A 17th century jacket

 As soon as I got home from Medieval Week I knew that I had only two weeks until I was going to take part in a 17th century event, so I saw this as my chance to finally make an outfit based on an image from Falun in 1683. I had much more ambitious plans, but I had to realize that  wouldn't be able to finish things for both me and my husband. The plan had been to make at least a shirt for him, but no, he had to make do with what he already had, which made hm look enough like a generic early 17th century farmer.

The first thing was to make a jacket. I found this gorgeous fabric in Visby, that I fell in love with, and even if my plan had been to make a brown jacket, red it was. I also wanted the jacket to be fairly generic, so that I would be able to use it for basically all time periods from the 16th century until today when I'd like to wear it with my folk costume. Jackets with skirts do occur in all time periods, and even if there are changes, I tried to make it without clear signs of belonging to a certain era, so for example no wings or rolls at the shoulders, which would have been the best thing to add if I wanted it to be a distinct early 17th century jacket.

For the pattern I decided to frankepattern it from what I had, rather than going all in for drafting a new pattern.

I started with the pattern that I made for my 16th century supporting kirtle. I did add som in all directions though, since I wanted to be able to wear it as an outer garment, over my longsleeved 16th century gowns for example. Here I did make a bit of mistake and added a bit too much at the bust, so it is rather large there, or rather it is a clear difference when I'm not wearing a very full 16th century shift and don't have a lot of fabric filling out the bust line.

The outer fabric is wool and I used linen for a lining.

When sewing I used a technique that I learnt when sewing 18th century, I'm not sure that it's correct for earlier periods. But basically I put one layer of fabric and lining together and treat them as one, I then sew that to a piece of the outer fabric, and I use the final lining piece to cover the seams and make sure that there are no raw edges.

For the sleeves I used my largest S-sleeve pattern. Now this pattern was way too large for the armscye. To make this look good I sewed the sleeve to the lining of the bodice. Instead of trying to pleat or gather the full sleevehead to the armscye I simply pinned the two pieces together where they fit, and then I cut off the excess fabric. I then used the outer fabric of the sleeve to cover the raw edges and first seam.

For the skirt portion I started out with a simple half circle skirt pattern. I cut this piece into four pieces, two fronts and two backs, and at those seams I angled them slightly outwards. Since the front has a distinct V-shape I also had to adjust the length in the front and back so that they would be even.

This is the back piece at the top and the front piece at the bottom. The skirt was also lined in linen, and to hem it I added a strip of wool to help it keep its shape a bit better. The final touch was to add hooks and eyes to close the jacket. 

Here I am wearing the jacket with 16th century underkirtle, my jedi skirt, my generic linen apron and a new hood, I will make a separate post about that.