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 ...

  Hello Beautiful Humans! In the 16th Century not everyone wore giant ruffs or rigid farthingales? Extreme fashions that capture the public imagination are not practical for most people in many professions. I made this short to remind everyone that we did not just stop farming and working once the 16th century got underway. While clothing may adapt to current fashions, there will always be people working 9 to 5, or longer hours, to make sure our world is functioning. If you are not into extreme fashions look at the middling and lower classes to find clothing that is functional and beautiful. When I made this dress I specifically wanted to choose colors that were typical of the time period I was working from. Red wool kirtles have been popular for many years by the time this style of dress was in fashion. Combining this with a blue linen apron was inspired by a painting detail from Peter Bruegel the Elder depicting peasants at a fair day. I later realized the specific figure with ...

  Hello Beautiful Humans! This week is a electronic gift to one of my friend's who recently had a birthday and asked me for a video tutorial a year ago on how I incorporate rings into my eyelets to reinforce my 16th century gowns. To give you some historical context, in the second half of the 15th century having elaborate lacing rings for your gown was very popular in Florence. By the 16th century the fashion had disappeared, but the fitted bodices of gowns continued. When Elenora di Toledo was burred, her funeral dress had small brass rings sewn into her eyelets. Exact sizing and details on this dress can be found in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 3 . It makes since that over a 100 year period the rings would have transformed from a practical focal point into a discrete reinforcement method. I usually get my rings for lacing, awls, and other tools from Renaissance Fabrics You can also find awls, thread, chalk, etc at your local sewing store. This video will walk y...

  This week we are trying out an experiment with natural dyeing. I haven't really died fabric in years, and I've never been hands on in dyeing with natural fibers. I chatted with some friends who have worked with natural dyes and started saving onion skins from my cooking for a year. While cleaning up my sewing room after the holidays I cam across another stash of yellow onion skins and decided I had enough skins to try making a dye pot. I started this project my soaking my silk veil I wanted to dye in a mordant bath of alum while I started cooking onion skins. Mordants are a dye fixative to keep your fabric from loosing color after the dye process. My research said to use a mineral mordant, such as pickling alum, when trying to dye vegetable and protein based fibers. I didn't time this process and went more based on description and experimentation. The onions skins cooked in a crock pot I found at the thrift store last year while I was stating to passively research this...