Renaming the Brown Silk

Here is the first sleeve embroidered. I hereby rename "The Brown Silk" as "The Gold Garb".

I embroidered all the flowers in all of the pieces first, because I'm not sure if I have time to embroider everything in time. Now I do the sleeves first and assemble the garb before embroidering the rest. The garb will not look too incomplete if I do the embroidery symmetricaly. I might not use this at Aarnimetsä Academy though, because I would like to reserve the wow-factor to when it is all done.

Oh. How long will this take? If I work hard and don't do much else, I can embroider a sleeve in two to two and a half days. That means that I'll be doing some embroidery for a long time, even though I know I'm fast.

The Brown Silk - Vol II

I'll post about the progress of my Brown Silk Garb here.

So here is a picture of the silk fabric. The colour is a little bit off, it should be dark chocolate brown. See the pattern? It is (machine)embroidered in chain stitch. (Click it to make the picture bigger.) I'll put more gold on it, first the flowers, them stems and as much of the leaves as I have time for. One pattern section is about 30cm across.

Here is 1/2 of the pieces I cut today. The front piece is quite wide, but so am I. The sleeve is made from three parts, the small ones go to the sides of the sleeve. The tip of the gore will be set between the small corners of the sleeve under ones arm, creating a W pattern. That one is very usefull, as the seam will stretch. There will be only one gore on each side, so the hem is not very wide, but it will be an early period garb, so it doesn't matter. The sleeves are not going to be buttoned, since I want to be able to dress myself without extra help, but I can always make them tighter later, if I want to. This one being the outer layer, the sleeves should actually be wider and maybe lined.

Which reminds me, that I should start thinking about that under layer too.

New garb on the making

So it is time for a totally new garb. I searched the internet for fabric, but all suitable matherial was too expencive or I just didn't like internet shopping. Anyway. Yesterday I ran through every fabric store I could find in Nürnberg. The last one (Maderer) was the best, and I could find embroidered raw silk, even if they didn't have any silk brocades. The embroidery on it is quite simple, so I can improve it with my own. I think that that chocolate brown (my favourite colour, though not the best one for garb. They didn't have enough of the yellow version, which I still couldn't leave in the shop. I can do something with it later!) can benefit from lots of added gold.

They had only 2,2 meters of it, so I had to play some tetris. I'm planning on a garb based on the Tunic of St. Elisabeth of Thuringia. Mine will not have buttoned sleeves, and the cut is slightly different due to shortage of fabric, but something in that direction.

I made a test sample of my cutting plan from a plain cotton bed sheet yesterday, and it worked well. Only the hem was a little short, only to my ankles, but I'll add a border or a broad trim on it to fix that. (Propably with some embroideries.) Now I have cut the silk as well. I'll fix the edges first so that they will not fray, and then I'll do the embroidery. The pieces are easier to handle when they are not put together yet. I'll put the sleeves together first, though, since they are made from three pieces each. Unfortunately it was not possible to position the sleeve pieces on the fabric so that they would both have the same part of the embroidery on them, so the other sleeve will have embroidery in the middle and the other on the sides. Tough, it couldn't be helped.

And the picture in the beginning of this post? That is the leftover pieces of the 140x220cm fabric. I wonder if that is enough to make buttons for the sleeves, if I deside to make them tighter later?