How to sew an easy medieval kirtle

[Music] hello and welcome to this video where I will be making this yellow cut so you may have seen my latest video where I sewed my green cattle and I actually got quite a lot of comments and questions from you asking if I could do a video in more detail how I did the dress and also more how to make a dress like that and I thought since I'm going to attend some medieval events this summer maybe I could make a video like that while I'm serving those verses so do you want dress that is very simple to make you maybe want a dress that suits a more simpler persona or character and maybe are an you an actor so you don't know exactly what your thing is yet maybe it's the 14th century or 15th century or 12th century or even in fantasy so you maybe want a dress that you can with just some small alterations where on your fantasy market and on your 14th century or inaccurate and you may want a dress that is very simple to make without a pattern that you can just make by yourself whenever a short amount of time you want a dress that you know are historically accurate if you are interested in that and you also want a dress like I said before that is very changeable it's maybe there's a dress that works just for the Viking Age as well as the 14th and 15th century the whole Middle Ages so you may want a thorough nectar to have a dress that works for all your events that he may go to you so if you agree to all of those points or just a few of them that I just tried to show you with my fingers you have found out the perfect video because in this video I will be making the simple rectangles and gorse dress which is if you don't know what that is a dress that is sewn just out of rectangles and triangles as I said before I'm going to attend them so medieval events this year and as the non fashion historian that I am I looked into some manuscripts to get an idea of what I want to make and I'm doing the 14th century the middle to late 14th century and I read everywhere and everybody is saying to me that oh the 14th century they just had buttons and lacings and trims and Tippit's on the dresses and what other things and then I looked into some manuscripts so 14th century German manuscripts and do you know what dress I found it the most the simple rectangles and coarse dress so that is what we are going to make today so now I've already talked too much and it's real time to start making the pattern the fact of this dress has this super simple pattern is in my opinion one of the things that makes this dress is so great I mean you couldn't even call it a pattern because it contains of just two big rectangles that is the front and back pieces and four triangles that are your goals which should just place one of the front or the back into other sides to be able to draw a pattern there are a few measurements that you need to take I often start with the measurements of my front and back pieces so what you need to know to be able to draw those are the length from your shoulder down to the floor and that measurement is the length of your pieces when I'm drawing the width of those pieces I often do that by measuring my bust I later on adding a few centimeters or tinea quite a few centimeters depending on if I want to dress to be more loosely fitted or more tightly fitted then it's time for the course and the length of your gore is the measurement from the waist down to the floor and this is something that is harder than you think because it's surprisingly hard to find a way that was my biggest problem when I make my first cut off and okay so to be able to find your waist you can bend over to one side and at that point when your side bends that point is your waist okay but what about the width to be able to know that you need to know how wide you want your hem to be or how long you want your home to be I've decided that I want mine to be 300 centimeters or 3 meters and then I'm just going to add my front and back pieces which is 40 centimeters each and that is to gather 80 centimeters what I like to do is taking 300 centimeters - 80 centimeters which is 220 centimeters then I take those 220 centimeters and divide that in for the result of that 55 centimeters and that is the bottom of a Gore's ata it with off my triangles so the last thing that you need to consider and the last thing I will talk about the four-star sewing is the fabric choice I mean you can have a wonderful cut and you can have a wonderful pattern but the fabric shows is very important because if you don't have the right fabric it will like do the whole idea of justice so if you're doing is totally accurate clothing the best fabric to pick is Wu because Wu were the most commonly used fabric for garments that would show so for cartels houses hoods etc do you often used wool there were some silks of course but who were the most commonly used fabric and the quality of that wood would be very important so if you were fine a person you had a better quality and if you were a poor person you would have a less good quality I've chosen this beautiful light woman twill which is in my opinion ideal for a cattle that you use in the middle of the summer and I've actually planted this fabric myself which was an interesting process the colored fabrics in the Middle Ages were plant died and the most easy color to achieve with plantain is yellow so if you're using a color like this that would tell the surroundings that you're not a very wealthy person but if you would choose colors like deep green the blue deep red purple that would of course mean that you were a higher ranked person in society so now finally it's time to start cutting this [Music] [Music] so when you're at this stage the best thing to do now I think is to pass them just clean sew them with big uni stitches it's a bit tighter than I expected it to be I thought this project would be like I'm doing the simplest dress ever it turned out this project is me trying to do the tiles dress that is ever possible to to put on without lacing or butter in the front okay so what I've done now is that I've busted together the front and the back together in the sides here and what I also did was I sewed the side course because I knew where my waist was but if you don't know that you can just put it on like this find your little belly button here and from that point you can go up three or five centimeters and here is your waist there is where we're going to put our front core and you're also doing the same thing in the back so you see those wrinkles here they are going to disappear so find the waste spots during the back what you can do if you are uncertain you can always ask someone to just cut until it doesn't wrinkle anymore [Music] [Music] okay so the next line is another thing that changes through the history so it depends as I said before on which century or period you want your dress to to be from him so since my is in the middle of the 14th century and wanted that claim to be quite wide but if you would like do it in another time period the neckline would be in another way so when you are at this stage in your sewing you can do some adjustments because now it's not a very straight like okay you have a bit of shaping here because the gorse are like joining here so what you can do is that you can just stand you can just pin and cut a cutaway these X's are break to get them more like fitted cattle [Music] so now it's finally time to really start selling this cattle and since I'm going for it so black you see here in my dress least I'm going to show this by hand you can of course sew it by machine if you want that goes so much faster then sewn by hand that is what I will do and I will do it with linear thread you can also do it with wool thread or a silk thread thread depending on who you think you're portraying in the Middle Ages but also like which alternative you like most [Music] [Music] it's now time for everyone's favorite part in dystopia costume making the slaves the world at least what I know two types of sleeves that were in commonly used during the 14th century which I'm making Michael Brown and those types of sleeves were two styles I will in this video call the straight sleeve and the ssleep the straight sleeve is the easy one it's the one we see in the boxing man in shifts in all periods of time and also mostly in early decades like the early Middle Ages and in Viking Age I'm not an expert in this but what I know at least this sleeve is a more complicated one it has its name because it has an s-curve in the upper part of the sleeve and that curve will help you to minimize book which you can get when you're using the Spacely and it's just this type of sleeve that I will be making in this video so to be able to draw this pattern the first measurement you need to take are the length of your over arm so after you've measured that you can draw a straight vertical line on a fabric piece after that they can measure the length of your underarm that you can draw a couple of centimetres away from the first line in truth you'll be able to know how wide you need your sleeve to be you can first measure around your overall and draw that on your fabric piece add some horizontal line then you can measure your wrist and draw that also as a horizontal line down at the bottom on your pattern which you barely can see here then it's time for the S curve itself and this is in fact if get old I'm just drawing that s curve and I'm trying to meet all those different lines the last thing you need to do is draw a line from the over part of your sleeve to the lower part of asleep which will become a soft angled line cut it out so it and try out a couple of times until you're happy with how your sleeve looks [Music] I have a problem there isn't enough fabric I tried to piece it in a way but one piece wasn't enough because I didn't have enough fabric for one big piece and I don't think I can manage for two either so I need several I think it wasn't be stupid when I thought I could make a dress out of two meters of fabric who even thinks that's possible so yeah that is what I'm going to do now he's this damn sleeve [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so the sleeves are so I will show you the results because I think that it didn't turn out that bad so if you look here when you're felling a seeing it will create this little pattern here outside of the seam and I quite like that so ii finished sleeves so what i'm gonna do now is that i'm going to sew the sleeves onto the dress and I mean how hard can that be [Music] [Music] okay so now you hopefully have only pieces sewn together in your dress and now it's time for fouling all the seasons this is going to be a very time-consuming step in this process but depending on the fabric if that could be very important because as you can see here my fabric has already started to fray so this means that I need to file all my seams in this dress and there are a lot of seeds [Music] I know so bad it was just three days until I'm going to my first reenactment ever and I want this dress done by then which means I need to finish it today but it means only some hem left that should be possible in one evening the colonel is ready actually it almost turned out exactly as I hoped it would I worried a lot at an event I was attending some weeks ago now actually has been a while since and I love it it did stretch a bit so it isn't so tight as it was I think it's great you can wear it on your own but you can also work under another car too I did record some clips while I was there and I have now added it together you can see how the wrestles looks but before I will show you that I will just want to say thank you for watching until the end as I hope you've understood during this video I'm not an expert I may have said a lot of things wrong mind maybe this video turned out a little too long and also I've probably talked too much with my horrible English but thank you anyway and now it's time for the final result [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Elin Abrahamsson

Views: 343,309

Keywords: Medievaldress, kirtle, cotehardie, cottehardie, medievalkirtle, wool, tutorial, medeltidsveckan, battleofwisby, sömnad, kjortel, medeltid, historicalcostuming, sew, historicalsewing, historicalcostume, handsewing, 14thcentury, 14thcenturykirtle, medievalsewing, medievalweek, reenactment, medievalreenactment, Sewingthroughthepast

Id: fRvzUQ8v9Ss

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019