Farmers clothes in the 16th century

 I have gotten quite a few questions about what a farmer would have worn in Sweden in the 16th century, so I thought it would be best to try and collect links to helpful sites. This is no way a comprehensive guide, but I hope it can help those who are curious.

In 2020 the blogger Marlein made a post about recreating a pattern for Swedish peasant trousers. Her blog is here but unfortunately she seems to have removed that post. 

First of all there are a couple of depictions of Swedish farmers from the 16th and 17th century.

An italian ambassador - Lorenzo Magalotti - travelled through Sweden in the 17th century and drew pictures of the inhabitants, and this is one of his drawings of Swedish farmers.

Of note here are the long trousers, not the fashionable shorter breeches of the time.

This goes well with this very well researched article about "husur" - which is a kind of wide trousers worn by farmers in the Siljan region, and already in the 17th century there are complaints that the peasants are giving up their husur and start following fashion by using breeches instead. The "husur" survived, barely, into the late 19th century and has been taken up by people reconstructing folk costumes of the region. Then made as a summer garment in linen.

In 1502 the German mercenary Paul Dolnstein was part of the Swedish-Danish wars and he drew the image above of a Swedish farmer-soldier up against a landsknecht. Once again the wide trousers are setting him apart from the fashionable landsknecht in his tight fitting hose.

This is a drawing, that is supposed to be a copy of an older drawing, but the provenience is doubtful, it shows the rebel leader Nils Dacke in the 1540s.

In church art from the 15th century it's also possible to find quite a few examples of wide baggy trousers, this is is an image by Albertus Pictor.

So with that in mind I have made two sets of farmers/peasant trousers. They are made from a pattern that was originally made by Marlein. This was the first pair.

They were worn by my friend Björn in 2023, together with a 15th century doublet that he borrowed and a simple shirt that was slightly gathered at the neck.

I have made a similar pair for my husband as well, but apparently I don't have any good images of him

Here is at a winter event, when he was coming down with a cold so I had just piled as much wool garments on him as possible, before he went home to bed.

Still the pattern for the trousers is pretty simple. It would be possible to use a modern pattern for wide, baggy pants. They do have a shaped crouch seam, but the important thing is that they go up to the natural waist, which is quite higher up than modern trousers. For these trousers I simply use a draw string to keep them up.

As for the upper body. For the 16th century look I would go with a baggy jacket/doublet, but make sure that it has a waist seam and skirt, but no shoulder rolls or wings since that comes in use later and is more a 17th century thing.

A good thing with being a farmer is that since fabric and clothes were so expensive, they were rarely well fitted. If something is too small, or too big, that is correct. People wore worn out garments, old clothes with bad fit or simply hand me downs until there was nothing left of them.

Post season clothes care

 Many people wonder why I go home a day early from Medieval week in Visby. The reason is pretty easy. Medieval week is my last week of holiday and travel time with both ferry and then driving home it takes a whole day. Then when I come home I need to take care of the clothes and equipment, and that takes a full day. I need to do it immediately, because after a week of working in the camp kitchen they stink of smoke.

Medieval week is the last big event of the reenactment season, some times smaller events pop up, that also means that I want to give the clothes some proper cleaning before packing them away for what can be several months until the next time we use them.

I live in a small apartment without a bathtub and without access to a balcony or garden so this is what I do with my historical clothes.

The first thing I did when we came home was to take out all the things of linen and cotton, so our shifts/shirts and kitchen textiles. I rubbed in some Galltvål on special stains and on the cuffs and collars where they linen had turned grey/yellowish. Galltvål is a brand but the kind of soap is also called "gall soap or bile soap" in English. Before going to bed I switched water, but didn't rinse the clothes, and this time I didn't rubb in extra soap, I just put some in the water.

As is common in Sweden our apartment has access to a washing room and I had made sure to book it before going to Visby. The linen and cottons were both put in a washing machine with regular washing powder and 60 degrees wash cycles.

For the wool I put the sweatiest pieces, that is our hoses, David's short hose and my underkirtle in the machine with a gentle wool washing liquid and on a wool cycle. I put the red pieces in a separate machine together with some paper that soaks up the extra dye that they are still shedding a lot of.

 Then I went into our common garder and occupied the patio. I put the white linen pieces in the sun, and on the grass, to get some extra bleaching. The wool was hung up to either dry, or in the case of our hats, gollars, double and overkirtle just air out the smoke. The non-white linen was simply hung over furniture and the like.

It was quite a windy day so I had to catch pieces that flew away from time to time, but it also made everything dry and fresh in a fairly short amount of time. When hanging the clohtes up it was also easy to spot holes and seams that had come undone. All those pieces go into my mending/fixing pile that I can take up in the coming months when I don't have anything else to do.

Then the clothes are all packed away in plastic boxes in my storage in the attic. I have never had problems with moths or the like but I am sure to put plenty of cedar wood pieces in the boxes to ward of any unwelcome guests.

Two soft summer hats

 I am the kind of person who just can't handle contact lenses, last summer I tried and tried, but apparently one of my failures in life is that I just can't get them into my eyes, and my eyesight is such that even when I could get them in I couldn't see good, just better than withouth. Meaning I could just handle a phone with the lenses in, but I could not drive with them. So I decided that it wasn't worth the frustration, and the money for buying lenses, and I have to go with glasses, and be half blind when in costumes where the glasses don't fit. Since I am also too cheap to buy corrective sunglasses I felt that I needed a summer hat this season to get some shade. Over the years I have loved big summer hats, but to be honest they get lost, the blow off or I simply don't use them because they are too big. I needed something smaller and softer, but I didn't just want a bucket hat. Well I decided to make a hat and went to search for a pattern online.

I found this pattern from Notches Sewing studio on Etsy.  Etsy today is unfortunately full of AI slop and it important to go through the profiles and see if you can find a real person behind the store. This pattern was a bit more expensive than the cheapest patterns, but I liked that it was more than a bucket hat and the fact that there was a youtube tutorial showed me that a real person was behind it. 

For fabrics I went into a local op shop and found some cottons, including two curtains with some stains on. I couldn't really decide on what I would do, and since they cost a total of $10 I bought all of them. I had to buy 1 m of medium weight interfacing, but that was just enough for both hats. In total material and patterns costed around $40, and the fabric I have left will be great to make toiles out of.

My first colour choice was this blue version. The blue was some kind of poly/cotton sateen, with quite a nice shine to it.

A downside was that it felt quite paperly and crumpled quite a lot. 

The pattern is marked as beginner/intermediate. Now there are no written instruction, just the youtube tutorial. It is an easy pattern, and for me it would have been nice to just have some written instructions so I didn't have to stop and play the video all the time. The second hat I made I didn't have to follow the video at all though.

The pattern is one size, and it fit me really well, I think I am normally a size 56 in hats, I have quite a medium sized head.

The pattern is easy, but it is a bit fiddly. In order for it to look good you need to be comfortable with sewing round pieces to each other, and to make topstitching. It is optional to top stitch the brim, but it really helps to make the brim steadier than when just relying on the fusible interfacing. I found it was quite wiggly to attach sew the pieces together when I was working with several pieces that were interfaced. Not hard, but wiggly and fiddly.

The other hat I made was in a more subdued colour palette, with a sandcoloured outer fabric, and a softer lining. Now the hats are reversible so it is possible to just turn them inside out if I want the flowers on the outside. The brim is steady enough with all the top stitching so it is possible to shape the brim and it keeps that way.

And this is the size of the hat on me, and not on the tiny styrofoam head.

Now I have to summer hats, and it took me one evening and one morning to sew them together.

A renaissance hairnet

 In my last post I had set up and started on a net with the sprang double grid stitch. I did the net in pink because I already have a black net, even if there are a lot of mistakes in it, and I also have a yellow and red as well, so I felt that I wanted something new. After all I am calling mine and my husband's landsknecht outfits for "50 shades of red", so to make something in pink felt like a fun project, even if I can't say that I have ever seen evidence for pink hairnets. For this I use the yarn "Grane" from Korps.se, which is a z-spun wool, 100 g = 400 m.

The net worked fine and I could make the whole net in one evening. I used 124 loops and it was 43 cm long. When I released it from the loom it was huge. This could never work as hairnet, unless I use my largest and heaviset wulsthaube, the one that was an experiment with wool and that I can't wear for more than a short while without getting neckpains and headaches. I did take my measurements and I could work out that I had a 0,75 conversion rate. Meaning that if I take the number of loops and multiply with 0,75, then I get the finished width. This is all very much depending on yarn and your own tension, but now I had a number.

So I set up a new warp with 80 threads and 40 cm long. It took me a bit less than an evening to make a new net. This size is perfect for my head with my own hair, it might be a tiny bit too small to wear a wulsthaube or large hairpiece under it though. So I guess a good size for me is probably around 90 threads.

I blocked the net over a bowl, but to be honest I don't really see a difference between this and just flatblocking it.

Here is the comparison between the first version and the new version. I think I will use the first version as a net bag for bulky but light things, maybe I should simply keep my yarns there.

A new sprang frame/loom and finally a double grid net

 I started out my adventures in sprang with an old picture frame that I found in an op shop. but a few weeks ago it finally broke so much that it couldn't be saved by duct tape any longer. The whole frame got wobbly in the diagonal direction which made it quite hard to work with. I have thought about a more "historical" frame for a while, one that I would be able to bring to a medieval market and it wouldn't look too out of place. I still wanted a frame that was easy to carry and move around.

In the end I decided to follow this tutorial I found on youtube.

I kept overthinking what kind of sticks I would use, until I took a stroll to the park and realised there are so many sticks and branches still on the ground after the severe winter storm we had back in January.

I picked up two loose branches and carried them home.

Here are my materials - a saw, two long sticks and some cotton string. The old frame that I used is also in pieces on the table so that I could use the pieces as general measuring devices.

I first laid out the size of it to see if it felt good, and it dig. It's definitely taller than my old frame so it will allow me to make longer sprang pieces.

And here is the finished loom.

I decided to try the loom and to finally get my head and hands around what Carol James calles the double grid stitch. It's supposed to be an easy stitch, basically on every second row you pick up double threads, but I had alwasy gotten a lot of loose threads and what I call "church windows", where the treads created little frames where they crossed each other. Now I decided to finally understand what I did wrong, work it out, and also to make a test piece to see if I could be better at calculating the final size.

I made a warp of 124 loops (248 threads) that were 43 cm long. I then followed the instructions of Sally Pointer on how to make the grid, her video can be found here. By working slowly, and having to untangle everything after around 10 rows and starting over, I realised two things. On the rows where I work single threads it's easier if I consider the four threads that have ended up together as threads to be braided together rather than just counting 1 up, 1 down. When I worked them four at a time I could clearly see if they twisted or if I got out of sync. I also used saving sticks for all four rows, the double grid is a set of 4 rows creating the pattern. The sticks made it a lot easier to "see" how the threads were moving, and I made sure to mark the nr 1 row, that is the red thread on the stick in the image. A lot of my problems with the double grid, that I realised this time,  come from threads twisting out of order, and that I couldn't remember which row in the four row pattern I was on. Marking that first row made it so much easier. The lower pieces of fabric are extra lifelines that I put on every fourth row to make sure I wouldn't have to go back too far if I realised a mistake that was more than 4 rows away, that happened the first time.

The loom worked really well, both with warping up and being easily movable, and it was a lot sturdier than my old frame. I am only thinking about replacing my metal knitting needles for the top and bottom, but we will see when I do that.

A few words

 I had the most wonderful aunt. An aunt that made sure to take me to medieval fairs and markets when I was younger. An aunt that was the only one in the family that knew about the band Eluveitie and in her work as a priest led many teenagers through their confirmation by being a game master and doing role playing games. ( I was really envious that we didn't have that kind of confirmation studies around here). She knew her Tolkien by heart and since she read Harry Potter in Swedish, two days after the final book had been released in English she phoned me up and said "I know that you don't read the books, but I know that  your friends read them in English so now you have to tell me who survives and how it all ends". 

So many rounds of shopping, going to concerts, opera and the movies. And as a niece in the same size and with a shared love of pink I was lucky to get so much clothes from her. I am sad that she didn't move back to Falun earlier so we could have had some more time, I had even planned to bring Bilbo and read it loud for her, despite me not liking Tolkien at all. But the smile when we greeted her when she arrived and we told her that was home in Falun, even on the same street where she lived when she lived here, and when you in a sudden burst of clarity said "how long should I have it like this" makes me think that she decided to let go, now that she had come home and was sure that she had us around not just for yourself but for her husband as well. And of course with her sense of humour and being an Uppsala person at heart she made sure to hold out and not leave on the last of April, but a few hours in on May 1st.

As a costumer she also meant something for my development. This is a photo from the midnight premiere of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. I am wearing an ill-fitting  dress made out of cheap cotton. She was dressed as a hobbit.

This is her at her Lord of Rings-themed 50th birthday party a few years later, and I made Eowyn's moruning gown for her (she didn't want the high neck or veil though). This velvet dress and the Arwen dress that I made for myself was the first time that I realized how important being careful when cutting and pressing seams were, that sewing was something more than just feeding pieces of fabric through a machine. When we cleared out their apartment two years ago I found this dress, even if it was missing the gold underskirt, so I brought it home and have it among my costumes as a very loving memory of her.

HSM challenge 4: Out of your comfort zone - a 17th century cap

 Last year I finally did a loose 17th century hood for a small 17th century event in my hometown. Well that got me inspired to take part in the main event focused on the 17th century in Sweden.

Every year in April the Vadstena castle hosts a Weekend of Military history, based on the fact that the castle was finished in 1620. Now with good enough 17th century clothes and having met some of the people that take part in it I felt that I really wanted to go this year. And of course I wanted to update my wardrobe. 

The first step was to make new headwear. I have my beautiful loose hood, but it is a bit fancy and unpractical, and I wanted something that was more common and easier to work in. Now finding images of Swedish 17th century women isn't that easy. Most reenactors, or at least people that post tutorials and information, are focused on the English Civil War, and I am weary of just taking English sources as a base. Still for the headwear we have a few portraits of wives of priests in Sweden.

Portrait of Margareta Hansdotter (1594-1657)

There definietly seems to be a standard dress for these women, with a white crosscloth, a  tightfitting cap in white and then a black cap over it. I decided to use this style as the base.

As a crosscloth I simply made a triangle in linen and addet two pieces of tape. I am not sure if there is any evidence for a triangular forcloth in Sweden, for later periods there have been simple bands used for the same function. Still since I dye my hair all my linens tend to become discoloured, and having a larger, and simpler piece of fabric to protect the next layer is a good thing.

For the cap I started with the instructions from the guidelines of The Marquess of Winchester's regiment, an English Civil War group. I used the pattern for coif 4. I actually started with coif 2, but wasn't happy with a seam in the top, I preferred to have the seam at the back.

This was the result, and I felt that it was too big. I tried it on and simply put a pin where I wanted the cap to end, and then I simply cut the front shorter.

I attached two pieces of cape to the back corner of the front piece. For the back I simply pinned pleats in place until it was a good size and then I sewed the pleats in place.

This was the finished result. A bit looser than I had hoped for, but it gives me a good idea on how to work with a pattern for the outer wool cap.

Here I am wearing the white cap under my black cap.

The HSM facts:

What the item is: linen cap and forecloth
How it fits the challenge: The 17th century is a new era for me, and is definitely out of my comfort zone.
Material: 0,5 linen
Pattern: coif 4 according to the instrucion on The Winchester regiment's guide - https://www.marquisofwinchesters.co.uk/living-history-guide-coifs-and-hair/
Year: 1620s
Notions: line thread, a piece of cotton tape for the forcloth
How historically accurate is it? 90%
Hours to complete: an evening
First worn: At Vadstena military days 17-19th of April
Total cost: $10