The last 24 hours has been mostly consumed by writing an essay involving Nazi propaganda and Catholics, and making a pattern for a doublet. Oh, and a series and a half of Game of Thrones, which I seem to do when every Empire approaches (and it’s Spartacus for Odyssey).
You see, I’ve managed to acquire several nice pieces of fabric that aren’t enough to make a cote or similar large garment, but are too large (and nice) to just use for bags and things.
So was born the idea of the sleeveless doublet.
It’s not the easiest thing to make. First you have to draft a pattern, which doing it the traditional way involves pinning fabric onto the person to get their shape. Of course, I can’t pin it on myself however luckily my dressmakers dummy is actually a really good approximation of my shape. I really need to pad her out a little belly, but I’m hoping that’s more of a temporary state of affairs while I get back into the swing of running.
Above you can see the pinned pattern after I’ve cut half of it away. You basically pin two pieces of fabric around the person, working in quarters, to get patterns with seam lines along where the pins are. Then you take the whole thing off, draw where the pins are, transfer it onto tracing paper, even it up with a set of french curves and hopefully you have something approximating a pattern custom made for yourself.
Then you make it up in fabric and see how it fits. Fortunately mine fit just time, but you can of course go backwards and forwards between paper and fabric several times. But once you’ve done it, you’ve got a tight fitting pattern block that you can then adapt for other shapes for garments for yourself.
I got a load of buttons from eBay over the last few weeks. They’re all silver and lovely. I don’t know which ones are for which garment at the moment, but I’ve got choices. I might have to get more.
And then this is the mess I woke up to this morning. That’s my drafted doublet on the stand, although it’s not pinned closed. It’s VERY tight fitting.
The fabric is a black silk brocade with roses all over in black. Should be nice. I hope.
