternsoftime.com (there’s some good ones here I can’t find the actual manufacturer’s name) or Mantua Maker Patterns, You’re in pretty good shape. Most of their patterns are really good ones, and mostly historically accurate.
For those out there that are like me and mostly broke so you can’t afford the really good patterns, or just starting out making garb and eventually want to draft your own, here’s a bit of pattern critique for you, and ways of making the pattern at least moderately historically accurate if it’s not close already. These patterns are all from Burda, Simplicity, McCalls, or Butterick.
Pattern the First
Simplicity Pattern 2589 – The dress and Pattern 2621 – the Underpinnings.
I’ve got this one for starting. It’s pretty damned close to historically accurate – i’ve got some other plans for fabrics for the dress, and the chemise from 2621 is hard to fit correctly, but it’s beautiful. I made a different style of hood, more softly curved because it looks better on me, but even the hood is pretty accurate – most ladies would have had only 1 hood in either black, or possibly white, that they used with all of their outfits, rather than making a bunch of french hoods to match. I’d suggest, on the corset, rather than sewing on the tabs, making them part of the main peices so if you want to bone them and make them work for their real purpose (helping to support the farthingale), you don’t have to fight with unneccesary seams. Also, to make the straps work with the dress, you’ll have to fuss and fidget with them.
Pattern the Second
Simplicity pattern 3782.
More of an Elizabethan than Tudor, but the sleeves have got to be altered – most Elizabethan dresses have much more fabric in the sleeves than this does. I’m pretty sure this’ll work over pattern 2621, but I’ve never found this in a size that would be easy to scale up for me, being a 50-40-50 and most patterns stopping at 40-30-40 (really annoying, because i like the red dress in this pattern), so I don’t know for sure. Other than the sleeves, and the fact that it’s totally not ornate enough to be Elizabethan, it’s a good start.
Pattern the Third
Simplicity pattern 3809
the green skirt would work. The bodice, if you want that style, would work okay. You’d really be better off attaching the skirt to the bodice, but it would work. The chemise? Oh, Hell No. The sleeves might be okay, but the neckline? in the era that this was supposedly styled after, the neckline wouldn’t be gathered with string. It would have been gathered to a band. Unless you’re doing italian ren, then it might be okay. But make it so it’s not gathered to an elastic band, or with string, and make it gathered to a rectangular peice and it might be okay.
Pattern the Fourth
Simplicity pattern 5582
Again, the bodice would work for a commoner. So would the skirt, but the skirt’s not full enough to be for anyone with money – The more money you had, the more fabric you could afford in your skirts. The chemise is yet another Oh, Hell No. Using the right fabric, (mostly linen and wool) this would make a good start into a commoners wear, especially for camping in the SCA.
Pattern the Sixth
Simplicity Pattern 5359
The main view of this pattern – vest, skirt, cincher, pants – is reasonably accurate for a Gypsy type (from what I’ve been told) – The skirt could be made with tons of different fabrics (as many as there are gores) and still be accurate. And the cincher is cool – just one piece of fabric, with boning in it, and it’s all cute and stuff
Pattern the Seventh
Simplicity pattern 3623
So they call this a scottish dress. PFFT. Make the bodice and skirt out of the same material. Make the chemise floor length and kind of dressy. Then make the front so it ladder laces about an inch behind the front lines. And you have something VERY close to venetian Ren. Lose the hat, though. It’s pretty aweful, and there’s tutorials out there for the Tudor Flat Caps that’ll make the construction of this hat pattern look horribly difficult.
And now for the Men’s wear – Much less of this than women’s wear. Something about it being only women who dress in funny clothes? At least, according to the major pattern companies. Ugh. Totally not true – I have a friend that does German Landskenecht. And he’s flamboyant about it. It drives his wife crazy, so she made him figure out how to make it all on his own.
Men’s Pattern the First
Simplicity Pattern 4059p
Get rid of the hat. No, it’s aweful, get rid of it. Do NOT EVER USE IT! It’s terrible. The coat and jerkin are okay, as are the breeches. Do resist the urge to run out and buy boots for it, though. The undershirt – take off the collar. As it is, the collar is totally not acceptable. If you can make it into a stand-up collar do it, otherwise, make it so the collar doesn’t show out the top of the coat or jerkin.
The breeches would do better gathered into a very small cuff or bias tape, but it’s not necessary.
Men’s Pattern the Second
Simplicity Pattern 3519
Good – ish, for men’s wear. Don’t lace it up the front, though. Make ties straight across from each other and tie it closed if you want. Also resist the urge to put trim around the v of the neckline, unless it’s very narrow and you use it all the way around the neckline. Could be altered to have the correct stand-up collar very easily, I think. The yoke’s not exactly period, and you may have to trim down the size of the bottom of the shirt – it may be waaay too poufy to fit under a doublet.
Don’t just read this and make the patterns how I think they might work – Do research! RESEARCH is Key! This is a guide, not a definitive and comprehensive look. And really, if you like it, do it. Just be aware that you may get comments from some of the nastier people out there. I also don’t have all these patterns, nor have I made them all. I’ve seen the Gypsy pattern, and a friend thinks it’s close, but it’s not where my interests lie, so make sure you’ve done your own research and figured what you want out for yourself.
Tudor Dress – Front lacing?
So, I use mostly portraits to research costuming – it makes it so I’m sure of how it probably looked (artistic license makes it impossible to know for sure), and it’s fun to make a dress in the style of my favorites.
Something I’ve been working on lately is fastening the dresses – being a SCAdian, and going to a lot of camping events being single – means either having to figure out how to fasten everything in the front, or run around the campsite yelling ‘Can someone lace me in?’ That would be fun, but I can imagine the remarks ‘How bout I unlace you’ would be the most PG 13 of all of them.
So I’m making my pair of bodies front-lacing, but that doesn’t help if I have to lace my dress up the back. You see a lot of Venetian ladies with front lacing dress, but very little about where and how the dresses of the Tudor era fasten. I believe that they laced up the front, and here’s my evidence.
If you look at the Study for the Portrait of the More Family, you’ll notice that some of the ladies show what looks like lacing in the front. These ladies were reasonably well-to-do, and would likely have had servants to help them dress, yet their dresses fastened in front?
The portraits of Mrs. Pemberton, Lady More, and Jane Seymore show what look like pinheads on the side of the front of their dresses – could this be a ‘stomacher’ panel pinned on one or both sides to cover up lacing? I believe so. Also, look at the sittow portrait of Katherine of Aragon – She’s got what looks like her chemise, then another undertype dress on that gaps at the top, then either a stomacher over it, or another dress. to keep the undertype dress closed to that point would have probably taken lacing.
So, I’m totally going to use front lacing, and a stomacher panel with hook-and-eye closing it on the side (which are period) to avoid poking myself with pins.
-
- Mrs. Pemberton
-
- Lady More
-
- Jane Seymour
-
- The study for the Holbein portrait of the More Family
-
- Detail 1 of more family portrait
-
- Katherine of Aragon
Wow.. It’s been a busy couple weeks
So, it’s been a couple busy weeks for me. Mostly because I started running and didn’t stop.
I did finish the embroidery I’d started a while ago for His Excellency, the Baron of Glymm Mere, well, a bit of it. I forgot to take a picture, but I’ll wait til after Urslemas when i get the tunic back to put more pretty’s on it.
I’ve also got a project I need to work on, for a snood type thingy for Her Excellency.
More tomorrow, and it’ll actually be about some things that are useful
Crappy news, but something okay in the middle.
So after two years of fighting an infection in her knee, my sister-in-law loses her leg tonight. It sucks how quickly that they gave up on her – it’s been the same damn thing for six months – a round of a Vancomycin, a week of being okay, a week of trying to get the doctor to listen to her about the infection coming back, another round of Vancomycin. It’s awful. And now she’s losing it. 
But on an okay note, this weekend is the Glymm Mere 12th night Orphans day – we’re going to have an allthing and it should be fun – I’ll be working on the Baron’s tunic embroidery, and planning a set of blackworked (only done in pink and blue with ribbons and slash and pouf) Venetian Courtesan bloomers I’m super excited!
Still playing, but MERRY CHRISTMAS
My beliefs are… unusual… but regardless of whether or not I’m a Christian or not doesn’t matter at this point – Merry Christmas is a sentiment meant to convey best wishes on the birthing day of a very important, but not necessarily proven, personage.
This is the time of year to remember the teachings, rather than what certain portions of the religion want everyone to believe are the ‘True Facts’. In the text, it basically tells you to try to be a good person, to not judge people based on what you see or think you know, to try and be kind no matter what.
To me, that is the important message behind Christmas, not whether or not it’s a birthday based on a ‘real’ person, but what someone thought was a good idea. I think it’s important, especially in our current economy, to be as kind as possible to everyone because pretty much everyone is in the same boat.
As a neat aside – there’s been a whole ration of people paying off layaways for strangers in places like wal-mart and k-mart. How ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. Those kinds of random acts of kindness make me think maybe we’re evolving as a race. And if I had the extra money, I’d do it, too, because I know most charities spend half the funds given to them on administrative fees – in the case of paying someone’s layaway, or paying for the person behind you’s groceries, you pretty much know where your kindness is going, and you know it’s going to who you intended it to go to. And even better – it’s going into your own community, helping to boost someone who may just need a helping hand up out of a bit of a tough spot.
I love random acts of kindness!
Newness
So, Gotta figure this out so it’ll be a bit before i manage to do a good post For now, i’m in the Society of Creative Anachronism (www.sca.org) and this’ll be my own little bit of chronicling for my stuffs –