Designing a Basic Kit for Reenactors

I've been sick, and as we all know, sickness leads to sewing.

I'm currently working out a set of easy instructions for basic start-up kit that would get a male actor from zero to fully costumed for as little money as possible. The kit would center around a simple outfit of shirt, jerkin, Venetians or galligaskins, and shoes. 

Conversations with potential actors, often center around two issues:

1. Start-up costs: All of the things a beginning actor needs seems daunting when you are starting from zero. Along with this post about "feast gear" and this one about modifying shoes, this set of simple patterns will complete the kit for any newbie.
2. "I'm not going to wear that." (Usually said while pointing to someone in short-short paned trunkhose displaying a lot of leg.)  The culture shock is sometimes too much for guys who grew up in the jeans & tee shirt era.  Because Venetians come down below the knee, they are the least threatening of the period-appropriate garb available to us; the least likely to scare off the potential actor who recoils at the thought of putting on a pair of tights or even thigh-high hosen.

If we get someone involved in this pastime with the minimum headache, they almost inevitably begin upgrading their kit. From these simple beginnings, most can be expected to begin to branch out into more intricate costumes as their characters progress. 

The goals for this project are:

1. Get new actors into a period-appropriate (1560-1580) costume for as little money as possible.
2. To teach some basic pattern-drafting and further my goal of getting more men to sew.
3. To get actors to shift more of their initial expenditure into period-appropriate fabrics.
4. To further the ideal that we are making clothes, not costumes*.

All of this will become a kit that I dispense to my new guildmembers, as well as a class I will teach for the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire (because they've asked me to) and anyone else who wants to pay me to come speak to their group.  My rates will be very reasonable... I don't know what that means yet, but whatever they turn out to be, they will be very reasonable, I assure you.

One of the laudable aspects of Venetians (from the standpoint of a new reenactor) is that
they have what we now consider a standard trouser fly. No codpiece necessary.

Because I wanted to illustrate some simple ways to dress-up a simple pattern (and because
I just can't leave anything alone,) I added some very basic chainstitch embroidery to the legs.

This blog will play host to those patterns and yes, they will be available as a free download. I will probably even get my wife to videotape the class so that I can send it to people and post it here.

See you soon with more pictures and information...

-Scott

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* Yes, I am aware that "costume" is the accurate and appropriate nomenclature for the clothing worn by a specific culture at a specific time. I further know that "garb" makes some people's teeth itch. I use it anyway. One of my missions is to make this pastime accessible to all, and we are combating an entrenched cultural connotation of the word "costume" with the word "Halloween". The word "Garb" is not only a period-appropriate word (Shakespeare uses it) it also specifically connotes period clothing, especially in reenactor circles. There are those whose mission it is to erase "garb" from the reenactor's lexicon, mostly because the academic community gets sniffy if they catch you using the term. Good for them. I, however, could not possibly care less what the academic community thinks of me. Academic accolades are not my goal here. 

Leatherworking: Wetforming Leather

Ok, so I promised a tutorial on wet-formed leather goods.  I have three leather projects on my docket right now that will call for wet-formed leather: another holster, a jack, and a new commedia mask.  But first, let's talk about leather for a minute.

Because leather had the previous job of holding a cow's insides inside, even after tanning, it contains a significant percentage of elasticity. Just like our skins, leather is primarily made of a group of proteins called collagen.  When you generally hear about collagen it's in one of two spheres: cooking and skin care.  In cooking, collagen is that which gives broths and gravies their unctuous mouth feel and in skin care, it's what contributes to elasticity.

It's this last one that we're concerned with.


Though these projects can be done with other sorts of leather, we'll be working with leather from cows that has been "vegetable tanned", which is to say it was treated using tannins taken from plant sources, usually the bark of trees.  The proteins in the tannins protect the proteins in the collagen to keep the animal skin from rotting as it normally would.


Using water -- the universal solvent -- we're going to weaken those tannins' relationship with their collagen friends.  And then we're going to use that to our advantage, because the weakened bonds will tighten up as the leather dries.


Wet forming leather - to one extent or another - is used in just about every durable leathercraft from purse making to shoemaking to book binding, so its a good skill to have in your toolbox.

Holster

Leather holsters are made using essentially the same methods as masks, wet-forming the leather around a form (or the gun itself in some cases).  Pictured at right is a holster and gun belt I made for a brace of retro-scifi laser pistols (cough-NerfGuns-cough) worn for the Arbuckle Rogers costume that debuted at Steamcon II in 2010.

For Steamcon III, I'm expanding the costume and for that I have a new ray gun which needs a holster and harness.  Because the people who make commercial gun tactical gear don't tend to market holsters for Monsieur Buck Rogers and his friends.

The Jack

Of all the odd things said of the English, one of the oddest (at least in my opinion) is their habit of drinking beer from their boots.  Which is silly, because everyone knows that's the Germans.  Anyway, what they meant was that the English were fond of their leather bottels and jacks, long after the rest of Europe gave up that sort of thing.  I suspect that the continent had a more abundant supply of clay.

And they looked little or nothing like the image to the side, but I didn't have a better one handy, so it'll have to do for now.

On the Mary Rose, a number of wooden tankards were recovered and one day I'll probably put one of those together too.  There many leathergoods found, however, among them a leather bucket and perhaps a bottel or two as well, though I can't find the pictures online to link to for those.

I've never made one of these before, but the science is straightforward enough.  The standard approach is to cut a wooden form and then wrap heavy soaked leather around them and let them dry.  Then sew a bottom on and seal the whole thing with beeswax or brewer's pitch.  Not all that dissimilar to the holster, really.

We'll see how it goes.

The Mask

I've been planning to make a Pantalone mask and after that, who knows?  I have made a number of masks now, so I know what I'm doing.  Pantalone, however is bit more expressive than the others I've made and I'm waiting for the right bit of leather to come along for this one.

Yes, I really am that finicky.,  I have to see the mask in the materials or I won't make it.  The mask shown at right is my wife's "bubble mask" in its infancy, though I didn't know she intended the bubble wand at the time.  And I'm not sure she knew it either just yet.

Pantalone is a standard Commedia character, the grasping, plotting old miser with great flowing eyebrows and warts and all the things that a 16th century mask maker would use to ape old age.  This is going to be fun because I intend to get quite crazy with it.

The Toymaker

The creative impulse takes many forms and often comes from a place of frustration with what's out there not living up to the potential you can see.

When I was a kid, I made many of my own toys.  All of my favorite toy guns came from the crates of miscellaneous junk beneath my grandfather's work bench, not Toys-R-Us.  This isn't because we were poor, but because I thought the toys I envisioned in my head were just that much cooler than the ones you could buy at the toy store.  For instance, the 1980's were woefully short of space helmets and other spaceman spiffery.  I was born twenty years too late for the real teeth of the space race and all the very cool toys that accompanied that space-borne fervor.

Thankfully, my parents and grandparents encouraged this sort of thing.  At least until I went as far as getting into pounding heated nails into tiny swords for my GI Joes.  Dad drew the line at me becoming an eight-year-old blacksmith.

Even those toys I did buy or was given eventually went under the tools.  All of my favorite GI Joe and Star Wars characters and vehicles were custom amalgamations to suit my own fancy, characters in my own extended storylines.

As an adult, I transferred this into sculpture and artwork, but really these are all extensions of the same brain frequency, the translation of a mental picture into a three-dimensional object.  I've made props for renaissance faires and small theatrical productions and science fiction conventions.

My name is Scott and I like to build neat stuff.  I am a Maker and a Modifier, in short, I am a Toymaker and these are my toys.

A message to my readers

Oh dear!  I have been gone a long time, haven't I?

The last time I posted was over a year ago.  In part this is owing to some health issues that are finally beginning to (sort of) resolve themselves, but mainly it's because I fell down the clockwork rabbit hole into steampunk.  I's still doing renaissance costuming, but I just haven't made much new stuff in the past year.

Rather than continue to allow this blog stand idle for long stretches while I'm working on things unrelated to the renaissance, or creating a whole new blog and let that one stand idle while I come back here to do renaissance or other stuff, I'll be broadening the focus of this blog to include all of my costuming and garb making. 

I hope you don't mind. Never fear, my dabbling in the renaissance is not over by a long shot.  As you can see below, I'm in the 2011 promotional video for the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire  (Guy with a big nose bouncing around like a maniac)

 

Anyway, rest assured, the quality renaissance costuming content is not nearly at an end. I have a leather doublet on the drawing board that I'm gathering bits for and will begin as soon as I find the right buttons or closures to complete it!  So my rennie and SCA readers can look forward to that.

Incidentally, in case you don't like pawing through the steampunk or sci fi stuff to find the renaissance stuff (or vice-versa), never fear; each period or genre will have its own tag that will be applied to all posts of that milieu.Renaissance, Steampunk, Science Fiction, Prop Making, Leatherwork, etcetera.  Some of them might have more than one category, but I'll try to keep overlap to a minimum.

My standards for costuming in any period remain the same:

1. Good garb feels natural when you’re wearing it.
2. Good garb won’t kill you to wear in the August heat (or the halls of a convention center).
3. Good garb is clothing you won’t hate putting on in the morning.
4. Good garb is just as durable as the other clothes in your closet (or better).
5. Good garb weighs style against wearability and strikes a healthy balance.