Laurel Cloak for Meistrin Kolfinna Valravn

When my friend, Kolfinna, received a writ to join the Order of the Laurel (the highest Arts & Sciences award in the SCA), I was very excited to help make it special. I was asked to lead the design and construction of a garb outfit for the elevation ceremony. Two outfits were organized, an early period Slavic outfit, and a 16th century trossfrau ensemble. Of the seven pieces that made up the trossfrau outfit, I made the cloak and the trossfrau dress.

The cloak was a simple full circle design with a tall collar. It was made from a medium weight grey wool that was incredibly easy to work with.

The real tricky part was the decorations. It started with 5" black wool strips which I steamed and ironed into curves to match the cloak edge.

This was then followed by several mistakes. First, I forgot that silk does not behave like wool and can't be molded in the same way. All the 5" strips I'd cut and folded the edges of were not going to curve around the cloak bottom. I spent a few days recutting and sewing them into lots of trapezoids. Second, I had planned to punch leaf shapes out of the black wool to show through to the green silk underneath. However, curved wool was much less stable than its uncurved counterparts and when I tried to punch out the leaf shapes, the trim became so wobbly it was useless (yay for test pieces! I only lost about 6"). 

New plan: applique! I borrowed a die cutter and punched out about 130 beautiful silk leaves. Because I had neither 2 years nor a hoard of elves to hand sew these on, I turned to a felling-stitch look-a-like stitch on my sewing machine. Several days and a LOT of thread later, I had beautiful trim. 

I thought the trim needed a little something more to tie it together so I embroidered a simple stem stitch to create, well, a stem. 

With a bit more ironing and the use of every pin in our house, I then attached the gloriously shiny trim to the cloak. 

(Note these photos were taken before I rememberd I should embroider BEFORE attaching the trim.)

It took a lot of experimentation to come up with a design I liked for the leaves going up the front and around the collar of the cloak. The inspiration print had the trim continuing as-is but then the collar would have needed to be 5" high (choking Kolfinna). I tried one variation where I divided the collar trim and had half sitting like a mantle but it looked heavy and odd. Finally, I realized that the front edges of the cloak could each represent a half of the pattern and voila! 

I chose to leave the cloak unlined so it would be the most versatile for our mid-atlantic weather but I still wanted to finish the neck nicely. I used some of the remaining silk to create a lining and stitched it in by hand. I added a silk ribbon to strengthen the bottom edge, stabalizing it from stretching, and to act as a closure. 

With that, the cloak was complete!

Glamour Shots: 

Cassair Warwick (Cecilia Jaeger) captured beautiful shots of this cloak in the wild. Link to each photo by clicking the image.