On Wed, 31 Aug 2005, Marie Stewart wrote: > I hand sew everything... and my gores are razor sharp. All it ever > takes is practice. As for no gores in the 13th century being sharp... > Just how many extant garments do we have to make that assumption on? I > would personally think that gores varied ... some pointy, some not.
I'd expect they varied, too, and I'd expect sewing methods in general varied from place to place, period to period, and person to person. I didn't say "no gores in the 13th century are sharp." I said it's a mistake to assume, from the evidence we have, that sharpness of gores was considered an important workmanship issue, or that medieval methods would, if properly done, necessarily produce sharp gores. I have no doubt that medieval people could have made their gores as pointy as they wanted -- they were very skilled, and their adeptness is evident in other aspects of these garments -- but I haven't seen evidence that they had any motivation to do this. My point is this: I hear a lot of people saying (or simply assuming) that gores are *supposed* to be perfectly flat and pointy. People routinely give advice on costuming lists on how to achieve this; they put up instruction pages on websites; they teach it in classes. Yet the best-known, most often referenced extant garments we have *don't* have flat, pointy gore tops -- an alternative I rarely see mentioned, much less taught. When I do slide lectures on the Herjolfsnes garments, I frequently point out the flat-topped gores, and from the reactions of the audiences, you'd think I'd just given them papal dispensation -- they never realized it was documentable to have non-pointy gores, hallelujah! Sure, maybe some medieval people made pointy gores. But we have absolutely no reason to think that flat, sharp gore points were valued, and what little data we have seems to suggest otherwise. Sure, it's fine to teach methods that produce flat, sharp points because they get the job done -- but I typically hear the "razor-sharp gore point" presented as a quality of accurate or well-made garb, and there's no justification to think that's the case. I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, to find out that some judges at SCA costume competitions would grade people down for gores with rounded tops or slight pleats, under the assumption that it's bad workmanship. That would, however, be a modern assumption, one that I suspect comes from people being taught to value making sharp clean angles in couture sewing, modern quilt-top piecing, etc. I've seen people teach other modern methods because they learned that "this is good sewing technique" without realizing that the garments *of the period they're teaching* show no evidence of those methods (e.g. gathered sleeve caps, French seam finishing, stay-stitching, facings, pattern matching -- and other techniques that were valued in some periods but not in others). In this instance, and in many others, ISTM that if you approach the construction of a garment using the materials and techniques available to the person of the period you're reconstructing and consistent with the known evidence, you're likely to come to different conclusions about what makes sense and what works well than you would if you use modern techniques and materials. And sometimes when we don't understand why period evidence shows us something (either in art or artifact), trying it using medieval methods may give us a clue that we wouldn't recognize if we used modern ones. On that line, I've been thinking about the small pleat in the top of the St. Louis shirt gore. There's no question that the shirt is well-made by a person highly skilled at sewing, so I would assume the pleat is intentional. I wonder if that slight pleating would make the gore wear better and work better, because it would allow you to spread the body of the shirt a little wider before encountering resistance at the stress point. If the gore is perfectly flat, you can't open the angle of the slash quite as far (unless you make the bottom of the gore correspondingly wider). With a flat gore, if you need to allow for a sizable amount expansion over a short vertical distance from waist to hip, you need to make a fairly wide angle, which commits you to a certain degree of width at the bottom. Making the top of the gore a little flatter and wider, and taking up that excess width in a small pleat, lets you get the sides of the finished gore further apart in those top few inches without as much stress, and without requiring more width at the bottom. Something else to try in an experiment... --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
