Introduction

Materials

Considerations Before Construction

As previously mentioned, there are very few extant garments from this region and period; linen often does not survive time. While this shirt is a rare example, getting a lot of information on it actually isn’t that easy. There are no real descriptions of *how* it’s made, no detailed pictures of the sleeve embroidery or back embroidery, and no real descriptions of the embroidery beyond “satin stitch”, which is not what it looks like to my eye. I did try to get more information on this, and wrote to the Hungarian National Museum (I even have a co-worker who speaks Hungarian who offered his translation services to me). However, since this year has been tumultuous, I unfortunately never heard anything back. As such, I actually did need to base a lot of things on information from other extant examples I had more information on, and on knowledge I have obtained through my research and personal experience.

Construction:

For construction, there is actually a cutting diagram available online. It is posted on a website, but originally comes from a 1962 article in the Historical Hungarian National Museum's yearbook, titled Folia Archaeologica XIV, written by Mária Ember (in Hungarian) (Szent-Györgyi website). This proved to be extremely useful, and is of course what I based my pattern and construction on.

The translation for the diagram description is as follows: "The blouse's front and back are each made of three trapezoidal pieces. The pieces are 40 cm wide at the top, 60 cm at the bottom…The two sides are widened further by two triangular gores, each 60 cm wide. The three front panels are gathered to a width of 21 cm, forming the front of the neckline… The back sections are also gathered to 21 cm …The sleeves are straight rectangles, 65 cm long, 122 cm wide, with the top sections gathered to 28 cm, and forming the sides of the neckline. The neckline is enclosed in a 3 cm wide band. The wide sleeves are gathered to 24 cm at the wrist, sewn to a 1.5 cm wide cuff. The underarm gussets are 25 cm squares” (Szent-Györgyi). These are the measurements I used to make the garment. For the length of the body pieces, the pictures looked like the sleeves were about half the length of the garment, so I just doubled that measurement.

All “squared” pieces of the pattern were cut after pulling threads in the fabric to use as a guide to make sure everything was as straight as possible. Where size measurements weren’t given (like for the length of the entire hemd), I used my best estimates. The entire hemd is hand sewn and hand embroidered. Period needles were used whenever my hands allowed for it. Waxed linen thread was used for all construction (Many linen garments, from both German and non-German areas, tended to use a very fine linen thread for construction. Numerous examples of this can be seen in Patterns of Fashion 4 by Janet Arnold, pages 65 and on especially). Pieces were sewn together with a running stitch, then flat-felled using a whip stitch. Flat felling the seams provides additional structure, and helps protect the raw edges of the fabric. All body seams were treated in this way. Hems were all double folded with a traditional hemstitch. These are the stitches likely used in period (Museum of London 157). All seams were about 1/8^th of an inch, to match the standard 1/8^th to 1/16^th of an inch most often encountered in historical garments (Arnold 65+). Actual sewing consisted of sewing the 3 main front and back body pieces together, then setting in the sleeves, gussets, and godets. The junction of the gussets and godets was something I was quite proud of.

I bound the neckline according to the article “How to Pleat a Shirt in the 15^th Century” by Beatrice Nutz. The same was later done for the sleeves. In the article, it is stated that "the trimming strip is equally broad on both sides, first one edge is folded in, and then sewn onto the pleats with a running stitch, the fold fastened with whip stitches, then folded over the edge of the pleats and the border then folded in once more and sewn to onto the other side of the pleats again with whip stitches". I made sure to sew through every pleat with my whip stitches. The final results look rather good.

Pleating

Fabric at the “cuffs” and neckline were marked out with several rows of dots at half inch increments by eye in order to be a guide for pleating the material. While you can use a tool to do this with more precision, after having made *many* pleated items, I find that my general sense of size and following threads for straightness is more than adequate. The half inch pleat size was chosen since it is very close to a size used in extant pleatwork. In the Lengberg finds, pleats averaged 1.4cm, or 0.55” (Nutz, p84). This number was simplified slightly... Once the dots were fully marked out, large basting stitches were run through each dot, and used to gather the fabric. Once gathered, I let things “set” for a day, and then loosened the gathering stitches out to the appropriate length for the finished garment. Unfortunately, when I did this, I realized that the pleats were not nearly as dense as I expected them to be, which would make the embroidery harder than I expected.

Embroidery

For the embroidery, I used 2 types of stitches: stem stich, which was a common way to secure pleats (Nutz, p82), and pattern darning. The Hapsburg Hemd looks like the embroidery is done in pattern darning to my eye (even though the translation states “satin stitch”). I know this is a period stitch, occasionally done using silver thread, as shown on an extant example of pleatwork with pattern darning at the Museum of London. In this example, the embroidery is done in silk and silver on wool, on what is believed to be a sleeve. The embroidery on this fragment is a form of pattern darning, counting pleats instead of threads, which makes it especially fitting for this neckline. The pattern is sewn in long threads across the neckline, from left to right. The pattern slowly grows as each line is added. The below picture really does look like pattern darning to me.

Since the embroidery is deteriorating in places, it is a little hard to see exactly what is going on. The front section is fairly clear, and seems to be 2 symbols in an alternating pattern. The sides, however, are very deteriorated. For the front, I was able to find an online diagram of the pattern on German Renaissance, which I found very useful, and was certainly easier than marking it up myself. I chose to use the modified version of this for my embroidery.

**It is important to note that this shirt was made in a different time. Back then, a swastika had a very different meaning. If you look closely at the embroidery in the above photo, you can see that the pattern does in fact include swastikas. Due to the current meaning of this symbol, I chose to not embroider that specifically, and chose an altered pattern.**

As previously mentioned, the cuffs and back of the shirt have no pictures that show the embroidery. All I could find was that the back was “narrower”, and the sleeves had “silver embroidery of semicircles embracing the wrinkles of the loose fingers at the wrist, converging into a narrow cuff.” Since that isn’t overly descriptive, I chose to do a very delicate embroidery on the cuffs, using a “reverse” stem stitch. With stem stitch, the direction you pass the needle through the fabric is usually the opposite direction of travel; however, if you travel in the same direction that you go through the fabric, it gives a slightly broken up and twisted line that can be used in interesting ways. Since stem stitch is best at straight lines and angles, this helped to make the zig zag pattern I did look more like a curved line (semi circles?) to better match the description.

Theory vs Reality: Conclusions

The best laid plans of mice and men… As I alluded to earlier, the pleating was not dense enough. The front panel was around 100 pleats (in 21cm down from 120cm mind you). Looking at the pattern after the fact, I needed closer to 300 pleats. On average, my pleats were about 12mm, so 6mm down and 6mm up… they needed to be only 4mm (2mm down and 2mm up). This is ridiculously tiny. While the size pleat I used is perfectly average for the period, it was just wrong for this shirt. As such, it was impossible to get the entire embroidery pattern on. By the number of pleats, 1.5 repeats of the pattern was possible, instead of the 4.5 repeats on the extant. I did what I could, and used multiple threads to “thicken” the lines and make it look more in scale to itself… but then ended up making it too vertically spread out, so I could only fit the top half of the pattern. Overall, I ended up getting about 1/6 of the embroidery on. While it looks shiny and pretty, I know once I buy more thread I am going to rip it out and at least fix the vertical spacing issue. I unfortunately don’t have the materials to be able to do that now, and shipping times being what they are, likely won’t for a while yet. Were I to do this again, I would certainly try to also make the pleating size match correctly, however, I don’t see myself ever doing that. While many of you know I am crazy, I am not sure I am *that* crazy.

References/Works Cited:

Arnold, Janet. Patterns of Fashion 4: The Cut and Construction of Linen Shirts, smocks, neckwear, headwear, and accessories for men and women c1540-1660, Macmillan, 2008

Crowfoot, Elisabeth; Pritchard, Frances; and Staniland, Kay. Textiles and Clothing 1150-1450 Boydell Press, 2006

German Renaissance; Mary of Hapsburgs hemd: Chemise pleatwork and pattern darning notes http://germanrenaissance.net/mary-of-hapsburgs-hemd-chemise-pleatwork-and-pattern-darning-notes/

Greenfield, Kent Roberts. Sumptuary Law of Nürnberg; a Study in Paternal Government. Thesis. John Hopikins University, 1915. https://archive.org/details/sumptuarylawofn00gree

Jaro, Marta. Gold Embroidery and Fabrics in Europe: XI-XIV Centuries. National Centre of Museums, 1990

Malcolm-Davies, Jane and Mikhaila, Ninya The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing 16^th Century Dress Costume and Fashion Press, 2006

Museum of London, Sleeve Fragment ID: A26865

https://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/90816.html?fbclid=IwAR1IR4IE9UtG7KiwWFK8qvEKf_3pNxZOlc5f2xWmOzGQGbkzR3Y20ixec1o

Museum of London, Texitiles and Clothing: Medieval finds from Excavations in London

Board of Governors of the Museum of London, 1992

Nutz, Beatrice. “How to Pleat a Shirt in the 15^th Century” Archeological Textiles Review Issue 54, 2012 p79-91

Rast-Eicher, Antoinette and Tidow, Klaus Mühlberg-Ensemble: Die Textilien

Staniland, Kay. Medieval Craftsmen Embroiderers. Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1991

Szent-Györgyi, Julia Palotay. About the Gown of Mary of Hapsburg https://www.virtue.to/guest_authors/hungarian.html

Willett, C and Cunnington, Phillis. The History of Underclothes Dover Publications 1992

Wolff, Colette. The Art of Manipulating Fabric Krause Publications 1996