14th century hood with daggings, long liripipe & decorative chain stitch embroidery – revisited

Today I have a very special treat for you:

My
14th century hood with daggings,
long liripipe & chain stitch embroidery
– revisited. 😀

As you might remember – I just posted about the “Chain Stitch” and its use for decorative hand sewing for my “fast & easy pouch tutorial“:
“Chain Stitch – posting I“ & “Chain Stitch – posting II”

While I was working at this two “hand sewing” related postings, I already had the feeling that a posting about embroidery next would be a good idea. And what would be more appropriate than a posting about a nice medieval project with Chain Stitch embroidery next? *lol*
Yes, this posting quasi suggested itself… 😀

Created in 2009, this hand sewn & hand embroidered 14th century hood with daggings, long liripipe and decorative chain stitch embroidery is still one of my favorite hood projects. …and I think I can see some similar hoods in the near future… B-)

…but back to the main purpose of this posting. I took some time and reviewed my old postings about this project for you. Following you will find a selection of my favorite project pictures as well as some useful information about this 14th century hood project. Enjoy! 😀

Above you can see a side picture of the hood and underneath a picture of the back. I think this two pictures give a very good impression of how this hood looks like when it is worn.

The next picture shows the pattern which I used for this hood as well as the placement of my embroidery very nicely. 

In my opinion a good embroidery composition is already a rather difficult task. But what many people tend to neglect, is the fact that its placement is rather difficult and very important for the overall appearance too.

Retrospective I can say that good embroidery is the result of a rather long and sometimes even rather painful process. You need to decide on patterns, where to place it, colors, stitches and techniques, materials,… Well, I can’t say how many sleepless nights I have already spent thinking about such things… *lol* 

I drafted the basic pattern for this hood – as you can see it on the picture above – from the book “Medieval Tailor’s Assistant: Making Common Garments 1200-1500“.
It is the “2. Pattern for Fig 1″ on page 193. Mostly following the instruction in the book, I decided to add more fabric for the liripipe, the face opening and the dagging. 🙂 

This is a very nice book for beginners to our hobby or people who are new to sewing. The instructions are easy to understand and to follow. They really give a good base to work from. The pattern for this hood – for example – worked very nicely.

To be honest, many re-enactors criticize that the pattern in this book are not very “authentic” but at least they are “easy” and “doable”. I think this is especially important for beginners. I already tried out some of the patterns and the only pattern I completely disagree with by now it the pattern for the “Woman’s hose”. I tried the pattern for the “Woman’s hose” (woolen stockings) and in my opinion it doesn’t work at all.

However – this is a nice basis to work from if you don’t have much experience concerning sewing but it is not the perfect solution. A nice basis which needs to be further developed by other, more in-depth books with more accurate period examples but I think it is still a good read for an advanced costumer or an ambitious newby. 😀
You can find this book here:

Amazon.com: Medieval Tailor’s Assistant: Making Common Garments 1200-1500
Amazon.de: The Medieval Tailor’s Assistant: Making Common Garments 1200-1500 

…and here a detailed picture of the chain stitch embroidery at the liripipe:

As you might have already discovered, wool is often not the best surface if you want to pre-draw a pattern for embroidery. Therefore I used the pin, which you can see on the picture above, like a mark for the “center axis” of this embroidery. This pin was a great help while I was freely embroidering this rather small triangles and rectangles without any further help…

The wool which I used for this project seemed to be even more stubborn as usual but I didn’t give up and finally found a very good solution for my work at the roundels!
-> Paper models and pins! *lol*
Yes, sometimes the easiest solutions are the most effective ones… 😉

This “paper model and pins” method worked surprisingly well – I admit that it worked even better than I initially thought. As far as I remember this was the very first time I tried this method but it was definitely not the last project I used it for. 🙂 

Last but not least also a short note about the daggings: Because the used wool was fraying a little, I decided to go with a “blanket stitch”* over the edge of the daggings.

The “blanket stitch” is worked similar to the well known simple version of the “button hole stitch” – you just leave more space between the single stitches.
* = I found a nice posting about the blanket stitch on this page: “Stitch School: blanket stitch“

 

When you take another look at the border of my daggings you will also discover a line of chain stitches along the border. This extra embroidery was necessary because the daggings started to curl as soon as the blanket stitch was applied. Therefore in this special case the chain stitch not only has a decorative but also a very practical reason. It sets a counterpart to the blanket stitch and “flattens” the daggings again. 😀

And last but not least an embroidery project of an other artisan which got inspired by my hood project. As you can see on the picture underneath – my Gugel inspired Nereida to make a similar embroidered hood for herself:

I hope you enjoyed reading this posting about my favorite 14th century hood project as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you have any questions about this project or would like to see another one of my projects revisited, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Btw. the next topic on my “revisited projects” list – by special request of one of my dear blog members – is: my “Woman’s Hose”/my “period woolen stockings”