SCA on the edge of the known world - or - How did I end up doing this?

I've always been super interested in history and playing pretend. When I was a child, I loved going to museums and reading books about "the olden days" almost as much as I liked dressing up as a warrior princess/sorceress and fight evil in the back yards of our street. As I became older, I became a voracious reader of all kinds of fantasy and fantasy-adjacent literature, as well as historical fiction set in the time that was the basis for the setting of my beloved fantasy books. In secondary school (13-16) I started being part of every class play possible, culminating in playing a third of the lead female part in my class's production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. (Yes, I went to a weird school, 15-year-olds do not normally play Brecht...)

This, fantasy and theater and a love for dressing up, led to LARP. I started LARPing at 17, in an "alternative medieval" setting. This meant that the technological level of the setting was roughly medieval and that the clothes were inspired by twelfth and thirteenth century fashions. That meant I had to learn how to sew. I already had the basics down, as I had loved the textile crafts-classes in school and done very well, but learning how to sew medieval-ish clothes, and finding materials that wouldn't leave me flat broke was something new. This lead to a LOT of linen, linen/cotton and wool/polyester dresses. They all looked ok (apart from my first two dresses, but we don't talk about those), but they were far from historically correct. I had gores in contrasting colours. I didn't cover my head. I had visibly machine-sewn hems. I wore a lot of fairly bright green (and blue, one of those first two dresses was a lovely dark cerulean), while playing a farmer's daughter. I only wore one layer. It was all a bit of a mess, but I had So Much Fun. I learned how to manipulate a basic four-pieces-and-gores-and-sleeves pattern into a lot of different shapes, managing to make elven court gowns and ranger tunics. I broke my mom's sewing machine, so for my eighteenth birthday my parents bought me a machine of my own. I still have it, it still sews 10 layers of linen if I use a thick needle and sew slowly and it is made of cast iron and awesomeness.

Aaanyway. LARPing where I'm from was, for practical reasons, as there's hardly any people here, a fairly small hobby. The most closely related hobby was the SCA. The local group (Shire of Frostheim) consisted of about 60% LARPers anyway, so it was an easy transfer, especially once Frostheim started running a demo-event in collaboration with some of the local LARP-clubs at an outdoor museum. For a few years, this was the only SCA event I'd go to, mostly because I was still young and poor and I live here (the blue line is roughly the Arctic Circle):

That arrow basically points to Really Fucking Far North. Most of the population of Sweden lives in the southern half of the country, so going to events other than the local ones was pretty expensive for a 18-20-year-old who either was still in school, worked part time or was at university. I had been involved in LARP/SCA for something like five years before I went to a Big Event (the Medieval Week in Visby, Gotland). Sadly, that is still the only southern event I've been to (I was at university for a really long time, summers were spent working), but our local little demo has grown to a fairly sizeable demo (1000 guests/day for four days, webpage is www.medeltidsdagar.se).

My closet has grown, and my skills as a costumer as well, especially since I started making early Italian Renaissance. I have a sewing room in our flat (thank heavens for cheap rents and a Husband Elect with good employment prospects), more fabric in my stash than what is reasonable, and with the explosion of the internet as a research-and-community-tool, SCA on the edge of the known world becomes more and more fun.

IRCC4 - Background

I've been a member of the SCA for twelve or so years now, and during the first ten years I never became interested in any particular time period. Partially this was because I first became interested in historical costuming and re-enactment via LARPing in the fairly serious "alternative medieval world" that was (and still is) the most common setting in Sweden, which was, while serious about things like materials and general shapes, not set in a specific time and place. But I've also always been interested in EVERYTHING and could never make my mind up about which time period I found the most interesting. This means I've made a LOT of four-main-pieces-plus-gores-and-sleeves dresses (at last count, including sewing for others and my first hideous experiments, I was at 26 of those dresses) in various materials and with various tweaks to change the pattern from 12th century to elven courtier to early 15th century to dwarven diplomat. This has at least made me reasonably well acquainted with the way fabric behaves and what my body looks like.

About five years ago I stumbled on this dress while traipsing around the internet for new costuming ideas. I fell instantly in love with the general look and shape and quickly made my mind up to try and recreate the dress. The result was my first Italian renaissance dress, mainly inspired by Florentine 1480s dresses. It looks kind of like this (ignore my extremely grumpy face and the so-and-so visibility of the dress)

The dress consists of a camicia made from cotton muslin (IKEA curtains, to be specific) a gamurra made from a green/bronze brocade of unidentified fiber composition, a giornea made from rayon velvet and poly-silk lining (which was HELL to work with), a beaded brown silk girdle, jewellery and a fabulous hat (which is actually a fifties hat found in a vintage store...) While making this dress I learned a few things:
1. Making very form fitting garments without darts is really hard when you've been blessed/cursed with boobs of epic proportions.
2. Poly-silk lining sucks.
3. I look really weird in a giornea.
4. In a dark feast-hall people WILL step on one's train, resulting in half-strangulation.
5. When wearing a hat, remember that you're about an inch taller, or you'll hit your head.
6. Try not to make dresses resting on the outer part of your shoulders. It's uncomfortable and it makes it hard to calculate the correct sleeve length.

After this dress, I've made a few 1510's dresses. What I've learned from them is mostly that while fully lined, cartridge pleated skirts look really cool, they weigh about a ton and that I can make the gowns without darts, but it takes at least an hour of fitting for every dress. Also, zibellinos freak people out and when I wear an enormous dark pink turban people think I have Voldemort on the back of my skull.

That being said, when I mustered up enough courage to sign up for the fourth Italian Renaissance Costuming Challenge it was that first 1480-1500 style I decided to revisit, with better materials and more knowledge and skills. My inspiration is collected here (as you can see, there's quite a few former entrants to past years IRCCs), but my primary inspiration is the frescoes in the Tornabouni chapel. After some deliberation and going through my stash, I've decided on an outfit based on Ludovica Tornabuoni's clothing in The Birth of The Virgin, with some tweaks and extras inspired by other contemporary sources.

The plan is to make a green silk gamurra and a yellow brocade overdress, open in the front, a linen camicia and however many accessories I can find time for. I plan to machine-sew all the internal seams, as I lack both the skill and patience required to hand sew entire garments. All visible stitching will be made by hand though. But first of all, I need to muster enough courage to cut into my green silk...