Grim Of The South @grimofthesouth - Tumblr Blog

Leshy is a forest spirit/demon from Slavic mythology and easily one of my favourite myths. I had so much fun drawing this giant bear-elk and his forest. I could just draw forest spirits all day long.

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Tutorial: Sew a Linen Bocksten Tunic with French Seams

The linen “Bocksten-style” tunic is immensely popular in LARP, SCA, and Dagorhir. It’s as comfy as pajamas, but it has perfect range of motion. It looks good on everyone, but it’s easy to fit. It’s simple to cut, but it uses fabric efficiently. It’s the ideal garment, and everyone should have one.

But a tunic is only as good as its seam finish. Weak seams mean your tunic won’t withstand running through the woods or fighting in a shield press, and raw edges mean your tunic might fall apart in the wash.

My garb shop, Tailored Tunics, specializes in making incredibly sturdy versions of this tunic in linen. Over five years (and hundreds of tunics), I’ve perfected my methods for making the perfect French seamed linen tunic, and now I want to pass my methods on to you!

This tutorial is kind of endless, so a lot of things have been split off into separate tutorials. Before you start, please look at:

Linen FAQ: A Primer on Where to Buy it and What to Do With It. This will tell you how to get the best deal on linen fabric, and how to pre-wash it so it won’t shrink.

Alric’s Bocksten tunic tutorial, which will acquaint you with the general idea of the Bocksten tunic’s pattern,

My Measure and draft a better Bocksten tunic for my improvements on Alric’s pattern,

How (and why) to sew a French seam for garb so you’ll understand how to sew the basic seam, and

The Sew a Keyhole Neckline with a Facing tutorial. Facings are far stronger and neater than hems for tunic necklines, so I highly suggest you learn to use them. They’re really quite easy!

Sew the tunic: first steps

1. Prepare your pieces

Your tunic is made up of one torso panel, two sleeves, two underarm gussets, a neckline facing, two side gores, and two center gores. You’ll need about 2.5 yards of 60″ wide fabric for all this, depending on your size.

Your torso panel is a long rectangle. It is twice as long as you want your tunic to be, because it’s both the tunic’s front and the back. There is no shoulder seam, so instead you’ll want to mark the shoulder point. The shoulder point is exactly halfway down the panel, so fold the panel in half and mark that point.

ie, if you have a 22” x 82” rectangle, fold until you have a 22” x 41” rectangle, and hit the 22" long fold with your iron to crease. This is the torso shoulder point.

Cut two slits for the inset gores. These slits should be 1/2″ shorter than your gores, so if you have gores that are 23.5″ tall, cut your slits 23″ up from the hems.

Mark the midway point at the top of your sleeve. ie, if your sleeve is 18” wide at the top, mark it at 9”. This is the sleeve shoulder point.

Trim your gores. You’ll notice that the gores are cut as triangles. This means that they’re longer on the hypoteneuse than they are tall. Since we want our gores to hang evenly, trim the excess fabric at the bottom of the gores away so the edges are the same length as the gore’s height.

The next two steps won’t be French seamed yet, because they’re the neckline and the inset center front and back gores.

2. Sew the neckline with a facing

Before sewing the inset gores, I sew the neckline onto the body panel using this method. Since we’re using linen, the raw edge of the facing ought to be finished, or it will fray in the wash. The easiest way to do this is to serge or zigzag the raw, outside edge of the facing.

I recommend sewing the neck facing as the very first step. It’s one of the most difficult part of sewing a tunic, so if you’re going to botch it, best botch it before you’ve sunk more labor into your project. Again, use this tutorial to learn how to sew a neckline facing.

3. Sew the inset gores.

Use “whole” gores for the inset gores, not ones that are pieced together along one side. Now, French seams only let you insert a piece into a seam, not a slit that’s closed on one end. On the Bocksten tunic, this means the inset gores cannot be French seamed into the slit.

Instead, you’ll finish (via a serger/overlocker or a tight zig-zag stitch) the long sides of the inset gores, then do the same to the slits that the gores will go into. This binds the raw edges of both pieces, preventing fraying. If you’re serging, you won’t be able to get to the very top of the slit without mishap, so switch to zigzagging on your sewing machine for the top 2”.

Pay close attention to the very tops of the gore and the slit, which are the most fray-prone. Remember, gore and slit should be finished separately, then sewn together. This ensures that the raw edges on both sides are properly bound and won’t fray.

The edges of your inset gores might be slightly warped after you serge or zigzag them, because this is a really stretchy edge. A light touch with an iron will coax the edges flat again.

La Cotte Simple has a good tutorial explaining how to sew inset gores. The trick is to remember that at the very top, the gore will have the same seam allowance, but the slit’s seam allowance will shrink to almost nothing. If you need another example, check out By My Measure’s longer tutorial for sewing an inset gore by machine.

Once the gores are inset, press the seams. I like to have the seam allowances pointing towards the side seams. This will make the seams look tidier from the outside. Always try to iron linen only from the wrong side of your fabric. There’s a tiny chance that your linen might get shiny when pressed on the right side, so it’s safest to not risk it.

Sew the tunic: sub-assembly with French seams

4. Sew the sleeve to the gusset

Alric’s tutorial tells you to sew the sleeve to the torso panel, then to sew the gusset into the corner between the sleeve and torso panel, but it is vastly easier and faster to sew the sleeve to the gusset before you sew anything to the torso panel.

The gusset is stitched to the side of the sleeve at the sleeve’s top, along the straight 6″ edge.

5. Assemble the side gores

These ‘pieced’ side gores are assembled from two right triangles, which French seamed together along the straight of the grain (not the bias-cut hypotenuse!).

If you have enough fabric to you cut out your gores like this, you only have to piece one side gore– all the rest will be whole triangles!

I like things to match, though, so I fold the other side gore in half and run a false seam down it. Now they match!

Why use these seamed gores for the sides instead of for the center front and back gores? It’s hard to line up the seam on the pieced gores with the exact middle of the slit, so I save them for the sides.

Sew the tunic: attach the sleeve-and-gusset and side gores to the torso panel

Remember to note which side of your torso panel is the “right” side before you start sewing sleeves and gores to the torso panel. This is another reason why it’s best to sew the inset gores and neckline facing on early: they’ll help you distinguish the ‘right’ side from the ‘wrong.’

6. Attach sleeve-and-gusset to torso panel

Match the sleeve shoulder point to the torso shoulder point, pin. Sew the sleeve-and-gusset construction to the torso panel using a French seam. Remember to not sew (or, god forbid, SERGE) over your pin!

Again, it’s helpful to remember that the shoulder point on the sleeve bisects the sleeve, not entire the sleeve-and-gusset combo. If your sleeve’s top is 18” wide, the shoulder point is 9” (ie, half the sleeve) down.

7. Attach the side gores to the torso panel

The side gore must be placed below the side of the sleeve that has the gusset. If you sew it to the side of the sleeve without the gusset, you’ll place the side gore way too high, and it won’t be long enough to reach the bottom of the tunic.

Measure down 4” from the bottom of the gusset to figure out where to start the side gore. If you know you’re going to wear your tunic pouched up with a belt, you could place the gore further down, but I think 4″ looks best. Leaving a gap between the bottom of the gusset and the top of the gore gives your tunic a visual 'waist.’

French seam the gore to the torso panel.

Advanced Technique: If you’re an impatient jerk like me, you can attach the sleeve-and-gusset piece and the side gores to the torso panel all in one seam, like so. I find this to be trickier to pin and measure but much faster to sew.

If you adopt this technique, treat the whole side like it is one long seam, instead of sewing and turning the sleeve piece and gores separately. That’s the beauty of French seams: long straight lines, not individual seams, are what’s important.

Sewing the tunic: sew the sleeves and side seams closed

8. Fold gusset edge up to meet sleeve edge.

Pin your sleeve closed along the orange line.

You’ll be sewing your sleeve closed in one long seam from wrist to gusset. Work from wrist to gusset, not gusset to wrist. As you sew, you’ll very slightly stretch the side of the sleeve that has the gusset on it. You want this to be just slightly longer than the other side, so you’ll have a bit of fabric to work with once you’re sewing the other side of the gusset to the tunic’s side.

French seam your sleeve.

9. Hem your sleeves.

Make sure to fold your hem up twice to enclose all raw edges.

10. Bring your only unsewn gusset edge to the side of the torso panel. Sew side seams closed.

This is the most difficult part of French seaming a Bocksten tunic, both to sew and to describe.

The first problem lies right where the top gusset corner meets the torso panel– in that 90 degree corner under the sleeve. If you didn’t slightly stretch the sleeve in step #8, you may have very little seam allowance to work with at this corner while sewing wrong sides together. This happens, but it’s not a huge problem: just start sewing with an almost nonexistent seam allowance and go very slowly, gradually expanding your seam allowance to the normal ¼" seam allowance.

If you did stretch this, you’ll have seam allowance on the gusset side and very little on the body panel side. When you sew this, make sure you catch both layers.

The second problem (which isn’t a very difficult one, but can be hard to understand) is sewing the bottom gusset corner to the torso panel. It is very easy to catch the bottom corner of the gusset wrong, producing a nasty lump, or miss it entirely, leaving a gap.

The solution is to not think of this as a bottom corner. Your gusset, though it looks like a right triangle right now, is still a square pattern piece.

Pivot it out, pulling it from behind the tunic, until it again looks like a square.

Tada! You’re no longer sewing to a point– you’re just continuing one of those long straight seams that French seams love.

Continue your seam down the side, sewing the free edge of the gore to the torso panel. The top of the gore can be bulky, so go slow and take your time. Trim the entire seam and flip the tunic to the inside to prepare for the second pass.

The top gusset corner is tricky when doing the second pass of the French seam: if you aren’t careful, you’ll either get a pucker here or let the raw edge fray through. The trick is to start sewing this higher up than you need to, on the original sleeve-to-body-panel seam that you sewed back in step #6.

Sew this pass all the way down to the hem. Be careful catching the top of the side gore, again. You might need to slow down and ease your needle through this part.

Finishing the tunic: inspecting and hemming

11. Flip the tunic right side out.

Make sure you don’t have any raw edges poking through your seams. This sometimes happens if you didn’t trim your seams in pass #1 enough. This will look like a cut edge poking through your seam.

If you find any of these stray “whiskers of thread,” just trim it off as best you can, flip the tunic inside out, and stitch the “second pass” between the sleeve and the gusset again, this time using a slightly wider seam allowance.

Flip it back out and check that the whiskers are all now safely sewn into the “second pass” of your French seam.

12. Let the tunic hang overnight before hemming.

The diagonally-cut (bias) parts of the gores are more elastic than the straight seams, so they’ll sag under their own weight, given time. Therefore, you won’t want to hem your tunic immediately. Hang your tunic for a day before you trim and hem it.

Here’s one I made! If you don’t have a dress form, try to use something sturdier than a thin wire hanger– the tunic has a lot of fabric in it, so suspending it by the neck on a thin wire hanger has tiny chance of stretching the neckline out.

Mark your tunic’s hem so it’s even, then trim away any excess. Marking is easiest and most accurate if you can get the recipient to model the tunic for you. Here’s a great tutorial on how to mark and trim a level hem.

Sewing over the bulky French seam seam allowance will be easier if you trim them off at an angle at the bottom, like this. Don’t trim them too close– just nip off a little on the bottom, oh, ¼-3/8″ on your tunic. Your hem will also be easier to sew if all the seams lay in the same direction, ie, with the “open” part of the seam allowance going “downstream” of your stitching, rather than fighting as you sew past it, so press your seam allowances so they all lay one way.

Turn the hem up twice and hem using a narrow hem. The narrow hem may be intimidating, but it’s much easier to sew a narrow hem on a curvy tunic skirt than it is to fold up a wide one. If you have a serger, you can serge around the bottom of your hem, then use the line of serging as a guide to help you fold up the hem.

Press the finished hem.

13. Give everything one last press and you’re done!

Yay! Now you may prance around in your tunic. Twirl! Fight! Build outfits around ‘em! I wear my tunics with trousers for basic fighting garb, but I also wear them underneath cotehardies, surcoats, and apron dresses. Add a skirt and a bodice and they pass as a chemise for later-period lady-garb; distress ‘em and they work for monsters, lengthen ‘em and they become gowns, shorten ‘em and they work for Crusaders. They’re great for everyone from Anglo-Saxons to Vikings to Normans to 14th century peasants. So even if your first French seamed linen tunic didn’t work out perfectly, you’ll have plenty of opportunities for pratice: go make one for everyone you know!

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Tutorial: Sew Decorative Bunting from Scrap Fabric

Hey, all! Today we’ll be talking about how to make bunting out of fabric scraps, and how to do it quickly and efficiently.

To decorate Drentha’s large Ragnarok campsite, we need a LOT of bunting, so I wanted to make this process fast and easy. All the online tutorials I found were for cute, two-yard strands for decorating toddler birthday parties or forced you to do pointless fiddly work (why hem the flags when they, cut on the bias, won’t really fray?). I also needed my bunting to be sturdy, since I would be tying it to trees and iron tent stakes and picnic tables and letting it hang in the wind and the rain for eight days.

My bunting has been to two camp-outs, and I’m really pleased with how it held up, so now I’m sharing my process. Let’s go!

You’ll need:

–A bunch of scrap fabric in multiple colors (any fiber content is fine!)

–Cardboard (for pattern and storing the finished bunting)

–Chalk or other fabric marking implement

–Scissors or rotary cutter and mat

–3/4” twill tape (I buy mine from Wawak.com, my favorite source for cheap thread and notions)

–A sewing machine with a zigzag stitch

Cut your fabric

Draw a triangle, 8” tall by 6” wide, on your cardboard for a pattern. Cut this out (but not with your good fabric scissors!) so you can trace it.

The trick to speedy fabric cutting is to avoid cutting your triangular flags out individually. Since we want a TON of flags, we’ll sacrifice perfection for the sake of speed. If you have bigger pieces of scrap fabric to use, you can fold it up into layers that are about 8” tall by 6” wide and hack a bunch of flags at once.

Trace your cardboard pattern onto your fabric, flipping the pattern vertically so your triangles fit together tightly– this will let you get the most flags out of your fabric.

Cut out your flags. If you’re using multiple colors, stack them up into piles of like colors as you go.

Next, we’ll open up our twill tape.

But why not bias tape?!

Yeah, I said twill tape, which, I recognize, is a notion not all of us have laying around. Why am I asking you to use something weird for a fabric that’s meant to be easy and use up scraps? Well…

Bias tape is expensive. The money really adds up if you’re buying it in those little 3-yard packs– and three yards is nothing! I have something like forty yards of bunting, and it honestly doesn’t look like much when it’s draped around camp. And no way am I stopping every three yards to piece a new packet of bias tape in, nope.

Bias tape stretches. That’s what things cut on the bias do: they stretch. This is less than ideal for something that will get tied around trees, tents, etc.

Bias tape is weak. If you inspect your bias tape closely, you’ll note that it has tiny seams on some pieces. Even if you buy it in a 100 yard spool, it will actually be pieced together out of multiple lengths of fabric. If you tug on a piece with seams, the stitches can pop. Again, we’re tying this stuff to trees, etc, so that’s not okay.

If you absolutely must use bias tape, you’ll want the single-fold stuff (which is creased down the middle, not folded in on both sides) and you’ll want it to be at least 1/2” wide. But seriously, why bother when you can use…

Twill tape (aka cotton tape, herringbone tape) is the bee’s absolute KNEES, guys. It’s woven to width, so its edges don’t fray. It’s used for shoelaces and drawstrings and tent ties, so it’s incredibly strong. And it comes in vast spools (The only reason I don’t own a 50 or 100 yard spool is because I live in a small apartment with little room for supply-stashes. :( ) A 36-yard spool will set you back $7 in basic colors, and it will be about the size of a hockey puck. Even I can store that.

For this project, you’ll want 3/4” to 1” wide twill tape. Since we’ll fold this in half, the final tape will be about 3/8″-1/2” wide.

Mise en place

Set out your cut fabric flags by your machine, with the stacks of each color arranged in the order you’ll use them.

Pull off a good two feet of your twill tape and put it to the back of your machine. This tape without flags sewn to it will make it easier for you to tie the end of the strand around trees, etc.

Set your machine to a long and wide zigzag stitch. On my machine, this is a 3.0 length and a 5.0 width. You want your zigzag to be about half the width of your tape. We’re using a zigzag because it will let us be sloppier in sewing than the straight stitch– if we veer a little, it will still catch the flags.

Set in the flags

Did you notice that the supply list didn’t include pins or rulers? That’s because we’re not going to pin our flags into place or precisely measure where they’ll be placed on the tape, because pinning and measuring is slow. I promise you that, with some practice, you can easily sew a 6” length without pins– and since we’re making a lot of bunting, you’ll get that practice very fast!

Put your twill tape on the machine, but don’t lower the needle into it yet. Lay the top of your triangle (the side with the 6” base) on top of the tape. You don’t want all of your tape to be covered by the base of the flag– a bit more than half of the tape’s width showing is plenty. Less, and your flag might not get caught in the fold; more, and the raw edge will get folded over, too, and poke back out to fray.

We’re going to fold the tape in half over the base of the triangle, so when we run our zigzag stitch over it all, the flag will get firmly stitched into the folded tape.

Lower your needle into the folded tape and stitch over the flag. You’ll fold the tape in half as you go– again, no pins! It seriously doesn’t matter if your tape isn’t perfectly folded, as long as the flag is trapped in the stitching.

Now that you’ve sewn your first flag, don’t cut your thread or pull anything off the machine. We’re going to stitch as many flags as possible on one pass, so it’s time to move on!

Place the next flag

We’ll want an empty gap between our flags, because the flags hang wrong if you jam them too close together. A 3-5” gap is good, but believe me, you will have so much bunting that no one will notice if this gap is off by a few inches. So, after you fold the tape over your first flag and stitch it down, keep folding the tape in half and stitch it down for 3-5” before placing your next flag and stitching as before.

Wind your finished bunting

Your yards of bunting will pile up behind your machine really quickly. I highly recommend that, every few yards, you wind your finished strand onto a piece of cardboard to store it. Your bunting will live on this card. When you’re putting your bunting up at camp, wind it off this to keep it tidy. When you’re breaking down camp, wind your bunting back onto this card so it doesn’t turn into a hopeless, tangled mess!

Leave a flag-less tail at the end

When you’ve run out of flags, finish your bunting by leaving another two feet-ish of “blank” tape at the end of the strand, just like you did at the beginning. Again, this is to facilitate your tying the end to whatever you need.

Go make eeeeeeverything into bunting!

Wasn’t that easy? You should totally go make more in different fabrics and color combinations! I want to see Ragnarok absolutely covered with this stuff. Use it to flag your tent ropes so they don’t catch drunks! Decorate your camp borders! Use it to tie up troublesome goblins! There are a million ways to use this stuff, which is good– it’s so quick and easy to make that you’ll be looking for ways to deploy it.

Remember t’s perfectly fine to make short lengths of bunting. You might have areas in camp that only need short pieces, and you can always tie short lengths together. I make as much bunting as I have the attention span for, then cut it off, wind it up and make more another day. There is no wrong answer, as long as you’re using up scraps and having fun. :)

Thanks for reading. Now, go forth and bunt!

ilsa-makes-things

Cooking at Ragnarok: Tips from the Drentha Round-Robin Meal Plan

My camp at Dagorhir’s Ragnarok, Drentha, has been doing a “round-robin” meal plan for the past five-ish years. Rather than forcing everyone to fend for themselves, or shoving the burden of cooking onto just a few people, we all sign up to cook one meal. It’s worked really well so far, but we’ve collected some tips that make things work smoother. Below is the post I share every year within our camp’s Facebook group (another excellent thing that helps us keep organized.) I thought I would share it so a. I didn’t have to dig it back up every year, and b. in case someone else might benefit from it. So, here’s something close to what I would post. Use it however is useful to you! – Hail, Drentha and friends! We have a LOT of folks on the meal plan this year (more than two dozen at last count?!) so let’s talk about how to make your meal go as smoothly as possible.

How the Meal Plan Works

We have people sign up to cook either one breakfast or one dinner. (You’re on your own for lunches and snacks.) The cook pays for all the ingredients for that meal, which “buys” them all their meals cooked by other people for the rest of the week. The cook makes the meal and is in charge of clean-up for it. Phoenix (note: one of our senior members with a knack for herding cats), bless her, has generated a list of who cooks when, because it’s really easy to forget when your turn is coming! We’ll save that list and have it available as a reminder on-site.

(Note: if your camp is smaller, you might want to only do dinners. If your camp is large, you might consider letting people pair up to cook! We’re at about thirty people this year, so we’re now pairing up to cook dinners.)

The meal plan isn’t mandatory— you don’t have to join in, but it’s a good way to get to know the people in camp and spend some time hanging out. :)

We make a reasonable attempt to accommodate dietary restrictions and food allergies. We usually make a separate post about this in our camp Facebook group. We’ve successfully navigated vegetarianism, fish allergies, and Celiac disease. If you have a restriction, you’re the one responsible for explaining it in advance!

You’ll be cooking on camp equipment in a rustic setting. We have several small propane stoves, a camp fire, a grate to go over said fire, pots and pans, and other basic gear, but if you’re making something that needs unusual utensils, please bring them yourself.

Tips to Make the Plan Work

We’ve been doing this round-robin meal plan for a few years now, and it’s mostly worked great. Here are a couple things we’ve learned while using this system. If you’re new, PLEASE read it and take it to heart. If you want help or have any questions, don’t hesitate— we all want to be well-fed, so we’d be happy to help! :)

(Note: some of this is specific to our camp, so edit where you need!)

So, please:

1. MAKE ENOUGH FOOD.

We’ll be burning a LOT of calories at Rag, so everyone will be very hungry, even at breakfast. Your meal should include protein, fat, and carbs. Don’t just guess at how much you need to buy— use this catering chart to figure out how much to buy per person, then add about 30% to your total. Plan on at least 4 oz of protein per person and lots of carbohydrates. When in doubt, buy a bit more.

This gets expensive (Alric and I usually spend about $50 on our ingredients), but remember that cooking your meal buys you TWELVE other meals. If you’re worried about not having enough food to go around, add a cheap carb (quick-cooking rice, $1 loaves of French bread from Walmart, instant potatoes or oatmeal) to make sure everyone gets enough. Ask yourself– does your meal look like 13 meal’s worth of food?

Remember, also, that the meal plan is opt-in. If you don’t want to (or can’t afford to) take a meal and want instead to handle all your own food, that’s fine. We all have different budgets, and we all understand!

2. BE PESSIMISTIC ABOUT COOKING TIMES.

Even if you can cook your meal perfectly at home, it WILL go slower at Rag because you’ll be cooking over propane burners and for 22 people. You should plan to leave the battles by 4:00 PM if you’re cooking dinner that night. Starting at 6:00 is a recipe for everyone still being hungry and cross by dark. Even water for pasta (as I now know, to my chagrin) takes forever to boil on a camp stove!

To help everything go faster, prepare as much as you can in advance. You can pre-cook and freeze meat, pre-cut your vegetables, even freeze cooked rice. If your meal is early in the week, you can just cook it at home, put it into the cooler, and re-heat it on camp.

Write down your cooking times and quantities so your meal prep goes smoothly. If you have your directions or recipe printed, other people will be better able to help you!

Don’t be afraid to ask for help when cooking, but remember that there’s no guarantee anyone (even noncombatants) will be in camp to assist you exactly when you need it. Your meal is your responsibility, so if people are kind enough to help, that’s great, but it’s still best to be conservative about what you can accomplish.

Raw potatoes, bone-in chicken, and dried beans are famous for taking FOREVER to cook! Bone-in chicken takes four to five HOURS to cook. Raw potatoes for two dozen people can take TWO HOURS. If you’ve cooked these at home, you’re probably rolling your eyes and saying I’m crazy, but remember that you’ll be making vast portions in small(ish) pans. Even hashbrowns take forever to cook when they’re layered in the pan four inches deep.

So, if you MUST use these ingredients, prepare them as much as possible at HOME first. Peter did pre-cooked potatoes for breakfast one year, and they were amazing.

Undercooked food is, at best, unfulfilling (you haven’t actually fed people if you’ve given them half-raw crunchy potatoes), and, at worst, unsafe (the famous lamb incident of ’10). Take this seriously— we don’t want anyone to get sick from food!

3. BE CONSIDERATE OF YOUR CAMP-MATES.

This goes both for cooks and consumers. For those eating, let’s all be in camp at 6:00 and ready to eat. It’s really tempting to wander away while food is finishing, but “I’m just going across the street, be back in ten minutes” often turns into “where the heck is Ilsa, and do we have to save her food?” It’s frustrating for the cook to try to keep food hot and unspoiled, so please be there on time.

Cooks, let’s be considerate to our friends. Sometimes people have a legitimate reason for being absent, and nothing is more discouraging than returning from War Council and finding that everyone had second helpings while you got nothing. If someone must be away during dinner time (ie, for the camp master’s meeting, teaching a class, war council), set aside a BIG portion for them, or send a runner up with a plate. Conversely, if you KNOW you must be away during dinner, TELL the cook and ask them to save you food!

Be realistic on what you need to save for those who are missing, so our absentees or late-comers don’t come back to find they’ve been “saved” a single sausage and a scrap of rice. That’s just cruel.

And lastly, remember that cooking your meal includes cleaning up after your meal. Everyone is responsible for their personal eating utensils, but the cook cleans the cooking utensils they dirtied. Food safety includes thoroughly washing your dishes in hot water, and “us not frowning at your in a really disappointed way”-safety includes cleaning up promptly so we don’t wake up to dirty dishes covered in bugs and rainwater the next morning.

All of this sounds pretty dire, but it’s best to be a little worst-case scenario about these things. Cooking your meal should be fun, and it doesn’t need to be difficult, but it SHOULD be carefully planned in advance. Feeding two dozen people is serious business, and having two dozen people mad ‘cause they’re starving is even MORE serious!

If you need help planning, shopping, or cooking your meal, please ask for help. Even on the busiest of Ragnarok days, we would all rather pitch in and help than go hungry. :)

–

(Note: I hope this helped some of you and that you’re considering trying our round-robin meal plan! It’s lots of fun, and it guarantees you get lots of variety in food and time to hand out with your unit. Best of luck, and happy eating! ~Ilsa)

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Tutorial: Sew a Keyhole Neckline with a Facing

Since I keep trying to explain facings to friends (and keep feeling like I’m failing miserably), I decided to do a longer tutorial, after all, about how to I use a facing to sew keyhole necklines on simple medieval-style tunics. This is an attractive and sturdy neckline for LARP/Dagorhir/SCA garb. I’ve used it on literally hundreds of tunics.

This tutorial ended up getting pretty long and scary, but don’t worry: this is not a complicated process. It’s just hard to explain over the internet. So– let’s go!

What is a facing, anyway?

A facing is just an extra bit of fabric that you sew to the edge of your garment and fold down to conceal a raw edge. I use them on necklines, instead of folding the edge down in a traditional hem. If you don’t get the concept, @vintage-aerith has a great tutorial here. Facings produce very sturdy, flat, and non-bulky edges.

For example, this tunic has a keyhole neckline finished with a self-colored green facing. The edge of the neckline is NOT folded over and hemmed: the facing is an extra piece of fabric that was stitched on to the edge and then folded to the inside. You can see the ‘lower’ edge of the facing– it’s the darker green line about 1.5″ in from the edge. I then tacked the facing down with embroidery. It’s a very clean, unobtrusive finish.

This tunic has a very fancy external orange facing, combined with a collar! The process is very similar to above, but the facing is flipped to the outside. This is an easy way to add color to a garment. (Forgive my dork-face and overlarge tunic– this was for a customer who’s about a foot taller than me!)

You should use facings because:

Hemming necklines is a pain. The curve will not want to fold down flat. Facings, on the other hand, are exactly the same size and shape as the neckline, so they automatically lay flat.

The point at the bottom of a keyhole is a nightmare to hem, and if you hem it badly, it will fray and rip, fast.

When you fold down a neckline to hem it, your neck-hole gets bigger. When we’re talking LARP/SCA/Dagorhir garb, a bigger neck-hole always means more sunburn. If you use a facing, you’ll get a neckhole exactly the size you planned.

Hemming stretches your neckline out. The more you handle a cut piece of fabric, the more it will stretch. A stretched out neckline = more sunburn, again. This facing method minimizes handling of cut edges, so the neckline stays nice and tight.

Facings are fast and easy once you understand what you’re doing and why. I can knock one out, start to finish, in about ten minutes. No lie.

Now that I’ve convinced you that facings rock, onward!

1. Make Your Facing Pattern

You’ll first need a pattern for your facing, and to make that, you need to know what size you’d like your finished neckline to be. I recommend a neckline that’s made of a circle that’s about 5.5″ in diameter and a 3″ slit, like this. This is juuust big enough that it will pull over most heads.

Draw your 5.5″ circle on a bit of scrap fabric. (I traced a saucer onto a sheet from a charity shop. Pure class, me.) This will be the hole your head goes through.

But, you protest, a 5.5″ circle only has a 17.25″ circumference! That’s way too small for anyone’s head! Well spotted: we’ll add a 3″ long slash down the center line so you can fit your head through.

Now we’ll mark the center and shoulder line. Since your tunic has a front half and a back half, you’ll be sorely tempted to put half your neck-circle on the front and half on the back.

But if you do this, your tunic will be really uncomfortable! Your neckline will constantly creep forward around your shoulders. This is because most of your neck is actually in front of the shoulder seam, so 2/3rds of your circle– about 3.66″ on a 5.5″ circle– should go in front of your shoulder.

Add 1.5″ around the edge of the hole and and around the slash.

Cut the fabric out along the outer line.

Cut out the center hole, and cut down the slash. Note that you’re just cutting the slash open with one pass of your scissors– you’re not trimming anything away.

Now you have a mock-up for your facing. It should look something like this. (Mine is super ugly because I’m traveling and only have terrible blunt scissors with me.)

Pull it on. Can you fit this over your head? Does it lie comfortably? If you can’t get this over your head, cut the slash a tiny bit longer and try again. If that doesn’t work, make the hole a tiiiiny bit larger. Remember that a smaller neckhole is better (sunburn!).

Don’t be fooled by my weird face– I am happy, because mine fits okay! I’ll now trace my mock-up onto a bit of sturdy poster board, making sure to mark the center front, back, length of the slit, and shoulder seams with notches.

The front white piece is my facing pattern, which I use to trace out the facing piece on fabric, ie, the background piece in olive green. Note that the fabric facing does NOT have the hole cut out. This is important!

Next, we’ll…

2. Cut Out Your Facing

Lay your new pattern on a bit of your fabric. Using chalk or a fabric-marking pencil, trace it all the edges and mark all the notches. Cut along the outer line until your facing piece looks like the dark shape in the photo above.

Here’s where it gets tricky, though: you won’t cut the interior circle, yet. This is because that inner edge isn’t really an edge at all: it’s your stitching line. When you’re stitching your facing onto your tunic, your needle will follow that inner line that you’ve chalked onto your fabric. See how in the photo above there’s a line marked in yellow chalk on the dark olive green facing? That’s the stitching line, so DO NOT CUT THE CENTER HOLE OUT IN YOUR FACING.

Similarly, DO NOT CUT A HOLE IN YOUR TUNIC YET. We won’t cut either hole until the facing is stitched to the tunic. That’s right– it will look and feel really weird, but trust me, there’s a good reason for it.

3. Finish the Edge of Your Facing

The outer edge of your facing will fray if you don’t do something to prevent that, so take a moment to serge or zigzag around the edge of your facing piece. It’s way easier to do this before you stitch the facing onto your tunic.

4. Stitch Your Facing Onto Your Tunic

Okay, so. I like to start by sew the neckline on my tunic before I do anything else. That way, if I screw it up, I haven’t wasted time (or fabric) by adding sleeves and gores and stuff.

Note how, in the picture above, no holes have been cut in the facing or the torso panel. This is not a mistake. Why aren’t you cutting the holes, you might ask? Well, fabric cut along curves stretches. Badly. This is bad news if you’re trying to match the hole you cut in your tunic to the hole you cut in your facing. Getting them to match requires a ton of pinning and fussying and delicate handling. I hate pinning and fussing, so I sew my facing to my tunic before I cut any holes. This way, everything is stabilized nothing can stretch out. Cool? Cool. Now, my torso panel is one long rectangle, which makes up the main front and back of my tunic– there’s no shoulder seam. Fold your tunic in half both ways and use your iron to crease these folds. These creases now mark your shoulder line and center lines. You’ll use them to line up your facing.

Lay your facing onto your tunic, right sides (ie, outsides) together. Make sure to match facing to the tunic’s center front, back, and shoulder seams. Remember how 2/3rds of your neckline will be on the front of your tunic? Check that, now. When your facing lays straight and flat and properly positioned on your tunic, pin it in place. You’ll now slowly stitch through both layers along the line you marked. The slash is a little different, though, so see the picture below for an explanation of how to stitch around it.

The stitching travels around the slash, with about 1/4″ to 1/8″ between the lines. The bottom of the slash should be crossed by just 1 stitch. If you use more stitches, this point will pucker when you try to flip it to the inside.

Once you’ve stitched along the entire stitching line, you’ll finally cut the neckline open.

Be extra careful cutting the slash open. You’ll cut through the gap between the two rows of stitching, stopping just shy of the stitch at the very bottom of the slash.

Okay. So, you’ve got your facing sewn to your tunic, but all the raw/cut edges are still exposed. To fix that, you’ll now fold the facing to the wrong side (ie, the inside), so the raw edge will be hidden inside the fold. This can be a little tricky, so be patient and use plenty of steam with your iron. To turn the points out, use something pointy but blunt, like a big bamboo knitting needle, to poke them right-side-out.

Once you’ve got your facing turned to the inside of your tunic, iron it well so the edge of the neckline is flat and crisp.

Hooray! All that’s left, now, is topstitching through the tunic and the facing in matching thread so your facing won’t creep back out to the right side. I like to use two lines of topstitching– one 1/8″ from the edge of the neckline, and another 1″ from the edge of the neckline. Make sure you’re catching the edge of your facing!

Hooray, you did it! That wasn’t so bad, was it? And look how sturdy and clean your tunic’s neckline now looks. That keyhole is never going to rip, I tell you that.

Huge thanks to Stellaria for writing the original tutorial that taught me how to do facings, and for putting up with my hare-brained innovations on her methods. Stell is the best.

ilsa-makes-things

Measure & Draft a Better Bocksten Tunic

Or, “Ilsa Overthinks Things, Part 983.” Alric’s Bocksten tunic tutorial was revolutionary, but the shapes never seemed quite right to me: the gores were too small and the gussets too large. Through trial and error, I’ve developed this method for cutting a comfortable basic tunic that fits well and provides good range of motion.

This is designed to produce a quick pattern for a unisex tunic. While it won’t provide the closest fit, this method is fast, easy, and reliable.

All seams have a 1/2” seam allowance. MEASURE You’ll need: – a flexible measuring tape marked in inches –your body ;) Measure: A. the circumference of the largest part of your upper body, usually taken underneath the armpits. Ladies, if you’re not very busty, you can probably just measure around your upper bust (right underneath armpits): the extra room you’ll need for your full bust will come from the wearing ease and the gussets. B. the length you’d like your tunic to be, from top of your shoulder to the hem. I like somewhere around knee or calf, which is between 40” and 45” long on most people. C. the circumference of the largest part of your flexed bicep.

D. the length you’d like your sleeve to be, from top of shoulder to wrist. Depending on your height and preferences, this might be between 19”-23”. If you can’t measure this on your own, 21” is a good medium.

MATH Your torso panel will be one long, skinny, rectangle. Its length is twice the length of your tunic, and its width will be half of your torso circumference plus ease.

Take measurement A and add 4”. If you had a 40” chest, add 4” of ease to get 44”. Divide your result by 2. This hypothetical torso panel will be 22” wide. Take measurement B and add 1”. This extra length is so you can fold up your tunic’s hem. If you wanted a 40” long tunic, this is now 41.” Multiply your result by 2. This hypothetical torso panel is now 82” long.

Your hypothetical torso panel, then, is an 82” x 22” rectangle. So you’ll know where to put the neckline and sleeves, fold it in half so you have a 41” x 22” rectangle. Mark the fold with a crease or chalk. This will be your torso shoulder point, later.

Your sleeve

Take measurement C and add 3”. If you had a 15” bicep, add 3” of ease to get 18”. The top of your sleeve will be 18” across.

Take measurement D and add 1”. This extra length is so seam allowance for sewing the sleeve to the torso panel and hem allowance so you can fold up your sleeve hem. If you wanted a 21” long sleeve, you’ll cut a sleeve that’s 22” long.

Decide how loose you’d like the sleeve to be at the wrist. Loop your measuring tape around your wrist in a circle until it feels comfortable. Make sure you can fit your hand through the loop, so you can pull your tunic on! Add an extra 1/2” for seam allowance. Most people find somewhere between 11-13” at the wrist comfortable.

You might think your sleeve is going to be a trapezoid that’s 18” wide at the top, 11-13” wide at the bottom, and 22” tall. That’s almost right.

But a square gusset, sewn onto a sloping side like that, probably won’t match the other side of the sleeve later. Anything cut on a diagonal (bias) is prone to stretch as you handle it, and that part of the sleeve is particularly bad. Instead, cut your sleeve so the slope begins 6” down from the top, like this.

It’s sort of an ice-cream cone? A trapezoid that was really slow on the uptake?Either way, it’s simple enough!

Your Gussets

The gussets in this simple tunic are cut as squares. For this basic tunic, 6” will be fine, so you’ll cut two 6”x6” squares.

Your Gores Height: Gores are the wedges of fabric that widen the skirt of your tunic. Your Bocksten tunic has 4 gores: two on the sides and two inset into the center of the body panel. You’ll want your gores to be tall enough to give your legs a good range of motion, but not so tall that they run all the way up to your sleeve and gusset.

To figure out how tall your gores should be, we need to figure out how much length on one side of the tunic your sleeve and gusset take up.

Our hypothetical torso panel is 82” long for the full length, but right now, we only care about one side: 41”. Our hypothetical sleeve had a 6” gusset and was 18” wide at top.

Divide your sleeve head by 2. (=9”). Add 6” for the gusset. (=15”). Your sleeve and gusset, together, take up 15” of length on your 41” long tunic. Since 41” - 15” = 26,” the absolute tallest our gore can be is 26”.

But a 26” gore would be so tall that its top would touch the bottom of the gusset, making an ugly join that’s difficult to sew. Much better to leave a gap between the bottom of the gusset and the top of the gore. We’ll use a 4” gap. 26” - 4” = 22”. Since we’ll want to add a .5” seam allowance to the top of the gore, we now know that our gores should be 22.5” tall. Width: In general, any tunic less than 70” in circumference at the hem will be pretty uncomfortable to wear, but wider is better. Gores that are at least 15” wide at the hem will be a little easier to handle, since they’re not as skinny at the top. If you need guidance, cutting your gores out of a piece that’s 36” wide x [Gore Height] tall will give you 18” gores, which are nicely swishy and twirly.

Cut: You can efficiently cut out your gores by laying them end-to-end, like this. This will give you two 90 degree triangles to piece together into one gore, and three whole isosceles triangles to use as-is. (Clever students might realize that if you fold the panel twice, you can cut all the gores out with one pass. As this defeated my MSPaint drawing abilities, this is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Piece the outside triangles together along the straight (NOT HYPOTENEUSE) to get one whole gore. Remember how you learned, in math class, that the hypoteneuse of a right triangle is longer than its other sides? That’s bad for us: we want the sides to also be 22.5” long, so we’ll have to do some trimming, like this. Both length down the middle and sides should be this length.

Take a yardstick and sweep across from the straight edge, like a pendulum, marking 22.5" (or whatever) as you go. Or use a French curve. Your Facing

Let Stellaria tell you how to do this; she’s wiser than I.

RECAP

To sum up, you should have:

1 torso panel, marked at the shoulder point 2 sleeves, marked at their shoulder point 2 gussets, 6” square 4 gores (or 3 gores and two half-gores), all trimmed to the proper length and 1 neckline facing.

Hooray! You’re ready to assemble things. I highly recommend using my upcoming French seamed tunic tutorial, but if you just want to throw it together via your own method, go ahead. Remember that you have a 1/2” seam allowance on every seam. Treat your fabric nicely, finish your seams, and you’ll have a sturdy, comfortable tunic for a long time to come!

Thanks for reading! –Ilsa of Drentha

ilsa-makes-things

Easy Skjoldeham Medieval Hood

I’ve posted this elsewhere, but I’m trying to get all my tutorials/rants on ONE PLACE on the internet, so I’m re-posting it here.

Hello, nerdfriends! Today we’re making a simple hood. This particular hood pattern will keep you warm, shield your eyes, and jazz up your kit without much effort, AND it’s based on history! A body from about the 11th century was found in the Skjoldehamn bog in Norway wearing this style of hood.

The Skjoldehamn body was quite small— probably a slender lady— and we’ve found that this hood isn’t ideal for people with very broad shoulders. The hood fits Alric here very well, but you’re a super-burly dude, you might do better with a pattern that puts the gores at the sides, like the Sunnfjord hood. Materials for the Hood

For this hood, you’ll need: —1/2 yard of outside (“shell”) fabric. Pick something warm. I used wool. (Sorry for the ugly pic edit– you really only need ½ yard!) —1/2 yard of inside (“lining”) fabric. Pick something soft enough to go next to your face. I used linen. —needle and thread (or a sewing machine) —pins —shears —a ruler —chalk/marking pen for fabric Cut Your Pieces

First, cut out your pieces. There are only three parts to this hood: the main ‘body’ of the hood, plus two square ‘gores,’ which add width to the hem. From both the lining and the shell fabric, you’ll cut: —one 18” x 46” body panel —two 8” x 8” gores Prepare the body panel

The shell and the lining are assembled separately, so for the first couple steps, it’ll look like you’re making two separate hoods: one out of your shell fabric, and one of your lining. You’ll join them together at the face-opening later. Trim a 1” x 8” rectangle away from both edges of one side of the body panel. This side will be the front of the hood. Cutting this notch will make it easier to sew the gore in. Sew the First Edge of the Gore

Pin one edge of each gore to the body panel, wrong sides together, like this, and stitch. Make sure to put the gores on opposite sides of the hood!

Fold down the other edge of the hood’s body and stitch it to the other edge of the gore. You’ll sew the back of the hood all the way up, but you’ll only sew the front gore to the notch. If this doesn’t make sense, look at the next picture. Repeat with your lining fabric. Yay! You should now have two hood-shaped pieces, one made out of lining fabric, one made out of the shell.

Flip the shell hood so it’s right side out. Pull the lining, right-side-in, over the shell. The “right” sides of both layers should now be facing each other. Pin around the face opening, then sew these two layers together. Topstitch, Hem, and You’re Done!

Pull the lining away from the shell until everything is right-side-out. The lining and the shell will only be connected at the face hole. Iron this seam. Tuck the lining inside the shell. Iron this edge until it looks nice, then topstitch the edge so the lining won’t creep out of the face-hole when you wear it. To hem the bottom, match the lining to the shell, pinning at the points of the gores and at the seams to make sure everything lines up. Baste the lining to the shell at the hem. The raw/cut edge will still be visible– this is just to keep the two layers from shifting around in the next step. Because the two layers are now tacked together, you’ll now treat your bottom hem like it’s just one layer. Turn the hem up twice and topstitch to hem. If your shell fabric is bulky, use a bias tape or a self-fabric facing so the fold won’t be too thick. If you’re not bothered by bulk, just fold the hem up twice to the inside and stitch it down. Variations and Other Ideas

Hooray, you made a hood! Look how happy you’ve made Alric! :D Now that you’ve managed your first one, you might be interested in exploring some fun variations: —round off the points of the gores for a different look —cut the hem into interested “dagged” shapes —make the hood reversible: stitch the lining hem to the shell hem during step 6, leaving a gap for your hand, then turn and press —round off the back of the hood, or add a long “liripipe” tail Thanks for reading! Let me know if you’ve made a hood!

ithidunes

AWOOOoooOOoooooo~ 🌝✨

kakotheres-anthropos

AU where pokemon and dnd mix

Aroo is still my strongest <3

kakotheres-anthropos

@rageagainstthemarine idk what ur gunna do with tiny babies, but at least the Shellder turns into a murder shell xD i just wanted to draw u with tiny cute ones…. sry its not great looking?

kakotheres-anthropos

@grimofthesouth and my ever inconsistent art style?

matialonsorphoto

my moons 2019

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