Pooh Tunics are DONE.

Her Majesty’s Pooh Tunic: > 3/4 assembled (one side complete, the other not).

His Majesty’s Pooh Tunic: 1/2 to assembled.

TRM came by on Monday to check necklines (I’m soooo paranoid about necklines) and a good thing, too, because I need to put bigger gussets in His Majesty’s sleeves.

If I am a good little worker bee I should be able to have them done by the middle of next week.

This pile of “Pooh” colored linen (Shoshanna’s color-description, not mine) is destined to be tunics for TRM, to be worn either solo or under their Viking overlayers.  To be done by Pennsic (eep!).  Good thing I’m machine-sewing them!  :)

Several months ago I agreed to put front & back gores in an otherwise-finished tunic for HRM Maynard.  It’s something I’ve done lots of times but I had never been totally satisfied with how it came out.  I can DO it, I just don’t LIKE it.

Then Tasha posted her instructions for setting a gore in a slit.  Tasha, it must be said, is a lifesaver, because while this is not anything that I hadn’t seen before, she put it in a way that I could make sense of.  (And I think having the instructions to refer back to really helped, too.  Previously I’ve only been SHOWN how to do it.)  And the gores, they came out beautifully.  Sadly, I didn’t manage to get any good pictures of them but HRM wore the tunic for court at Pax and it looked great, at least from afar.

I counted this for my A&S 50 because, while I didn’t do the whole garment, the re-learning how to do center gores was a pretty big thing for me and definitely will have an impact on how I go about constructing 13th century clothing.

Did I get your attention?

Here are Caleb’s braies.  I did them in the “quick and dirty” style – a wide center panel with legs attached, as pictured here.  This is how I did braies when I first started making them – they give the right impression, ESPECIALLY when worn with hosen, but are pretty fast to make and don’t require draping them on the wearer.  I leave a small portion of the front seams open for access to the drawstring; it’s left open on both sides so that we can attach points directly to the drawstring and leave them there for the duration.

I haven’t seen them on him yet, but he tells me that the fit very well.  If Alicia can make it to textile guild next week, we’re going to drape his hosen pattern.

I seem to have a huge pile of projects all in the works at once right now… not that I mind, it’s just a little crazy.

I’m sending an A&S display item to Crown even though we’re not going.  That will be Matatias’ brown riding tunic – I had to do some mending on it last night because the topstitching on the neckline had broken in one place, but it’s repaired & washed.  I need to check/update the docs for it, though.

I’m also working on Caleb’s rapier armor.  It’s going to be my usual 2-layer undergarment with a fashion layer overgarment.  He has chosen brown with black bands for the fashion layer and white for the undergarments.  His hosen will be black as well.  I cut a bunch of bias bands for the trim last night.  When we get to the point that I’m going to drape his hosen pattern, I think I’m going to turn it into a workshop – Alicia wants to see how I do them and at that point we might as well just have a bunch of people over.  It’s not like I don’t have the handouts for it!

Finally, I’m working on Catlin’s riding tunic.  I’m repeating the seaming technique I used on the first riding tunic, only without whip-stitching the fashion and lining fabrics together first.  So far I have done about 6″ of seam on one set of gores.  I couldn’t find my wax last night so it wasn’t going as fast as I would have liked.  My GOAL is to have that done by Pennsic so it can be displayed and then delivered to her there.

ETA:  Heh, I forgot that I also have a tunic of His Majesty’s to do some work on.  Thank goodness for my handy to-do list, eh?

It’s not FINISHED finished, but it is all assembled.  And suffering from “looks better on a person than the dress form” disease, but you will get the idea.

For this gown, I tried something new in terms of the neckline – I made bias tape and finished the neckline with it.  Since it’s a keyhole neckline, I had to miter the corners, and I even did it correctly on the first try!  (Hooray, I get to pass ninth grade geometry!)

In general, I like this as a finishing method.  I like an applied facing rather than just turning a small hem for a neckline.  I made one mistake, which was only cutting the strip about 3/4″ wide – this meant that I had to make the seam allowance smaller than the allowance of the center seam, which in turn meant that getting things to line up on the inside was a little… finicky.  It looks a little strange on the inside, but it lies just fine.

The fabric that I’m working with is still annoying, and the results are still beautiful.  I have the neckline finished (stay tuned for a post just about the neckline, once I’ve taken pictures of it), both sleeves put in, and the gores and side seam done on one side.  There’s a LOT of skirt, and it’s lovely.  I’m very pleased.

This evening I cut out HRH’s gown and put together the front & back panels with their gores, cut the neckline, and assembled the sleeves.  OK, when I write it that way, it doesn’t seem like all that much for two hours of work.  The cutting took me about half an hour.  As I was working, I realized that I have an order that I ALWAYS make gowns in.  I pin as many pieces as I can so that once I sit down at the machine, I can just sew.  The first pieces done are always the first pass of the gussets to the sleeves, the center seam of the split gore if I’m using one, and the shoulder seams if I’m using two body panels.  This time, I swapped out the first pass of the front gore to the front body panels for the shoulder seams.  Then I finish the sleeves, place gores, and sew side seams.  This time, I’m going to be facing the neckline, so that’s next on the list because it’s easier done while the garment is still two-dimensional.

I had a brief moment of panic when I convinced myself that I had once again made the sleeves too small, despite accounting for how the bad pair on the underdress fit.  I agonized about this until I realized – I have the too-small pair lying around, I could just check the new sleeves against them.  The new ones were, of course, just fine.  I was just being paranoid.

I found the fabric a little annoying to work with; it’s EXTREMELY ravelly, made me cough when I ripped the straight cuts, and was generally just … weird.  I was becoming very disenchanted with it towards the end.  But then I draped what I have  done over the dress form and stood across the room, and everything was better, because it LOOKS stunning, annoying as it’s being to work with.