Project Complete: Pink Wool Open Hood

Two new hoods in two weeks? Wha??!

Project:
An open hood of the early 15th  century.

Project Complete: Early 14th Century Open Hood

Project: Open hood in the style of the Luttrell Psalter hoods, circa 1330

Project Complete: Late 14th Century Transitional Open Hood

I think it might be clear at this point that I am a connoisseur of the open hood. I have an entire drawer full of them. Seven of them, in fact. Each with its own color and character. The seventh is the hood I'm sharing today.

Project:
A transitional style open hood suitable for the period between 1360 and 1420.

Project Complete: Red Wool Open Hood

This project has been on my "want" list for a very long time. Like 7 years a long time. I came close with my linen hood, but that one definitely falls flat, both figuratively and literally. But this one? I have a hard time believing that I'll ever need to make another open hood again.

So let me backtrack just a bit by reminding you of this post a few months back. The cliff notes version, in case you haven't read it, is that open hoods are not a style of hat that remained a static constant. The open hood was present for the entire duration of the 15th century, but just like fitted supportive dresses, it evolved as styles and ideals evolved. The open hood of 1410 would have been quite different from the open hood of 1480, even if they were both made from identical pieces of wool.

Ever since that post, I knew that I needed to create a new hood that better matched my findings. While I love my other two hoods, and will continue to wear them, I realized that they were anachronistic when compared to the shapes of hoods worn in the 1400's. They almost didn't match any of the hoods worn at the time. I did find a few examples, but I couldn't take them seriously as "fashionable" in their context.

I started the new hood with a simple goal- get the wings shaped correctly. I was willing to overlook the size and shape of the collar and the width and length of the liripipe because what I'd already come up with was really good, and felt right to me. I didn't want to try changing too many things and end up with a new hood that I hated. So I focused on the brim.

I began by tracing my black hood out on a piece of paper then redrawing the brim. I brought it upward very slightly (and I probably could have gone further upward, but I was being cautious.) Then I jutted the point way out. Around 2" further out than my previous brim. The imagery doesn't indicate that the top would have been that wide, so I eased the line back to my original brim depth at the top.

From that new pattern, I cut out the hood body, the gores, and the liripipe. The hood and gores were cut out at a 4-layer thickness, with the fold at the top. So what you see in the picture is actually two hoods folded in half. I followed my original pattern for the gores and their corresponding slits.

After getting the 4 gores sewn in and the liripipe sewn on to the outside layer, I just tacked all the seam allowances down to keep them flat and to keep the seams looking nice on the right sides. All that sewing was done by hand.

I knew that I needed stability in the brim if I wanted the wings to hold their shape and go where they needed to, so I dug through my stash and found an old piece a felted wool. This particular wool was once part of my very first kirtle, the one that bit the dust when I tried to refit it a few years back.

I married the two layers together, added on the reinforced panel, and used the sewing machine to sew all the way around. I left just the opening of the liripipe unsewn.

Then I clipped the corners and curves. I wanted the cleanest edge I could get, so I was pretty liberal with the clipping.

I turned the body of the hood right-side-out, then stab stitched the entire perimeter. I also finished the edges of the liripipe, which was still a flat piece at this point. The entire thing was still in that manta ray shape, with the back seam unsewn.

To finish the back, I traded the red silk for my heavy duty cotton thread. Since I had four layers of wool to go through, I didn't want to risk breaking the thread simply in the act of sewing. The gray thread is invisible from the outside. I used an overcast stitch down the entire length of the back (right to the tip of the liripipe). And with that the hood was complete.

The brim is thick, which will take some getting used to, but it's incredibly sturdy. It wants to stick out to the side, which is exactly what I want it to do.

I get a great bonnet shape with no effort when I unfold the brim. Since it was snowing when I stepped outside to take these photos, I was really happy with that particular performance.

The liripipe could probably use a bit of ironing.

Let's ignore the slightly crocked cap, shall we?

Overall, I'm incredibly satisfied with the way this hood turned out. I know there's still some adjustments I could have made, but I'm very happy with how much better this new shape meets the shape of hoods from the period between 1415 and 1440. I might look like I'm about to take flight, but I'm okay with that. And I'm really happy to finally cross this one off the list.

15th Century Open Hoods

One of the best pieces in my wardrobe, one that really helps me drive my persona look home, is my black wool open hood. I have two hoods (the other is rust-red linen), but the wool hood is probably the single most worn item in my garb closet. I'm pretty sure that the hood has become a trademark of mine in my local region, and those people that may be looking for me are looking, in actuality, for that black hood.

My black wool hood. Oh, and my handsome husband.

Three years ago, when I first made the hood, there were really only two sources available online for the specific patterning of the open hood. One was Marie Chatel Cadieux's page on open hoods, where, in addition to tons of pictures, she shared a rough, not-to-scale drawing of what her hood looked like flat after cutting it out. She also gave us the length of the liripipe. That page, unfortunately is no longer online, but it was truly the biggest inspiration I had to make my own hood. Unable to really work out a pattern from Marie's information, I turned to Lia de Thorngegge's open hood. While she didn't have a pattern or measurements to work off of, she did provide a photo of the hood as it looked cut from the larger piece.

My first open hood attempt in a single layer of blue wool.

With a better idea of the basic shaping, I tried a hood out with some bright blue wool. It wasn't nearly perfect, but wearing it to 12th Night that year, I had a much better idea of what worked and what needed more attention. In particular, I needed to enlarge the brim and shape the collar better by adding gores. I also knew that weight made a difference, and that the stiffer the brim, the better the look. With those changes, I was able to find the correct shape for my black hood, and I've never looked back.

There is still a lack of patterning help out here on the internet. While I've posted pictures of my hood numerous times here, I've never provided anything more. With Marie's page MIA, there are also fewer pages out there that really look deeply into the open hood style for those people looking for research. I've put together an article that discusses the evolution of open hoods through the 14th century into the 16th century, so if you're looking for the historical perspective, you can read that here. That's a permanent page on this blog, so you if you need to go looking for it later it won't be buried in the pit of my post archives.

At the end of this post, you'll find a link to a PDF containing a pattern with measurements, along with images and notes about my two hoods and how I made them. It is my hope that by having an actual pattern for an open hood available, we might begin to see more hoods around. It's a start at least.

That comes with a caveat, however. When I created my hood, I was at the stage in my costuming career where I heavily relied on seeing what others were doing to make my own items. It was easier then, given my limited sewing skills, to understand real-life items and copy the looks I liked. Being able to look at a period image and analyze it to determine how to recreate it was a long way off. Now, however, it's time to look back at my hoods.

So in this post, I'll be focusing specifically on my retrospective research and thoughts regarding the shape and construction of 15th Century open hoods. In the end, you'll hopefully see, as I do, that while my hood is perfectly acceptable, there's still room for improvement and more accuracy. And as a warning, this post is pretty lengthy and covers a lot of ground.

Open hoods are not easy to pattern. Like so much of the fashion in the 15th century, the open hood style was a fitted garment. If done carefully, at can certainly be an off-the-rack type of item, so their fitting isn't necessarily custom. The shape, and the way it's meant to sit on the head, though, can become quite specific.

Detail, BnF MS Latin 7907 A, The Comedies of Terence, circa 1400-1407, fol. 42r.

Aesthetically, I prefer the look of the slightly winged versions, like the example above from the Comedies of Terence. This is the style that my winged open hoods most closely match. I would venture to say that most recreation hoods you'll find out there are similar to this as well. It's a modern preference, I think. A narrower hood just looks more "regular" to us, and certainly more wearable. As I study more and more images from the first third of the 15th Century, however, it appears that this narrower look, though preferable to my modern eye, was not truly fashionable- at least not in the first half of the century.

Detail, Arsenal MS 5070, reserve, The Decameron, 1432, fol. 188r.

Sharper-looking wings that stuck out nearly horizontally from the face, like the example from The Decameron above, are quite normal. The collar still appears to be tight around the shoulders, though excess fabric at the neck in this particular example creates an extra fold at the front.

Whether these fashionably outward wings are shaped with a wire, we're likely to never know for sure. I'd hate to accidentally walk into one of those corners if there's a wire doing the work, though. I'd like to suggest, as an alternative for experimentation, that the brims were possibly stiffened with heavier wool (like a Melton wool or sturdy felt) stuffed between the brim layers. There may have also been starch involved, since we know starch of some type was used on the goffered veils popular just prior to this at the turn of the century.

The style of the open hood was by no means static. Since the early inception of the idea way back at the start of the 14th century, the open hood continually evolved and wound through class barriers over two centuries. The peasants loved it for its versitility, the lower middle class combined it with fashionable dress as a symbol of their class position, and the upper class embraced it as an alternative to the complex and cumbersome hats that dominated their affluent couture. Even just looking at the basic winged hood, differences in the styling from the beginning of the century to the end show that the look of the hood was constantly in flux.

Details from July (left) and September (right) from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.

Take the open hoods depicted in Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The calendar images in this iconic manuscript were completed by a handful of artists between 1411 and 1489. The July page, in which a shepherdess is seen shearing a sheep, was painted by Paul Limbourg sometime between 1411 and 1416. The female laborer in the field in the September page was painted more than 70 years later by Jean Colombe, circa 1489.

They offer a wonderful comparison. We're looking here at two working women, each wearing rather typical  outfits for their occupations, and each mostly turned away from the viewer. They both wear black winged open hoods, each with long liripipes. The two collars are very similar- covering most of the shoulders and back, but not longer than necessary to cover any exposed skin. The liripipes are both very long, extending past the waist. The later version does appear to have a better handle on the fold at the start of the liripipe, creating a more intentional corner, and there is a little bit of the sense that the later liripipe is possibly bulkier in general. It's the wings, however, that stand out from each other. Where the earlier hood clearly favors the pointed, outward shape, and does not sit at all close to the head, the later hood's brim is folded neatly back, and is minuscule by comparison.

Detail, BnF, MS Latin 1173, Heures de Charles d'Angoulême, fol. 20v.

But we can't draw the pattern of change too definitively here. Around the same time Colombe was painting hooded peasant women in Les Tres Riches Heures, Robinet Testard and his team of artists were completing their work on Le Heures de Charles d'Angoulême. This manuscript contains some of the best and clearest examples of lower class French fashion at the end of the 15th Century. A great and iconic image of a peasant wearing an open hood can be seen in the Dancing Peasants panel above.

The wide liripipe here is very clear, helping to make sense of why Colombe's liripipe version looks like it should be interpreted as wide. The collar is small, even more so than either of the Tres Riches versions, but as with the others, her exposed skin is covered by the hood, offering the same kind of practical protection. This collar is very close to the collar on my hoods- trim and minimal. What makes this a notable look, however, is the zig-zag fold to the brim. In the perspective given us, we are looking at the hood directly from the side. The fact that the wing is forced back to the front indicates that it may not simply jut out from the head a little stiffly, as it does in the Comedies of Terence example, but is rather forced forward to perhaps increase the outward appearance.

Detail, BnF, MS Latin 1173, Heures de Charles d'Angoulême, fol. 6v.

Earlier in the manuscript, the pages are decorated with short panels along the bottom depicting various scenes of everyday life. Among them are a few women wearing open hoods, such as the baker's wife above. All the hoods in this section of the manuscript are missing a collar, but seem to have compensated for that lack by being generally larger in overall shape. The wings are quite large as a result, and though they do extend out pretty far, proportionately they don't have the same horizontal jutting quality as the hoods of the first half of the century. Here also, there is no indication that the brim is folded more than once.

So what does all this mean? Well, for starters, it means that there really is no single open hood style that can be labeled as the de facto style of the 15th Century. Even still, there are some very specific things that we can look at to better understand the possibilities of the style, and to more accurately pinpoint specific looks. Quite plainly, not all hoods in the 15th century were the same.

Details from fol. 143v of De claris mulieribus (left) and fol. 66v of the Roman de la Rose (right).

One element of the hood that really shows a consistent evolution throughout the century is the shape of the liripipe. Earlier years, coming out of the narrowness preferred at the end of the 14th century, liripipes are rather thin and rope like, such as those seen in the 1403 copy of De claris mulieribus (BnF MS French 598), including Proba's above. Later in the century, liripipes are wide and flat down their entire length, and create a neat corner fold at the top of the head, like those seen in the late 15th Century Roman de la Rose (OXF, Bodlien MS Douce 195), also above for comparison.

These two images additionally offer great counterpoints to each other, and though they can both be called "open hoods" they are clearly not the same. I won't belabor the comparison, as you can see their differences for yourself, but just to make a statement about the changes, later or early, comes down quite plainly to the question of scale. It's important that I reiterate, however, that just because one style of hood was "more fashionable" than any others doesn't mean that those others disappeared. In my research for this post, I came across countless examples of hoods of all types throughout the century.

The Courtesan Bacchis and her nurses, Comedies of Terence, fol. 115.

Most often (though not exclusively) hood style and class have a direct correlation, and is the best way to determine which particular styling was considered the most fashionable at any given time. Important to this point is the understanding that until the end of the century, the hood was not generally preferred among the higher classes. When the upper echelons finally decided to use the hood, it was not the same type of hood we've been looking at. For one, it lacked a liripipe. That means that when we're looking at winged, liripiped open hoods, we're looking primarily at the range of women between laboring peasant and bourgeois housewife. Taking a look at their gown along with their situational context will provide a better idea of the woman's position in that range. For instance, in the grouping above, the lady in the red houppelande holds the higher class. She is a courtesan accompanied by her nurses. Her hood, therefore, can reasonably be assumed to be the more fashionable version of the three here.

Before I conclude, there's one last thing I'd like to discuss. I've stated in the past, here and in my classes, that the hood was a stalwart element of lower class clothing, because it makes practical sense. While I knew this had to be true, it had admittedly been difficult for me to truly come up with the reasons why. Certainly, simply covering the head is a practical application on its own, but there is more to it than that. Last weekend, I spent the day in garb in the sun. It resulted in a terrible sunburn on my chest, face, back, and the visible portions of my bust. Just like my medieval forebears, I had no sunscreen, and I paid the price for the lack of protection. Getting a sunburn isn't something only modern day humans have a problem with.

Today is quite sunny, so to put the practical application of a hood to the test, I put it on, and went outside. Here are the ways my hood worked for me..

It wasn't windy, but if a significant breeze was blowing, the best way to keep the hood on and stable is to "turban" the liripipe:

With the brim unfolded, I get a great protective cover. in this photo, I'm facing the sun, and if you look at my chest, you can see that I am getting at least partial shade:

I turned, and here's what that looks like from the front looking down:

After adding some more deliberate shape to the brim, it looked like this looking up:

I then began to experiment with other ways the brim might look, based on my findings. If the wings extended further outward, when the brim is flipped forward, it might look like this:

Applying the double fold from the Heures de Charles d'Angoulême peasant page, I get this:

I have to admit that I really liked this, and I did indeed feel that I had better shade. From the side:

Finally, even with the way I normally wear it, I still had good shade:

Alright. Time to wrap this up. I go forward from here with more specific ideas about what my next hood should look like. As a middle class townswoman, who endeavors to be as fashionable as her means allow, I should prefer the outward, pointed wings on my hood. This will come with some experimentation and certainly take some getting used to in terms of wearing. I'd never forgive myself if my hood poked somebody's eye out.

Lastly, as promised, you can download from here the pattern and construction information on my black open hood as well as my red version. I hope that it helps you skip a bit of the frustration of patterning one of these things from scratch. I also hope that my digging deeper into this style encourages you to begin looking closer at the things we're recreating.

Turban-Style Open Hood

I didn't point this out yesterday, but I feel that it's worth a mention, so it get's its own post. Let's take a look at the young woman from the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece again, this time focusing on her head.
Upon a quick glance, you might say that she's wearing a turban. While it's true that turbans were well known to Western Europeans because of the Crusades, and turban-like headdress can be found on religious figures in paintings of the era, it was not a particularly favored style. There are a handful of portraits featuring treatments that look like some sort of messy turban- Van Eyck's "Man Wearing a Turban" obviously comes to mind- but these are men. There is speculation that these examples aren't turbans at all, but instead are chaperons that have been twisted up on the head. Are these real examples of fashionable male headdress? Probably not. Art history 101 teaches us that artists tend to contrive things to show off their skills. A headdress with lots of folds and complex twists would certainly do that.

There is, however, something to be said for the practical aspect of converting a chaperon, or hood, into a turban, and this is where the young woman from the altarpiece comes in. I wasn't able to locate a file large enough to really zoom in on her head, but hopefully this is detailed enough that you can see where I'm headed with this. The black "turban" has all sorts of flaps- not what you think of when you conjure turban images in your head, right? That's because this is not a turban- it is an open hood.

If you've been reading my blog for some time now, you may already know about the prevalence of the feminine open hood in the 15th century. (If not, you can use my "open hoods" tag to see what I'm talking about.) The open hood is remarkable as being probably the only fashion item of the 15th century to start with the lower class and work its way up. The open hood found its greatest supporters among the peasant population because of its practicality in many different work-related scenarios. By the mid-15th century, however, we begin to see open hoods on wealthier women- starting with the peasant middle class such as what is seen in certain copies of Boccaccio's Decameron, many examples of which can be found in the "Women's Hoods" section at Larsdatter.com.

Try to see the tree through the forest (to reverse a cliche). In the image at left, I've highlighted the portion of this headdress that is the "dead-giveaway" that it's an open hood. It bears the short neck and folded-back wing-like brim that is the primary characteristic of the 15th century open hood. This detail is easily lost in the look of the headdress as a whole, in part due to the dark coloration, but also because our eyes aren't expecting to see an open hood with that overall shape.

Let's go back to yesterday. Remember that in my analysis, I concluded that this woman was no doubt on the fashionable side based on the transitional nature of her gown? It makes sense to me then that she would be wearing an open hood- after all, it was the trend. Yet she's wearing it in a different manner that what fashion dictated. Rather than wearing the liripipe down along her back, she's wrapped it around her head. This serves a practical purpose in that it prevents her from sitting on it. If we are to assume that she's stationed herself at the bedside of her relative until his death, the accidental sitting on her liripipe (which might dislodge it from its proper position on her head) might be a terrible inconvenience. But let's also assume for a moment that she's seen peasant women wearing the hood in this manner. There are a handfull of examples out there that show peasant women doing this, including this one. I have a parallel to draw here that I've presented in a few of my headdress classes and it goes something like this:

Blue collar workers have been wearing sleeveless "wife beater" under shirts for decades, and they have been stereotyped to always be wearing one, often with nothing over it. This stereotype is not a pleasant thing- it groups those laborers with "white trash". Yet a few years ago, a young woman named Brittany Spears showed up outside her house in a wife beater. Granted, not everyone thought it was a good idea, but that didn't stop 16 year old girls the world over from filling their dressers with wife beaters. A celebrity- the fashion elite of our time- made that style trendy and removed (or at least made us forget) the stereotype

I suspect that this is exactly the scenario that caused the low-class open hood to become a high-class fashion. (I am basing all this on a survey of images I've collected showing the open hood through the 15th century. When laid out in chronological order it is easy to see that the open hood climbed the ladder of fashion.) If this young woman is part of the fashionable elite, then she would have had no problem with "stealing" this look, and as other portions of her attire demonstrate an understanding of where fashion was headed, she could be confident that this turbaned hood would come across as fashionable, not a faux pas.


My black open hood is cut somewhat different than hers, so I can't recreate it exactly, but in the photo above I'm wearing it in the turban style. All it takes is twisting the liripipe around the head. Hers may be so bulky on top (compared to mine) because her liripipe is longer and/or thicker. And to take this one step further down the practicality road- I'm not using any pins. The turbaning process secures the hood on its own, and without the chance of accidentally sitting on the liripipe, there's little that would move the hood once in place.

So there you have it- the Turban-Style Open Hood. Both fashionable and practical.

Outfit information

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you all about the sources for my 15th century outfit from the last post. In fact, after this post, I'll be quiet for a bit. We're entering the slower event season for this area, so I'm going to be taking a break from the SCA for the rest of this month as well as next month. I've got some mundane things that have been piling up that I need to focus on for a while. But I still have some projects to work on before the next event, so when I get started on those I'll check back in.

So, I wanted to share with you some of the bits and pieces I used to come up with my finished 15th century working class outfit. Most of research started by looking at completed outfits by other folks, and getting an idea of what I thought I might like. These included:
Marie Chantel Cadieux's front laced kirtle and
Matilda La Zouche's short-sleeve kirtle

Then in October of last year, I attended a day of lectures by medieval fashion historian Robin Netherton. In her lecture on the Gothic Fitted Dress, she made mention of the fact that the open front variety is not seen on most women- only those in distress or on girls. Her information was both informative and inspirational. The best thing that I took away was the confirmation that the underdress made a huge difference. Under my lovely teal wool is a slightly less lovely underdress doing the job of keeping myself in place.

Robin had great information about the fitting method, but it was Tasha Kelly McGann's Le Cotte Simple site and Charlotte Johnson's Costly Thy Habit that I found really valuable.

I was also interested in Marie Chatel Cadieux's open hoods. Looking for further information, I discovered Lia de Thornegge's open hood, and decided to make one. Marie did such a great job pulling images together, so I won't worry about adding any here.

As far as period sources for the dress goes, the 1432 manuscript of Le Decameron is a great source, as well as the dresses listed under "Kirtles" on Hope Greenberg's 15th Century Dress page.

I used a million other sources along the way, including other recreations and random finds of period images, but these are the things that got me started.

I'll be making another fitted dress next, a black linen dress with a lavender lining. There are a few minor adjustments I need to make, but overall I now have a dress pattern that works much better than my previous dresses and make a huge difference in making me feel that I am doing more to be authentic.

So, enjoy the autumn, and I'll "see" you again in December!

Hooray Garb!

I am proud to present to you my completed 15th century working-class outfit- I love it!


I'm standing a little odd in the middle picture, so I look kind of uneven, but the side and back views definitely make up for it. I love the side view!

I started the day without a bra, which is how the fitted dress is supposed to be, but by the time we got to the event, the "support" aspect of the dress had ultimately failed. I have very large and heavy breasts- I'm a DDD cup size (which is just a nicer way of saying "a size F"), and the fact is that very little in this world can keep them properly defying gravity and in place. Luckily, I had the foresight to throw my bra into my hatbox. So the photos above are of me with the bra on. I felt much better after I put it on (yesterday was the first time in a very long time that I went out into public without a bra, so I was really self-conscious about it.) Unlike my other dresses, my fitted dress and bra worked together to create a comfortable and flattering shape. I don't think of it as a compromise- I just needed to find what worked for me. The fitted dress will need a small amount of additional tailoring to account for how much the linen/cotton stretched as it warmed up, but I look at the whole thing as a pretty great success.

The teal dress is wonderful. It was well worth the cost of the fabric. Yesterday was a chilly day, and the dress was the perfect weight. I was wearing 6 layers (with one of those layers being both the third layer in the chest of the fitted dress and my bloomers covering my lower body from my waist to my knees.) I was also wearing my knit knee-high socks. My only problem was that the fitted dress and the wool dress are both short sleeved, and the pin-on linen sleeves (which I borrowed from mom) were only barely heavy enough, and there was a little gap at the back of my arms.


In addition to my dress, I was able to also make a mini-houppelande for Owen out of some burgundy corduroy. I think it ended up a little too short, or maybe a little too wide, but he looked really handsome. I made some pseudo-hose out of the gold knit cotton I ended up using to make a scarf for myself, but they were a little too small, so he wore a pair of blue pajama pants. Dearg made him a new belt, recycling the belt tip and buckle from the belt Dearg made for him when he was a newborn.

I even made a fake chaperone out of the scraps from my teal wool. He hates hats, so he didn't really wear it, but it was very cute when it was on his head! For the majority of the day, he looked like the photo on the right above- a perfect little gentleman.

My open hood is also perfect. It fits perfectly, looks perfect, was the perfect accessory, etc. I loved wearing it all day- all the hard work was worth it!

The only problem I had with it was that I didn't make the best choice for what to wear under it. I chose to wear my cut-off shirt sleeve, which I normally wear under my veils as my "head underwear". I think I need a new sleeve, though, because it stretched quicker than normal yesterday and it kept slipping back. I had adjusted the whole thing shortly before this photo was taken, and I put the sleeve too far down, but this photo was better to show it than the one we took right after it, after I readjusted it so the sleeve was in the right place. I think the back of the hood kept popping up, but I can use a small pin the keep that in place in the future.

I'll post more about the open hood in the next day or so, as well as more information about the inspiration and sources I used for the items of my outfit, but for now I'm glad all that hard work is over and I have great garb specific to my period and flattering to my frame.

Great Event

We had a wonderful event yesterday at Ceilidh. Very busy. My husband, Dearg, authorized in rapier fighting, my mother, Elspeth, was promoted to Kingdom Signet. I taught my class on women's medieval headdress. I had 5 people attend. It went very well, but I had to speak very loudly to be heard over the fighting, so my throat hurt at the end. I followed my outlined pretty well, only got tripped up once or twice, and I had a lot of fun. Everyone complimented me on how good the class was afterward.

On the garb front, I had planned on wearing a new dress that I was making. It's a rusty-orange linen fitted dress, but I sewed it wrong not once, not twice, but three times. That was enough for me to not touch it again for a while. I haven't sewn a dress for myself for several years, so this is still kind of a new thing for me. I did, however, make a 14th century open hood to wear yesterday.

I used this example of Isis's open hood (look for the "Open Kaproen" entry- it's in Dutch) as my starting point, but I had found the image below some time before- it just took me a while to correlate the two. This one is from the Lutrell Psalter, a 14th century manuscript. Isis shows other period images with her re-creation.

I used a soft maroon flannel for the outside and white medium weight linen for the lining. I then crocheted a chain using 100% grey wool yarn and stitched it around the edge.

We jokingly call it "The Gonzo Hood" because it looks kind of like Gonzo's nose. I think this one is my current favorite. I've been wearing the Flemish Kerchief (I've been experimenting with different ways wear it), but this one is really fun and very distinctive. I talked about it in my class and now my mom wants one. My evil plan is working....

Late Friday evening I made a little jacket for Owen out of green linen. It's not really done- it needs buttons instead of the tie I've got on there now. Despite him being in green, people still thought he was a girl. We're suspecting that it's the coif, so we're going to nix that for the next event, even though it's appropriate for his age. I may need to put him in blue.

The booties are suede with a knit lining that my mom picked up for him the other day- he got a lot of complements on them.

He was supposed to be wearing black leggings, but I forgot to look for some last time we were at the store. He really kind of needed them, though. After I get the buttons on and get the hose, I think this outfit will look a bit better. Not that he isn't adorable anyway.

I purchased The Medieval Tailor's Assistant yesterday. It has an extensive section on headdress at the end- that was my main reason for picking it up. It also has patterns for a large number of medievel clothes for both men and women (as well as a small section on children's garb). I've been meaning to get Dearg into a 15th century outfit, so this book will really help.

That's all I've got today.

That's My Boy!

Owen is on YouTube! I love my son.

Additionally, as you can see, I wore my blue open hood to the Fenix 12th Night. It's not really finished, as the edges need to have a rolled hem still. I just couldn't think of any other thing to wear on my head, and I've got so many options now, there's no excuse for going without a headdressanymore!

I'm not sure what I did wrong around the neck and shoulders, but as you can see in the photo below, it's not sitting right. I think part of the issue is that the wool is a tropical weight, and so the whole thing is really flat. I probably need to double it, but I only had enough of the blue for one layer.

I forgot to get a picture of the smocked apron. The girl I gifted it to was already wearing an apron, so she didn't put it on, which means I didn't think to ask her to indulge me with a photo. She's chosen a German persona, and the apron is English/French, but it's cool and will go a long way to making her look a but more period while in the kitchen.

That's all I've got for now. I've got to re-evaluate my project pile in the next week or so. I keep picking up the pink dress, but I'm at a point where I'm not at all sure that I know what to do next. That may be one of those cases where I just need to start sewing, and go from there. Otherwise, I've got some wool fabric I need to figure out what to do with. And I've got a few other items I'm just needing key materials for (like rings and buckles). Always something to do....