----- Original Message -----
From: "Elinor Salter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Are the sleeves truly ribbed? When I look at it, the ribs just look like
the folds from pleating to me. I'll have to look again when my eyes
aren't so tired.
Definitely ribbed fabric, like faille or grosgrain. You could even tell how
they'd laid out the sleeve on the fabric, because along the top of the
sleeves the ribbing is pretty much parallel to the cuff edge of the sleeve,
but along the slit on the sleeve's underside, the fabric is at a bias.
Which fascinates me, because that doesn't seem anything like the most
efficient layout!
I'll be going back to the museum to look at their Lowlands section again
before too long. If you'd like, I'd be happy to pick you up a postcard of
the painting; with the help of a magnifying glass, you can make out nearly
all the detail that the painting contains, and much more than any web image.
(Mail me off-list if you want one.) Although, the postcard also does that
thing where the chemise material at the sleeves looks much more opaque than
it does in the painting.
I'm pretty sure it the rosary was red coral - it's too orangy to be ruby
and red coral was one of the favorite expensive materials. Too bad the
real stuff today is still expensive and I haven't found the substitute
dyed coral in large enough beads yet (especially not as large as hers are
pictured).
Red coral is certainly possible, and would fit the history of the stuff. It
just didn't LOOK like it in the painting to me. =} Either Holbein was
having an off day, or (more likely) the finish and polish to red coral then
was different than red coral now. Now, it's generally highly polished, but
the stuff in the painting barely looks polished at all--more like wood or
bone, or one of those nuts that they carve into beads. And of course, red
coral is getting noticeably more expensive each year, like 15-20%! Although
luckily, it's the light-colored stuff that's most popular rather than the
oxblood stuff. And since I spend several happy hours staring at bead
catalogs each week, now you've got me interested in finding the perfect
cost-effective replacement, so I'll post on that when I do!
So do you think that the turn-back sleeves are a different material then?
I thought it looked the same as her gown fabric, but that's the problem
with black. I've since seen a few more images of turn-back sleeves
matching the overgown, but they're of a later date. I think I'm going to
go ahead and plan to do it that way.
Given the black-on-black, I'm as sure as I can be... the turned-back inside
of the sleeve definitely has a deep pile of some sort to it, but I couldn't
detect a pile on the rest of the fabric. However, I can think of a couple of
portraits (both by Corneille de Lyon, and I think there's one by Clouet as
well) where the sitter is wearing a black dress and (at least from the web
images) it looks like the turn-back is of the same fabric as the dress, so
if I didn't have some velvet of the right color just sitting around waiting
to be used, I'd use that. (And by the way, I do mean only the lining fabric
of the sleeves looked like it had a pile, not the fabric for the outside of
the sleeves--looking back at my post I might have been unclear.)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for confirming my greatest hope. Now more
about the stiffening - how would I construct this? My Italian dresses
have a layer of canvas on the inside with the fashion fabric on the
outside (no lining). Is this enough, or should I be planning for more? I
think I would prefer canvas because it would be a little easier to clean
when that time comes, I think.
There are a lot of different ways... canvas would definitely be one of them,
and a period one at that, so if you've had success with it for other styles
I'd say go for it with this one. One thing I'd highly suggest is stiffening
both your outer gown and your undergown, though not necessarily with the
same technique, and not too heavily. Two light-weight stiffening techniques
together work better and give more support than one heavy-duty technique.
A trick I've discovered but have yet to document (though I have ideas!
Anyone into Cranach style dresses, ask me) is to use boiled wool as a
stiffener; it works much like a corded corset, and gives you very smooth
lines. Just don't use it if you plan to wear this in temperatures over
about 50 degrees, because breathable or not, that stuff gets awfully warm
when it's right close to your body like that!
In fact, looking at the extant chemises in my image collection, it's
rarer to HAVE gores than not.
...
Really? That's odd. Is there anywhere online with those pictures or
patterns of the chemises? I can only remember one 16th or 17th C chemise
with blackwork offhand in Cut My Cote, which I'm not sure where it is at
the moment. Would the the sleeves of the chemise be poufy or tapered (I
thought vertetsable's was tapered)? At first I thought the poufs of
chemise escaping the false sleeves were fake and their chemise sleeves
were tapered, now I don't, but who knows, maybe they still are - I've
never had a lot of luck with forcing poufs to stay poufed out with my
Italian sleeves.
Welp, see, as far as I can tell there was a switch between real chemise
sleeves being puffed out of slits and fake poufs sewn in place to look like
they puffed out. The problem is pinning down when that switch happened,
which I haven't managed to do yet! =} I'm pretty sure it happened somewhere
between 1500-1540, and therefore possibly in time for your dress to have the
fake poufs, but I'm not positive; about the only thing I'm reasonably sure
of is that it wasn't a universally-timed switch and there were all sorts of
different things going on side by side for much of that time period.
The practical reasoning behind the switch helps pin down the dating a bit,
though, at least for a specific style of outer dress. In the first quarter
of the 16thC, the outer sleeves on square necked gowns were loose all over,
and the false sleeves (which were not universally worn, and not even
necessarily false) were small and relatively fitted; though they were sort
of puffy, they didn't really stand away from the arm. In other words,
there's room for a puffy chemise sleeve under there, and if you were to pull
that puffy chemise sleeve through slits in the false sleeve, the puffs would
have your arm to hold them in place, rather than getting lost in the
cavernous space between your arm and your false sleeve. In the 2nd quarter
of the 16thC, the bicep part of the outer sleeve got much tighter and the
false sleeve got much larger. If you wanted that outer sleeve as tight as
possible at the bicep, you wouldn't wear a huge puffy chemise sleeve under
it; it'd mess up the line. And if you wanted your false sleeve to have the
effect of a puffy chemise sleeve, you'd have to fake it, because you got rid
of that puffy chemise to make the outer sleeve fit how you wanted it to fit.
So, there's a few different chemise options: the flat, tunic-like chemise as
on vertetsable, which is more of a 15th century style (or at least, I can
document it well for the 15th century, including the seams); or, the puffy
gathered chemise, or a combination of the two. The combination style is
mostly theoretical right now, as far as I know (though there's a couple of
extant Italianate chemises that are similar to my theoretical garment).
However, it accounts for the flat, square chemise neckline visible with some
outfits that also show probably-not-false puffy sleeves, especially where
another type of partlet is worn (suggesting that the flat, square chemise
neckline isn't a partlet). Of course, it's quite possible that they wore two
different chemises, or two different partlets, or two of each all at the
same time.
There are no extant puffy gathered chemises from England in that period that
I've seen. The closest-dated extant western chemise-type garment I know of
is the chemise/blouse displayed with the Mary of Hungary dress:
http://www.virtue.to/guest_authors/hungarian.html which actually does have a
gore.
There's also the Nils Sture shirt, which helps for technique stuff, but
being male and high-necked probably isn't patterned anything like what
they'd have worn with this sort of dress. There's a gap in extant chemises
around your time period; then, there are several English and Italian late
16thC chemises that are very well documented. You may do well to copy one of
the Italianate chemises, as the lines would work well for a
combination-style chemise. There's one in this book:
Ricci E. 'Italian Lace Designs 243 Classic Examples' New York Dover 1993
that's really well suited, but I couldn't tell you where exactly. Here's a
couple of pictures of it, though:
http://www.formfunction.org/temp3/ricci1.jpg
http://www.formfunction.org/temp3/ricci5.jpg
When I do c1515-c1525, I use a pattern I've come up with myself that gives a
specific effect (lines of embroidery/trim that seem to radiate evenly out of
the neckline all around) which is different from what you'd need for this
dress, and isn't based on anything beyond 'it looks right'. Basically, my
version has rectangles (or trapezoids) for each arm and for the body, but
instead of putting the short end of the sleeves against the body so that the
sleeve is perpendicular to the body, I put the long side against it, so that
you have 3 parallel rectangles. I sew about a foot-long armhole seam on
each side to connect the two, then gather the tops of all 3 rectangles into
the neckband. Clear as the Mississippi river? If someone wants to try it,
I'll put up a diagram. For anything earlier, I'd almost always go with a
flat, tunic style, or at most a combination.
If you go with fake poufs, then the flat, tunic style of chemise is most
practical, since you don't want anything big and in the way.
-E House
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