This last weekend with my lovely wife, we taught a class at an SCA event that presented some details and inferences of the research I've been doing in regards to extant leather garments. I think the class went pretty well, and it was pretty well received. For those that couldn't make it, the link to the slides is: https://tinyurl.com/ybl8h49r and the spreadsheet that drives it is at https://tinyurl.com/y978b3gb. The one thing we didn't share with class was a link to my curated Pinterest board with the available museum pictures.
The short version is leather doublets & jerkins were more prevalent than what we generally see in the SCA. From what I've been able to discover, these type of garments made out of leather were treated just as if they were from any other cloth: could be decorated or not, assembled with regular sewing-type seams, etc.
To recap some of the class, I've found 81 extant doublets and jerkins between the periods of 1540-1650 so far. 43 of those are from the Mary Rose wreck which pretty much requires access to a copy of Before the Mast to get details, and can definitely skew any kind of analysis. The next single biggest cache comes from the Royal Museum of Sweden, which contains a total of 11 unassembled doublets, which are absolutely stunning.
There was no way I could go over the entirety of what I've found so far in a one hour class (or even on this blog). I encourage anyone interested to go through the main tab of the spreadsheet for the full list, as many of the items either can't be captured to Pinterest or have no available online pictures. If you know of one I haven't captured, please reach out as I'm always interested in finding more.
And again, make more leather jerkins.
No comments:
Post a Comment