The Tudor Revolution

  Hello Beautiful Humans! CoSy 2021 is finally here and I am so excited to get you started today with some renaissance costuming content. The earliest hairnets I have found reference to come to us from ancient Greece. The mesh work on these is much finer than the net I am going to show you to make today, as were many of the examples from the middle ages and renaissance. I am still in awe that we have surviving nets from these time periods for people to study! Some of my favorites are visible on the Museum of London's collections website. in the 1540s and 1550s Eleonra di Toldedo, the duchess of Tuscany is often depicted in paintings, carvings, and other media with her hair parted down the middle and arranged into a gold scuffia, which we would today call a snood or hairnet. My goal today is to make a similar scuffia for my own dresses from this period. They are a very versatile accessory which allows the wearer to keep their hair contained, follow the letter of the laws about b...

  Hello There Beautiful Humans! After a bit of a break do deal with apartment renovations and work I am back with a tutorial on how I made these Edwardian lavender wands. From the research I was able to find, this craft seems to have started in Provence in the late 19th century. Lavender has a long history of being used in households to improve scents and clean things for hundreds of years prior though. An alternative to weaving wants with ribbons and stems would be drying the flowers and making small sachets with them. To make these wands you will need freshly cut lavender, ribbon of your choice, and scissors. I tried several different types of ribbon and found that generally the wider the ribbon the faster your weaving will go, but the more likely you are to have buds falling out of your wands. Satin ribbons were easier to weave through the lavender stems, but harder to tie off at the end of your wand. My recommendation is to try the one you have on had, and if you don't like ...

  Hello Beautiful Humans! Thank you for your patience this week with my technical difficulties. I promise it will be worth it because I was able to make some more edits to my video to make it more fun. This is a project I am making to go with a new medieval dress that one of my friends is making, and I thought a few of you might be interested in how I stitch these tiny hems on silk veils. My secret with the fabric is particularly flimsy is starch. Starch is a material that is available in Europe by the 16th century and is used to set riffs, and hide glue was also being used to stiffen buckram for interlining garments and hats. I'm going to call the idea of starching difficult fabric for sewing historically plausible, even if they would have been cooking starch rather than using a convenient spray bottle. the Elizabethan Costume Group on Facebook has lots of great information in its archives on starches and buckram if you want a deeper dive. This video was not sponsored by Targe...

  Hello there Beautiful Humans! If I am being honest with us all, this dress did not fit before the pandemic started either. I mad this dress when I was fresh out of college, living on a military base, and in very good shape. I am still in fair shape, but no where near that lean, and I still love this dress. When I made it I was living in Arizona and could only really wear it for a few months our of the year due to the heat. Historically people did not often throw out clothes that don't fit like we do today. 1 gown could cost a significant portion of a laborer's wages to just replace. Instead of buying all new garments all the time they would altar, mend, and redecorate older outfits to accommodate for weight changes, wear and tear, or repurposing of garments. Janet Arnold in Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd even discusses tailor bills indicating that she was not wasting the expensive materials her clothes were made from. Instead she has several dresses that were ...