I'm SO amazingly bored right now...
Nov. 29th, 2006 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guenievreSo winter tends to be the slow season where I work - I suppose most companies don't want to deal with the hassle of new office equipment during the holiday season, not sure. Either way, I'm bored enough I started uploading random pictures to the gallery on my website - and that says something right there, as I've said many times that I Am Not A Picture Person. Unfortunately, I think Nick has some of the better pictures on his computer, and he's at a customer. :( I should probably caption/label/reorder the ones that are up there, but that's not nearly as fun as picking and uploading.
My other alternative is to go fabric shopping - 12th night is coming up soon, and I have (still fairly vague) thoughts about new garb. Some of my thoughts are here - I rather like the embroidered red dress with dagged tippets and the blue/white outfit for Girard. Both of these outfits have some major weirdnesses, which is partially why I picked them, but on the other hand it makes it a bit hard to decide if and/or how to recreate them.
Background first - these scans are from a set of tapestries that were in the Paris 1400 exhibition catalog. My french is limited at best, but as far as I can tell they date from about 1400-1410; they were created in Paris, and they were either reassembled in 1890 or at least brought to the same place then, and there was some conservation work done on them in 1905. (BTW,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
intrepida, if you happen to read this and know of any resources where I might find more info on these particular tapestries, I'd do a happy dance. Or if anyone else has any info on them, for that matter, much happy dancing would ensue).
So on to the clothes - the red dress first. First, I've never seen dagged tippets before - if the tapestry was any later, I'd guess it was some artist doing something that was never actually done, but as far as I know from other artwork, all these styles of gown were being worn in 1400-1410 time frame (the proto-houppelandes, the gowns with tippets and the gowns with fancy sleeves). So there's weirdness #1. Weirdness #2, in the other tippeted gowns, the artist goes to great lengths to emphasize that they are Fur, specifically Ermine, what with all the little tails. Not so much on this one, so maybe it isn't fur? or at least it doesn't seem to be ermine. Wierdness #3, and this is even odder, is that all of the decoration on the red dress, and on the blue-and-gold dress next to it, seem to be placed on the diagonal. This, of course, may be entirely coincidence. But... maybe it isn't - to my (admittedly modern) eye, it suggests the possibility of bias, kind of like those crazy Spanish plaid cotes. I can/have made dresses that fit snugly, like these, over a supportive underlayer and yet had no method of closure (the pink dress of doom, my current blue one which needs a bit of tightening, but was a proof of concept anyway). But these two dresses depended on a certain amount of intrinsic stretch to the fabric, just because, well, let's say I'm not underendowed on top so getting into a dress that fits tightly under the bust can be a bit interesting. Doable, but interesting. Wool has this stretch... but silk or velvet? not so much. And I'm a SUCKER for luxurious, impractical fabrics - so the idea of a gown made of two layers of bias cut silk is REALLY TEMPTING. But I can't decide whether it's even conceptually period.
As for the man's garb? well, the hosen and the white garment are fairly straight forward, even if the sleeves are a bit interesting. but the blue garment with the dags and the possible bezants? IS BIZARRE. My first throught was "fancy cloak", in the same family as those others shown in the gallery. BUT... the pleats across the front seem REALLY regular, and looking at the man's left shoulder, it almost seems as though there are dags, similar to the ones on the right shoulder. That would kind of imply a sleeveless garment of some sort, maybe similar to an Italian man's giornea (though I thought those were later). Some preliminary web searching (as I said, I was bored today) also brought up the word ganache (yes, like the chocolate, which made googling interesting) as a possible word for an open-sided gown of this sort. So still thinking there too. This may reqiure more research than I have time to do before making the garb for 12th night!!!
On the other hand? I don't have time to do those quite as shown (embroidery!!), and I don't have fabric that I *quite* like for doing it with, nor have I found anything cheap. I do, however, have a fairly large amount of black wool with a gold honeycomb pattern on it, that's begging to be some interesting set of matching outfits - so appropro for 12th Night, as it's one of the few times we're really in the same place the whole time at an event (usually we hit events and wander in opposite directions, one or both of us are in armor, I'm in the kitchen, or something...) So maybe I'll do something with that instead. Either way, in order to do that, I need to quit doing what I've been doing for the past week, which is Playing Too Much WoW.
However... Playing Too Much WoW has been good to me. I made Sargeant in PvP, (those of you who are serious PVPers are probably laughing now, but considering that I only started doing PvP to get the mount discount, that was an achievement), bought my Swift Riding Frostsaber, and got the Sinew for my bow. Now, to kill the demons...
Yay! Husband is back from a customer! I can go home now!!!!
My other alternative is to go fabric shopping - 12th night is coming up soon, and I have (still fairly vague) thoughts about new garb. Some of my thoughts are here - I rather like the embroidered red dress with dagged tippets and the blue/white outfit for Girard. Both of these outfits have some major weirdnesses, which is partially why I picked them, but on the other hand it makes it a bit hard to decide if and/or how to recreate them.
Background first - these scans are from a set of tapestries that were in the Paris 1400 exhibition catalog. My french is limited at best, but as far as I can tell they date from about 1400-1410; they were created in Paris, and they were either reassembled in 1890 or at least brought to the same place then, and there was some conservation work done on them in 1905. (BTW,
intrepida, if you happen to read this and know of any resources where I might find more info on these particular tapestries, I'd do a happy dance. Or if anyone else has any info on them, for that matter, much happy dancing would ensue).So on to the clothes - the red dress first. First, I've never seen dagged tippets before - if the tapestry was any later, I'd guess it was some artist doing something that was never actually done, but as far as I know from other artwork, all these styles of gown were being worn in 1400-1410 time frame (the proto-houppelandes, the gowns with tippets and the gowns with fancy sleeves). So there's weirdness #1. Weirdness #2, in the other tippeted gowns, the artist goes to great lengths to emphasize that they are Fur, specifically Ermine, what with all the little tails. Not so much on this one, so maybe it isn't fur? or at least it doesn't seem to be ermine. Wierdness #3, and this is even odder, is that all of the decoration on the red dress, and on the blue-and-gold dress next to it, seem to be placed on the diagonal. This, of course, may be entirely coincidence. But... maybe it isn't - to my (admittedly modern) eye, it suggests the possibility of bias, kind of like those crazy Spanish plaid cotes. I can/have made dresses that fit snugly, like these, over a supportive underlayer and yet had no method of closure (the pink dress of doom, my current blue one which needs a bit of tightening, but was a proof of concept anyway). But these two dresses depended on a certain amount of intrinsic stretch to the fabric, just because, well, let's say I'm not underendowed on top so getting into a dress that fits tightly under the bust can be a bit interesting. Doable, but interesting. Wool has this stretch... but silk or velvet? not so much. And I'm a SUCKER for luxurious, impractical fabrics - so the idea of a gown made of two layers of bias cut silk is REALLY TEMPTING. But I can't decide whether it's even conceptually period.
As for the man's garb? well, the hosen and the white garment are fairly straight forward, even if the sleeves are a bit interesting. but the blue garment with the dags and the possible bezants? IS BIZARRE. My first throught was "fancy cloak", in the same family as those others shown in the gallery. BUT... the pleats across the front seem REALLY regular, and looking at the man's left shoulder, it almost seems as though there are dags, similar to the ones on the right shoulder. That would kind of imply a sleeveless garment of some sort, maybe similar to an Italian man's giornea (though I thought those were later). Some preliminary web searching (as I said, I was bored today) also brought up the word ganache (yes, like the chocolate, which made googling interesting) as a possible word for an open-sided gown of this sort. So still thinking there too. This may reqiure more research than I have time to do before making the garb for 12th night!!!
On the other hand? I don't have time to do those quite as shown (embroidery!!), and I don't have fabric that I *quite* like for doing it with, nor have I found anything cheap. I do, however, have a fairly large amount of black wool with a gold honeycomb pattern on it, that's begging to be some interesting set of matching outfits - so appropro for 12th Night, as it's one of the few times we're really in the same place the whole time at an event (usually we hit events and wander in opposite directions, one or both of us are in armor, I'm in the kitchen, or something...) So maybe I'll do something with that instead. Either way, in order to do that, I need to quit doing what I've been doing for the past week, which is Playing Too Much WoW.
However... Playing Too Much WoW has been good to me. I made Sargeant in PvP, (those of you who are serious PVPers are probably laughing now, but considering that I only started doing PvP to get the mount discount, that was an achievement), bought my Swift Riding Frostsaber, and got the Sinew for my bow. Now, to kill the demons...
Yay! Husband is back from a customer! I can go home now!!!!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: Tippets and bias
Date: 2006-11-30 06:40 pm (UTC)I knew she would enjoy seeing what you were doing, so a posting I went. ;)
Moira
West Kingdom
Re: Tippets and bias
Date: 2006-12-01 03:59 pm (UTC)Re: Tippets and bias
Date: 2006-12-01 04:08 pm (UTC)