#french tailoring

[oxfords---notbrogues]

@jeanmanuelmoreau

[thurstongrey]

[samwisethestitch]

I made Tudor shapewear out of fabric scraps!

This is part of my ongoing project to make a Tudor French gown for the ren faire. While I'm not super concerned with historical accuracy for things like fabric fiber content and dyes, I *am* trying to be as accurate as possible with the silhouette, and that classic Tudor noblewoman silhouette requires some very specific undergarments.

This garment was commonly called a "bum roll" and was worn around the hips to add width. Sort of like 16th century butt pads.

I used this pattern from The Tudor Tailor by Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies, which I resized to fit my hip measurements. This was my first time resizing a pattern!

(Ignore the Magic: The Gathering playmat, my sewing table is also our card game table.)

Since this is essentially underwear, I decided to make it as cheaply as possible by using scrap fabric. The roll itself is made of leftover muslin from an embroidery project, the ties are made with fabric leftover from a quilt, and the roll is stuffed with scraps from various projects!

The next step of this project is to make a farthingale (similar to a hoop skirt), which will be worn on top of the roll to complete the silhouette.

[softquietsteadylove]

Gil surprised her with a matching look? She has a white nice dress and he shows up in a white suit? Would be a cool partner look =)

"Madame?"

Thena offered a tight smile as she picked up a glass of champagne off of a passing tray. "Merci."

She hadn't really wanted to come all the way here for this function, but it was insisted upon not only by her French diamond contact, but the entirety of his diamond house family. It was to seal their business, as well as act as a gesture of good will for future deals.

Karun told her she had to go, and Kingo doubled down, even telling her that she should 'lead him on a little more' for the sake of business. She attempted to ignore that.

She was an engaged woman.

She had told Gil she had to attend a meeting in France. But she knew that he was no fan of the monsieur with whom she had conducted business. In all fairness, she supposed she wouldn't be thrilled if he had to conduct business with the Little Heiress again. But she was here for tonight and then she could return home.

"Madame Glasse?"

She smiled as her business associate sat down adjacent to her. At least if she was seated or holding something, he didn't feel the need to kiss her hand. "It's a lovely soiree."

"You seem very," the gentleman looked around the sparkling ballroom, "isolated."

Thena inhaled, looking down at her don perignon. "Forgive me, monsieur, I have never been the life of the party."

"Ah," he offered a smile, adjusting the gold button of his beautiful blue suit. "You accepted my offer, but I think perhaps your heart is not here with us."

Her heart was in a penthouse apartment with a certain Tyrant King, who had probably fallen asleep on the couch in front of the Food Network. She should have just asked him to come with her, risk that he would start a fight be damned.

"Madame, would you grant me the privilege of speaking my mind with you?"

She gave him the faintest expression of surprise before nodding. Perhaps he wasn't as much of a dumb blonde - the irony of which did not escape her - as she had suspected.

"I admit I am quite taken with you," he expressed openly, leaning on the arm of his chair that was closer to her. He did have that sad, puppy-love expression on, too. "Positively enchante, truly."

Thena merely waited for him to go on.

"But as much as you did not tell me," his eyes drifted down, and to her hands, safely folded over her crossed legs. "You do not withhold your heart from me out of modesty, non?"

Thena adjusted her lace around her arms and in the crooks of her elbows. She didn't bother taking her ring off for the night. "Would that affect our business if I told you that you're right?"

He chuckled, although she could already see his disappointment. "But of course not. I am a gentleman, Madame Glasse, and I will honour our business just as you have. And I do have some brain under these looks."

Thena resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She knew it was in good humour, but few men were allowed to get away with cocky humour like that with her. One man in particular.

"I realise I am pursuing a woman who has already made her match," he sighed, leaning back again. His eyes flicked down, "it's a beautiful ring, cheri. They are small, but I can tell the quality of them is impeccable."

Thena smiled. The little diamonds in her ring, creating joints where the bands could meet in their weave, were indeed perfect in every way. "But of course; I am the diamond queen, after all."

"Indeed," her associate agreed, also plucking a glass of champagne for himself. He gave her a smile, "I am grateful that you came. But if you wish to leave, I will not hold it against you."

Oh, how she ached to be at home, in the arms of her Tyrant. But even with a private plane, the journey home was no quick hop across the pond.

"She should stay for a dance, at least."

"Gil!"

"Hey Princess," he greeted gently, despite her insistence that he not call her that in public. He bent over the arm of the chair, capturing her hand smoothly and pulling it up to his lips. "Miss me?"

He was like a knight in shining armour, and while she had never seen him in a white suit before, she didn't dislike it on him. She raised a brow, "new?"

"Like it?" he grinned as he pulled her to her feet, leading her closer to the dance floor. "I had my tailor whip it up just to surprise you."

Thena shook her head at him, her feet moving automatically as he led her until they could sway together, his hands holding hers and at her back. "When did you get here?"

"Not long ago, actually," he made a more sheepish face. "I got on a place a few hours after yours, after I picked up this number."

She smiled, running her hand over the lapel. "Did you want to match me so badly?"

"Well," he smiled as well, his eyes soft and reflecting the chandelier above them. "Can't let my wife show up to a fancy ball unaccompanied, can I?"

She refused to let him know how much she liked it when he called her his wife. "I did, though, didn't I?"

"Okay, so I was a little late," he huffed, rolling his eyes in good nature. He spun her around before pulling her closer, "I wasn't invited."

Thena stole a glance to the edge of the room, where her associate was excusing himself from the room entirely. "Last I checked, he was not in your good graces."

Gil shrugged, and her hand moved with the bounce of his massive shoulder as he did. "Just don't laugh at his jokes, Ice. Then we've got no problem."

She did not believe that. But perhaps she was too intoxicated by the warmth of him and the champagne she'd had. He pulled her nearly flush with him and she resisted the urge to lay her head on his chest.

"Sorry I'm late, baby," he whispered, sneaking a kiss to her temple while they were able to go unobserved. Or at least, unremarked upon, as far as this branch of society was concerned. They weren't exactly law abiding citizens, but this territory of Thena's was more about business than about brutality.

"You're forgiven," she sighed as she let him numb her overstimulated senses, "this time."

"This time?" he chuckled, and his chest bounced against hers from it.

"Just this time," she purred, running her hands over the front of his fine, white suit. "And this?"

Gil didn't even glance down as she tapped at the royal blue pocket square that screamed against the colour of the rest of his outfit. "Maybe a little bit of a challenge to French-y."

"So territorial," she murmured. She had to be careful not to sound like she enjoyed his territorial side; it would only encourage him.

Gilgamesh pulled her hand up his chest until he could kiss her fingertips, tapping against her ring as he did. "I think I have a right to be territorial about my own wife."

"We are not married."

"Yet," he nearly cut her off to insert. He smiled at her, still swaying them loosely to the beat of the band, "not yet. Anytime, any place, Ice."

"Hm," she sighed, the exhaustion of the business and the travel and the whole of the last few weeks weighing on her. She leaned against him heavier and he allowed it, holding her as much as she liked. "Not tonight."

"Fine," he chuckled, kissing her cheek this time. He stayed close, his nose dangerously near 'nuzzling' territory. "Wanna go home?"

"You just got here," she nearly groaned at the thought.

"Okay, so we get a room, spend a little time here before we go back?" he suggested. "We can take a long weekend in Paris, what do you think?"

She did not care what they did, so long as she didn't have to let go of him.

[shredsandpatches]

Really want to see the church scene in Gounod Faust staged with Marguerite and Mephistopheles on opposite sides of a confessional screen (I would not be surprised if this is common but I haven't seen that many productions). I think it'd really underscore the psychological/spiritual horror and violation going on in that scene.

[cerescereso]

[postcard-from-the-past]

"The gallant tailor"

French vintage postcard, staged and photographed by A. Bergeret

[vermillioncrown]

how do you think flying on a sword compairs to skateboarding/snowboarding? if an expert snowboarder ended up reincarnated do you think they could be a flying prodigy?

oh my god this ask has me doing the equivalent of that stick figure biting into a thing and tearing it apart (in a good way)

yes and no. i think they'd have a leg up and have a higher chance at being a flying prodigy if and only if qi powered flight has aerodynamics involved, and isn't just the equivalent of using your mind to hover through the air.

think of a paper airplane. you can 1) throw the plane and have it glide, or 2) personally hold the plane and move it through the air. both have the paper plane 'moved' but the forces and energy involved are very different.

(1 is more energy-efficient btw, and energy in the physics sense of work)

so let's say 1) is how sword flight works. okay, let's compare it to riding a skateboard or snowboard.

the key difference is that you don't have the ground. that sounds stupid but it matters.

=

before sword flight, let's think of an aircraft. and before motion, let's think of being still.

without doing work, you can stay in place with a skateboard. why? because you have the ground. the balance of forces is stable without motion. you weight a certain amount and press on the ground, and the ground can push back through the wheels. it's called normal force and we don't have time to go through intro to hs physics. it's why you don't fall through the ground.

snow is a bit different but it still works out. ground is dense enough that you don't compress it like snow, it's solid. snow isn't... purely solid--the individual snow flakes are solid crystalline structures, but it's a collection of these tiny little solids that can move if you press them together. we can call the collection of snow, not an individual snow unit, a fluid rather than a solid. fluids do not hold their shape if you use an outside force on them. from basic chem, we have gas, liquid, solid states, so fluids encompass gas and liquids (with so many caveats but again y'all aren't signing up for intro to viscous fluids)

but let's treat snow like a very dense fluid. the entire snowboard is distributed over the snow rather than the tiny wheels of a skateboard. you can already intuitively imagine that if you put a skateboard on snow, it'd sink until the flat part. the density of matter is what affects how it can 'push back' at things. ground is super dense compared to snow, so little wheels can stand on it vs snow needing a huge distribution to push back the same weight (snow shoes).

air is much less dense than snow. with a density of 1.225 kg/m^3, let's say you weigh 50 kg (~110 freedom units). using basic ass Pressure_liquid=density*acceleration_gravity*height and Pressure_you=mass*acceleration_gravity/Area -> we want P_liquid = P_you -> solve for Area... to stay still at a height of 10 meters, you'd need a 'board' of 4.082 m^2. or about 44 sq ft. but! that board will also have a weight, so you need something bigger, and bigger,

there's nothing out there that can support you, and be lightweight enough to not outpace the pressure that air can exert back to keep you in place. so how do you stay in the air?

two ways. either hover like a helicopter, continuously moving upwards to counteract gravity... or you continuously move forward like an airplane.

=

motion time! probably heard of lift force? what you're doing is, as you move through the air, you're displacing the air molecules. think of how it feels to wade through water. the faster you go, the more water pushes back.

now up the magnitude for air since it's less dense. you need to move very fast to displace enough air such that the amount of air pushing back can actually keep you up. but! you also need to deal with that resistance against your motion, too, aka drag.

but in this case, to even keep in constant motion or zero motion, work must be expended to push you up or keep you moving forward, or you eventually slow down and fall like a paper plane

skateboard relies on normal force and friction for its movement. i count staying still as movement, too; it's just movement = 0. you push on the ground with your feet, the ground resists your sideways push, and the wheels can turn, so you move forward.

snowboard relies on something like buoyancy and gravity for its movement. the pressure of the snowboard on an area of snow keeps you up, and you slide downwards because gravity pulls you. friction is still at play but not like skateboarding; the snow is 'slippery' compared to the ground, so you can glide forward

aircraft rely on external forces for any constant motion, even motion = 0. air isn't dense enough to support things in the same way as the ground or snow.

=

let's get to why it matters for sword flight.

for changing directions horizontally, all three would be similar. you lean (banking) towards the direction you want to turn, relying on the force keeping you level to push you towards the turn.

for climbing or rolling up, similar--you need to push the ground, expend effort to go up a hill on snow, or provide more thrust to exceed gravity's pull to climb in altitude.

diving, rolling downhill are similar. gravity does the work.

the mechanism for slowing down or staying still, however, very different. for sword flight, it's not that you can't; it's that you cannot rely on the same intuition as for terrestrial boarding. you probably need to consciously trade between the qi-pushing you forward to needing to push you upwards, and it's always a balance. you basically need to treat your qi like a reaction control system for spacecraft, which gets into optimal control theory and of course it's not that the human can't intuitively do it. but it is DIFFERENT than skateboarding or snowboarding. you're not moving your weight around to change motion; there's this nebulous qi thing that needs to be controlled alongside the positioning of your weight to do what you want it to do.

so i think the pro-skater (pro-boarder) will have an advantage, but it's not directly equivalent.

=

now, if qi-powered flight was the equivalent of holding a toy plane making airplane noises to move the thing through the air, moot point. entirely not the same thing at all, they don't have an advantage in qi control. but they do have the advantage of balancing on a thing in motion.

=

happy winter holidays, sorry not sorry to ambush y'all with physics

[1-sided-dice]

Reposting here some recent dress ideas I had:

Aziraphale borrowing dresses from Madame de Pompadour

And Crowley stealing dresses from Scarlett O'Hara

[coquelicoq]

oh no this reality dating show is really sweet actually. this was not supposed to happen. crap. crap. i didn't sign up for this!

[alltheseprettysongs]

all day every days😍

[harpygon]

The fight between writing in german bc the formal and informal you allow for more subtle power play in conversation and writing in english because it has more detailed words for the 18th century dress.

[thurstongrey]

[samwisethestitch]

Adjusting Period Costumes for Practical Wear

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I'm working on a Tudor-era French gown to wear to renaissance festivals. French gowns aren't a very practical garment, since they mostly existed to be big displays of wealth by using as much expensive fabric as possible. This is probably never going to be something I wear everyday. That said, I am making some adjustments so I'll be more comfortable in my costume.

Here's the thing: Tudor gowns were worn in England, a place that is famously cold and wet. And, as Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies point out in their book The Tudor Tailor, Tudor England was actually colder than modern England because of The Little Ice Age, a global cooling phenomenon that happened in the 14th through 19th centuries. (And that's not even getting into modern climate change.) Because it was generally cold, Tudor-era English folks wore a lot of layers and used a lot of heavy fabrics in their clothing.

I do not live in Tudor England during a global cooling event. In fact, I live in the Southeastern United States, where summer days routinely get up to 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Most renaissance festivals fall during the late spring, summer, or early fall, which means it is HOT. And although I love wool and velvet as much as the next guy, I'd rather not have a heat stroke while waiting in line for steak on a stake.

Obviously, some adjustment is needed to make this costume appropriate for the climate I'll be wearing it in.

I'm not super concerned with historical accuracy, but even if I was, Mikhaila and Malcolm-Davies say that Tudor women did change their wardrobes in different environments. Clothing would be made from material appropriate for both the temperature and the lifestyle of the wearer. Noblewomen specifically would add or remove layers depending on how hot or cold it was. This means adjusting my costume plans for Southern summers is more historically accurate than you might think.

With this in mind, I'm making a few adjustments from a typical reenactor's Tudor noblewoman costume:

I'm wearing fewer layers. The plan is to just wear a farthingale, kirtle, and gown, without bothering with a chemise, stockings, or a petticoat. Hardcore reenactors will be gasping in horror at me leaving out the chemise, but no one is going to see it and it doesn't provide any shaping, so it really is just an unnecessary layer. Same with stockings. Petticoats and kirtles were used interchangeably even in the Tudor era, so leaving out the petticoat is actually period accurate!

Whether/how often Tudor women wore stays is hotly debated. I am not wearing stays because they aren't strictly required for the silhouette I want. I may add some boning to the kirtle if I feel like I need it, but we'll see.

I'm choosing fabrics that are lightweight and breathable. I'm sticking to natural fibers as much as possible, and because I'm on a budget, that means this baby will probably be mostly cotton. Was cotton fiber widely available in 16th century England? Nope! But it's cheap and comfortable and that's what I need for this project.

Being picky about fabrics means I will be spending more on materials than if I was willing to, like, use thrifted polyester curtains, but I think it'll pay off. I'm hoping sticking to natural fibers will help keep sweat and BO to a minimum.

[louiseintrees]

POV: You’re an average French girl living in America

“Little white men from the United States scurry to me, like rats.”

- Sam’s Tailor

[thermesiini]

white french bisexual guy gosd i think i just thre w up in my mouth