Fixing the Lotto dress

You may remember this dress here. Based on Lorenzo Lotto's "Lucretia" I made it last winter.  There is so much about this dress that I love.  It is unusual and striking and the patchwork is rather amazing if I do say so myself.  I don't wear it often though.  I still don't even have a full picture with the sleeves.  I kept resisting the big glaring fact about it.  It just didn't fit well.  I wanted a higher neckline, but what I ended up with was monoboob and a bodice that projected away from the body. 

I was stubborn about it.  Some people even tried to tell me what the issue was, but (due to some other circumstances and the accompanying frustration) I wasn't willing to listen to the advice.  Besides that, if I trimmed the neckline I'd lose some of the beautifully aligned patchwork stripes.  Not to mention the snipped bias trim I'd fretted over!  So, it sat in the closet.  I've worn it twice. 

It is a year later now, and the pretty colors and the snuggly warm flannel lining have convinced me I need to fix the problems so I can wear it to Coronation this weekend in Montana. So, I woke up this morning, threw the thing on (man, it is heavy with the fully lined skirt,) stood in front of the mirror, drew some lines, and took some scissors to the bodice.  I ended up cutting the front down about 3 inches.  THREE INCHES!  That's a rather big chunk. I have some nice cleavage now though and it instantly fixed the way the bodice sat on the body.  Not trying to fight my chest and giving it an escape route made everything happier.  I angled the cut back along the shoulder strap, slimming the straps by quite a bit.  The back was trimmed about an inch lower.  It is still rather high, but the straps sit comfortably, and I didn't see a reason to try to accomplish a lower, more accurate, back to the dress at this point and just mess things up.  Maintaining the integrity of the piecing was also a concern.

Now I just need to figure out if I'm going to try putting the snipped bias back or not.  I do have a yard or two leftover blue silk so that isn't a concern. The thing I'm most worried about is getting the finish right in front where the eyelets are.  There's not a great deal of space between eyelets, so the turn under is minimal and I can't do it how I'd prefer with the fashion fabric wrapping over and being stitched to the lining.  I'm actually wondering if I can do a thin bias binding and finish it all that way. I also need to decide if I'm going to rehem it, add a tuck above the hem, or try the bizarre fold over at the top from the portrait which is why the skirt is so long in the first place (well, chopines also figured in to the decision, but I never made a matching pair for this outfit.)

We leave Friday morning for Montana, and I have a Provincial banner to applique, birthday presents for my daughter who turns 9 on Sunday to make, and some cleaning and food prep to do before I take off for the weekend.  Guess I better get going.

Didn't get pictures at 12th night, but here's some of me in the background

My friend Megan was kind enough to let me share a couple of pictures she took at 12th night. Not many got taken, but I intend to remedy that this weekend and have my friend Davey take some good pictures of the dress and accessories.

And, in case you wanted to see the back.

Here's the dress

In need of steam, the real bodice cords and the sleeves still, but its officially a dress. The weird bulge I was worried about in the right shoulder strap isn't there once its laced on rather than just pulled close to check fit so WHOO_HOO!

Even with the lining and padding in the cartridge pleats the skirt doesn't seem as full as I'd hoped. I think I may wear it with my larger gold petticoat rather than the salmon one I made for it. That actually sort of works out well. I wore the salmon one with the red dress at Solstice Court and it made the red dress skirt hang much better. The salmon one is shorter and lighter weight and the red skirt is more narrow that the one on the new dress. There are more than 200 inches in the hem for the blue and orange and it is cartridge pleated so I think the gold one will support it better.

I need to put chapes on the kumihimo cord I made to lace the bodice closed and I'm calling it quits for tonight. Bianca announced on the AErie that we needed to bring documentation to 12th Night and if we were doing that full documentation by midnight was optional but encouraged. I'm going with optional and spending the holiday with my husband and kids rather than scrambling. We have lobster tails, shrimp, a couple of bottles of mead and a big ol' pile of board games.

Happy New Year!

Bodice cut and pieced.

My children have once again seized and broken the camera. With their assistance it now shoots the batteries across the room (my son broke the latch.) Since he had previously wrapped his kazoo in the last of the duct tape, I cannot fix the problem quite yet. Thus, there is no picture of the silk patchwork.

I'm rather pleased with it actually. I'm also pretty surprised at how quickly it went together. I had stressed about it a lot. Noelle was sweet enough to throw in the muslin we used to fit the bodice pattern in with the paper and I used it to sketch and cut up and divide the bodice to bits, then redrew the pieces with what I thought were generous seam allowances. Somehow they shrank (I blame how late it was when I finally cut it,) but it was enough. When I matched it back to the pattern it was pretty close with only a tiny issue on the shoulder strap. I "think" it will still be fine since it wasn't too far off. Trying to get the 4 strips to all come together squared at the shoulder with an angled seam wasn't as bad as I'd made it in my mind. At least I hope so. We'll see what happens once I actually get the whole sandwich put together and the shoulder seams done. Crossing my fingers.

Giant jewel of sparkliness

This is another one of those "learning experience" projects. It did not turn out remotely like I wanted it to, but I think it might be a stepping stone to get there. Just probably not in the next 3 weeks.

The large jewel sort of stuffed into the front of Lucretia's dress is rather intriguing. It has pinky/red gems and blue ones with a drop pearl. It has foliage and figures and the center is a giant flower. All kinds of interesting stuff going on.

Wikipedia's zoom is loads better than the images at the National Gallery and allows you to see the spiky topped flower stems and the faces of the cupids/putti.

While I would like to make a reproduction of the portrait jewel (in Sculpy since that's as close as I'm going to get to gold) I'm not so sure about my ability to sculpt it. I started on it and the proportions were not very good. I was having a tough time with the total 3 dimensionality of the putti. The entire piece also didn't seem particularly stable. And then my son tried to eat it and I gave up once I wrestled it away from him. I figured I'd start with something a little easier after that. I found this simple pendant dated 1540-1560 at the V and A (museum number M.242-1975) It is that simple because it is more concerned with the efficacy of the stones and their value as talismans, but I love the lines of it. I bulked it up a bit, both because of my sculpting ability as well as needing something more monumental.

Here it is before it hit the oven.

You'll notice the green and red stones, which is what I wanted (mostly. At least as far as the confines of what acrylic stones I had to hand.) I sculpted it, pulled the stones out so they wouldn't melt and put it in the toaster oven. Then my children once again intervened. They ran off with the acrylic. I have no idea where. I had given them their own sparkly stones for "treasure" but that was apparently not sufficient. After several hours of looking I gave up and went back to the bag to see if there were other options. The only ones in the right sizes were blue and pink. I'm not against the blue, but I hate the pink. I think it makes it feel like its something you'd find in package with a tiara and plastic high heeled sandals in the kid's dress up aisle. Also, just to add to frustration, I thought I'd accounted for shrinkage, but not enough. I broke a bit of the setting on the bottom stone getting it in to place. Even after sanding it down it didn't go in smoothly. So I added the pearls to disguise the fix. Then I added some more so it wouldn't look like they'd been tacked on in the end. Every place where I had had little gold balls I removed them and replaced with pearls. Not sure I care for the effect. To make things not so visibly Sculpy, I used liquid gold leaf and then buffed it with a wax gold finish to try to pick up some of the detail. Loads of gold chain and a clasp finish it out.

As I said, learning experience. I thought the acrylic would look fine since they are table cut. The color is a huge issue, however. Some colors look fine and others do not. While the blue and pink is actually pretty close to those in the original jewel, using a semiprecious stone of some kind might be a better option, especially to counterbalance the fact that I'm using a polymer clay. Another few attempts at sculpting is going to improve things over all, and I might get crazy and try the figures in the portrait. I think a bad looking attempt at the portrait necklace is going to make me feel better than a marginally better attempt at something that is already a compromise.

So, making my own sculpted medallions/pendants is going to go in to the pile where comb making is. I'll try again another time. Its something that I certainly want to figure out at some point.

Sprinting to the end

I've changed my mind multiple times on my project for the Artemisian Costuming Challenge and hemmed and hawed about what I was doing. Back and forth between Russian and Italian and in the process time has run out on me. The deadline is in basically a month, so I'm going to have to buckle down and run to the end.

Since my IRCC dress would actually count for the ACC according to the rules of the challenge, I decided doing another Italian would be the best idea since I could fill in with pieces of the IRCC ensemble for things I don't get done. I'm going to do the Lotto gown, as I've got the hat pretty much done already, the mantellino in progress and a few other bits and pieces in process.

I also made the soccaccia, a couple of girdles and other bits of jewelry, and have the muff almost done. Since I'd like to get back to posting on a daily basis, I'm going to wait and show those one at a time and talk about sources and such separately rather than putting everything in a pile today.

So, today's project is a tassel bag. I wasn't really happy with the IRCC one, so I've been working on doing a better version this time around. I'm pretty happy with this one. The picture also gives a glimpse of the fabrics I'm using for this project. The dress will be orange and blue instead of the orange and green of the portrait. I'm using a smoky/frosty blue dupioni and the rosy orange dupioni silk that I used to line my red dress. Both are stash fabrics and, while not as nice as a taffeta, are a step up from the cotton brocades I'd originally thought to use. I splurged and spent $14 of my $100 budget on a half yard of upholstery fabric for the muff and this bag. Not that easy finding something to match my crazy fabric choices, so I was happy to find it.

The tassel bag is an attempt to make a tasseled round bottomed drawstring pouch worn on long strings over the dress. It hangs low on the skirt. There are two portraits in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion showing this. Illustration 40 is Parisian and 52 is Dutch and I've found a few in other portraits from a variety of countries. Here's a French example from 1581. This print by Jacques de Gheyn II is from slightly before 1600 (de Gheyn stopped engraving in 1600 and was active from the 1580's.) It is a lower class individual, but it has the flap top in addition to the rounded drawstring purse shape.

Album Amoricum of a German Soldier dated 1595 has a number of them pictured, including this lady and this one.

Bags and purses seem to be much like modern ones, with shape size and preference shifting a bit according to the whims of the wearer. I wanted something with a bit more structure after my plain unstructured tassel bag. Looking around, I took inspiration from this German bag made in 1596 and this French tasseled bag from 1595
Although this is later (17th century) I liked the tassels and feel of this Italian coin purse at LACMA

I knew I wanted some structure, lots of tassels, a covered opening, and to be able to use the nifty metal mount I had picked up at a garage sale awhile back attached to a really sad pouch with an elastic opening. I cut the flap to match the mount and then tried to figure out how to give it some structure as I didn't have a purse ring. What I ended up doing was cutting a thick piece of leather that stiffens the back section even with the width of the flap. It also helps the bag hang nicely rather than droop. Then I cut two wide tear drop shapes from my fabric and lined the bag and flap with a blue linen that I'll be using as the lining for the dress as well. I placed buttonhole slits around the top edge and inserted a drawstring. It's a plain piece of grosgrain ribbon with a sliding bead to tighten it. I finished the bag off with little tassels made from the fringe I'll be eventually edging my parasol with and beads left over from my girdle. At present I'm planning to attach a short length of chain to each side of the stiffened section and bring them up to a single attachment point that will attach to another longer piece of chain that attaches to either a pin or my girdle directly. I haven't sewn the chain on yet as I'm going to have to buy the long chain for this and it might not match my short pieces. Or I may change my mind as I dig in stash a bit further since I'd prefer not to spend any of my budget on that.

Anyway, I'm back working on this and determined to finish by the New Year's Eve deadline.

Change of plans

I've been staring at some of the bits and pieces I have for the Russian dress for the Artemisian Costuming Challenge and am worried.  My plan for the gown involved this linen brocade.  I planned to attach the enamel peacocks and the bronze and black glass diamonds and then surround them in pearls.  They'd be outlined in bel (a couched cotton cord) and then have pearls couched on top of that and then a gold cord couched around that.  I also want to couch gold around the pattern in the brocade.  Ummmm.  Somehow I doubt that that is getting done by New Year's Eve.  I could simplify it or not do it, but I REALLY want it that way with the totally encrusted dress.  So, new plan.


I'm sick this week and the Lotto gown isn't going as fast as I'd like, but I like how its coming along and want to have the dress.  I already have all the undergarments and accessories for an Italian gown and they have been made within the parameters of the ACC.  I'm going to change from the Russian and do the Lotto gown as my ACC entry.  If I have time I'll actually get around to embroidering the drawers I planned for the IRCC and didn't do, and I want a new pair of stockings and new slippers.  Maybe I'll even get the gloves I started done.

I'm going to continue working on the Russian with the intention to have it done by May Kingdom Arts and Sciences.  The research I have for this gown is some of the best available for Rus (which isn't saying much, but I've tried) and I think I can justify my choices when I deviate.  That gives me more time, but still gives me a deadline.  It also lets me out of the budget constraints of the ACC so I can buy more pearls.  Happily enough, the Lotto is going to be made from stash so it works nicely with the $100 budget of the ACC.  Win, win all around I think.   

Lots of string, not much progress

I've been wrapping chopsticks in wool yarn and baking it in a low oven and making curls.  I've also been boning the inner layer of the bodice.  Like I said, lots of string and not much progress.  I figure I have about a third of the curls I need, depending on what I end up using for the foundation of the hat.  It would be going faster if I had more chopsticks.  I'm doing them 10 at a time.  Had to stop for today and wait for evening since even a low oven is making the house unbearable.


I've got most of one side of the front of the bodice boned.  I didn't have the thick hemp so I'm doing multiple strands of a heavy cotton cord.  Not so sure its going to substitute since I have such a squishy shape, but I guess I can always make a corset for underneath instead if it really goes poorly.  At least that's what I keep telling myself.  I really don't want to go buy cable ties.  Not for any particular reason, I just want to make this dress a "free" one from entirely stash materials.  My September personal challenge is to not buy any crafting materials.  It really shouldn't be hard since I have a large stash of stuff, but there always seems to be something I just don't have.

Finished the povoinik

And yes, it is not a particularly attractive piece of clothing. That's alright though. It was never intended to be worn alone. Not even at home. There were to always be a couple of additional layers worn with it for casual wear and lots and lots more for doing things like leaving the house. The decoration at the forehead might peek out from under them, hence its focus, but mostly it was just supposed to be a tight little cap to keep the dangerous hair of a Russian woman contained.

I used a few more of the little flowers and I'm really pleased with the mirrors and beads and gold. I'm laying a solid foundation of bling to build upon. I think there are enough of the flowers with the bugle bead flourishes to embellish the rectangular flap that attaches to the back of this. Then I plan to use some of the plain flowers and perhaps some of the larger pieces to embellish the ubrus (sort of a heavy veil-- the word means towel.)

The new Italian/Lotto gown is going pretty well. I sewed most of the boning channels for the bodice late last night and plan to finish the rest up tonight after my kids are asleep and I can get downstairs to the sewing machines. I still haven't gotten around to making a corset yet, so this will have interior boning like the Camilla dress. If I didn't have my shape I could probably get away without it, since there are definite wrinkles at the waist of the painting, but I need shaping and support. I'm going to "bone" with hemp cording, however, in order to give it a softer shape. I plan to add a layer or so of wool felt to smooth the bones out and as a substitute for the fur lining that I'm forgoing. The bodice will have 6 layers like the last one since it seemed to work pretty well. I added a little extra allowance to allow for the cording. Right now the bodice is too large. Hopefully threading the cording in will solve that problem. Guess we'll see how that goes some time tonight.

Apparently I couldn't be a courtesan if I tried

It seems I do not have the sensibilities of a courtesan. This is my second Italian gown and I keep insisting on picking "matronly" dresses without knowing it. The first one was pretty obvious, what with the 3 little kids. Then I found out about all the additional symbolic supports to Camilla's position as a good mother with the zibillino, her jewelry, and such. This time around I managed to pick another model of virtuous womanhood based solely on the fact that I like her dress and hat.  I was, of course, aware of the story of the rape and suicide of Lucretia from Livy, but I didn't pick the painting for its title, just the dress.  Shows me for not thinking.

I found a really interesting article on Lucretia here. It goes into an explanation of this unusual painting of a woman that emphasis her virtue and chastity by depicting her in a masculine pose and giving her thus "manly virtue." She is apparently more active and virile in motion as opposed to being docile and self contained as an ideal woman would be. Its a fascinating read. 

Also of interest is the Elizabeth Taylor version of "Taming of the Shrew." The costume designer chose to put Kate in a version of this dress for the speech in Act 5 scene 2. I think it adds another intriguing layer to the interpretation of the "submission' speech.

I love having lots to mull over while I sew.  It makes the time go faster and builds the excitement for getting to wear it.

The bodice is patterned, I just have to calculate how I'm going to assemble the patchwork and mark a second version of the pattern for the fashion fabric.  Should get it cut tonight.

Just a little detour

I had way too much fun this weekend at Coronation. Mostly thanks to my friends Fia, Malatesta, and CiCi, but I have to be honest and say a lot of it was I got to wear my dress and brag. The best part? I didn't even have to do my own bragging. Baroness Casamira, my friend and kingdom A&S minister (and thus my boss as a local MoAS), was sweet and pulled me up before court and had me talk about my dress. Their (outgoing) Majesties Morgan and Esabell called me up in their final court before the official business. (Now) Duchess Esabell said some very touching things about bringing prestige and honor to the kingdom. I truly hope that I have. Being a part of the SCA Kingdom of Artemisia is such a gift to me. I am so glad to be a part of it. Queen Claire was also kind enough to say some very complimentary things while we were watching the tournaments and I got to giggle when His Majesty Ronan ended up borrowing my parasol to get a little shade while watching the tournament for King's Champion. Vikings and fringe don't go together very well. All in all the dress was a total success.

And thus we arrive at the detour. I'm going to Harvest War in 2 weeks to celebrate my birthday (and Fia, and Cici, and Owen's and Eli's-- a good portion of my friends were all born within 3 weeks of each other. Lots and lots of Virgos.) I want something pretty to wear. I've got the Persian camp gear I just made for Baron's War for most of the time, but I'd really like one nice dress. It's my birthday, a present to myself is in order. So, I've decided to do a quick version of the Lucrezia dress from this portrait by Lorenzo Lotto.  I absolutely adore patchwork and it was one I considered doing for the IRCC.  There's a totally fabulous hat as well.  On top of that, I have a cotton brocade in a deep salmon rust and a clear wedgewood sort of blue in my stash that I think will give me the contrast I need while not being green and red.  I'm doing my Russian in green and red and just did the red velvet gown so another color combo seems in order.  Blue and orange are actually my favorite colors.  I've got 5 yards of each so that should be plenty.  There's no trim so I won't have to worry about that.  No way am I crazy enough to fur line it like the picture.  Even in mid-September it would be too hot.  I've already got canvas and wool felt for interlining though as well as a couple of options for lining, so this might actually be a "free" dress with nothing new to have to purchase.  That would make my husband happy,

I'm a little nervous about putting the Russian off further since I'm already behind, but I really want to make this so I spent a good portion of the evening drafting.  My measurements have changed recently with a little bit of exercise and the weaning of my twins so I started by making myself a new conic block according to Missa's instructions at Sempstress (which are similar to how I learned in my costuming classes in college, but that's been awhile so its nice to have step by step instructions to look at.)  I figured I'd need that regardless.  Not that I really need anything that fitted for making Rus clothes, but it was a reasonable justification and having updated measurements is a good idea regardless.  I'm planning to work on the applique on the povoinik tomorrow.  If I finish, which should be pretty easy to do, I can draft a front lacing bodice from the block.  My husband is home with the holiday and having an extra set of hands for fitting will be helpful.  Wish me luck!