Late 14th Century Green Wool Overdress

I found the most GLORIOUS green wool broadcloth and I broke sewing rule #1, never buy fabric without a project. So I made a project and this giant sleeved overdress was born. 

The Process:

I started with my 8-piece gothic fitted dress pattern (which I made and talk about in this post). I added about 1/8" of ease to accommodate the thickness of the fabric and the fact that this garment is intended to be worn over another dress. I then test fit the torso by basting the pieces together without the skirt gores.  I wanted to check the overall fit and my ability to pull it on over my head with no closures. I ended up adding too much ease and had to pin it back out (especially around the chest and hips). 

Once I had the fit right, I started in on the new and daunting part: figuring out the sleeves. I needed to tackle this before cutting and putting in the skirt gores because I had limited fabric and I was worried about having enough. The size and shape of both the sleeves and the gores would depend on what I could squeeze out of my available fabric. 

I took my regular gothic fitted dress sleeve, which I trust the shape of the armscye of, and folded it in half. I laid it on the fabric and guest-imated a wide sleeve shape that would fit on the fabric width. I mocked this up in linen and tested the hang and movement. 

I did not like it at all. It laid too much like a bell-bottom pant leg and did not gracefully open in the front like many of the manuscript miniatures of the time depict. So I tried again, this time with a shape much elongated. This I liked MUCH better, but used more fabric. So I worked about fitting it into the fabric I had through creative pattern placement and some subtle piecing. 

This allowed enough room for moderately sized skirt gores. I cut them with all the remaining fabric. 

With all the pieces cut out, I started to work on the sleeve decorations. First was the scalloping along the edge.  I drafted a few patterns in different sizes and tried them on scrap wool of a similar thickness to my fabric. Once I settled on a size and spacing, I got to thinking about how to finish the edges. I considered a few different ways to do this. The more historical method would be to flat-line the sleeve pieces. Then to finish the edges, my options were to either fold the silk and wool towards each other and top/whip stitch the edge closed or fold the wool over the raw silk edge and stitch it down. Both of these would be incredibly time consuming and fiddly. 

I was working on a deadline (trying to complete this garment for an upcoming winter event) so I opted for a more modern finished-and-turned method. I don't believe there's any evidence for bag-lining garments in the 14th century, but this method met my time requirements and resulted in a clean/sharp finished edge. Since images often depict these sleeves rolled up at the cuff, I was looking for this sharp finish to imitate the period look.

Before cutting into the sleeves, I experimented with how to sew the edges such that I would get relatively sharp points at the end of each scallop. Initially, I tried sewing to a point and clipping the fabric nearly to the stitch line. This worked fine for the wool, but the silk was wrinkly and pinched. The trick seemed to be sewing very close to the point and crossing to the next scallop with just 2 small stitches parallel to the edge. When turned and pressed, this method resulted in very little pulling in the silk.

The next step was deciding on overall fabric decoration. I initially wanted to embroider or applique the whole dress, but time drove me to focus on just the sleeves since they would be lined and had to be finished before garment assembly. In my research for this project, I found examples from the 14th century of men's garments with decorations only on the sleeves, but feminine garments seemed to nearly always have patterns all over. I decided to accept this anachronism knowing I could always go back and add decorations to the body of the garment later. 

I considered appliqueing these tiny wool flowers I had saved from my Rapunzel Jerkin project, but they turned out to be a little fragile. Still, I used them to lay out possible patterns. 

In the end, I decided to embroider simple star shapes in pink silk on a grid pattern. I would have liked to do more, but my embroidery is not particularly fast. 

Once complete, I lined the sleeves, turned them right-side-out, and ironed them. This step felt like it took forever, but the transformation was worth it.

The second to last step was attaching the sleeves. These went on relatively easy (for sleeves). To finish them, I chose to bind the armscye seams in a bit of silk ribbon to keep the edges from fraying. I know this technique is documentable back to the 16th century and I opted to use it for ease and speed. 

Hemming and hand finishing the neck were the final steps. The wool is tightly fulled and it should not fray, so I folded the fabric over once and used a simple whip stitch to finish the neck and hem. For the remainder of the internal seams, I pressed them open and left them unished. 

The final result: 

 I'm incredibly pleased with how this garment came out. It's comfortable and warm and the sleeves are super fun. Turning them up at the wrists gives me the exact historical look I was going for and keeps them out of the way. While I'm unlikely to need another dress like this in my climate, if I ever did, I would 100% make this again.