Summer of 2003

After wearing the Enn's dress to two events where the temperature was around 100 degrees, I decided that I really needed something cooler if I was going to go to anything during the summer time. This turned out to be a wise decision as we had one of the warmest summers on record for Seattle in 2003 and I had lots of chances to wear this new very cool linen dress.

Made for Kingdom of the West, A&S Competition 2005

Introduction

In June of 2005 my local SCA group was challenged by another local group to compete in the 8 category team competition in the annual arts and sciences event. One of the competitions was for horse barding. That's all the direction we had to go on.

I decided to stick with what I know, 16th century German. Before I chose a design to recreate, I first conducted an art survey of all four volumes of The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500-1550 as well as several other art books in my possession, resulting in 100+ separate instances of horse barding.

March 2003

After looking at lots of images from the range of 1560-1590, one of the biggest things that struck me in looking through a lot of images is how smoothly and well fit all the bodices were in front and back, and how flat yet uplifted their bust lines were. But while the bust lines were flat, there was not an excess amount of cleavage over flowing the tops of the dresses, in fact, very little cleavage shows because a woman in the German lands during this period is usually covered up to her lower jaw. There are of course exceptions to this smooth fit and maximum coverage, but that’s not the look I am going for, I am a respectable merchants wife.