Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

The seam between the wool layer of the two halves of the front gore were sewn wrong (which I guess is what happens when you get impatient). It didn’t lie flat at the top. I ripped out that seam and sewed it together again. It’s lying much flatter now. I also finished the edge of the front opening. Lastly I…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

Lots of procrastination (and being too busy to breath (damn holidays)). Two nights ago I -finally- sat down and cut out the wool for the dress. I think the procrastination was caused by having to make the first cut in nice fabric. Luckily I got past it. The cutting went really fast. After cutting it all out I started sewing…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

At sewing night this week I had Edith fidget with the fitting. We had some success but then it got frustrating and very hard to work with. With only a little itty bitty seam allowance to tug on it was very hard to get a tighter fit. Eventually we gave up for the night and went on to other projects.…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

Ok, all the pieces of yellow lining linen are sewn together. I tried it on and found that the yellow linen is a lot lighter and stretchier than the linen we used for the fitting. After fuming about this overnight (and talking with Edith) I’ve decided to re-cut out the lining from some heaftier white linen I have in my…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

Last night I ironed the yellow linen and cut out the lining. I noticed that a lot of the details of the fitting got lost when I added the seam allowance. To fix this I laid the yellow lining on top of the pattern pieces and traced the fitting marks onto the lining with purple chalk. The yellow was just…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

Not much done at this point. I cleaned up the pattern pieces. I used a T pin (head of the pin is about 1/2 inch (1 cm) long) to mark the seam allowance on the dress. I then trimmed all the excess off of the pattern. Place the T-pin so the body of the pin is parallel with the seam…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

Edith fit me for the dress using Robin Netherton’s methods (super secret, she made us promise not to publish them). Yes, it’s only been a year and a half… but in that time we’ve fit lots of other people for the dress. So we weren’t too rusty on the methods. We used some aweful chunky linen with thin black stripes…

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Yellow Cote (late 14th - early 15th Century)

I had the very good fortune to be able to attend a lecture by Robin Netherton. She lectured on her method for achieving this type of fitted dress and she also talked about her reasoning why the garments found in Greenland around that time (the so-called 10-gore dress) aren’t good examples of the fashions on the mainland. All-in-all, she was…

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