I’ve had a little time to myself and have genuinely got my research to the point I’ve been able to tackle my folders of my costumes. And also open up my WIP boxes of my Cleves frocks as I have found them too overwhelming. You see this health stuff has set back everything. Ditto my data issues. And mistakes I made a few years back required me replacing a whole lot of under linings that were barely too short. Frustratingly too short.

For my red velveteen gown this was critical. I need to have wiggle room to shift the patchwork of pieces up and down the underlining so I get the very best use out of the tiny scraps I have. Luckily the Moritz von Saschen schaube comes to my rescue. Because there are places where the joins in the guarding are raw edge to raw edge. I’m hoping it doesn’t come to that but I do need to be able to use every tool I have. So I’ll be fusing the very edges and zig zagging them down to the underlining.

And I have an underlining for the minkie, I mean tube rat lining. It’s not overly stretchy, but it is still stretchy so I need to firstly baste it to the underlining and then sew parallel rows down to mimic piecing. I may not make it quite as narrow as I know it should be…

But there is some hard core piecing happening in that layer too as I only just have enough for this and my remake of my dark blue gown. I’m making it into an earlier style and that means fur.

My Gelderlander gown has just one underlayer. Okay. I probably should buy some more calico for a second so that the skirt can be lined and the fur lining go only about to my knees. It depends on how much I trust the Codice de Trajes on some details.

The artist just didn’t understand the overlapped skirts, most people don’t. But, see, I really want to call my red velveteen gown a Gelderlander frock too but I’m making the liste as deep as I can get to push it right up to 1550. These liste are more like 1530s and earlier.

Sorry the museum site is down, here is a link to the RKD site https://rkd.nl/images/59494

But see how we can easily see the gap between the liste and narrower guarding? that tells us how tall it is.

And you can tell this gown has something really similar going on with the guarding around the skirt and sleeves.

And now that it’s so easy to retouch you can see how high up Katharina von Reidt’s liste is! I don’t think we can say that’s just an artifact from the photography or processing or digitisation.