I promised pictures of the garments that I made for people going to the Pennsic War. Here they are, minus some faces.
First up, though nearly last-made, is a fighter’s tunic, meant to go over armor and keep the more plastic bits of the armor from showing to the assembled crowd. Simply a large rectangular bloc of fabric, adorned with strips of trim, hemmed, and a neck T-hole cut through the middle. Should work fine over the armor, and only a few hours’ work. There was enough fabric left that we could probably make something small out of it, a few bags perhaps, possibly some other things. We’ll see. The neck-hole is a T-shaped slot lined with more of this pale brown trim. I did the machine stitching with a paler purple-red color that the fighter can pass off as “the last thread from our house in Carthage before the sack of the city at the end of the Third Punic War.”
It’s good to have a story.
The second things I’m showing off, but the first made, was a Roman senatorial toga, two broad purple stripes of a different cloth than the main body of the white toga. This was for a different client. Underneath the toga is a tunica cerulea, a sky-blue tunic. AT the time of the fitting of the garment, I hadn’t yet hemmed the neckline. Both garments are essentially linen. Both should be very, very nice after a few washings.
The footwear needs some work, of course. But that’s how these things usually go.
In essence, this toga is a sari. It’s the width of the fabric, selvedge edge to selvedge edge, hemmed on all four sides, with the purple ends attached as a result of two folds in the fabric to make a broad double-seam in the middle. Saris are woven completely from end to end, so this isn’t a sari. But in terms of length, it seems about the same. In terms of width, it seems about the same. And it’s a pretty plausible re-construction of a toga, as near as I can tell. Which makes more sense than some of the other constructions I’ve seen, that appear to require looms dozens of yards wide.
I don’t know if the third garment is historical or not, but it’s basically a wraparound skirt or short kilt with a strip of trim on three sides. Wrap it around you, left over right, belt at the waist, fold the upper part over the belt, voila! Working clothes on a hot day when you feel like being shirtless. It seemed the best use for a broad strip of fabric left over from a chiton, at least for the guy whose fabric it was.
So… those are some of the projects I’ve worked on and finished this weekend and early week. I wonder what’s next?
In the meantime, back to quilting.
