It has been a ridiculously intense month; I'm finished on the shirt (post on that soon), and on to the ruffs that are due June 15th or so.
Here's the link to our Gardiner's weblog that has pictures of the suits being made by Eleanor and Olivia, pictures of the embroidered shirt being made by Esther, and rather boring pictures of me doing endless drawn-work. Yes, I designed the embroidery for the cuffs and collar of the embroidered shirt; it is an amalgamation of several bands of embroidery from the period. Yes, you can copy it if you want. :)
Swear, I *swear* there will be a whole post on the shirt soon. Meanwhile, here's a pic of the pleating:
This is for the collar of the gathered shirt. The pleats are 1/4" apart, and would be starched and set like a ruff. It's 4.5 yards of handkerchief weight linen, cut in strips and butted together, with the drawn-work stitching carried over each of the butted seams (as in, step 1: Pull threads, step 2: Sew seams together, step 3: Do drawn-work stitching along the entire sewn-together length).
More tomorrow.
Here's the link to our Gardiner's weblog that has pictures of the suits being made by Eleanor and Olivia, pictures of the embroidered shirt being made by Esther, and rather boring pictures of me doing endless drawn-work. Yes, I designed the embroidery for the cuffs and collar of the embroidered shirt; it is an amalgamation of several bands of embroidery from the period. Yes, you can copy it if you want. :)
Swear, I *swear* there will be a whole post on the shirt soon. Meanwhile, here's a pic of the pleating:
This is for the collar of the gathered shirt. The pleats are 1/4" apart, and would be starched and set like a ruff. It's 4.5 yards of handkerchief weight linen, cut in strips and butted together, with the drawn-work stitching carried over each of the butted seams (as in, step 1: Pull threads, step 2: Sew seams together, step 3: Do drawn-work stitching along the entire sewn-together length).
More tomorrow.
Comments
That being said, linen-work, especially in ruffs and shirts, was being done by women, so considerably lower in cost than the silks and gold thread that goes into tailored clothes (which would be made by men). The thing to remember is that materials are expensive, even the best linens, and labour is not. The time spent is less important than the materials used. Yes, only the richer people wore ruffs with lace and fancy clothes, but in London, linen ruffs with little or no embroidery or lace were worn by anyone who could get the money together to pay for the linen.
Hence this shirt being only a second or third (or tenth) best piece of clothing for Lord de laWarre. Does that make sense?