It all started when I was invited to join the whorehouse. No, really! I am a member of the Guild of St. Ives, a not for profit re-enactment group in Southern California. One of our venues is the SoCal Renaissance Pleasure Faire at which we have several functional buildings, almost one per household. We have weavers, cooks, musicians, dancers, painters, potters, a tavern, a working forge, and a whorehouse (working, too?). I reside in the musician’s household of Noteworthy, but our loveable whores invited me to romp for a day. I liked the idea of making a new dress for an upper crust courtesan, and since I had already broken my taboo of making a dress for wearing only one day last year for my Germans, I thought this would be great. Planning the dress: the evolution of ideas Unfortunately, our whores have very specific guidelines from the faire as to what they can wear and how, and what I wanted to make wasn’t going to fit into their theatrical needs - too fancy for a whorehouse. Well, the Madame suggesting I could be a visiting courtesan from Italy. Then I could make a fancy dress and delve into the culture, poetry, song and life of the Italian courtesan; a much less restrictive life than the respectable Italian lady lived. Ok, then, I was off and running… but to where? Italian dress was wildly different from region to region and from decade to decade. Which should I pick? The Portraits: Titian is a God! I’ve scoured various art databases for artists that were painting in Italy in the mid to late 1500’s. I also took inspiration, suggestion and research from Bella’s site and Oonagh’s site for specifically Venetian info, and scoured many of my favorite costumers’ sites for general inspiration, tips, tricks, research, etc. Some details I notice that distinguish the Venetian dresses I like from other regions… Skirt with pointed “V” at waist in back and pleated all around – no flat area in front and no split skirts. Shoulder straps are set very wide and tend to fall off shoulders. Neckline tends to be lower than English styles, sometimes even running below the nipples in later decades. Sleeves tend to be bulky or looser, not tight to the arm. NO HAT! Lots of braids (even though I have short hair – yikes!) Dresses tend to be simple in design; not a lot of extra trim or embellishment. The fancier patterned fabrics made the statement instead of lots of beading or braided trims. Accessories: flag fans and simple pearl jewelry, perhaps with a large pendant. Also, the beaded girdle – love beaded tassels. I must have one! The camica has a square neckline that sets right against the dress neckline. Décolleté can be completely bare or covered with a very fancy, bejeweled partlet. I haven’t decided if I’ll make the partlet. I think that will depend on time and money.
Click here for a gallery of paintings I'm taking inspiration from. 1/12/04: I’ve already spent too much money! I’d spent the better part of 2 weeks driving to every fabric store I could reach on a lunch hour and gathered swatches; not to mention lots of time on eBay looking for good quality silks at a reasonable price. I am determined to use silks for the dress and linens for the under things. I don’t enjoy hand sewing so I can’t say I’m going to get this as period as possible, but I do want it to be as accurate as I can personally muster in a reasonable amount of time. I liked the idea of a white dress, and I actually found some amazing silk damask in crème and taupe for $28/yd, but the more I looked at it the more I thought it would look too much like a wedding dress. So I went with RED. Venetians loved red and so do I. It occurs in more portraits than any other color, and I kept returning to one swatch. Is the red too bright? I looked at it in every available light… I think I can pull it off. It’s a brocade of 27% silk, 73% linen with a nice weight and drape to it. Not thin at all; crisp like regular silk damasks, but with a good weight to it like a cotton damask. It’s a yummy 55” wide and the pattern is railroaded. $75/yd but I have to have it. I bought 5 yards which should give me 165” around my hem and 1½ yards left for the bodice and sleeves. 1/16/04: More fabric  This week I have picked up 2 yards of 60” linen with a nice woven pattern in it for my camica. I’ve also ordered and received 5 yards of a lovely color of dupioni silk called sparkling sand to go with the accent fabric, which is a shot taffeta in red/apple green that look like orange together. It also has a taupe satin stripe woven in, along with vine embroidery in taupe, olive and gray silk leaves with red wine velvet flowers. Drool. I should have enough to make a nice, full, roll pleated underskirt, trimmed with the strips of embroidery from the taffeta, and have enough left to cover for the corset to match – perhaps even with some embroidery on it, too. The colors are very hard to photograph... take a look at the pictures under the 3/3/04 entry to see truer color.
Side note: I highly recommend, to anyone turning up your nose at using dupioni, that you read either Luca Mola's “The Silk Industry in Renaissance Venice” or Jennifer Thompson’s excellent summation article. I’ve never found anything I like as much as cotton duck to make corsets with so I picked that up, too. It’s less bulky than canvas and doesn’t have any of this bias stretch that washed canvas has. I’ll cover it with the sand silk and bias bind it with either the orange from the taffeta or some wine bias tape. I’ve read several times now about using cable ties for corset boning so I’m going to give that a try. I picked up 2 packs of 48” ties at Home Depot. It looks promising. My last fabric purchase, I hope, was a yard of scrummy 100% linen velvet. I liked the mohair but they didn’t have the right color. I found and LOVED the 100% silk velvet, but it looks and feels almost exactly like cotton velveteen and I can’t see spending $120/yd to look like $10/yd cotton velveteen. Maybe on pillows for my living room but not to drag in the dirt… Oh yeah, I also got some trim. I haven’t decided to use it yet or not but I got it just the same. It is impossible to find trim with this cranberry red in it. Everything I find is either burgundy or Chinese red, so I grabbed it while I could. It’s metallic gold and looks a little manufactured for my taste. Maybe I’ll bead it or something. Starting out Well, my hubby has become quite adept at helping me tape myself up. We taped and drew and cut and I now have a pattern. Last night I turned it into a toile so I could fit it further. The cutting has begun! The corset is cut in the duck and dupioni. Tonight we start the boning channels. 1/19/04 Well, I got the corset together with a few snags. So far I have satisfied two of my four rules for this being a “real” costume: 1) I have bled on it, and 2) I have ripped out a mistake. The corset has 2 layers of cotton duck and a layer of silk. I hate having to try and navigate boning into channels that have a seam across them so I decided to have the seams toward the outside of the garment. The layer behind the silk won’t show so that seam allowance is just pressed to one side and stitched down for strength. The inside layer I used a lapped seam on so it’s strong and won’t have a raw edge next to my skin. I decided to use the orange shot taffeta for the bias binding on the edges (that’s the silk stripes between the embroidered stripes used to trim the underskirt). But the stripes are only about 3 inches wide so that’s a lot of bias sewing to get a long enough strip to bind the corset edge. Once that was done I didn’t think the binding strip would be strong enough to hold the boning in, so I ran a line of thick button thread around the edge before sewing the bias binding over it. That should hold it! My bias edge is sewn on the outside lower edge, around all the tabs, etc. What a pain. I turned it and pinned it before going to bed. Oh yeah, I also cut the panels for the underskirt and pieced together the trim. I can’t tell you how much I loathe hand sewing, and yet I’m contemplating smocking my camica. Hmmmmmmmm, perhaps I need to up my medication… Continued on Pg. 2 | 
