Tyrant productions Part 1

The start of my year was very much caught up in preparations for Rowany Festival. If you are familiar with my projects, you'll know I've been the RF cartographer for 6 (?) years. Ever since I created the job really. It involves a lot of fiddling around with maps and doing my best to please over 800 stakeholders. This year, I was also making garb for Tyr. He needed enough garb for a 6 day event and he's not the sort to schlep around in a basic t-tunic. Oh no. Unfortunately, the only items he had were a couple of shirts I'd acquired at Pennsic and a vest he brought along.

As the shirts were late-period-ish, we had to settle on a wardrobe collection that'd please his sense of flair and wouldn't be too challenging for my sewing skills. We eventually settled on Landsknect, partly because I've been collecting images for hat making, and partly because it has so many options.

I'm not going to go into everything we made, but by the end he had 4 pairs of pants, multiple shirts and a vest. As I've never made fitted pants before, it was quite a learning curve. Tyr also helped out by fray-stopping all the slashed edges. He also sewed some codpieces.

Tyr accidentally in the background... photo by Rachel Vess

I suspect Tyr is really proud of this codpiece. He designed and made it himself. As one of two token American's he didn't really need to advertise but it garnered no end of appreciative smiles. Unfortunately, it was washed in warm water and the red ran so the codpiece is no more.

Personally, I'm most proud of this silver pair of paints. We slashed the legs in two different ways as they were the first experiment and unfortunately the second leg (right) was absolutely perfect. What I liked most were the cuffs of the pants. You can't see them but I managed to create two rolls of slashes and fitted a tie so they could sit snug above his calf. There are many period images of this. Below is a nice clean one without additional slashes on the leg to obscure things. You can see the slashed roll and the ties hanging down.

Detail - Allegory of Virtues and Vices at the Court of Charles V by Hans Daucher 1522. The Met Museum, 173.19.745

The fabric, being a poly blend was a nightmare to work with. It frayed at the drop of a hat so Tyr spent a number of hours carefully applying fraystopper to every single slash. We tested a number of products to ensure they wouldn't be too stringy or leave marks on the fabric. In the end we had to chose between a white residue and a slight darkening of the fabric. We picked the one that darkened the grey as it'd be less noticeable with the blue underneath.

The pants were lined in a blue cotton to help avoid sweat problems

We also created a black/grey pair under which Tyr wore white leggings for contrasting fabric.

Once we had the pattern correct, we also made a pair of black strip sleeves (with white silk lining)  to hook into the vest and a pair of grey strip pants with blue edging. I think we lined those in black. I really liked the stripe pants too. Once they were assembled, they just worked. It was a nice feeling during frantic midnight sewing sessions.

Apart from the many 100's of things I've learned about detailing 16th century German garb (research posts to follow), I'd say the most important take home message is: USE WOOL. Since we were in Perth, with a very tight timeline, we couldn't get light, slightly felted wool to make this garb out of. We used poly-fabric in one pair of pants and cotton and silk in the rest of the garb. If we had of used wool, we could have slashed everything easily in a variety of patterns. The hours Tyr spent fraystopping the edges could have been used to slash his vest and add puffs. Or maybe embroider the collar and cuffs of the shirts. There are many things I'd modify in the wardrobe if I had another year to continue work on it. As it was, he was dressed in comfortable, fitted garb so I'd call this a win.