kareina

My normal #1 sewing rule is "Don't sew to a deadline". I find that if my goal for any given sewing project is "I want something to do with my hands right now, and this is pretty and fun to sew" I am happy, and life is low stress.

However...

• When I fell in love this year I acquired a new champion. Unlike my previous champions, this one didn't say "I don't really want to win, I am just going out to have fun" (an actual quote from my viscount, who had so much fun that day he won), instead he said (translated from the Swedish) "I want to enter this tournament with intent to win: I think it would be fun to serve as Prince and Princess with you". 
• I have always loved the look of bliauts, especially the variation for men, with the slit skirts, like St. George wears. 
• I saw a photo on FB of a lovely blue diamond twill wool available for purchase

Together these added up to a very ambitious project: two bliauts, to be worn if we happen to win Nordmark Coronet. Because I am me, (and because of how delicious this fabric feels) I, of course, want to hand-sew them both. All 44 pieces (each) of them.  Alas, we didn't start these soon enough. I only finalized the cutting diagram and started cutting the fabric on 18 July, which was just over two months before the tournament.  

Therefore I started focusing on "what can I do to get them 'wearable' before the date of investiture rather than perfect?" and focused on that.  Therefore, before this weekend, both of them had come this far:

• body rectangle attached to the skirt gores that are on the side, framing the side slits (6 fabric pieces each for this step)
• sleeves attached, including the contrasting colour upper arm band (5 fabric pieces each sleeve, so far for mine (there will be another set of three gores added to my upper forearms, later), and 8 each sleeve for his)
• hemming of all of the above
• lightweight linen undershirts with extra long, very fitted, sleeves finished enough to wear (though they are on the short side, and could use extending the hems a bit, eventually)

This weekend my beloved took me over to the "dark side", where they have not only cookies, but sewing machines, and I (twitching only slightly) cut and pinned the fabric while he drove a sewing machine (and in-between cutting and pinning, I kept hand-sewing the parts that need it), and now we have added:

• four sets of skirt gores inset in his bliaut plus two sets of skirt gores inset in my bliaut (each set comprised of 3 triangles), all machine sewn together, and attached to the bliaut such that the machine stitching is on the inside (it was necessary to un-pick the machine sewing several times when I accidentally pinned the gores to the skirts the way I normally do them (with the stitching to the outside, because I prefer to work on the side that is going to be visible later, so that I can make the stitching disappear completely)
• The points of three of the four sets of his skirt gores have already been hand-finished
• one set of skirt gores for mine hand sewn and ready to inset into the front, and the three pieces for the second set cut and ready to hand sew and inset
• one cloth belt, for him cut and ending in rope in the same manner as St George's belt in the above linked photo (I already have a belt for a bliaut)

The event starts Friday of this week. The tournament is on Saturday, the investiture, as per Nordmark tradition, will be that evening.  We won't know if we will need these or not, but "just in case", between now and Saturday evening we need to:

• hem the all of the new skirt goes 
• finish the point of his remaining skirt gore
• finish the points of all four of my skirt gores

Then, if there is still time, I really want to:

• finish the bottom bit of the seams all around the hem (the middle bits of those seams can be done after the event)
• cut the fabric for the black band that will go around the hem
• attach the black band around the hem (this part is is the reason those seams need to be partially finished, so that we can do the first pass of attaching the band by machine, running over the finished part of the skirt seams, then turn it over and sew the second edge by hand
• attach the black chevron band at the waist
• add those above mentioned additional sleeve gores to mine

• anything from the above that didn't actually get done by the deadline (hint: when on a time-crunch, focus on making the front side pretty and done, and hope no one notices the back isn't quite there yet if you don't quite manage to get it all done)
• finishing the remaining seams
• possibly add decorative embroidery over the black bands

All in all I am enjoying the project, but I think that some of the seam-unpicking that happened yesterday was a direct result of the stress of a looming deadline encouraging me to work too fast, and thus missed seeing that I was sometimes pinning the pieces using autopilot, which is to say, incorrectly in this case. 

However, much though I am enjoying the project, and loving how these are coming out, I still cannot recommend sewing to a deadline. That path leads to the dark side, short-cuts, and unnecessary errors...

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.