I managed to get to Canterbury Faire after all 🙂 And taught two of three classes and then had to come home due to a truly minor infection (from sewing, hand sewing, not even machine sewing) and so didn’t get to preview some of the Anne of Cleves context. I might have to do my presentation at the conference then get it into some SCA context 🙂
But I started that journey in part due to the so called Rule of Three that meant many of us my generation missed out on reproducing her garments.
The rule of three says that you need to find three iterations of a Thing before you can recreate it. Or that’s how it has been used, in the past. The rise of viral social media has pretty much erased that. I saw it really rise with cosplay and especially with the Star Wars costuming clubs. The cache with being the first to recreate (and yes, I have managed that and there is a lot of social currency that follows) has meant not many people even know this was a thing.
But it really was.
Anne of Cleves in her two portraits wears garments of a Princess of Cleves between 1500 and 1550. We have so very little visual depictions of any princess of Cleves in that time frame that this was always going to be an impossible task.
So I started there. I think I genuinely have enough for a dissertation of my own. It would be faster to do it as a Masters and then get all my appendices in that rather than try to find a Ph.D superviser at this distance from.. you know… the actual paintings and archives.
But I did get to teach from my iPad a quick intro to my basic patterns. I know what I know about extant garments and tailor manuals, but there is a lot of work to turn that into a really useful book.
I am centered on frocks. But will include some outer garments and can probably get in a little info on bifurcated garments and doublets. There are some fairly easy to apply fitting bits.
But again, I want to get my reference ducks in a row so that it has very solid but easy to read support.
So I’ve been collecting all my Burguen notes (I started transcribing several years ago but redrawing all the line art has been perhaps the most useful contribution) and found some rescaled line art of some of the Northern manuals.
But also so many extant garments have been described so i need to do some transcribing and translating to make sure I’m not missing anything. But some is really exciting 🙂
Meanwhile my cough has gotten worse so am in the middle of some tests (including stuff like liver and thyroid functions) and I’m hoping it’s something really simple. As embarassed as I will be if all of this is simple to fix it’s much much much better than having some nodules or scarring from coughing (as yes, that is very much a thing and scarring from coughing is very easy to do!)