lace~of~hearts @laceofhearts - Tumblr Blog

2mysticmoons

Happy Litha!! 🌻🌞

safije

Iceland's Traditional Woman's Dress

ortut

Yuki Yamada

wandering-songstress

SORA CHOI at New York Fashion Week S/S 2019

ravens-play-exy-too

i saw the words “ur not the first person in your lineage to be queer” and it’s rocking me to my core. how many generations down the line did one of my ancestors feel the way i did, feel differently than i did and so damn queerly it was a crime? how many of us were there? did they have hope? did they find peace? i don’t know. at the very least, maybe i am proof their identity was never wasted. reincarnated.

quousque

YOU KNOW WHAT BOTHERS ME

when fantasy books describe the cloth of Quant Farmpeople’s clothing as “homespun” or “rough homespun”

“homespun” as opposed to what??? EVERYTHING WAS SPUN AT HOME

they didn’t have fucking spinning factories, your pseudo-medieval farmwife is lucky if she has a fucking spinning wheel, otherwise she’s spinning every single thread her family wears on a drop spindle NO ONE ELSE WAS DOING THE SPINNING unless you go out of your way to establish a certain baseline of industrialization in your fake medieval fantasy land.

and “rough”??? lol just because it’s farm clothes? bitch cloth was valuable as fuck because of the labor involved ain’t no self-respecting woman gonna waste fiber and ALL THAT FUCKING TIME spinning shitty yarn to weave into shitty cloth she’s gonna make GOOD QUALITY SHIT for her family, and considering that women were doing fiber prep/spinning/weaving for like 80% of their waking time up until very recently in world history, literally every woman has the skills necessary to produce some TERRIFYINGLY GOOD QUALITY THREADS

come to think of it i’ve never read a fantasy novel that talks about textile production at all??? like it’s even worse than the “where are all the farms” problem like where are people getting the cloth if no one’s doing the spinning and weaving??? kmart???

systlin

THANK U

rosslynpaladin

pro tip: what do you say instead? I gotcha.

In Ye Olde Medieval Fantasy Dayes, everybody’s layer against skin (shirt tunic or shift) is gonna be linen. it’s almost never wool except stockings or hose (like pant legs). Say “undyed cloth” if you wanna make them sound simple and peasanty. Comment on how you can tell it wasn’t made for them (the fit is off) and has had probably eight owners before.

Outer clothing is gonna be either wool, or a blend called Linsey-woolsey, and again you could say Undyed, but dyes are not only common they are CHEAP and relatively easy. (innerwear is often left undyed or bleached to white because it gets washed to heck- like beaten by a wooden stick on a stone by the river- and dye would just fade out a lot so why bother. Ths is also why innerwear has ties, rarely buttons, unless you are so rich you have people doing your washing delicately because they’re hired to do only that. Buttons would get broken in the washing)

A poorer person is often seen in “russet”, a kind of rusty orange-brown color. Purple was famously reserved for royalty in many times and places, but its also just hard to do. We see a lot more magentas and fuschias for nobles or common middle class folks than we ever see of Purple- and not many of those. Deep blue was more likely on very rich people, but a light blue was common for even poorer folks. Yellow was popular with everyone, and so was green, and many shades of reds, including the color we now call orange (they did not- this is why redheads are called redheads and not orangeheads). Your vision of everyone in very drab brown and mud colors is from Hollywood- most medieval-ren folks have clothing with colors. Sometimes garish colors, to the modern eye. Traffic cone Orange and acid green was a popular combo in the 13th century.

elfwreck

Example medieval dye colors. Lots of yellows and orangey-browns. Woad gave a range of blues that are basically what we think of as “denim colors.” There were purples - royal purple was a specific color from a specific source - but if you mix wine-dye and woad-dye, you get purpleish dye. (Getting the color to stay that way may be more difficult. Everything worn by peasants fades; they couldn’t afford the really good fixatives.)

More examples and explanations here:

Plum, dusty purple, lavender, burgundy, chestnut, blood red

Walnut, chocolate, tan, linen, pale apricot, spice, dark spice

Peasant clothes were often more colorful than the nobility. Nobles could afford bright, clear colors that peasants couldn’t - but one mark of wealth was being able to buy all 4-8 yards of fabric for an outfit at the same time. So nobles would have a full outfit, including hat, stockings, even shoes, of one type of fabric (with ornamentation of a contrasting type, and as many buttons or bits of silver as they could get away with wearing), while peasants would often have a shirt, bodice or jerkin, skirt or pants, stockings, and hat of all different colors.

Dying or re-dying any one piece of clothing was within most of their cost limits - dye itself is cheap; fixatives cost. But boiling your shirt for an hour with onion skins in a copper pot would re-color the fading fabric.

lloerwyn-deactivated20201104

And yet more medieval dye colour samples:

historic-old-guard-lover

While centered on medieval Europe for the finer points, this is broadly true for any clothing needs

gethporno

if anyone is interested in way too much information about the spinning, weaving, dyeing, and trading of cloth in ye olden days, pls see these lecture notes by my old economic history prof, who knew more about the textile industry in pre-modern europe than any reasonable person should. they’re old at this point but still pretty reliable.

dduane

This is a bit of a hot-button issue for me… so reblogging with pleasure.

The tl:dr; version of my usual complaint: I love Terry Jones’s work, but he (and MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL) have a lot to answer for in the “Medieval Life Was Irredeemably Mucky / Everything Was Drab” department. In the wake of that film, practically all the everyday color of Non-Royal medieval life got washed out of public perception. And it makes me cranky.

Period records make it plain that even among the Poor Folk, color was rife. Many people far more specialized and knowledgeable in this field than I am have gone on about this at length. I’m just signal boosting here.

fandom-oracle

queer as in gay but also queer as in unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe

neshamama

william goldman, “untitled,” c.1892, vintage silver print

horreurscopes

my fave thing about being alive is that there is nothing that cannot be learned. tapestry weaving, astrophysics, swimming. music, theremin, singing. cutting your own hair, dancing, quantum mathematics. sewing, philosophy, social skills. knowledge is divine, but sharing it is human !!!