Sixteenth Century Kaftan Sleeves

While I was cleaning up the sewing room a few weeks ago, I came across the pile of kaftan sleeves that had been in Time Out since last year. When I cut out a kaftan, I usually cut it with short sleeves with the archer's curve in the front and then cut a separate long sleeve that can be worn with the kaftan or mixed and matched with other kaftans.

This is based on several extant sets of kaftan + detachable sleeves in the same fabric as the kaftan and extant sets of sleeves that have no extant kaftan.

child's kaftan with matching sleeves

second quarter of the 16th century

Topkapi Sarayi Museum, Istanbul

TSM 13/1015 & 13/927

photo credit www.kostym.cz

Sleeves

16th century

Topkapi Sarayi Museum, Istanbul

TSM 13/1945

photo from: A la cour du Grand Turc

kaftan with matching sleeves

c. 1550

Topkapi Sarayi Museum, Istanbul

TSM 13/100

photo from: A la cour du Grand Turc

Very late in the 16th century/early in the 17th century, you also see some illustrations of sleeves that were clearly of a different fabric than either the outer kaftan or the inner garment. Sleeves contrasting with the outer kaftan but clearly matching the under kaftan are most commonly seen in Ottoman miniatures.

Kiz, an unmarried Girl

Habits of the Grand Signor's Court

1620

British Museum 1928,0323,0.46.103

photo credit: British Museum

excerpt of folio 14.b

Album of the World Emperor

c. 1610

Topkapi Sarayi Museum, Istanbul

Bagdat 408

photo from: The Album of the World Emperor

However, because I live in the Deep South where it is Too. Darned. Hot. much of the year, the sleeves never seem to get finished. So, last summer while Jay was at Lord Baltimore's Challenge, I set down to binge-watch Netflix and finish off 4 pairs of sleeves with silk facings and topstitching. I got through 2 pairs and was working on the third when I took a look at the sleeve and thought: "something is definitely wonky here"

I have no idea what I was thinking when I cut them out, but they all needed to be shortened and sized down. My hypothesis is that I cut the first pair incorrectly, noted the sleeve measurements down in my pattern journal, and because I never finished off the first pair, proceeded to look at my journal and repeat the error three more times.

What was I thinking?!?

Infuriated at wasting the better part of 2 days hand-sewing, I tossed the whole pile into the Time Out bin and forgot about them until a few weeks ago. Since I didn't have any pressing projects, I decided to finish them once and for all.

The red/turquoise and the black/white sleeves are to kaftans that are already finished. The blue/red & teal/beige sleeves are from kaftan that I started for Gulf Wars 2019 and never got around to finishing. Guess I know what my next projects are. :)

 photobomb: Lafayette

My standard method for kaftan sleeves is unlined

but faced on both ends with silk

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Fetvaci, Emine. The Album of the World Emperor: Cross-Cultural Collecting and the Art of Album-Making in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Maury, Charlotte ed. Al la cour du Grand Turc: Caftans du Palais de Topkapi, Louvre Editions, 2010.

Sops... it's what's for dinner!

So this summer I hosted a 15th-century dinner A&S event for our Barony.  One of the stars of that meal was something called Jacobin Sops.

Jacobin Sops (the first)

photo credit: Allison Halterman

I used the Chiquart redaction from Scully's Early French Cookery. I am more of a "feeding people yummy food" cook than a culinary experimentation cook, so I usually rely on other people's redactions. 

Per Scully's introduction to the recipe, the Jacobins were the Dominican order, dubbed so because their Order house was on the Rue St. Jacques.  Jacques in Latin is Jacobus.  So the Dominicans were also known as the Jacobins.  The Dominicans had quite a few aristocrats in their number and let's just say they were less than rigid on the "poverty" part of their vows than some of the other orders.  They liked good food and saw no reason to stop eating well.1

The recipe is relatively simple but delicious.  A coarse bread on the bottom with shredded chicken and cubes of brie and an herbed beef bone broth poured over it. The brie gets soft and melty in the broth. It was so delicious that we ate the leftovers from the dinner party for several meals the next week.

I made it again for Castle Wars Royal Luncheon. (sadly, I did not manage to get a single picture; I was too busy cooking)  Multiple lunch attendees asked for the recipe and our Baroness used the recipe the next week for her family's Thanksgiving dinner. So I think it was a hit.

At this point, it is in our standard rotation for mundane weeknight dinners. Jay takes salads to work for lunch and I am always looking for ways to use leftover rotisserie chicken.  We are both cheese lovers (Aldi has rounds of brie for ~$3.29) so there is usually brie in the house. And the Buford Highway Farmers Market has the soup bones, fresh marjoram and thyme, and good Ukrainian rye bread.

Toss the soup bones into beef stock with a Bouquet Garni of marjoram, thyme, parsley & hyssop and simmer for a couple of hours. Remove bones and strain. I end up using dried hyssop because while the Buford Highway Farmers Market has just about everything under the sun (including fresh rue -which I discovered when I was playing with Roman recipes a couple of years ago) even they don't have fresh hyssop.  Luckily, Amazon has it for ~$3.99/oz -prime shipping if you buy the 4 oz package)

The important thing is for the bread to have some weight and texture to it.  I made the mistake early on of using a lovely French boule, which promptly turned to mush when it encountered the broth. If you can't find or don't like Eastern European rye, I'd use a whole-grain bread in its place.

Since we don't shop the Farmers Market every week, I make up large batches of the broth and freeze them into 2 serving portions.  (For a dinner portion, I like 2-3 cups per person). I've been known to freeze the bread too.

And after that, it's an easy peasy weeknight dinner.  Unthaw the broth and bread.  Shred the leftover chicken, dice the brie and toast the bread while the broth heats. Combine everything in a bowl and voila -dinner is served.

So easy, it's what we had for dinner tonight!

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1Scully, D. Eleanor, and Terence Scully.  Early French Cookery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

A 16th century Italian Camicia with Lace

I have been in need of more camicia for a while now. I had four or five at one point but am down to two, and have a definite favorite of those two.  At Midwinter A&S, I got caught in the rain and the cherry colored silk facing on my Turkish robe bled on that one and, sadly, the stains didn't come all the way out..  And Gulf Wars is fast approaching.

A couple of camicia isn't an ambitious goal for Gulf Wars.  Really, it's not.  Unless you are me, that is.

My favorite camicia was made from Margo Anderson's Italian Ladies Underpinnings set. It was the second one I made and the way it's cut out, it was perfect for adding lace insertion. Right as I was getting ready to cut out camicia, the Elizabethan Costume group on Facebook was abuzz with a new Etsy store: DSA Threads who was selling machine embroidered lace in patterns straight from 16th c. modelbuchs.

My cutting table supervisors: Charlie (standing) and Lafayette (sitting)

I have been in love with the extant camicia with embroidery and lace since the first time I opened PoF 4 and have always had an especial crush on this one.

16th c. camicia

Civic Museum, Milan

photo from Ricci's Old Italian Lace

http://realmofvenus.renaissanceitaly.net/workbox/extcam5.htm

So visions of a camicia with lace from DSA Threads danced in my head.  But even at the ~$9/yard she calculates it at (which is, frankly, a bargain for a documentable pattern on the lace) 4 40" lengths for insertion in the body panels and 6  28" lengths for vertical insertion down the lengths of the sleeves was just over 9 yards of lace. I had enough other things I needed for Gulf Wars that spending $100 on lace didn't seem like the most responsible thing to do right now. (But I fully expect I will do so at a later date!)

I do, however, have an antique lace addiction. There was a  revival of 16th c. needle arts like needle lace, drawn work, and Assisi embroidery in the early part of the 20th century so, if you know what to look for, eBay, Etsy and the buy/sell groups on Facebook are a surprisingly good resource -if you don't need it on a deadline. 

For the past couple of years, I have been watching and buying antique lace, dreaming of partlets and aprons and lacy camicia.  I love the thought of needlelace but I am distracted by so many rabbit holes on a daily basis that I never get more than an inch or so (and my detached buttonhole stitch isn't going to win any blue ribbons. It would, I know, get better with practice, but see above comment about distractions.) And bobbin lace is faster, but with 5 cats in the house, it's got its own set of problems. 

A little digging turned up a little over 10 yards of a bobbin lace that might not be documentable to a specific modelbuch but it didn't have a glaringly modern look to it and I had enough (or so I thought)

Full disclosure:  this is antique lace I purchased.  I did not make it

My promise to myself was that I would do all the insertion by machine.  I thought better of that briefly, but the time involved in hemming and whip stitching the lace to a single panel showed me that if I had any hope of wearing this at Gulf Wars, machine work it was going to need to be.

The camicia pattern has a front, 2 side fronts, a back, 2 side backs, 2 sides and sleeves.  And, if I was doing insertion on the sleeves, 4 panels for each sleeve.  Even machine sewing, that was a lot of tiny hems and even though I had found 5 seasons of Law and Order UK on amazon, I was glad when that stage was done. The zig-zagging the lace to each hemmed panel was equally tedious.  This part broke my heart a little.  It would have looked soooo much nicer done by hand.  But needs must and on I went.

I started the insertion on the sleeves and quickly realized I'd miscalculated.  I really wanted 4 insertions on the sleeve, which added 56" to the amount I needed.  This miscalculation was compounded by realizing that I needed a minimum of 2 more insertions (ideally 4) for the body. I solved that by splitting the center front panel, adding an insertion there and just doing 3  front insertions and just felling the seams of the other body seams. This meant undoing quite a few of the hems.  Which, of course, took longer because they'd been machine sewn.

I broke my machine sewing rule putting the underarm gussets in. I have never in my life been able to get a gusset in on a machine without puckering.  Hand sewing, it's easy peasy.  So hand sewing it was for this part.

I also broke my machine sewing rule when it came time to gather the neckline. No. 10 perle cotton  and a tapestry needle will be so much easier to gather, I thought, machine gathers inevitably break.  So another episode or two of Law and Order UK and I had hand-gathered the neckline.  Except that I tried it on and darned if the perle cotton didn't break on me.   

At this point, I thought I wanted a square neckline, so I had the bright idea of gathering the front, back and shoulder seams separately to make them easier to manipulate.  So back to more Law and Order and hand gathering.  The reality of 4 gathering threads actually made things exponentially difficult, not easier and after way too much fussing, I gave up on the square neckline.  Some future camicia will have a square neckline -but not this one!

Despite the construction hurdles, it was going so well that I decided to add some gorgeous antique needle lace that would be perfect around the neckline.  So I spent last night with the first couple of episodes of Discovery of Witches and hand-stitched the lace around the neckline.  I had maybe 6-8" to spare and I am still trying to work up the nerve to cut the excess off.

So overall, I am pretty pleased with the end product.  Future camicia may have square necklines and be done entirely by hand, but for an extra camicia for Gulf Wars this year, it will do admirably.

Cost: $0   everything was from the stash

Time Spent: a couple hours most nights since February 10 and most of yesterday. So far too long for making an undergarment

First Worn:  Gulf Wars hopefully

The irony is that while I made it to wear with my Turkish Robe, this is all of the camicia that shows.  Guess I will be moving an Italian gown up on the endless list of projects I want to do. But I'll worry about that after Gulf Wars.