SCA: Green 1490s Florentine Outfit - for Candlemas 2024

1490s Florentine Italian
for Candlemas 2024

In the beginning, I honestly had no thoughts about what to wear to Candlemas in February - I figured I would just go Viking, like I always do.  But then I went to the event webpage and saw this: 

"The year is 1494 and the wealthiest bride in Europe is about to become the queen of Germany and future Empress of Rome.  Come re-live the wedding of Bianca Maria Sforza of Milan and King Maximilian I of Austria and Germany." 

1490s Italian? I'm in.  The Sforza wedding was said to be one of the most amazing spectacles in years, by several people who wrote about it later: a pageant of high fashion and pomp the likes of which the writers had never seen.  Candlemas this year is intended to be a huge costume extravaganza, and everyone will be wearing their finest Italian and German garb - there's even a costume contest!   Time for a new fancy outfit, I thought.

My first thought was to make some minor alterations to the red velvet Florentine-ish outfit I wore to Baronial in 2022 (the trim is wrong, the sleeves are too big, and the whole thing needs small adjustments here and there), but I wanted something new.  And so of course, I started with something  old.  

Gamurra

I started with my black silk noil gamurra, which I made in 2014 and which has undergone many transformations in the past nearly ten years, mostly in the form of various decorative stitching and trims being applied and removed to change the look.  

I did the same this time, applying a gold and black braided trim to the neckline and front edges, and attaching some gold (brass) lacing rings to the front opening (yes, on top of the hand-sewn eyelets that were already there. The eyelets are very small, and they don't show under the rings when the dress is laced at all).  

Giornea

before - Burgundian dress

For the giornea,  I made over an old Burgundian dress that I had made in 2013 and had never worn - I just never got around to making an underdress or headgear to wear with it, so it just sat ignored  in my closet all these years. The outline was already nearly perfect, though. The dress is voluminous (much fuller than it looks in this picture), but the sleeves were too tight at the top, which made the shoulders fit weird.  Fortunately, I didn't need the sleeves.  

I removed the sleeves and all of the faux fur trim, cut the armscyes a bit deeper, removed the collar and opened up the center front seam all the way to the hemline.  

I also stitched a length of gold braided trim along the neck opening/center front.   I didn't want to dress this giornea up TOO much, because the sleeves and the trim on the gamurra were more than enough decoration for this outfit, but it did need something so that the edges weren't just plain. 

closeup of the front

Giorneae were usually open either at the front or sides or both, to allow the gamurra underneath to show through - mine is only open up the front, and is belted all the way around with a long, black, double-faced satin ribbon sash.  My giornea was inspired by several Renaissance paintings, like these two (both fragments of frescos by Domenico Ghirlandaio): 

fragment from the "Birth of St.
John the Baptist" fresco

fragment from the "Visitation" fresco

Sleeves 

While 90% of this dress was basically free - I made over old costume pieces and used materials from my stash for almost all of it - I did actually splurge on fabric for the sleeves. This is a silk damask in aqua and gold (sort of a shiny tan, really) from Rennaisance Fabrics - it’s so soft and pretty, I just love it!   

Since the fabric was fairly dressy, I opted for a plainer sleeve design, closed at the upper arm and open on the lower arm, and laced open to allow my linen camicia to poof out through the lacings.  

I stitched eyelets along the open forearm edges and on the sleeve heads where the sleeves attach to the gamurra in a tan/brown thread which matches the "gold" parts of the fabric's design. 

I took my inspiration from images like these: 

another fragment from the
"Visitation" fresco by Ghirlandaio

I'll talk about the accessories, and my hair, tomorrow. For now, although I won't be the fanciest nor the richest-looking person at the Candlemas event in my made-over dress, I'm proud of this outfit and I can't wait to wear it.  I just hope it's not too hot, and that it holds up to dancing.  

Bonus:  my Project Cat, Rabi, asleep on an Ikea pillow underneath my work table: 

Trimming My Viking Coat

Back in October 2015 I made this coat out of some remnants I had - burnt orange and royal blue linen, and a pair of gray cotton curtain panels from Ikea:

It's a great coat, and I love to wear it.  The only problem is, I made the arms a little bit too short. I don't have any of these fabrics anymore, either, so I can't just pull off the blue cuffs and make new longer ones to match.

Instead I added a second cuff made of white faux fur, to extend the length of the sleeves overall.  The cuffs are interlined with some scrap linen and an iron-on interfacing to help them keep their shape. So that the cuffs wouldn't look like add-ons, I also ran a 3" band of faux fur all the way around the neck and front, and the lower hem of the coat.

(sorry for the terrible picture)

I have to admit, I tried to dye this fur brown at first, because I hated the white - it's just so bright and glowy!  It kept coming out purple, though, no matter what dye I used.  Can't walk around an SCA event with purple muppet fur trim!  So the white is growing on me, I guess.  I suppose I can pretend it's polar bear or something.  What white fur would have been available to eastern Scanindavia in the 10th century?  Fox? Rabbit? Weasel of some kind?  I don't know.  Certainly not purple muppet.

I'll be honest, I'm not happy with the way the sleeves look. The fur cuffs look overly bulky and unbalanced, and the width of the blue section on the sleeves now looks completely stupid alongside the equal width of the fur cuffs.  But overall, I like the way the trim on the whole coat came out - it's warmer, it covers me better, and it's a bit longer on the hem. It's quite a bit heavier, too - I'd forgotten how much weight faux fur adds to a garment.

I would say something cheeky like "I'm ready, bring it on, weather!" but I know better than to tempt Mother Nature like that.  It's shaping up to be pretty cold at the event, and it might be rainy, too.  I've got a coat I can actually wear, now, and a couple of good hoods to cover my head, and I've got lots of Secret Mundane Underthings (leggings, tall socks, long underwear) that I can wear under my clothes, so I should be okay in the cold.

Preparing for this event I always laugh at the crazy weather BAM gets.  This time the highs should be in the 40s-50s.  The last time I went, four years ago, it was 90º during the day.  The year before that it stormed the entire time and flooded out half the site.  You just never know with this event.

What's next? 

I have a pair of new blue dresses to show you, and a "new" apron dress pattern. More on that soon.

A Makeover: Blue Split-Front Apron Dress

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In 2015 when I was in the process of spiffing up my entire Viking wardrobe, I created this dress:

Isn't it neat?  It's wrong in so many ways. I did a really good job based on my knowledge at the time;  it's just that that knowledge was incomplete, and based mostly on what I saw other people doing instead of on actual solid research.  And so we had this dress:  split down the front, which is incorrect for the accepted understanding of how apron dresses work; the wrong type of straps - flat straps, not loops; embroidered to the eyeteeth, and apron dresses weren't covered in decorative embroidery; and with a front trim band and skirt guarding in a contrasting color, which was an idea I copied from someone but has no basis in historical anything.  

So, I decided to tear this dress apart and make it over completely into something that is actually correct and which I can wear to events without looking like a bad example.  So, to start with,  I removed all the embroidery, the straps, and the orange trim. 

I also removed both of the remaining blue front panels - they were too narrow to simply sew closed into a single front piece - it made the dress way too small, and it would have placed a seam directly down the front of the dress, which would have looked horrible.  I needed to create a whole new front panel to insert into the dress. Thankfully, Fabric-store.com still sells the same exact color (Bluebonnet), so I was able to order a single yard so that I could make a new front panel. 

Once I'd closed the dress with the new front panel, I also cut a new top facing to replace the one I'd removed in the front.   Then I removed the embroidery from the flat straps and took them apart, and made two new loop straps out of them, as well as front loops.  After that all I had left to do construction-wise was to hem the whole dress, since I'd removed the skirt guarding from the bottom, leaving a raw edge.  

To finish the dress, instead of all that incorrect embroidery I opted for a trick we know the Vikings used on their apron dresses:  I stitched a length of blue ribbon around the top of the dress.  In period this would be a strip of silk fabric or ribbon, or a tablet-woven band. 

In my case, it's a rayon faux-silk seam binding ribbon, and it looks perfect at the top of the dress.  It's almost exactly the color of the fabric, just a bit darker.  It is awfully plain, especially since it's supposed to be simulating "fine imported silk";  I may replace it with something a little fancier at some point in the future if I come across anything that will work. For now, I like it just fine.  

So there's a piece of fantasy made over into something with a little more fact woven in.  The best part is that now I have a "new" dress I can wear, for only about $11 (the cost of a new front panel).  I needed an extra outfit to wear to BAM in a few weeks, and this goes a long way to fixing that hole in my wardrobe.  

What's Next? 

Now that this dress is fixed, the question is, do I launch into a quest to re-do all of my apron dresses to make them more correct, or do I leave the rest alone?  I hate to take out all the work on the orange and brown dresses just yet - I did a really great job on both of them and I love the way they look.  My black dress, however, is covered with some very amateurish needle work and is glaringly incorrect, so I think I will make that one over next. 

The Ikea Cotehardie, Revisited

It's been over a year since I made my grey linen cotehardie (Ikea's linen, which, sadly, my local Ikea no longer carries, the bastards).  

at Coronation, October 2011

I've worn it 3-4 times, and loaned it to a couple of other women for events when they had nothing to wear.  I've gained weight and lost it since then; and in the last few months I've been toning up and building muscle like crazy (I hula hoop a lot).  

The dress no longer fit properly.  I could wear it, but the arms were too tight across my new biceps so I couldn't really bend my arms much, and the bust wasn't the same shape any more.  Also, I was pretty much done with having a light grey cotehardie.

Last week, I tore it apart.

First, the sleeves came off, and I opened up the side seams so that I could add a gusset at/under the bust on the sides.

I still love this lining, hehe.  It's just a cotton print that looks like eyelet.  Not period, but nobody sees it but me. :)

The long gusset I put in.  It's 2" across at the top, and down the top 3"; then tapers sharply to 1" and stays that way all the way down the side, in sort of an elongated Y-shape.  (For a tiny bit more space in the ribcage, but a lot more space in the bust).

Oh, that's waaaaay better.  It's actually comfy now.

Honestly, looking at these sleeves, no WONDER they were too tight across the top. They're practically straight!  This was one of my first cotehardies, and I hadn't quite gotten sleeves figured out yet.

I removed the top half of the lightweight upholstery fabric lining the sleeves, and kept only the part lining the bottom half where they unbutton.  The lining had NO stretch to it, and was part of the problem.

The second problem with the sleeves is that they cut into my armpits, so I deepened the curve here and on the dress itself.

The third problem was the shoulders, which didn't really move all that well, especially the more developed my upper arms and shoulders become.  In this case, though it's hard to see in this small picture (click on it for a larger image), I added a wide gusset to the back sleeve seam, making it similar to the gore you'd find in a grande-assiette style sleeve; but without some of the other components, and without being set into the back of the garment.  This is basically just a regular sleeve with a big gore in it, hehe.

The dress works!



And I'll stop here, because there are two more MAJOR steps in making over this dress (hint: notice the sleeves aren't buttoned in this picture), but that'll be a blog entry of it's own.

Assuming I don't screw it up!  (^_^)






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