Now that I’ve got my mitts on PoF 1(updated) and 6 I can breathe a sigh of relief. The overlap in what I have been doing and what’s in these books reveals that yes I am in the right area of understanding.

Where I diverge is still of interest and still important. That’s a lot like where I am with my understanding of tailoring in the 16thC. Enough that matches that I can probably invest my time in what doesn’t rather than repeat it all.

It’s fun though when you name your “system” modular and finally read a snippet from a tailor who basically supports what you’ve been trying to express for 20 years. It’s also kind of funny to now have so many scaled patterns not just in colour but also with the fabric decoration overlaid. I’ve been using my old photocopies and prints of extant garments and tailoring and dressmaking books and colouring in each piece.

What I was doing though was to support my modular system so I have different colours for skirts, bodices, sleeves. It’s fascinating how fitted sleeves were almost unchanged from the 16thC right through to the late 19thC. And what that reveals, in much the way my work matching established work reveals, is how well they work. And you can then compare the extant pieces and the line art in manuals and recognise how far drafting takes you before individual fitting comes in.

I think I started all this because skirts tend to be the first thing recycled into church vestments or maybe cloaks and we’re lucky when the bodice and sleeves survive this process. It means my focus on frocks is heavily on how that happens. It’s one thing to be able to recycle fabric but how does the cut of the skirts influence how these new pieces are cut and assembled?

This also ties really deeply to my North Rhine research as gold yarn was a trade dominated by women. Said yarn was used for embroidery and passementerie and hand woven trim especially for said vestments. It was also exported to Italy in different qualities to be woven into fabric.

I’m still skirting outside my 16thC research because I need a little bit of distance from it. So I’m just trying to enjoy my mantua work. One of the questions is where did the term Mantua come from in the first place. This is where digitised records are so very important. One of the likely sources of the term is the French term “manteau.” So far so good. But neither term really brings up a lot of digitised books or archives.

But what if you realised the spelling of the time (late 17th-early 8thC) was very different. And it was “manto” and “mantoes.”

Try saying that out loud.

So I think the French connection is the stronger one than the embroiderers who migrated to England in Henry VIII’s reign from Mantua.

And it helps with connecting to the French fashion plates with the same early style.

I’ve been overlaying the patterns from the disparate sources but am hoping the expanded Patterns of Fashion 1 and new volume 6 does have all of them with much clearer lines and the new colour blocking. These are in various volumes of Costume, the little Museum of London book by Zillah Halls, History of Costume by Blanche Payne, Cut of Women’s Clothes by Nora Waugh.

I did also get a little further boost to what I believe is going on with them. One is from a written description from a book I already have, another is related to how fashions were communicated, and the last is my own timeline of dressmaking. I had to add back in some tailoring books and household books. The latter mostly deal with recipes and how to spot adulteration of foods and toiletries. The quality of digitalisation now means it’s easier to pick through the hundreds of close typed pages to find advice that I’ve otherwise missed out on.

But my timeline of patterns has probably tripled since I published it. And that covers from the 16thC to 2000s. It’s a lot to wrangle and I’m sure people wonder why I do it. But no one repository has all of them, and even when they do the coversheet rarely explains what you are getting. So my preview images are of the bodice at least and a full gown where possible. It really helps to illustrate just how much experimentation went on once dressmakers were responsible for most frocks. They had to get inventive because the tailors were really unhappy and kept their trade secrets secret.

And that is a preview of the kind of depth and breadth of research needed for context of any one era. And a hint as to how expanded my timeline and mantua pages are going to be.

I haven’t even touched on the different tools developed in the 19thC.

This was a beloved story when I was young. It wasn’t just sweet it really touched on themes of identity when all the adults in her life kept giving her hot water bottles when really she wanted a puppy.

So when it came time to do a self directed piece for my Diploma of Performing Arts I knew I needed to reference it.

So for this piece we had to work to a time limit, we used tech for effect, and we needed music. I was stumped on the last. But I knew what I wanted to do with the space.

I wanted it filled with roses. Visual, scented, I wanted realistic ones, I had at least one book on gardening too.

I wanted to essentially be Phoebe but in my piece for me to have people keep giving me roses because that’s as much as they know about me. A mix of not knowing, and not wanting to know. And I really still needed music and I still needed a way to go from isn’t this lovely, she’s talking about her passion, to oh, this is actually bad.

At the time I was living about a 40min walk (maybe more, yes it was more, it was more than an hour) which gave me a lot of time to listen to the radio (yes) and play back lessons to practice singing. Nothing builds core strength and for a lifetime like speed walking and maintaining a smooth line in singing.

And one day I was listening to concert FM and it was some Early Music. It was 16thC French songs and dances and I settled in to listen. And you won’t believe the name of the album.

“Le Jardin De Melodies” by The King’s Noyse.

The garden of melodies.

Okay, so I keep listening and it’s Pavane and Galliarde “de la Battaille” and I’m loving it. Still doesn’t quite feel like what I need. It’s so close though. This mix of gentle and then passion. I could work with it. I’m just enjoying it anyway.

So we get to the “Almande / Saltarello” And hey this is nice. And then really quickly you feel like you’re slightly forward with the music. Then you get a bit of relief, then you fall forward again and… bang. Right into “Schiarazula Marazula”

I got goosepimples.

And the best part, is the music then starts to right itself. We’ve had this music that seemed so standard but felt wrong, to this music that startles with the instruments, but it feels like we’re coming back together.

So in my piece the Almande reflects external expectations, but it feels wrong, then the start of Schiarazula is my own recognition of how I’ve been part of the same expectations. As the music builds I started to look for anything but a rose, breaking them all up on stage. When the music pauses is the start of calmness and rebuilding, but by my own hand and imperfectly a rose that is now entirely my own. It’s about rebuilding and keeping what was good. The music builds faster again, but this time it feels like heading to new place.

PIAS represents the Harmonia Mundi label and they’ve created playlists of many albums including Le Jardin:

And:

Also yes. If you’ve ever heard me sing anything at an SCA event it’s likely Helas Fautil. It took on a different meaning for me in 2016.

But my voice is classically trained and getting a vibrato let alone the ability to do trills was so very difficult that I’m not giving up the placement I use which also has protected my voice from wear.

Yep, growing up with this song has meant some phrases really stick, rather than being a very catchy song.

Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves

It’s something I think about a lot because the pressure I put on myself to produce my work is because I can’t repay in kind the kindness I receive. I wouldn’t need it if I could do it. So I try to express that in ways I can. And that is my vast library that is digital, physical, and everything that is still stuck in my head.

I desperately want to get my work on tailoring and Anne of Cleves published. It will probably have to be self published because I’m just so very stuck with having to rebuild my sites, my pc, my archives. It means I’m finding it harder to work towards a timeframe than ever before.

And currently relearning to walk in this protected recovery from my Achilles injuries. It’s starting to work, but it’s so much harder than other injuries I’ve recovered from. The amount of time and energy and appointments to just be able to stand steadily really does take so much out of me.

I went from literally throwing myself across the stage to not being able to move overnight. Quite the thing to have gone from studying immunology to feeling the full power of it. Essentially my immune system thinks my own tissue is an infection and that tissue is literally everywhere. Nose to toes. Joints, tendons, ligaments, organs.

In RA, the synovial tissue becomes markedly expanded, with a striking increase in cellular infiltration. This leads to hallmark “pannus” formation at cartilage-bone interfaces; pannus can be composed of macrophages, FLS, leucocytes, plasma cells, and mast cells (14), and behaves like a locally invasive tumor, mediating damage and erosion formation in later disease (15). 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2019.00045/full

I’m celebrating surviving all of this.

Last time I wrote about wanting to make a mantua with my taffeta it was quite hard to get really nifty views. Still true for a few but my word! The Shrewsbury mantua! It looks brand new. And all the wonderful joins are now recorded. And what’s really exciting about these early examples is that they were developed outside the work of tailors.

I think we can recognise how the rules dressmakers/milliners had to follow in not cutting seams to fit- the curved darts do this- but I think it’s always why you get the wedge panels through the sides. Tailors still used side seams, with classic extensions that go to the selvage then over. They had centuries of records of how to do this.

Milliners/dressmakers did not. But they probably had a lot of experience with linen goods.

And the diagonal to straight seaming might be something to pin experiments on.

Because this was all pretty new.

I was only supposed to be looking in my files to really have a bit of fun and recover from a very heavy week of sadness and stress.

I’m actually going to make my Elsa mantua.

I just got way too excited about all this new imagery!

Yes it is! Despite some weird OS update stuff (I got the welcome screen but then couldn’t find any new updates) and explorer breaking, again, I’ve actually been doing some really nifty work finding art in places not previously recorded. The only downside is it means I have to go searching for “Flemish” art to find even more.

But I kind of need to stop where I am because I need to write up why I’m so sure about two images in particular- because it’s not “just” what I know about frocks. It’s also what I know about how artists worked in different forms. It’s even in legal proceedings some artists undertook to recover their own sketches. One of the ways you get influences in art is through the kind of theft this reveals.

In many ways the reason there is so much work to do is to not believe there is this rich level of information in depictions of frocks.

So if I can write up why these depictions are so easy to spot then conservators and historians with access to the art can continue that work.

I’m sad to say I am not able to present my research at the IMCS. While I seem to be on the path to recovery in regards to my PC I’ve just been put so far behind that I haven’t been able to practice. The reality is also that regardless of whether my CNS issues are fibro or vanilla RA it does mean I have to practice more and put in place many more stress relievers.

On the plus side my work isn’t in vain. When I put my paper up for consideration I was mostly working with a negative space around Anne of Cleves. Much of what I could do was really limited by the quality of images and a lack of open access written work. It’s been further hampered by the curation of catalogues that remove depictions of women. Luckily the efforts to digitise collections has rectified this but it’s taking time to fold all this new information in.

The last year has been a particularly bad year but I kept working on this project because I do believe it’s important not only to people interested in Anne or even in North Rhine fashion, but more widely in how much we don’t know because the information is so broken and separated.

But now I need to take a break. Missy seems to have had a fright overnight so she wasn’t on my chair this morning and she’s only eating outdoors. Fluffy is now back to being in my room, which he shared with Carlo until we needed to protect Carlo by keeping doors closed while he was in my room or also when he was in the lounge. So we’re all a bit out of sorts.

Today my PC decided to break down. If I’m very lucky indeed it is resolved-ish (there is still a problem in booting.) But spending all of my good hours on it today is not recoverable. The unpredictability means it’s unfair to keep the organisers waiting. It was going to be hard to pay for registration anyway but today was the day I would have.

Unfortunately I can’t even say “well I can put it towards a new PC” because I am still paying for physio and I need to see the dentist. I can put off glasses for a little longer as my last set of glasses were too strong and I’m only now fitting them. But that’s not a good solution.

If none of this happened I was on track. My health limits how many hours I have to spend on everything so while I know my health would not let me fit in the hours I’ve spent on this over the next week it is still my PC failing that has put me in this position. It’s something that would be an issue for anyone who can’t just rock up to by a new PC on the same day. Because that too would have given me a good chance of recovering.

Disability tax is real. It’s also both obvious and not obvious at the same time. The tech fail I’m experiencing is in and of itself no different than for anyone trying to do what I am doing. Where the difference lies is the cost in terms of percentage of time and percentage of health and very much as a percentage of pain.

I have only a few hours in a good day to do everything that would otherwise fill the 16 hours of day sans 8 hours of sleep. So take 16 hours and try to do it all in what, 4? You can’t scrimp on health so that 2mins of tooth brushing is now more like 10mins.

So far so easy.

Where things get harder to calculate is pain time. It’s not like 1 hour in pain is like 4 hours otherwise. Or rather it is but then you have a cost for many days after to include “recovery” that is less like recovery and more like recalibration. Sometimes I can do half an hour of pain and it be like 2 hours with no cost days after, but that’s rare now.

So where I’m heading with this post is that I’m in the last few days of time left to know if I can do K’Zoo because I have two days to pay registration fees but the next two weeks might be almost entirely tech rather than actual research (*). If I had 3K spare for a new PC with specs for research (think gaming x data centre) it would be fine. But I don’t. So that cost comes out of my time (remember at least a 4x cost) and health and pain.

It’s close enough that I might have just a day or two in which to really know for sure. And again, that amplitude of cost doesn’t include bad days. I don’t even have space for one (4x) bad days. They tend to have a long tail. So one bad day is more than a week in both actual time and disability time.

(*) I think there is actual memory leak. I turned off all “visual effects” other than thumbnails and yikes. Explorer still ratches up private and working set bytes (because everything works within explorer/desktop) but instead of crashing I’m just not getting pdf thumbnails then no image thumbnails created and instead defaulting to icons. It’s difficult to work with but for what I’ve been doing it’s enough to have made enough progress I might be able to switch different effects back on. But oh boy it also physically hurts my eyes due to font rendering being so messed up. Again, browsers operate within explorer so turning off visual effects messes with that.