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The Inspiration
 This is the image that started it all. It's Netscher's Lacemaker, and dates from the mid-seventeenth century. That makes it significantly too late for Kentwell, but I liked the jacket so much that I didn't really care. It just struck me as such a practical garment - warm, comfortable, easy to work in. Plus I haven't seen anyone else make or wear one, which is a bonus. A trip to London to see the original followed but, unfortunately, it's quite a small painting, and I couldn't really see much more detail of the construction.
So I hit the internet, looking for other images of working women wearing this sort of jacket. And I struck gold. "The Salacious Historian" is a wonderful site, which has large numbers of clear picures of working women. Unfortunately, it's also an intensely frustrating site, as it doesn't always identify it's sources. Yep, the historian in me is twitching. I've done my best to identify the images I've used from the file names, and have linked to the complete pictures, but I haven't tracked them all down. If you can identify any of the others, then please do let me know.
Primary Sources
Analysing the images
All these images are from mid-seventeenth century sources. All show working women. All show a similar style of jacket, all being used during day to day work. Together, they give enough information to very precisely guide me in how to construct one of these jackets.
Looking at the images tells me this about the construction of these jackets:
Jackets like this can match the skirt of the garment underneath, but they don't have to.
They are reasonably snugly fitted over a supportive underlayer.
The sleeves are full, and are tightly pleated at shoulder and wrist. They vary significantly in width from picture to picture. When wide, they're pleated with cartridge pleats, which - at the shoulder - are concentrated on the back of the arm. The pleats appear to be evenly spaced at the wrist-end. The sleeves finish in a cuff, which may be folded back to reveal a contrasting lining. They are three-quarter length, ending shortly below the elbow.
The neckline is roughly circular, scooping deeper at front than at back. It's filled with the smock or a scarf.
The seams run from the back of the armhole diagonally downwards towards the centre back. In addition, the image on lower left appears to have a centre back seam.
There don't appear to be any seams on the front of the garment, so any shaping at the front must be done at the opening.
The opening - where visible - is always centre front. No fastenings are shown, so this thing doesn't close with buttons. Possible methods of fastening include pins or a hidden lacing strip, but hooks and eyes - which we know were used in the sixteenth century - seem the most practical for a garment I want to be able to take on and off.
In this very limited sample, grey and red are both common colours. That makes sense: grey is the colour of sheep, so is really cheap, and that sort of brick red can be achieved with madder, a common and inexpensive dye in the period. I plan a grey jacket, because I want to wear it with my yellow kirtle, and yellow and red are a bit much together. Plus, I have just enough russet - which was a low-status wool cloth - to make this jacket.
They flare out at the waist to fit neatly over the bulk of the skirt. That can happen in one of two ways - either by a seperate skirt-like piece sewn to the bottom of the jacket, or by (as in the image on the lower left) inserted triangular-shaped pieces.
Materials
The jacket is made up of the following materials:
The outer fabric is russet. This is a wool cloth, woven to period specifications from the fleece of what are now rare breed sheep, which were the breeds of the period. Based on documentary evidence and surviving fragments of cloth, this is as close to the real thing as you can get, and is available here.
The jacket is lined with linen, in a dirty grey-green colour that only differs very slightly from unbleached linen. It's reasonably heavy weight, sturdy stuff. There's no interlining, as I wanted to keep it relatively light-weight, and no stiffening of any sort.
The jacket closes with hand-made, brass hooks. These are from Annie the Pedlar. Rather than use matching brass eyes, which would be visible when the jacket is open, I've sewn bars of linen thread for the hooks to slip over, which blend almost invisibly into the cloth of the jacket.
Construction information
The jacket is sewn with linen thread, waxed with bees-wax.
It is sewn entirely by hand. The wool and linen are treated as one layer, in the technique known as flat-lining. The seams are back-stitched, then the excess seam allowance is trimmed and whip-stitched down to the lining. The edges are finished simply by folding the wool over the lining and whip-stitching down the raw edges. This creates a strong garment which is very obviously hand-sewn - always nice, if visitors are likely to pick it up and examine it - and is quicker and easier than putting in a seperate lining.
The pattern was draped directly on me, over a kirtle, by Bess of My Lady's Wardrobe.
There are seams at centre back, side back, and sides. That was in part to allow the gores at the waist to be inserted easily, but also because I was making this out of left-over fabric, so was having to work with small pieces.
The sleeves were the only tricky bit. Each is in essence a very wide tube (they took up a remarkable amount of fabric) with shaping at the armscye. They're assembled as seperate pieces, lined and pleated, and then the pleats are butted up to the finished edge of the arm-hole and the sleeves are whip-stitched into place. Getting the pleats to look right was an interesting experience, and I ended up having to redo them two or three times, which was a bit fraught, as I was up against a dead line in finishing the jacket. In order to hold those pleats neatly, each sleeve has four or five rows of gathering threads which are spaced about a thumb's width apart.
The sleeves finish with a cuff, which can be folded back to show the lining, as in some of the primary sources above.
The flare over the fullness of the skirt is achieved with triangular gores. They were also quite tricky, but not as bad as the sleeves. There are five of these in total - one at the centre back, two at the side back and two at the sides. All of them are set into seams. I was anticipating having to place two at the side-fronts, but it turned out they weren't needed. In order to size them, I simply left those seams open from the waist down, put the jacket on my dummy over a kirtle and pinned in triangles of fabric until they looked right. I was surprised how small they ended up: each insert is barely more than an inch or so wide at the widest part. Any wider, and the skirt stuck out and looked silly.
The jacket took about a week to make. Most of that was the sleeves. And, yes, I was still sewing it the night before the event opened.
Construction Photographs
These photos are all taken inside out, which nicely shows the seam position and some of the construction details.
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Back view, showing seams and gores. The contrast-colour seams are an inevitable consequence of flat-lining. I quite like them. |
Side view, showing the seam at the side and running down the back of the sleeve. All those seam allowances have been trimmed, and then tacked down to the lining to keep them flat.
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The sleeve has been assembled as a seperate piece and then whip-stitched into the arm-hole. At the shoulder, only the back section is pleated...... |
...and at the wrist the pleats run all the way round. Note I didn't need any gores or seams to shape the front of the jacket.
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Back to the pictures of the finished waistcoat.
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