A Festive Thread 2024

[Jubal]

How have you all been celebrating the end of the year/impending start of 2025?

[The Seamstress]

Christmas Eve (24th) with family at my sister's, being a bit envious because my nephews got a very cool Playmobil castle complete with dragons and knights and all... Today at home with the bunnies, tomorrow lunch with family. New Years will most probably be the same as ever: fondue & raclette, again at my sister's because it's the most spacious place... (All in all there will be up to 12-14 people.) Eating lots of my mum's homemade cookies (which are undoubtedly the best ever), my favourite thing about Christmas time.

[dubsartur]

It was a dark and stormy day!  We opened stockings and Christmas presents, had the traditional cinnamon buns made from kits in cardboard tubes, and watched the animated "Mole's Christmas" from 1994.  Did a lot of hand sewing on the 14th-16th century gown I am making so I have a second winter coat.  Was not successful at ignoring the Internet, email, and social media.  Tried to find the right hard drive to back up my laptop on.  Took a call from $relative who is living out of province.  Turkey dinner.

The Christmas Day dinner with family in town has not happened in the COVID era but my mother will visit them in a few days. 

[Jubal]

We're doing most of our festivities on Dec 30-Jan 1 when my sister gets here, but the last few days we decorated and prepared the house in any case, and today we visited my aunt & uncle: the next few days will be a bit of a lull before festive round 2.

For Christmas day itself we went to see seals! There are some large colonies on the Norfolk coast and this is the breeding/birthing time of year for Atlantic grey seals. They're big animals - males up to 400kg - and really interesting to see flopped all over the beach like sleepy tourists on holiday (with occasional bouts of certain other activities that can also happen on holiday). So here are the Christmas selkies

[The Seamstress]

Cute! They look fluffy, are they fluffy? I don't think I've ever seen seals IRL except maybe in a zoo.

[Jubal]

Yeah, I mean, you of course can't pet them so I don't know how fluffy they'd feel, I imagine their fur is very oily due to needing to swim. But the babies in particular have visibly quite long hair, it looks a bit shorter on the adults.

[The Seamstress]

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt then.   

[Spritelady]

We had Christmas morning with Reece's family and then went to my dad's, where I did us the typical spread with turkey etc.

Now we're in the back end of beyond visiting my aunt and grandad. The 5 hour drive took us 8 hours to complete because of crashes and roadworks and other nonsense 😭

[The Seamstress]

Ugh, 8 hours of driving was certainly not fun :/ Hope you're able to rest and have a good time despite the trouble!

Did a lot of hand sewing on the 14th-16th century gown I am making so I have a second winter coat. 

That sounds interesting, btw. What kind of gown is it, which pattern do you use? More details, please 

[dubsartur]

The cutting strategy is:



Three yards of broadcloth is a basic minimum for a man's gown to the mid-shin in expense accounts and tailor's books from the 14th century to the 16th century. 

I would be happy to talk more but I would need confirmation from Jubal that he won't try to turn it into front-page post or an email.

I have a very visible and time-consuming web presence under my meatspace identity and I am tired. Either I can be conversational and frank, or I can be polished and my public self, its hard to be both.  And I am tired of people who want to cross the streams of my various identities and communities just because social media makes that easier.

I have people who want to have intimate conversations in WhatsApp of all places although at least that is not Googlable.  The idea that casual thoughts on current events or other people's writing should be preserved indefinitely feels wrong to me.

[Jubal]

I would be happy to talk more but I would need confirmation from Jubal that he won't try to turn it into front-page post or an email.

Yes, that's absolutely fine of course: we never include things publicly if people request otherwise. I can make a general note that we should default to avoiding including material you post in newsletters, if you'd find that preferable.

[The Seamstress]

Three yards of broadcloth is a basic minimum for a man's gown to the mid-shin in expense accounts and tailor's books from the 14th century to the 16th century. 

Thanks for the image, now I have a clearer picture in my mind. By Leonfelder you mean this, I suppose, that's a quite interesting source I think! And of course I'd be happy to read more about your sewing endeavours if you'd like to share them.

[dubsartur]

Jubal, I will get back to you when I have time and brain-space.  I remember something a year or two ago where you turned a forum post into a front-page post and IIRC linked my forum identity with my other identities. 

The way twitter shared everything you followed with the world was gross. 

Three yards of broadcloth is a basic minimum for a man's gown to the mid-shin in expense accounts and tailor's books from the 14th century to the 16th century. 

Thanks for the image, now I have a clearer picture in my mind. By Leonfelder you mean this, I suppose, that's a quite interesting source I think! And of course I'd be happy to read more about your sewing endeavours if you'd like to share them.

I didn't remember that that site has a full set of scans! I access the Leonfelder MS through barich-mcneally-drei-schnittbuecher That page actually shows a MAPP by SpinWorks Woops! 404 page on my laptop but I think its image 25 on my smartphone.



I have made two previous gowns in this cut since 2016 or so, both fully lined.  This one is black wool coating with the front opening lined with heavy red silk satin (I don't have enough satin to line the whole thing, and decided not to try other linings because nothing in my stash felt right).  The long seams are machine-stitched, the satin is laid in by hand and the shoulder seams and collar seams will probably be done by hand because eg. the front and back shoulder are different lengths.

[The Seamstress]

Oooh cool! Thank you for the photo. It's fascinating to see how ye olden patterns make the best use of the available fabric so there's as little waste as possible. I try to emulate that when cutting modern garments but it doesn't always work out.

Btw the "Drei Schnittbücher" book looks so good. I should probably check if any local library has it.

[dubsartur]

I believe that industrial patterns are laid out by computer with parts from many different sizes on the same piece of cloth. Then they are cut with bandsaws.  Commercial patterns often imitate those industrial patterns, even though the efficient way to cut and sew garments one or two at a time is not the same as the efficient way to make them one or two hundred at a time.

One problem is that good books on pattern drafting tend to be 70 or more years out of print, and training is supposed to be hit or miss.  I never found a book on pattern drafting which approaches the sleeve-armhole junction as an engineering problem.  Kathleen Fasanella has a book and some useful blog posts but she has applied education not academic education so her writing has a lot of unstated assumptions that I have trouble unpicking.

The biggest disadvantage of this cut is the long bias-to-bias seams which can stretch before they are sewn.  European cotes from say the third century CE to the fourteenth century CE tend to join mostly-rectangles to almost-triangles straight-to-bias which discourages stretching.  I also suspect that a heavy lining would help with the drape.