The Herjolfsnes tunic I made recently is nice, but it can’t really be worn without some other pieces. Last week I made a pair of red chausses out of the same kind of tropical wool broadcloth I used for my last pair of 15th century hose. I used my usual separate hose pattern, with a change at the top to reduce it to a single point of attachment and pointy toes instead of the usual natural shape.hey went together quickly and without any fuss, and I’m quite pleased with them. I mended one of my old pairs of brache and opened the drawstring casing at the sides to allow a place to attach the chausses. I ordered a pair of shoes to go with this outfit that I plan to pick up at Pennsic.
I’ve been wanting to make a hood to go with this, inspired by Racaire’s awesome dagged and embroidered hood from a couple years ago. I’ve tried making hoods before but they always turned out too small or otherwise just plain wrong. I sat down with some horrific polyester patterning fabric and started from a vague idea of the “Nockert Type 3” pattern. I measured my various parts and added a generous amount of slop, then made the first mockup.
My first attempt had enough room to store a second head on top of my own, so no problems with it being too small. The mantle was also way too long (or so I thought), so I trimmed down accordingly and ended up with a nice close-fitting hood. My first attempt at the side gussets had the slits only going halfway up, with small gussets. That didn’t really work. After a few more iterations, I ended up with slits going all the way up the mantle and gussets that were essentially squares with one corner rounded off. That made a mantle that laid right but wasn’t really long enough. I decided to just go with it and started putting the real thing together out of some eggplant-colored, loose-weave wool.
About 1 AM, after completing pretty much the whole hood except the front seam and liripipe, I started to have some glimmers of previous research into this topic. See, I was also enamored of Ragnaveig’s hood with the buttons all down the front, and was planning to make mine like that, but then I remembered that that style of hood was only worn by women. Without the buttons, there was no way to get my head in and out! Despite the teasing existence of one example of a man with a buttoned hood, I decided that I would have to punt and added a square gusset under the chin. Some googling also confirmed that the mantle was way too short, but there wasn’t really a good way to fix that… or was there? This hood in the Roman de la Rose (1350) shows a keen embroidered hood with feathery dags that I thought might be a viable solution. I cut a couple of wide bands, dagged them up and sewed them on the bottom edge of the mantle, and they seem to do the trick.
As a post like this is useless without pictures, here they are:
Revealing the tops of the chausses
The hood also makes a keen hat.
This terrible self portrait shows some details on the hood.