Elizabethan Mafia

About a year ago, inspired by Laura Mellin and a blackwork jacket in the collection of the Museum of London, I decided to embark on the project of creating my own embroidered jacket. I spent several months working on a burgundy wool jacket that served as a proof of concept for the project. Creating a wool jacket first also helped me work out the kinks in my pattern until I had something I was happy with.

When it came time to design the embroidery for my jacket I knew that I didn’t want to copy a design from an existing piece but I did want to use a design from the period. So I turned to A Schole-House for the Needle for design ideas. A Schole-House for the Needle was a popular design book during the early 17^th century. Published in 1624 and 1632 it featured both lace and embroidery designs. In fact, a smock currently residing in the V&A collection (T.2-1956) features 4 motifs from the book.

Due to the popularity of A Schole-House for the Needle it would not have been uncommon for a woman to use its designs in her own embroidery. I found looking through it that many of the vine designs felt reminiscent of the vine design of the Museum of London Jacket. So I chose a vine design from the book that I particularly liked and had not seen very often as I wanted to create a unique but period correct piece. I laid out the design (which can be seen to the right) similarly to the way the vines are laid out in the Museum of London Jacket, taking care to try to fill up as much of the space as possible. More pictures of the jacket in various stages of progress can be found in my gallery.

References:

A Schole-House for the Needle. 1624 and 1632. Available from http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. Downloaded Sept. 2008

Blackwork Jacket in the Museum of London Collection. Available from http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image.php?id=142036&idx=2&fromsearch=true

Embroidered smock in the V&A collection (T.2-1956). http://collections.vam.ac.uk/objectid/O78791

Arnold, Janet. Patterns of Fashion: The cut and construction of clothes for men and women c1560-1620. Macmillian. London, England. 1985

Special thanks to Laura Mellin for answering all of my silly questions.

I finished this coif in January 2009 just in time for Atlantian 12th Night. It is worked in red silk and completely hand sewn. The design was created by Laura Mellin, owner of Extreme Costuming.

As Laura is a very dear friend I would like to take a moment to plug her awesome embroidery patterns. All of her patterns are meticulously researched and based on historical embroidery designs. Her entire line of Extreme Patterns embroidery designs is available online through Reconstructing History. Reconstructing History also carries their own line of extremely well researched patterns covering a wide array historical periods as well as notions for embroidery and sewing.

I made this petticoat in the summer of 2007. Every good Elizabethan woman needs a red petticoat and I had wanted to start doing more hand sewing. This seemed like a nice, simple first project and I estimate that it probably took me about 10-12 hours to complete it. It's made of red wool flannel and the waist band is wool flannel backed with fustian. The petticoat itself is made up of 3 rectangular panels that are 60 inches wide (the full width of the fabric). When sewing my petticoat I followed the method laid out by Laura Mellin in her article "The Elizabethan Seam: Sewing by hand effectively, strongly, elegantly". First I hemmed the edges of the petticoat panels and then I assembled them by whip stitching them together. I then cartridge pleated the body of the petticoat to the waist band and hemmed it.