Juggling life, liberty and happiness

After making several prototypes, I think I finally have it!

This is a notched barett, dockenbaretten, as seen in this woodcut by Erhard Schoen from The German Single-leaf Woodcuts G.1212 Lansquenet and Wife, c. 1535

( Here are my latest attempts, )

Its not completely finished, but at least I fixed the parts I felt failed in the last prototype. Now to just do the finishing thread tacks and do the final pressing.

I think it would be an interesting project, and probably PhD thesis to go back and study the formation of what I've come to call "Rennie Landsknecht Fashion" or RLF for short.

For those of you who don't follow the Renaissance faire scene or the Landsknecht scene at all, you may not have the slightest clue of what I'm talking about. Basically its just a small subset of the available styles of clothing, some are depicted in period artwork and some aren't. There are several period hat styles that aren't represented in current re-enactment circles (peasent hat styles, droopy barett styles), or are so far removed from the period depiction of the hat as to be a completely different style all together (most tellarbarett).

Which leads me to the anthropology part of this train of thought.... Who came up with the coda of fashion which defines the current Rennie Landsknecht look?

I can imagine a scene in some small cluttered apartment, with some guy pulling out the Osprey Men at Arms Landsknecht book and telling his wife/girlfriend "Honey, I want this outfit"

And she says "OK, I'll make it for you because I love you!" So she does, and its 11 pm the night before the event that he's going to wear the thing at, and she gets to the hat, because how hard can that be? Or rather, it has scared the living daylights out of her and she's put it off till the last minute....

So she looks at the hat, pulls on her theatrical costume experience and comes up with something that works.

The next day, people come up to her and ask her about the hat, so she tells them how she did it. They make them, and tell other people how they are made. Twenty or more years later, its now standard fact and classes are taught, and everybody makes their hats this way and nobody questions if this is the way its supposed to be done.

And so you end up with this being the standard method for creating a crown for a square topped barett.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77086627@N00/413774279/

Not that this is a bad hat, its just not the method of construction that I think the artwork is showing.

More on the subject of period construction methods later....