T-Tunic Update

I always seem to injure myself while sewing. In November a ruler of all things fell and split open my toe. Today one of my cats pushed the scissors off the sewing table and it cut my foot.

Also, I hate sewing with linen. It slides everywhere (then again other fabrics slip around everywhere for me, I have shaky hands.) Even if I use pinking shears it frays horribly. In hindsight, I probably should have read up on the fabric more, but I tend to learn by making mistakes (when it comes to crafts) because I am lazy and stubborn. Luckily, the garment I am making right now (a long t-tunic dress) with gores was meant to be a learning piece (I’m new to sewing) and is going to be my 90+ degree garment/dirty work garment. I have many more years of linen sewing to go. So I just need to learn.

Overall, I’m really proud of myself right now. I sewed in another gore and the sleeves. Things were really rolling in November, then after the holidays everything really came to a complete stop. Depression does that. Granted, I’m on meds so I can still go to work full-time and school part-time, but by the end of the day or even the weekends I had no extra energy for anything other than sleep and homework. I’m slowly getting my motivation back, and I’m partially looking forward to the mildly hypo-manic days where even if I don’t get a ton of sleep I’ll be just peachy.

Video: A Tudor Feast at Christmas

 

A great BBC documentary recreating a Tudor feast. It’s an hour long and has some great information. Love the peacock pie!

Medieval Lantern Corps

So, I spotted this statue in Tate’s a while back and thought “I should draw a whole rainbow corps with outfits from different nations during the Middle Ages.”

The Pros: I get to draw + and do SCA research

The Cons: I couldn’t settle for one era of time, so I’m doing one for the early 9th century and one for the 1490’s.

Here’s the list so far. (I haven’t matched empires and colors yet, except for the Byzantines. They get Violet.)

800-820 AD

• Byzantine
• Abbasid
• Heian
• Khmer
• Maya
• Norse
• Franks

1490-1510 AD

• Ming Dynasty
• Songhai
• Ottoman
• Aztec
• Joseon
• Venetian or Florentine
• Vijayanagara Empire

Too Lazy to finish #1

I’ve been working on a gored linen T-tunic to wear around in the hot Florida  weather since last November. I’ve only managed one gore since cutting it out.
The original plan was to hand sew the entire thing, but I’ve been a rut lately. So I’m going to machine sew the tunic and hand stitch the detail bits. I’ll go back later and add some embroidery to the collar.
Hopefully I can finish by Three Ships.