Schlossfest

Roughly translated to "castle-festival", this is an event which takes place in Neuburg, Donau, every other year and where my lovely friend Lilly took me and some other friends last weekend. The entire historic city centre was converted into one giant renaissance fair, and most of the townspeople were in costume - it was incredible! Here are some pictures, like I promised:

Lovely Lilly on the left. The guys' garb was generously supplied by Lilly's family

The castle's court. The entire inner wall used to be painted like that,
they're restoring it

On the left, the wall-painting has already been restored,
while the walls in the middle and opposite still await restoration

Lilly being silly in the courtyard

I said there would be pictures of my costume, din't I?

The entire group, picture taken by a nice lady who just couldn't
for the life of her figure out how to use my camera.

There were groups like this walking through
all the streets, making music...

...or representing the guard! It felt like a real
medieval faire as you could always hear
drumming or music out of one direction or other :)

On the second day, it was so hot and we intended to stay only for such a short time, that I couldn't be bothered to wear my costume. Still took some pictures, though:

Lilly and me, and I actually bought that parasol/umbrella!
(I was told by the shopkeeper that it could absolutely be
used as an umbrella :) )

We were all pretty tired at the end of our second day

In other news, I decided to postpone the corset making until after my exams are done (august), but as I like to have something to do, I'm knitting a stole now. Pictures and a pattern will be up soon :)

Renaissance apron the second

You can see how little of the thread was left about halfway through

My apron is done! Yay! I finished the embroidery today, more out of necessity than my free will. Firstly, the event I'm planning to wear the apron to is this weekend, so I had to finish, secondly, my thread ran out, so I actually had to finish. I couldn't quite finish the pattern I had drawn on before, but unpicked one of the flowers at the other end so that it would still be more or less symmetrical. I'm quite satisfied with the result, although there are a couple of things I would do differently if I ever did such a project again:

• Start from the middle. It doesn't matter if you're drawing the pattern on or embroidering, if you start from one of the sides, it's going to be asymmetrical. (That holds especially true if you can't be sure that you have enough thread)
• Don't start an embroidery project unless the deadline is more than a year away! Embroidering (especially an ever repeating pattern) is a long and boring task and you will come to hate it if you have to do too much in too little time 
• Read the instructions before you start. 'nuff said.

That being said, here's the finished result:

You can see the tiny holes on the left where I unpicked a flower because I simply didn't have enough thread left to embroider one on the other side ;)

 And here it is on me, completing the outfit I plan to wear this weekend:

My camera sometimes doesn't like me, so it gives me demon eyes ;)

If I get any better pictures at the fair, I'll post them :)

Renaissance Apron

I figured I needed some accesoires for my renaissance dress (the GGK) and I've long been wanting to try smocking, so I decided to make an apron. Since I had never done any smocking before, I firstly had to figure out how to do that. Thanks, Wikipedia! I still had some trial and error until I figured out the perfect way to get the look I wanted:

Upper left: gathering stitches 1cm apart. Upper right: gathering stitches 0.5cm apart, the version I ended up using on the apron. Bottom: Lazy as I am, I tried to get the smocked look without gathering at all. needless to say, I quickly gave up.

 
First things first, I had to cut the fabric. Smocking supposedly shortens the width of the fabric to a third, so after eyeballing how wide I wanted my apron to be at my waist (~30cm) and how long I wanted it to be (~70cm, a little longer than my knees) I cut a 90x70cm rectangle. Then I marked dots running 5mm apart, since that was the width I wanted my gathering stitches to have. I did three lines of markings (in regular pen, don't judge me, it doesn't show through to the right side of the fabric) and gathered the fabric, using a contrasting colored thread to make it easier to unpick later.

Two lines done, one more to go

I just realized that I didn't take any pictures of the actual smocking process, I'm soo sorry! I'll try to put in some pictures once I have some free time.

I'm really happy with the finished result, although I'm not sure if using red thread for smocking on a white garment is period accurate. I had some already-sewn straps from a not quite finished poject, so I whipstitched them to the top corners as ties.

Finished apron! ...well, not quite. I still had so much time to the actual fair, I decided to decorate it - with blackwork. Or, in my case, redwork. I picked out a pattern I liked from blackwork embroidery archives (the daffodils), drew it on some graph paper and from there copied it onto my fabric.

Yes, I used regular pen again. Don't judge me.

I used the same red thread as for the smocking (polyester, extra strong for handsewing) and emroidered with the wrong face of the garment (and thus the pattern) facing up. No idea if that is how it's usually done, it just works a lot better than everything else i've tried so far.

The dress, the shirt and the (half finished) apron on my dressform, just to get an idea of how the embroidery will look with the finished costume

I still have over half of the pattern to finish, so I'll wrap it up now. I will of course post pictures of the finished apron, as well as maybe some pictures from the fair.

Reasons for writing this blog

I am a big fan of all kinds of costuming. Where I come from, carnival is celebrated for weeks and every weekend there's a ball at a different village where people dress up, get drunk and dance to (mostly) terrible music. "Historical" costuming for me started out when I tried to recreate a dress from a Victoria Francés Poster for carnival - it needed a corset, but all buyable corsets were waaay to expensive for a mere costume, so I started researching ways to make my own. The costume ended up looking terrible (by my standarts today), still I wore it: it was the first costume I had ever sewn on my own. Atfer that , I kept sewing as one of my hobbies. I did it very scarcely and hardly ever any big projects, but i kept learning. A couple of years later, after watching (and reading) a LOT of Jane Austen, I decided I wanted to make a Regency dress. Having gotten better at Internet research, I stumbled upon my first costuming blog (the hungarican chick). With the help of that post and a modern, high-waisted shirt, I drafted the pattern for my very first Regency dress (I'm way too cheap to buy commercial patterns, also I seem to be unable to use them to my satisfaction). I really like the result, although I can't wear it (at the moment) because I made the bib too small to actually cover my chest. I'm planning to take it off, cut and sew a bigger one and attach that to the dress, but only after i've made proper undergarments, so that hast to wait.

The very much too small bib-front of my dress

 Of course, there are other things I would do differently if i made another Regency dress (I only read about the diamond back after I finished the dress), but still I think it's a good start.
Another year or so later, a friend invited me to visit her hometown in july, because there's a huge renaissance festival going on, with the whole towncenter dedicated to the festival and almost all the townspeople dressed up, so I decided I finally needed a dress for that period.

This time, I did some actual and extensive research: what year was the event the town is celebrating? (1530's). What was the appropriate dressstyle for that era, and where can I find some period pictures of what I want to wear? (I ended up looking at paintings by Breughel, sometimes called "Bauern-Breughel", meaning "peasant-Breughel" because he painted the simple people's life). Sadly, those paintings couldn't show me what I was looking for, but I found another great website: Elizabethan Costume. They have tons of infos and also a lot of Tutorials, which I ended up using for the construction of my Green Gathered Kirtle:

The GGK

This is the first costume I made that is actually wearable and that I am really proud of. Even though I had to rush the sewing (I only have a sewing machine available on weekends, when I'm at my parent's) it turned out perfectly and the way I imagined it. I can't wait to finally wear it in july.

In all these years ( I started sewing sometime in 2009), the internet has been a great help for me. I'm mostly self taught, so when I encounter difficulties my first step is always to go to the internet and look for someone who's already done what I'm trying to do and has recorded the steps it took them to do it. Since I now feel I am at a level where I can actually share knowledge instead of just consuming it, I am starting this blog for other people like me who might be trying to do things I've already done.

Besides that, this blog is also meant to share my successes and failures with you, (hopefully) get and give helpfull tips and - and this would be the icing on the cake - to meet other costumers/sewers/crafters in my area, since I hardly ever have opportunity to actually wear my costumes (carnival focuses more on the silliness and, lately and regrettably, sluttiness of costumes than on their historical accuracy/prettiness).

All that said, on with the sewing!