The big occupation of my living room floor

After the bodice it was time to make the skirt of the 1520's court gown. It took a lot longer than I had planned, simply because it was boring and uncomfortable.

Back in February I had started with cutting out the skirt in linen. I wanted to make a full circle skirt, to get this very dramatic and beauiful folds that can be seen in art, but without too much bulk around the skirt. The extant gown of Maria of Habsburg from 1520 is a also a full circle skirt. I wanted to make it in two layers, with a base layer in linen to keep the velvet from stretching and warping too much. It also made it easier to use the linen pieces as patterns and adapt the silk velvet to them. The downside is that the skirt is very heavy, due to the amount of fabric in it.

I could not fit a full half circle, or even a quarter of a circle on the silk velvet, but I could get almost a quarter circle, and then add a wedge of fabric at one bottom to create a full quarter circle. The wedge is an historically accurate solution to get a full circle out of fabric that is narrower than modern widths. Since I had a lot of fabric I brought it with me to work and layed it out on the speaker's stage in our biggest conference auditorium. It was also nice not having to crawl on the floor.

The fabric had been folded, in order to remove the fold lines I wet the fabric and then threw it all, both the cut pieces and the remains, in the dryer to tumble on low heat. This is usually the best way of refreshing silk velvet, but the dryer in our house couldn't handle it and simply didn't dry the fabric. We do have a drying room wth a big fan though so I hung everything there. The important thing is that you need some kind of breeze or movement to make fabric move while it's drying. If you have a garden it's great to just hang it outside. Since the fabric is cut as a quarter of a circle there will also be stretching, due to the different grainlines in the circle. Since I was going to fit the silk to a linen base I could finetune the shapes afterwards though.

Then it was time clear out my living room floor and place the skirt on the floor. As you can see my usable space could just fit a bit more than a panel at the time.

I started with attaching the side of the panel with a selvage to a seam on the linen. Then it was a matter of crawling on the floor smoothing out the fabric towards the other sea and cutting off excess fabric where the silk had stretched. I sewed the non-selvage end over the seam of the linen, and then the next selvage end was placed on top of that, in order to get a new straight line and to hide the raw edge of the first piece.

For the final piece I simple folded the raw edge down and sewed it down with prick stitches, the thread disappeared into the pile of the velvet.

It took me really long time to make this, it was uncomfortable sitting on the floor trying to avoid crushing or creating wrinkles in the velvet, but now it's done. I am worried about the weight and how I will attach it to the bodice the best way though.

This is the skirt draped over my ironing board. It's big and heavy. I also haven't hemmed it yet, that will wait until it has been attached to the bodice, and I will let it hang out a bit more as well.