The Tudor Lady's Wardrobe Pattern is now shipping!

At long last! The Tudor lady's Wardrobe Pattern, with patterns for Smock, Kirtle, Gown with three sleeve styles and optional train, two partlets, two coifs, English gable Hood, French Hood, apron, and sash.

In addition to being the most complete Tudor pattern package ever published, it includes our largest instruction manual yet: 194 pages, and over 300 illustrations.

Click on this post's title to see details and order.

I'll be taking a much needed break for a week or two, and then starting on the Tudor men's pattern.

Faux (don't call it fake!) Fur

The Tudor Lady's pattern is almost ready, and I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about fabric and notions.

One of the strongest identifiers of the Tudor woman's style is those long, wide sleeves, turned back and lined with rich fabric or lush fur. But where do you get the fur?

You can, of course, use real fur. I don't, personally, choose to use new fur, which means I know next to nothing about how to find or buy it. You're on your own on that one.

I do occasionally use second hand vintage fur, figuring I'm not doing any more damage to an animal that's been dead for 50 years. However, the chances of finding a vintage garment large enough to cut these sleeves is highly unlikely. That leaves us with "faux" fur.

To find faux fur, go to your local Big Fabric Store. Then go home and cry.


Okay, sorry, but the truth is, most retail fabric stores have awful looking fur. It's there for making Halloween costumes and toys, not for looking like the real thing. For that, you'll probably have to go online.

One of the best faux fur companies available to the consumer is Donna Salyer's Fabulous Fakes. This company started by selling kits to make a close copy of a high quality fur coat.They've transitioned to ready to wear, but they still sell yardage, although they keep it tucked away on their website. To find the yardage, go to the "Home and Throws" section, and then look in the list on the left to find "faux fur fabric".

Now, these fabrics aren't cheap. In fact, they're $150 a yard, and you need 1 3/8 yards to line the gown sleeves. But they do look, well, fabulous. Edited to add: I had a link to a discount coupon here, but it's been pointed out to me that they may not appreciate me handing it out to you all. I'll try to find out if it's okay.

For those with lesser budgets, I'm Stuffed Fur has a huge selection of all kinds of fur, from lime green Wookie to some very real looking animal furs. They deal in job lots and sales, so if you want something, buy it now. You can also call or email them and ask for something specific.




Fur isn't a requirement. You can line the sleeves with fabric instead of fur. Or, you can go the opposite direction, and copy Jane Seymour's gold bullion embroidered sleeves:

Just for the fun of it, I used my pattern drafting software to plot and measure that embroidery pattern. Then I priced gilt bullion thread. To do the sleeves and the band of matching trim around the neckline would cost $700.

It makes $150 a yard look downright reasonable.

Not Your Usual Sewing Machines

Some fun sewing machines, working and not:

Steampunk!

The Crafty Chica does her thing

This is the same model as my main machine...in LEGOS. How awesome is that?

Is it wrong that I want to use these instructions on a sewing machine?

Perfection Is the Enemy Of Good

Okay, I confess. When I last posted, I promised a Big Juicy Post. then I got busy. So busy, in fact, that I managed to forget which of several juicy possibilities I'd promised you. And then the whole project jammed up against "But I promised a really great post, I can't settle for something moderately interesting"...and, well, here we are months later, with no posts at all.

I'm going to try to change my mindset, and just post a couple times a week, with what ver I think you'll like. Possibly, some of these posts will end up being fabulous, but it's okay if they're just moderately useful, cool, or amusing.

Nobody's Perfect

It's been too long!

Those nasty taxes have been taking up too much time. I promise I'll have a juicy new post soon, but in the meantime I wanted to update my last post, about English gable hoods:

Turns out, everything I said about them was pretty much wrong.

When I made my first gable hood last year, I based it on a well known source. I thought at the time that the odd engineering, with the flared front, seemed awfully complex, but any costumer knows that people in the past did weird things for weird reasons. So I went ahead and made it that way.

Then I started work on creating my own version for the Tudor pattern. You saw my previous conclsusion. But when it was time to actually make the final graded version of the pattern,I just could not come up with a method that would create a consistant pattern that wouldn't drive my customers to drink.

I kept thinking this couldn't be right, so I decided to take another look at the original source material, and the notes from my researcher, the wonderful Kimiko Small.

The first thing I noticed was Kimiko's statement: Something I do want to point out for both redraws is that the narrow band/frontlet ‘E’ is attached to the under structure close to the face, and hides the edges of the padded band RS. I have seen several recreated English hoods where the narrow band/frontlet ‘E’ encloses the face inside a box, which it does not do.

Now, I swear I have read every word of her research report several times. So why didn't I remember it when it actually came time to make a hood?

Part of the problem was a drawing I was following. It does show the frontlet sitting on the outer edge of the hood on one side, but on the other side of the face, it's done an Escher-like twist and is on the inside of the face! So it's no wonder I was confused.

I wondered if attaching the frontlet to the inside edge, rather than the outer, was part of the problem I was having. I cut a new one and made yet another manila folder mockup. It was better, but the difference in width between the back of the hood and the frontlet still caused the front opening to flare, making it twist.

So I cut another frontlet, the inner edge of which exactly matched the back piece. Voila! No twisting, no torque, and the whole thing sat properly on my head and hugged the sides of my face the way it should. The hood understructure is simply a set of flat panels, and could have been made of thin wood, possible shaped into a curve with steam.

So, I take it back. It is like wearing a box on your head, but a very carefully tailored, well fitted box covered with silk and velvet.

Mad as a Hatter!

If you remember your Lewis Carrol, you know that March hares are as mad as hatters. So here's a hat post, in honor of the last day of March.

I've been working on the pattern for the English gable hood. That's the goofy one that looks like this:



The Gable hood is a surprisingly complex bit of engineering. If you make a simple "roof" shape, the thing looks like a cardboard box sitting on your head. The trick is to cut the frontlet, the border part around the face, with a wider angle than the back piece, so that it flares in the front. But if you cut the frontlet too wide, the whole thing wants to twist and looks terrible. The only way to get this right is to experiment a lot.

One of the things I like best about working with CAD software is that it's so easy to scale drawings. Rather than make full sized mockups, I scale the pattern pieces down to 1/3 size and print them out on card stock. Then I tape them together to test the patterns. This works best for things that are going to be stiff when finished, such as hats.

This has come in handy with all the iterations of the Gable hood I've made. Every little change of angle affects something else, resulting in many trial versions. Here are some of them:



After futzing with them all day, and littering a 20 foot blast radius around my desk with schnibbles of card stock, I think I'm satisfied with this one:


And that's just the undercap. There's still a box piece that fits on the back, the lappets, and two different veil styles. And of course, they need to be embroidered and jeweled.

If that's too much trouble, you could always go with the Margo's Patterns Deluxe Super Presto Easy Version:



What can I say, things get a little punchy around here when we're working hard. I'm not alone in this. Here's our General Manager, Doug, in what he says is a Tudor Baseball Cap:


Happy Springtime!

To make of sewing something attractive and cool with men of today and convince him of that he can sew without loosing him virility!

Maybe I should just post this one to Ingrish.com.