SCA: 1520s Venetian - Black Dress

 After completing the wine-colored linen Venetian dress, I set about making the same changes to my black silk Florentine dress: 

 

Once again, the silk fabric was badly faded, and needed a refresh.  I over-dyed the whole thing with Rit's black dye. 

 

 

I created some new bag sleeves for it, just like I did with the wine dress, cut from the skirt of an old sideless surcote that had seen better days, and dyed them at the same time as the dress so the black tones would match.  This fabric is linen, with a woven stripe pattern, which I find just neat as hell. 

 

There's two old 1490s Florentine dresses turned into 1520s Venetians for the price of a couple of bottles of fabric dye. Yay! 

 

The only thing I'm not sure of at this point is what to do with my head.  My hair is very short these days (I cut off like two feet of hair in May and am growing out my gray), and I prefer to keep it covered in the SCA.  With Viking all I have to do is throw on a kerchief or a Jorvik hood and I'm good to go.  But what will I do with these Venetian dresses?  I suppose I could just pop on a snood, but I want to do more than that.  Hmm.  Maybe some more research is in order.  

SCA: 1520s Venetian - Brown Dress

So, I'm a Viking pretty much full-time, but we have an Italian-themed event coming up in October, so I thought I'd drag out my old Florentine wardrobe and see if it still fit.  

Reader, it did not.  I'm a bit larger than I was when I made these outfits - ten years ago!  The corset, first of all, rides up over my belly into my armpits, so it's not workable at all. Thankfully, the two dresses fit well enough if I lace them wide open (they used to close in the front), and can be laced tightly enough that they're supportive, so I don't need the corset. All of my old sleeves are also too tight.  I wanted to replace them with bag sleeves, but between that idea and the fronts being laced wide, I was getting pretty far away from the 1490s Florentine style that these dresses were originally supposed to be. 

Enter Palma Vecchio and his contemporaries.  I found the following paintings online, from 1510s-1520s Venice: 

Cariani, 1520

Unknown, 1520s

These Venetian dresses are laced wide (tied, actually), and shown with baggy oversleeves.  That's exactly what I wanted!  Now I know it's actually a thing.  (Mind you, I have no actual research to back this up, just a few paintings to go off of). 

The first thing I did was to dye my old brown dress.  It was badly faded after all this time, and needed the color refreshed.  Rather than overdye it with brown (I hate Rit's browns), I combined a wine color with an eggplant color, just like I did with the cotehardie I dyed two years ago, and it came out beautifully: 

Then I created some bag sleeves for it out of a blue linen, dyed to match (eh, they mostly match. They’re a little lighter, but then the original color was very pale).  I had to improvise the pattern:  all I had to go on was a pin from Pinterest with a broken link; I couldn't find any 1520s Venetian sleeve patterns anywhere else.  I copied the shape as best I could, and the sleeves came out just fine. 

 

my version

 

The only problem I had with dyeing this dress is that for some reason I originally attached the skirt with dark gray thread. It didn’t show much against the brown linen, but now that it’s red, it stuck out like a sore thumb.  So, I took the skirt off and put it back on with thread that matches.  Not a huge deal, but kind of a pain in the butt. 

So now I have a new dress to wear to the event. I have a black one to re-work as well, and a court gown to fix up. I’ll show you those soon.