Juggling life, liberty and happiness

At the end of April 2008, I was contacted by Baron Erich of Zweihammer Armory about making him a wappenrock for his Laureling ceremony. He was the Baron of the SCA group I played with while out in California for several years, and I was thrilled to be asked. As my schedule had opened up, I was able to take on the commission.

As he is progressing towards a more period appearance, he wanted something documentable, that he could wear without needing to explain anything, yet he wanted the German flash and over-the-top appearance that he sees on the German guilds in California. He also wanted to be able to wear it over armor and without.

Challenges of the commission:
- He wanted to able to wear it over armor and without, I wanted it to look great either way. Armor changes a person's measurements considerably in the shoulders, which the garment hangs off of. If the shoulders weren't made right/supported correctly by the tailoring layers, the garment would look slack.
- The armor he wanted to wear it over wasn't finished yet!
- He was losing weight during the whole process
- No fittings in person, he lives in California and I live in Virginia, 3000 miles away.


I asked him if I could keep a public diary of the project as I went along and he thought it would be a great idea.
I intend to do a full write up on my website at some point, but as I'm in the middle of revising it, I decided to put it up on Picassa for now.

Here is the construction diary, with the period images and extant garment that I used to base my design on.

Red & Black Waffenrock Construction Diary

( remainder behind the cut )

Here's what I did this weekend, worked on the Wappenrock commission!

The project has been progressing behind the scenes for the last month. I'm behind on diary entries, but making the mockup and how much ease I ended up using isn't really thrilling like actual pictures of construction. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Here's the design we ended up going with.



Saturday
Spent about 6 hours ironing, cutting and sewing the skirt together. There are 24 sections, alternating black and red. Each section is made of three parts. This was a lot faster to sew than I thought it would be.
Skirt section pieces

Two skirt sections sewn together

Completed skirt


Sunday
Started piecing the body sections. This is the side front flap. I originally was going to strip quilt a large piece of fabric, and then cut the pieces out of that. But after doing a trial layout, and a sample strip section I realized two things.
1- There would be a lot of wasted fabric.
2- Its really hard to keep the seams even with no rippling over 50" wide material.

So I went with a different approach where I laid out the cut strips over the pattern, gave just a little extra on all sides, trimmed to size and then stitched it. The result is a really nice small section with very little waste. You end up using just about every last square inch this way.

Laying out the strips


Cut to size, with a little extra for sewing takeup


Pattern traced out on quilted section, see how little waste there is this way?


Cut out and mounted to linen backing for stability.