The collar of the gollar

 It sounds fun, but really collar and gollar are the same word, even more obvious in Swedish where gollar in the 16th century was probably called a "kraga", and collar in modern Swedish is "krage".

Anyway for a proper winter gollar I wanted a nice high collar as well.

This is the shape of the collar. The important thing is that the bottom of the collar is the measurement that you want your finished backpiece to have. The backpiece of the main gollar is then pleated to the gollar to give it the right measurement.

That the backpiece is pleated to the gollar makes it quite bulky. For that reason it was a good thing that the fur lining didn't go all the way up to the top of the backpiece. Now I only pleated the wool pieces together, and afterwards I covered the gap with a piece of fur that I put in over the gap.

This is what the inside of the gollar looked like when I had attached the larger pieces of fur. From this I had to patch the rest with all the pieces that I could get. I was also very lucky in that I could cover the collar with the collar piece from the furcoat, since that was a piece of fur that was definitely of a different and higher quality than the rest of the coat.

At about this stage I got the chance to listen to a talk on the re-use of clothes and textiles at the Swedish court in the middle and late 16th century. And I can only say that my method of attaching the fur lining is totally wrong. Originally the fur lining was sewn together separately and then quite loosely attached to the outer fabric. It was easy to separate the lining from the main fabric, and it's very probably that they were stored separately. I should not have attached the fur directly to the outer wool fabric. 

Another note about construction is that I'm using fairly large stitches when I'm sewing the fur. I don't know if that was how it was done, but it's a habit I have from sewing leather and fake leather on the machine, where all the instructions call for using large stitches so that you don't weaken the leather.

When all the fur was attached I finished by taking off the excess fur that was peaking out. When working with fur, also with fake fur, I'm using a scalpel. I've also heard from people that have used a razor blade. The important thing is that you cut through the leather, but not the fur itself. With a pair of scissors you would cut everything, and that leads a to a lot more loose fluff that you need to clean up. You still get some fluff, but it's a lot less since you haven't cut it.