I made myself a new Hallowe’en costume this year. Twelfth century instead of my usual nineteenth.

The costume has two parts - an underdress (chemise) and an overdress. The underdress is plain muslin with a high neckline and close-fitting, extra long sleeves that cover my wrists. The overdress is dark green cotton with lighter green cotton lining in the sleeves which are close around the biceps but flare dramatically from the elbow. There was also a cloak of wine coloured velour stuff. It looked pretty cool but was kind of annoying as the velour was stretchy and didn’t want to fit together with the lining fabric very well.

The back of each dress laces closed. The pattern instructions used cross-lacing (like a corset) but since I am a bit of an armchair scholar for history and fashion I used spiral lacing. This also required less actual lace which was handy.



The dress was pretty easy to sew for the most part. The only really tricky thing was putting in the under arm gussets but I decided to do it by hand so I didn’t have to wrestle with the machine. I did come across a few weird things in the pattern instructions. First the neck line is supposed to be gathered - this works with the lower neckline where it accounts for a bit of bust space but on the higher neckline the pattern designer seems to have forgotten that most people have a collar bone. I ended up picking out the neckline for my underdress and re-sewing it without the gathers - it fit perfectly. The second strange instruction was to under-stich the lining in the sleeves of the over dress. This seemed perfectly normal until I actually got to that step and realized it would be next to impossible to under-stich the edge of the sleeve through the space at the arm hole. Apparently no one tried out the instructions after they were written.

I asked Rob to take a few pictures of me in my costume when we got home from work. Zeke was happy to join me and can be seen here in his favourite position looking over my shoulder.

... Or two.

I’ve added some new pictures to my photos page. All the pictures are from a couple of tea parties we had over the summer. We made all the dresses and I did my best to make sure each one would be a little different. It was a lot of fun to see everyone all dressed up at the parties. A few people even did up their hair in Recency-ish styles. After tea we walked down the street to a little park so we could take some nice pictures.


... some people were a little more shy than others about being seen outside in costume.


I am very proud of my spencer with its little skirt. It’s based on the one on the cover of Persuasion. I had to work out the pattern myself and it took a few tries before I had both the math and the style complimenting the rest of the jacket. I still haven’t attached any fastenings or trim but my broach worked well to hold the jacket closed.

Here is my progress so far on the Easy Lace Mesh Triangle. I’m not really sure how long I’ve been working on this now. There were about two inches last night and I spent a couple of hours on it today. Right now it grows pretty quickly but I imagine that it will slow down considerably as it gets wider. The pattern is pretty easy to memorize as long as I start the row correctly. The mesh has a honeycomb look to it that will be more apparent once the shawl is finished and blocked.

I actually followed the instructions and made a swatch first. My gauge is a little tight but I decided I didn’t want to wait around for new needles to arrive and just went with what I had (lovely bamboo). I figure it wont make too much difference if my shawl is a tiny bit smaller than it’s suppose to be. The instructions just say to knit until it’s big enough anyway. I’m not sure what to do with the swatch now. It’s too pretty to throw away. Maybe I’ll make a reticule for my next Jane Austen party or something.