hudebnik | Entries tagged with sewing

shalmestere started building a 10' round medieval pavilion (henceforth #1) before she met me, I got interested in the design challenge, and we finished it together in 1994. After an especially rainy Pennsic with the two of us and our musical instruments sharing a 10'-diameter tent, we decided it wasn't nearly big enough, and started building a 12'x17' oval tent (#2), which we finished in 1996. Pictures of both here.

That served us for many years: we've replaced many of the ropes, and replaced the valence once or twice, but the roof and walls have pretty much survived. But they've gotten thinner, and less water-resistant, and more faded, and around 2013 she suggested we build a new one — another two-pole oval tent, slightly larger than #2. So I started designing, and bought the fabric (50 yards of 84" Sunforger canvas) in April 2014. But it was never a top priority, so I made only minimal progress every year, and it dragged on.

In 2015, Will McLean died and left us his beautiful round arming pavilion (#3). It's about the size of our #1, but better-made (largely by Mac & Marianne); not big enough for the two of us to camp in with instruments, but it works nicely for daytime living history shows.

In 2022,

shalmestere put her foot down and said she wouldn't go to another event in Tent #2 (which by this point was 26 years old). I reopened the design docs and started working on our new pavilion again, while she mail-ordered a 5m-diameter round tent from India (#4). So far we've used the mail-order tent at two events in 2023; it requires ten vertical perimeter poles, which I object to on historical-authenticity grounds, but they do allow you to take up less real estate than a tent with no shoulder structure at all. And if you're setting it up on sloped ground, you have to compensate by using perimeter poles of different lengths, which is a pain. But it seems to be well-made, and better than no pavilion at all.

Anyway, I'm very much hoping to finish tent #5, the one we started designing in 2013, by this Pennsic. The roof was finished in September 2023, and I turned my attention to walls, which are simpler. There will be two wall pieces, overlapping at front-center and back-center so we have a front and back door. Each wall consists of two rectangular door pieces and eight trapezoids to go around the semicircular ends of the tent. So I've been cutting trapezoids. More precisely, I've been cutting rectangles from the bolt, pre-washing the rectangles, and then (after they've shrunk as much as they're likely to) cutting two trapezoids from each rectangle.

Selvages are top and bottom edges of this diagram. The trapezoids are supposed to be 27.5" at the narrow end and 34.5" at the wide end, a difference of 7", so an isosceles trapezoid should be 3.5" off the perpendicular on each side.

But where is the perpendicular? When you pre-wash fabric like this, the cut edges come out somewhat raveled. So in order to make sure I was cutting proper isosceles trapezoids, I spent at least an hour finding weft threads that started or stopped part way across the fabric, and pulling them the rest of the way out, until I had a single weft thread forming the edge all the way from selvage to selvage; then I could use the corner between that weft thread and the selvage as a consistent starting point for the measurements in the diagram.

And it didn't work. Every measurement was right, but the trapezoids were decidedly non-isosceles. Whether I folded vertically down the middle so the selvage matched itself, or crosswise, one selvage to the other, one bias edge always stuck out several inches farther than the other. (We're talking 2-3" off, over a fabric width of about 80" after shrinkage, so that's maybe a 2° angle.)

This happened for at least half a dozen trapezoids. I rechecked the arithmetic, measured everything three times, and it kept happening. The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that the weft threads are consistently not perpendicular to the selvage.

So my revised cutting method is "fold the cut edge toward the center of the fabric so both selvages match themselves, even if that means one end is folded several inches farther than the other; use this perpendicular fold as a measuring reference." Which has the advantage that I don't have to spend half an hour pulling out weft threads, and the resulting pieces look isosceles. But I worry that they may stretch weirdly because one bias edge is farther off-grain than the other.

Have any of my sewing-and-costume colleagues run into this problem?

We have no commitments for the weekend, so we're Getting Things Done.

shalmestere has her own list, largely either laundry or dollhouse-furniture, but here's mine.

Haircut ✓

Bake bread ✓

Clear space in basement for trunk freezer (we just had an electrician put in a line to support it, but there's a bookcase full of stuff where the hypothetical freezer needs to go) ✓/2

Mow lawn & sublawn ✓

Pay bills, file paperwork for car-insurance claim

Put away clothes piled in spare bedroom

Make tent walls -- won't get finished this weekend, but "substantial progress" ✓/2

Walk dogs in park ✓

Progress has been slow so far: I think my vaccinations yesterday (COVID and flu) left me getting tired more quickly than usual. But I've washed, damp-dried, ironed, and measured a couple of pieces of tent canvas, and am about to cut them into trapezoids. This requires a large area of unobstructed floor, which means the kitchen, which means I had to vacuum the kitchen floor first. Marking straight lines c. 7 feet long on fabric presents some challenges: I think the most reliable way is to use the chalk-line we bought years ago for laying floor tile. The chalk-line tends to shed a lot of chalk as it's pulled out, so (not wanting spurious chalk lines on the fabric) I pulled it out over the sink, so now the sink is full of blue tailor's chalk.

I made eleven Paris-pie hand-pies yesterday morning, and we split the leakiest one for lunch. Note to self: at 350°F, the pies leak a bit onto the cookie sheet, and the leakage solidifies and curdles. At 375°F, the same leakage scorches and blackens.

I also braided a lacing cord for

shalmestere, about 49" long. Started with FFF beading silk, looped five times around two clamps attached to the dining-room table 60" apart; tied a slip knot in the middle, used its loop as an anchor to braid one half of the cord, then untied the slip knot, and used the loops at the braided end as an anchor to braid the other half of the cord. The only difficulty was finding the five loops after undoing the slip knot, because they had tangled around one another while I braided the first half. Perhaps if I put them on a comb, or put a weight on each of them? Still need to attach an aiglet to one end of the cord. She has some commercial aiglets of silver or silver-gilt, which would be cool, or I could just make one of sheet brass.

I also made and attached a neck facing to a linen shirt that we just converted from one of D's smocks, and that appeared to be splitting a bit between the shoulder blades.

I also finished machine-sewing the new valence to the tent roof, then went around the bottom of the valence with pinking shears to give it a crenellated effect. I don't want to put too much work into this 25-year-old tent, because I very much hope to have the new tent finished by next summer.

I discovered yesterday that the trailer's registration hasn't been renewed since 2019 (a lot of things haven't happened since 2019!), so I probably need to go to the DMV today to renew it.

[ETA: Went to the DMV, and it went pretty smoothly. They grumbled a little about me not having the title to the trailer, but it wasn't a blocker. They refused to let me keep using my current license plate, but handed me a new one, and don't appear to have charged me anything extra for it. Trailer is now legal. In and out in under an hour.]

And I did some practicing on the noodly line in the Faenza piece we're doing in our concert next week. I've got it mostly off-book, but there are several passages that are almost the same in the A and B sections, but go different places, and I get them mixed up. I plan to perform with music in front of me, but the more memorized it is, the more fluent it'll sound.

Meanwhile,

shalmestere finished putting sleeves and gussets on the wool gown that she just repurposed from one of her dresses, and attached a collar. I think we'll want to put a linen lining on the collar, both for comfort and to help the collar stand up straight. She also patched some braes and smocks.

Last night after dinner

shalmestere brought a couple of pieces of wool into the dining room and asked me to stand up so she could try something on me. The "pieces of wool" are in fact an old, pale-blue GFD that no longer fits her. She cut off the bodice section and the sleeves, put shoulder seams in the skirt where the waist used to be, put arm-holes in the skirt where the hips used to be, and fit the sleeves back into the new arm-holes to make it a Greenlandish-style gown for me. Part of the bodice section is being recycled as upper-arm gores (since I have more muscular upper arms than

shalmestere does); the lower arms, with their buttons and buttonholes intact, seem to work as-is. All terribly efficient, appropriate to "a dying colony on the edge of the civilized world". And it's old, new, borrowed, and blue, all in one item.

Before we leave for Pennsic in a few days, I need to do a bunch of narrow-work: one or two new dress-lacing cords for her, and several hose-points for me. I need to finish attaching a new valence to our extremely-old tent. And we need to pre-cook a bunch of meat-pies for lunches, and tartlets for breakfasts. It would be nice to make some wafers, although that's lower priority. We need to write and copy a program for our concert at Pennsic. And make sure we each have enough undergarments, hosen, shoes, and outer garments for the time we're there. And check instruments for strings, reeds, etc. And pack everything we need, and nothing we don't.

siderea linked to this article on the sex lives of White-Throated Sparrows, which inspired this post.

But first, consider how sexual reproduction works in our world, in our species. I'm only talking about biological/chromosomal sex here, not anatomical or social or legal, and for simplicity I'm assuming that every individual is of one unambiguous biological/chromosomal sex -- no XXY or XYY trisomies. A man and a woman can produce offspring of either sex; both sons and daughters are genetically close to both of their parents (although sons are slightly closer to their fathers because that's where they got their unpaired Y chromosome). The result is basically a single gene pool for the whole species (except for mitochondrial DNA and a few Y-linked genes).

Now imagine that each human carried only one sex chromosome, rather than a pair, and that men and women were both capable of homosexual reproduction: two women could produce a (necessarily female) child, and two men could produce a (necessarily male) child. If this happened only occasionally, it wouldn't have much effect on the population. But if homosexual reproduction were universal, there would be genetic divergence, with males and females gradually becoming two mostly-separate gene pools and then two separate species. If there were an occasional instance of heterosexual reproduction against a mostly-homosexual background, the offspring would have genetic material from both pools, and thus (if the offspring reproduced) pull the two pools back together.

So, back to the sparrows. White-throated sparrows have two genetically-determined color morphs: brown-streaked and white-streaked, each forming roughly half of the population. If brown-streaked sparrows preferred to mate with other brown-streaked sparrows, and white-streaked with white-streaked, they would diverge genetically over time and we'd eventually have two separate species: brown-streaked and white-streaked. But in fact, females (both brown- and white-streaked) prefer brown-streaked males, while males (both brown- and white-streaked) prefer white-streaked females. As a result, white-streaked females and brown-streaked males get their pick of mates, which is each other, leaving the remaining brown-streaked females and white-streaked males to make do with one another. As a further result, essentially all mated pairs are either white-streaked-female to brown-streaked-male or brown-streaked-female to white-streaked male. Both sorts of pairs can produce any combination of male, female, brown-streaked, and white-streaked, so there's no genetic isolation and no speciation event: there are effectively four "sexes", but they're all still bound together into a single genetic population.

(Another point in the article: brown-streaked sparrows of both sexes tend to be more nurturing, while white-streaked sparrows of both sexes are more aggressive. Which has interesting implications of its own, but it's peripheral to the point I'm making here.)

By amazing coincidence, the same day that I read that article, I read Ursula LeGuin's short story "The Wild Girls", about a human society with three castes named Crown (nobility), Root (merchant class), and Dirt (slaves). In our world, wherever a caste system has arisen, cross-caste marriage is strongly discouraged if not forbidden, which (given enough time, and strict enough enforcement) would be expected to produce genetic divergence and speciation. But in "The Wild Girls", cross-caste marriage is mandatory: Crown men are only allowed to marry Dirt women, Dirt men with Root women, and Root men with Crown women. It's not entirely clear in the story, but I think a child's caste is always the same as its father's. In any case, there are effectively six "sexes", and they're all bound together stably into a single genetic population by the cyclic marriage rules. And although you can tell someone's caste by clothing, there's no genetic difference among castes and thus probably no way to tell the caste of a naked person. (Which raises plot ideas....)

And then I thought about fingerloop braiding. Consider a simple two-loop "braid", as discussed here. There are two interesting operations you can do: you can pass one loop through the other, and you can twist a loop on its own axis ("taking thy bowes reversed", as the middle English source says). If you just twist each loop on its own axis, never passing one through the other, you end up with two independent two-ply twisted cords, connected only at the anchor. If you only pass one through the other, never twisting either one, you again end up with two two-ply twisted cords, connected at both ends but otherwise independent. But if you pass one through the other, then twist one, in alternation, the two operations lock one another in place and you end up with a single four-strand braid. Likewise if you have three, or four, or five loops: if you only twist each one, you get five independent two-ply cords; if you only pass them through one another, but always "taking thy bowes unreversed", you get two 3-ply, 4-ply, or 5-ply braids connected to one another only at the ends. But if you pass loops through one another and reverse them, alternating operations reasonably often, you get a single bound-together braid of 6, 8, or 10 strands. If there's an occasional reversal in a mostly-unreversed braid, you get a cord with large "eyes", holes where the two halves run parallel but independent between one linkage and the next.

Do with that what you will.

I was involved in some kind of archaeological project concentrating on fiber arts. We had a large number of volunteers attached to the project, and at one point a rule was passed giving the volunteers one "credit" for each [equivalent of] a standard Gutermann spool of silk they processed. But then we found that a lot of the material we were dealing with was cotton, frequently in raw form, and since the cotton gin hadn't been invented yet, the rule-making body was uncomfortable with cotton and unsure how to deal with it, so a similar rule awarded one "credit" for each [equivalent of] a single cotton boll.

I assume this dream was triggered by a conversation with

shalmestere last night about her impressive collection of Gutermann silk thread in various colors. The cotton-boll part... I don't know.

To do:

Plant remaining bulbs in sublawn ✓/2

Buy stuff at farm stand in Forest Park ✓

Clean some part of the house

Plan Thanksgiving dinner ✓

Use up stuff in fridge to make room for Thanksgiving

Christmas shopping

Play medieval music (towards Sooper Seekrit Project)

Walk dogs in park ✓

Make warm coat for Archie (who arrived in summer; he can wear Luna's if need be, but it's not his colors)

Pay bills

Fix somethin ✓

Pick raspberries ✓

Buy groceries ✓

I started a batch of sourdough bread dough Friday evening, and was persuaded Saturday morning to use it for croissants rather than bread, so I worked in a stick of butter that wouldn't normally have been in a bread dough. But the croissant recipe I was using as inspiration has four sticks of butter, rolled into a plate, chilled, and folded repeatedly inside the dough. I wasn't convinced I could do the full rolling-chilling-folding-rolling-folding-rolling-folding thing at this point, and it had leaked a lot of butter out the edges the last time I tried, but I sliced another stick of butter into pats, arranged them in the middle of the rolled-out dough, and folded both ends over it, then rolled it out again, rotated 90 degrees, and folded both ends over the middle again for at least an approximation of how they're supposed to work. The croissant recipe also calls for sugar, and I left that out. Eventually I used half of the dough to make half a dozen croissants, and shaped the rest into a smallish loaf, which will presumably be very buttery bread. We'll see how they turn out.

Spent an hour or two yesterday raking and mowing the front lawn, and moved a couple of potted plants (one Thai-basil, two Thai chili-pepper) from the back yard to the enclosed porch before it gets too cold for them.

shalmestere and I hung up a couple of posters in the recently-renovated office. We still have to triage and re-shelve about a thousand books in the office, and there's some wall space still un-covered with artwork, and we still have to install the wooden blinds in the windows (they're just propped up in place now). And we need to get the radiator fixed or replaced, because when I turned it on after the contractors moved it two inches out from the wall (to clear the new window frames) it leaked water on the floor. And while we're at that, we should get the radiator in our bedroom fixed: for at least the last five years it's been very reluctant to heat up, and only one end at the best of times. I sent out a CFP on Angie's List a few days ago.

And we had an hour and a half music class yesterday afternoon, on "ornamentation for wind players". We didn't get a lot of specific advice we didn't already know, and we already have Ganassi, Ortiz, Conforto, etc. but the teacher had dug up a lot of fascinating textual references -- people in the 16th century advising one another how to or how not to ornament, describing particularly compelling or offensive performances they'd heard, etc.

I spent an hour or so helping with

shalmestere's construction of the #capecult Edwardian cape that all the historical-costume-vloggers are doing this year. Having previously gotten at least one piece inserted backwards, she wanted to be reassured that all the pieces were in the correct orientation, and I concluded that the shell pieces were correct (albeit one sleeve two inches longer than the other), but the sleeve pieces of the lining were swapped left-for-right. (This is an easier mistake to make than it sounds, because the sleeve pieces of this cape are basically rounded triangles, almost-but-not-quite equilateral.) Fortunately, they were only pinned in place, not stitched, so I pinned all the lining pieces to their corresponding shell pieces in the ultimate orientations, things matched up pretty well, and she was able to put the thing on with all the pieces as a sanity check. So I think it'll be sewn together by the end of today.

This morning I'm scheduled to pick up a CSA farm share, followed by the usual angst about how to fit it all into the fridge, then to donate blood mid-day, then we have a music class at 3, then another music class at 6. It'll be busy.