still waiting for winter

Well, when we got home from our excursion to the mountains and winter yesterday it was a nice, beautiful -5 C here, and the couple of cm of snow that had fallen Saturday morning was still here. A bit crunchy from having been rained on before it cooled off, but the world was covered with white and not looking anywhere near so dark and dismal as it had before that snow fell. However, today had been predicted to be warmer, and, sadly, it was.

When I got up this morning it was already +2 C and there was a warm wind blowing, which meant that our street, which hadn't been plowed yet, but had been driven enough to trample most of the snow down, was very wet and icy. Only the very edges of the street, which hadn't yet been driven on, was reasonably safe to walk upon, since it had a couple cm of slushy snow, which was much better traction than the street itself.

The bike path which runs from our neighbourhood to the uni, on the other hand, had been plowed, which meant that it didn't have any of that good traction slushy snow anywhere, but instead was a rather wet layer of ice, with occasional patches of dirt showing (they haven't paved this path yet). Luckily I have good boots and good balance, and was able to make it to work only five minutes later than the walk normally takes, and I didn't actually slip once.

However, I didn't even try to walk home after work--by lunch time it was raining and everything was even slicker, so I got a ride home from lord_kjar, where I spent some time chopping ice from our walkway (which wouldn't have needed doing if we had been home on the weekend, as I would have gotten the snow completely removed from the walkway before it had a chance to freeze solid). Can we please just have winter yet, with no more temperatures above freezing till at least February or March? April or May would be better...

why so many pieces?

I got a comment to my recent lj postwith links to photos of my bliaut in progress, wherein I mentioned that each sleeve is made up of ten pieces of fabric, which asked: "Why so many pieces - is that the period example, or did you have small bits of fabric?"

This is a good question, and one that deserves its own post, so I am replying here instead of there.

In part it was because the first bliaut I made myself was made from a very narrow and not that long piece of fabric, so to make the most of it I first cut the fabric in half lengthwise, which gave me two pieces exactly as wide as my shoulder, from which I cut off my body rectangle and then turned the rest into the sleeves and skirt gores. In order to have enough fabric for everything I chose to do the inset skirt gores only as high as the tops of my thighs, while the side gores went all the way to my waist, and that left just enough to do a large square for the bottom of the sleeve, the main sleeve rectangles, and two more small rectangles, which I cut into three triangles and set into a slit in the sleeve rectangle, to make the sleeves as wide as I could make them.

The effect I was going for with the sleeves is what is seen in this period illustration of St. George and the Dragon, and to my eye I managed to pull that off, but I can't find any photos of me in that dress with my arms in quite that position.

I didn't have any extant examples of a bliaut I was working from, but just used the period mind set cutting logic of combining rectangles and triangles to make the fabric fit with as little wasting of fabric as possible. That was the first project I had done using such narrow skirt gores, and I was really, really, really happy with the result, since cutting them so narrow gave a few nice side effects, the most important two of which are A) the fact that the slight curve cut from the bottom to make the hem line smooth meant that my only scrap fabric for the dress was a bunch of little bits about 1.5 cm wide and 15 cm long and B) the fact that the bottom hem never deviates much from the grain of the fabric, so it doesn't tend to sag, which means that the curve I cut for the hem before sewing the fabric together was the same curve that I hemmed when the dress was done, and the hem is still as even today as it was when I made it, more than six years ago. Likewise, the tiny triangles that went into the sleeve gore gave similar benefits for the sleeve.

Therefore, since I was so happy with how that one came out, when I made my second one, from a much larger piece of fabric I made only two changes: I used much longer body rectangles, to try for the tummy wrinkles that show up in some statues from the time, and I made a larger square gore for the sleeve bottom.

However, bigger is better, when it comes to 12th century sleeves, and many of the statues show much longer sleeves for women, so I decided to adapt the exact same logic for my third try, which is still in progress (page through the album to see other photos). This time, instead of attaching the large square to the bottom of the sleeve rectangle directly I put a set of three triangle gores in between the large square and the sleeve rectangle on each side, and a set of two triangle gores into the slit in the mid point of the rectangle. (Note: the diagram in that album showing how the pieces come together is wrong--it shows fewer sleeve triangle gores than actually exist.) As a result that gets the project up to 10 pieces per sleeve.

Could I have done it using fewer pieces? Of course. However, if I had opted to, for example, cut the triangle gores as a single large triangle instead of assembling them from sets of three narrower ones, that would have created larger pieces of scrap cut off the curve at the bottom of the triangles (yet still not large enough to be useful), and it may well have changed how they drape, since a significant portion of those triangles would be free to stretch on the bias.

So, do I know for certain that they did it this way? Nope. Is it plausible given what I know about period fabric cutting techniques? Yup. Will I use this approach again? Probably, I really like the result.