SCA: The Køstrup Dress (Part II, Pleating & Sewing)

In this post I'll talk about actually sewing - and pleating - my Kostrup dress.  This is part two of a three-part post (first part on the tablet weaving is here).  

The original dress is known from small fragments of the top of the dress, as found attached to a a pair of bronze brooches.  Only one of the two brooches was attached to the pleated fragment, leading to some indecision over whether the pleating was placed in the center front of the dress, or on the side between the brooch and the armpit as Henriette Wielandt (original analysis, 1980) suggested.  Most people I've seen make impressions of this dress place the pleats in the front, which is what I've done. 

We don't know exactly how the pleating was achieved.  No trace of the threads used to create the pleating exist, so we're not even sure exactly how it was done - were the pleats stitched in place with fibers that have long since disintegrated, or were the pleats woven into the fabric, or pressed in with steam, or something else?  We don’t know for sure. 

 

Finished pleats

In my first attempt at this dress I did the pleating first and then hemmed the top and applied a band of fabric trim and some tablet weaving, which smashed the pleating completely flat, destroying all the work I did on it and making it look like flattened knife-edge pleats, so the whole thing looked completely wrong when it was done.  (It was also made of wool "stuff", which is the wrong fabric for this time period and it just looked weird).  So I never wore it, and in the end I finally decided to rip it all apart, use the pattern pieces to develop the pattern I used for this new iteration of the Køstrup dress, and will eventually re-use the wool stuff for another project. 

Anyway, this time, I did the pleating the way it was done on the extant piece (inspiration from and props to Hilde Thunem's work):  I hemmed the top of the dress by folding the edge over and stitching it down with a whip stitch, and THEN I did the pleating next, so that the finished edge of the dress ends up being part of the pleated section. This is essentially a very simple form of smocking . 

Stitching the pleats down

 

I’m not a huge smocking person really - in fact, this is only the second time I've done this - so I just kind of winged it, and I don’t know what this method/technique is actually called.  I made eight rows of basting stitches along the top edge of the fabric 3mm below the hemmed edge, each stitch and space between about 3mm; and then drew the stitching together to create the pleats.  After that I stitched the pleats in place by whip-stitching them closed on the back side, and whip-stitching each pleat to its neighbor on the back as well, so that all the pleats help hold each other in place.  This worked well on the first iteration of this dress for the most part, and I like the results here, too. 

Gathering the basting stitches 

After the pleating was done, the rest of the dress was sewn by hand in the same way that I sew all of my other apron dresses - the pattern is three rectangular panels and three triangular gores, with long loop straps at the back and short loops at the front for the brooches to grab onto.  The lower hem is folded, pressed, and secured with a herringbone stitch like all of my other smokkrs (which is based on Inga Hagg’s research at Birka and Hedeby).  

I should note that I did alter the fiber content of this dress from the original.  The fragments from ACQ were made of wool, and my dress is linen.  I chose to use linen this time because, as much as I love a nice wool, I wanted to WEAR this dress, not save it away for the one day a year that it’s cold enough to wear wool here – and also, I wanted to be able to put it through the washing machine when it needs it. 

As discussed in my last post, the tablet-woven band is not sewn onto the fabric of the dress along its length.  Instead, it is mounted between the loops at the front of the dress so that the band sort of "floats" above the pleated front, like this drawing of Charlotte Rimstad’s:

My version looks like this, so far: 

Tada

* 

And now for the last component of this outfit:  the beads! More soon...