Chopine Research

Several weeks of social obligations doesn't leave much time for blogging, so I'm going to update briefly on a project that's been running in the background. 

For a long while I've wanted to make myself a pair of chopines - that is, the original Italian high heel. I didn't really know where to start to find out information on them, despite numerous online articles I wanted to be able to verify some of the information for myself. I turned to my local library and ordered anything that seemed even remotely historic footwear related. Unfortunately, this wasn't terribly successful, but I did find out a few things from the books that turned up.

The Seductive Show: Four Centuries of Fashion Footwear by Jonathan Walford, Thames & Hudson - alas, this is the four centuries I'm not currently interest in, and gave only a brief mention of chopines and 16th century footwear. I could see myself coming back to it if I wanted to look into 18th or 19th century items in more detail.

Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook by John Peacock, Thames & Hudson - Filled with colourful illustrations followed by line drawings and a brief description, this might be a good book for someone who wanted ideas for what style to go for. But this book surprised me by having no references for the shoes that were studied. I had been hoping for something rather solid, a museum reference perhaps for pieces examined. Granted, there is a "sources for shoes" bibliography in the back which can lead me further on in this quest, so at least I have that.

A History of Show Fashion by Eunice Wilson - this was a little more interesting. This book had a whole (10 page) chapter dedicated to chopines and their evolution. It also had an interesting little snippet that has me rethinking what I thought I knew about chopines:
"most had mules attached into which the stockinged foot slipped; but others had real shoes attached which fastened over the instep. This was largely the difference between the chopine and the patten..the latter was held on by straps fastening over a separate shoe".
Chopines as footwear without a separate slipper? Now that is a completely different approach to one I had considered before, but makes an awful lot of sense.

This is clearly only the tip of the iceberg for these shoes - I'd still like to see some definite cork examples given how much I've seen the phrase "wood and cork were used to make chopines", especially as I have cork blocks waiting to be carved for my own shoes. And to see some more ideas on the slipper or no slipper idea.

Italian Quiver

Towards the end of last year, Dun in Mara hosted a leather working weekend, with Master Pol attending as the teacher. I attended with a specific project in mind, and I was quite pleased that I actually got further along with it than I’d hoped. 

I bought myself some leather earlier this year with the hope of turning it into an Italian style quiver. Thankfully, not only is there a perfect image where the painted archer is twisting himself into knots to make sure we get a full front image of his quiver (though granted, you do need to zoom in), wiser heads than mine have gone before me, so I even had a pattern to work with. 

I started by sizing up the pattern, and made up a cardboard mock-up to check the size against my arrows and to make sure it wouldn't just plain too long or awkward for me to wear. With this confirmed, I transferred the pattern to the leather and cut it out. 

Now, to be honest, this was as far as I expected to get this weekend. I'd planned to draw my heraldry on the quiver, but as I hadn't drawn it out before hand, and didn't initially trust myself to free hand it, but as time marched on, I felt there were worse things I could do than attempt to draw it out. Lo and behold, I had a heraldry! Now I could move onto the problem of being stuck with what to fill into the rest of the blank space. Several minutes browsing through Pinterest later, I fell across this image of a red velvet hood embroidered with gold thread (as per the description, I've never actually seen the colour image), but I've always adored the scroll work of this hood, so I decided to use it as inspiration for completing the design for the quiver. That was actually the easy part. 

With the design completed, I had to transfer it to the leather. I taped the leather quiver cut out to a convenient flat surface, then taped the paper pattern over it, matching the outer lines. I used a leather stitch marker to transfer the shape through the hide, which took forever, or what very much felt like it, but I was afraid to stop halfway through in case the paper shifted, or I lost track of where I was. A brief chocolate break later, shapes all transferred, I went over the lines with a swivel knife to finish the transfer of the design. 

I have plans to gilt parts of this design, and Lady Órlaith is currently doing some research into period leather dyes for me, but first, I wanted to do some stamping to bring out texture in the pattern. Typically, the two stamps I decided on, a simple beveller and a drop shaped texture stamp, were two of the smallest in my collection. But I really like the effect they gave.  

This is as far as I got before I had to call it for the weekend. I'd promised myself the quiver would be the Saturday job, and I'd work on something else on the Sunday of the workshop. *sigh* I shall be at this a while before it's done. 

Get re-elected, go up a level

Recently my shire decided I was doing a good enough job as seneschal to re-elect me for a second term. And it’s only right that there be some kind of external representation of my levelling up – newly blinged-up garb!

This is the same black dress that I sewed up for Raglan, now with trim added. I had planned to add this for some time, but only recently got time to complete it. The trim is actually a ribbon yarn that was spotted in my stash by a friend, and it has worked out beautifully.

I based the trim placement on "Portrait of a Woman", a mid-sixteenth century Florantine portrait. The trim was pinned in place before being sewn down with whipstitch. I decided against putting trim on the bottom edge of the skirt for the moment, as I’m rather torn still about it. There are several portraits and woodcuts that clearly show Italian and even Venetian dresses with one or two lines of trim along the hem, these are in the minority of overall images, and I’ve seen more portraits (when you finally do manage to find a full length Italian portrait instead of one that finishes at the hips) where this trim is not evident. Even if it would give a nice bit of extra sparkle on this gown…