Saturday, April 25, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Illustrating
I call these my 'silly lasses'. They are illustrations to accompany the typology for my Master thesis. The writing is going slow: somehow these days I seem not in the mood for writing. I had lots of fun making these drawings though.
I made the first drawings like this for my powerpoint that accompanied my lecture in March. Now I am completing the series with the other existing types of frilled veils discusses in my thesis.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Winding up Part II

The bow shaped thing right a way reminded me of a bow lathe. Bow lathes were used in Medieval (and earlier) times for small turning projects, like bone beads etc. By moving the bow up and down you can turn round the object you are working on. However, with this mechanism your object also always turns in two directions: it will always turn back at you.
When winding up yarns you cannot have a mechanism that turns in two directions, because then the yarn will never be wound on the reel.
So someone with more insight in things like this could throw in some ideas?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
A typology of Netherlandish frilled veils
Ah, I got work to do!
Friday, April 10, 2009
New project: Swedish frilled veil Part II

And now I remember where I saw this type of frills earlier. It was on this Netherlandish statue from the 15th century of St.-Anna-ten-Drieën (Saint Anne, the mother of Mary). It was made by an anonymus sculpturer, and is now in a private collection.

Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Frilled veils - Experiment 2
These sculptures show a very similar style of headdress. On fig. 1 you can see a female head console with a single layered wavy frill on her headdres. Fig. 2 wears to layers of wavy frills on top of each other. In fig. 3 two layers of fabric are worked into one wavy frill.

Here is my reconstruction before starching, hence the pins still being in place. This is just a small sample. I didn't attach a veil part to it, just a small strip of fabric to attach the frilled edge to.
fabric = bleached linen
thread count = 26x21 / cm² (and a coarser linen for the veil-part, just what I had at hand)
width of fabric = 8 cm
length of fabric = 70 cm
length of final sample = 16 cm
pleats = small cartridge pleats of ca. 0.5cm deep, for the wavy frills I used my index finger as a diameter for the frills
Here's how I made it:
1. take a strip of fabric and sew it in tiny cartridge pleats
2. attach pleated fabric to veil
3. work the pleated edge into wavy frills using pins to hold everything in place
More detailed descriptions of all the experiments will be in my final thesis.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
New embroidery project Part III
Yesterday's progress...
The inventory with frilled headwear is now 72 pages long and nearly finished! YAY!
I also found the time to finally upload the promised pattern/information sheet on the Maastricht purse.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
New embroidery project Part II
A tiny bit of progress! I added a touch of strawberry red and I decided the tassels of the purse should be blue. I'm not sure which type of tassels I should pick this time. Tassels with turk's head knots, pompom's with a turk's head knot or maybe even just the knots without tassels or pompoms.
Friday, April 03, 2009
New embroidery project
I'm using DevereYarns loose twist 1200 denier silk. It is the first time I use this type of yarn for embroidery (I have been using it in the past for fingerloop braiding and tablet weaving), and I really love it. It is so shiny and smooth and it looks so much like the silk used on original medieval purses. Machteld did a comparison between spun and filament silk some time ago. More recently Kathy from Medieval Arts & Crafts did a comparison between different types of embroidery threads that is interesting to take a look at.
The pattern of the embroidery will be the same as I did on this one, except I won't be adding the coat of arms. the pattern is based on a ca. 1300 purse in the Sint Servaas treasury in Maastricht. the purse originates from the Liege/Maastricht region. I have made an information sheet on this purse in a pdf file, including the pattern and a photo of the original. I will be putting it in the new 'downloads' section on the blog soon, so keep your eyes open!
In the background you can see an image of a console from Diest, Belgium. It dates back to the second half of the 14th century.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Winding up
The yarns are, from foreground to background:
I really like to use these yarns for making tassels and braids.
You can also see some late 14th - early 15th frilled veils in the background as well. Fragments of paper with parts of my catalogue are cluttering every table in the house!