Amsterdam Vacation - History pieces

I had the pleasure of taking a vacation with my lovely wife and family this summer that included Amsterdam and Norway.  While our selections in Norway were limited by the ports of call of our cruise, we had free rein in Amsterdam to do as we choose.  Being who we are, our choices of stops were fairly historical in focus (duh!).

In Amsterdam in no particular order, we were able to visit:

Rijksmuseum

Probably the best known museum in Amsterdam, and one of our highest priorities to visit, we probably could have spent a week here and not seen everything we wanted to.  Museums with children are always challenging, luckily big kid is getting old enough to entertain little kid while mom & dad do their thing.  The biggest draw, of course, are the Night Watch and other Rembrandt paintings.  The Rijksmuseum is fairly good about having their collection available digitally, but the things you just don't get from the online presence is the sheer scale and vibrancy of these works of art.  They are massive, and so, so beautiful in person.

Hermitage Amsterdam

This museum is a branch of the famous Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.  I honestly didn't even know it existed until we were already planning to go here and were looking for things to do.  Then we found out they had a Dutch Golden Age exhibit running in coordination with the Rijksmusem and the Amsterdam Museum, and it quickly came to the top of the list.  They had a huge collection of civic guard portraits in this exhibit, and the presentation was awe inspiring (I'm pretty sure my jaw hit the floor when I walked into the big room).

Museum of Bags & Purses

A personal interest for both me and my wife, this was pretty high on our list and we didn't figure it would take too long.  It's not a huge museum, and all of the pre-1700 items were on a single floor, but they do have a nice little collection with several sweet purses, a bead purse, and a lovely leather purse that I've seen before (it's WAY bigger than it looks):

Museum Van Loon

This is the house of one of the founders of the Dutch East-India Company.  Again, a small museum, but unique in that it consists of the house, the garden, and a coach house still together.  While the house itself is later than our period of interest, the Van Loon family is not.  There are several portraits and a few artifacts for anyone researching the later 16th/early 17th century times.

Rembrandt House Museum

This was one from the wife's list of priorities, and I'll admit I wasn't that interested until I got there.  With it being the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's passing, this museum like others in the city were well stocked.  This was probably the busiest museum we went to as we managed to hit it right as a school group was leaving, we think.  There is evidence that some of the furnishings in the historical portion of the house are actually from other museums in the city, like the Rijksmuseum; it's nice to see that partnership and sharing among the local museums again.

Oude Kerk

It's hard not to end up in at least one historical church while in Amsterdam, and this was our choice while we were there.  Translating to Old Church, it truly is, originally built in the 12th century, there are various additions throughout the centuries.  The entire floor of the church, practically, is full of graves with some very interesting grave stones if you're into that kind of thing, but the painted ceilings were especially nice to see.  They also have a few artifacts on display from varying time periods.


We also managed to visit a couple extra gift stores: those in the National Maritime Museum and the Niewe Kerk (New Church - new is relative, being consecrated in the 15th century).  If I had to do it over again, I would have liked to find time to do a full visit to the Maritime Museum, as they apparently have a very nice collection of historical maps.

All in all, a wonderful vacation filled with a ton of history.  Pictures are spread across at least 3 devices (2 phones and a digital camera) so haven't fully been gone through yet, but I'm hoping for some gems in there.

Class on Leather Doublets & Jerkins

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.

Making of a Leather Jerkin - Part 3

In The Modern Maker book, Gnagy describes only a single type of skirting: a one or two piece skirt for the whole circumference of the waist.  I'm not a huge fan of this and wanted a more traditional tab for the leather jerkin.  We went to another great newish resource, 17th-Century Men's Dress Patterns, to help us get the proportions right.  We drew up a new tab pattern and an separate pattern for the two front tabs (actually we drew up two different ones for the front and decided which one we liked better).  I also wanted a paper pattern for the short sleeve, which was a simple trace of the existing sleeve, just cut off at about 9".

Figure 1 - Tabs and short sleeves

With new patterns in hand, 2 short sleeves, 6 tabs, and 2 front tabs were cut out of the good leather.  In addition, I cut out body, back, sleeve, and collar linings of a white linen; this stuff multiplies in our house, so I honestly have no idea what weight it is or where it came from, but it's not as fine as what we used on the blue cloth doublet.  Lastly, I cut out lining for the tabs from a cinnamon colored leather that had leftover from my previous leather fencing jerkin.  Look for something interesting coming with the tabs.  We'll see if I want to add the linen lining to the tabs later or not.

Figure 2 - Tab interlining layout

Figure 3 - Tab interlinings cut out

Note that I've chosen not to do any interlining or shaping layers on this jerkin.  That is a conscious choice for a couple of reasons.  First, even on the cloth doublet it's hot.  I live in NC and regularly fence in 90+ degree weather, and I just don't need to add heat stroke to my list of chronic injuries.  Second, I think the leather itself will hold the shape well enough, but only time will tell.

This marks the completion of all of the primary cutting.  There may be some minor additions, like a waist lacing strip, extra collar stiffening, etc., but nothing major.  Now on to sewing.

Time: 5 hours 47 minutes (across several days)

Total time: 11 hours 22 minutes

Making of a Leather Jerkin - Part 2

Figure 1 - Fronts, backs, necks, & epilets

Well, real life got in the way, but I'm back to making a jerkin. If you'll remember from Part 1, we had an initial layout of parts.  Unfortunately, even with the picture it had been long enough that layout had to be redone, plus I suspect we had forgotten we wanted lengthen the back pieces by an inch from the original pattern to provide slightly better protection for fencing.  Once the layout was done, I traced and cut out the jerkin fronts, backs, collars, and epilets.  It was a gruelling 3+ hours of crawling around the floor (no permanent work area in our house) with plenty of back and knee aches slowing things down.

Figure 2 - Traced layout

Side note: Tracing on leather provided an interesting new challenge.  Typical fabric marking items (chalk/chalk pencils) don't work very well on leather without a whole lot of work and a high potential of causing the "fabric" to move on you.  When I've traced on leather in the past, I've just used a sharpie (permanent marker) but I've also been tracing on the bad side of the leather.  Also remember that I'm using the flesh side of the leather as my good side; this is normally where modern tanneries put markings, as they assume it's going to be on the back of whatever is made.  Because of using the flesh side as good and having to avoid the markings, I would be tracing on the good side, and I didn't really want to use a permanent marker in case I slipped.  Child's washable markers to the rescue - see having kids does have its advantages ;).

Going back and reading my previous post, I realize that I haven't listed the materials I'm using.  The good "fabric" in this case is a Nappone Bone colored deer skin purchased from Zack White Leather; they're relatively local (less than an hour away), and I can walk in and choose my leather, which I really enjoy doing.  For cutting, I use a pretty boring pair of leather sheers that I've had forever.  I don't have the surface, skill, or time to use a traditional moon knife or other period equivalent (although I do own one).  And of course, an orange Crayola washable marker for tracing patterns :).  More on the materials as they come up.

Time tonight: 3 hours 5 minutes
Total time: 5 hours 35 minutes

Making of a Leather Jerkin - Part 1

For those that don't know me, when I participate in fencing at SCA events, I typically wear a leather jerkin.  Over time, they get a bit gross, brittle, etc. and need to be replaced.  It's well past time for my current one to go, so I started down the path to a new leather jerkin a while ago.  It's been a long, winding process, though, which I'll actually go into here.

First things first, I wanted to be a bit more historically accurate this time around, so I started some research back in Nov. 2016 looking at extant leather garments (after already purchasing the base leather, of course - a white doeskin).  I originally started looking for how they were decorated, but that bloomed into so much more.  Look for a separate blog post on the research itself.  Suffice it to say that for the most part, leather garments when not for military use were treated exactly like any other fabric with regards to decorations.


Then, we needed to make sure we had a current pattern.  We go through sewing phases in our house, which means my most recent pattern was from 2012 and let's just say I've become more prosperous since then.  My wife has typically been the tailor/seamstress in the house, and she'd been interested in the Modern Maker method that had become all the rage, but I said I wanted to be involved, which is a rarity when it comes to sewing.  You can read more about that here, but the short form is that the prototype out of cloth is mostly finished, which means I can move into production of a new jerkin, finally.

Figure 1 - decoration ideas

Last night, we took the first steps on this new journey.  The nice thing is because we've already done a cloth one, the patterning phase is done.  I had decided even prior to the cloth production to use a trim design based off of one from Mistress Isobel (second one down), and drew it out with a little color (Figure 1).  Yes, I have orange trim 😁.  Because this is a fencing jerkin and has to meet SCA protective requirements, I can't slash down the belly like it probably should have.  After doing the cloth doublet with the same trim pattern, there's a consensus between Kate & I that the belly area needs some extra fill, so I need to figure that out.

Figure 2 - Proposed layout on the leather

And now the layout and some decisions.  I've chosen to use the flesh side of the leather as the good side based on the extant garment research, which made layout more challenging (Figure 2) because I had to deal with nap directions.  Normally on leather I would have put things that require extra flexibility near the belly of the skin as there's more stretch there, but with the nap there wasn't a lot of options.

Another decision was around the fact that I am looking at slashing the skirting.  Often on the leather garments the skirting is self lined, so I went looking for a different color leather to back the white.  I settled on the cinnamon colored leather, which are the remnants from the existing jerkin; it's light enough in color to present through the white, and I think it will go ok with the trim.  There were better color options to go with the trim (bright blue - not exactly a historically accurate color), but both other options just were too dark when put behind a small hole in the white.

All told, I think I'm ready to draw and cut out in the next few days, so stay tuned for progress.  I'm also looking to track how long this actually takes, just for my own education.  Oh, and Kate's only allowed to consult - no work from her on this one, so that should be interesting.

Time tonight: 2.5 hours
Total time: 2.5 hours