January 2024: Entering the Home Stretch
My January goals were:
Complete the commonplace book.
Complete the vasquiña.
Prep University class materials.
Find new material for the chapines.
Drawing out the vasquiña onto fabric with the help of bara tape and algebra.
Early January started off rocky. I had some major set backs with the chapines in December and getting those to the finish line seemed even harder than it already was. I was able to take a step back, pivot, and move on, but it did also give me the opportunity to start into the vasquiña in time to take it to 12th Night as my car project. Having spent a lot of time in December working on the actual research also helped and a very weird thing happened: aside from editing and finalizing process documentation, all of my Pentathlon documentation actually got (mostly) finished. Almost all of the research was where it needed to go, works cited were annotated, and I had my survey data also formatted. For the first time since I started considering this project, completing Persona Pentathlon actually felt very real and very attainable.
I know I got very lucky this month, but Tandy Leathers had undyed, veg-tanned goatskin leather back in stock in early January and I had a coupon. This allowed me to order some, and in doing so, further improve the historical accuracy of my project design. I was really nervous about dyeing this leather. I have not done any sort of dyeing outside of the sole leather and I really wanted the black dye to be very even.
Thankfully, downtime with the chapines gave me a lot of free time for the vasquiña and the commonplace book. I got most of the vasquiña done in time to take it to 12th Night with me as my travel and event project. Taking this from theory and math that was not mathing was a kind of scary process but ultimately, I’m super thrilled with how it went. Because my fabric is a drastically different width than the one pictured in Alcega’s diagram, I had to fold it a different way than he did, moving where the seams ended up in comparison to where they would have ended up following the diagram. However, I’m still very pleased with it, because that in turn removed the need for a center front seam that would have not lined up with what we see (or would not have looked nearly as nice) as the inspiration images for this outfit as a whole. I got the pieces cut, assembled, seams finished, pleated, waistbands applied and hem trimmed before leaving for 12th Night, allowing me to work on the hem that weekend.
The completed gonete and vasquiña together at last!
I was concerned going into the hem on the vasquiña about how the fabric was going to behave. When I did the hems on the two side openings, they ended up being fairly rounded instead of laying flat so I had to top stitch them in place. My worry doing a folded hem on the bottom was that not only was I going to have to fold and hem the entire bottom, I was going to have to also top stitch it. Thankfully, I got lucky and my usual rolled hem worked just fine. I figure I’ll be spending enough time going around in circles with the ribbons, I don’t need to add yet another rotation for the hem as well. But that all worked itself out in the end!
The ribbons themselves make up the lion’s share of the work time on the vasquiña, as expected. However, they look just as striking as I was hoping they would, so I’m gonna say the 30 odd hours they took were totally worth it. After spending 58 hours on this piece, I finished the vasquiña on the the 27th. Trying the gonete and vasquiña on together for the first time was a really amazing moment for me. I’ll keep pictures to myself for now but no matter how Pentathlon goes, I am so completely thrilled with these two items and how I feel wearing them. The many many hours and amount of research time spent on this project (I’ll do the math at some point, but I can’t even begin to estimate hours for the commonplace book and almodrote) really make this outfit such an incredible special one. It helps that these fit gorgeously and I can totally see myself making more of these items as time goes on.
Speaking of the commonplace book, I used a lot of down time for the finishing it as well. Once I got into the swing of working on it, I was consistently surprised with how much I had the ability to do at once. I finished the bulk of the work by mid January and was able to double back to the Greek inclusions that I had originally planned to cut, re-translate some of them into Latin, and add those back in as well. It was fully completed by January 23rd. I am so thrilled with how this piece turned out. Early days of working on it, especially with the issues with various writing implements, were really discouraging and I doubted more than once whether or not I was going to be able to get it done. I can confidently say that calligraphy is not something I need to do on a regular basis but I’m happy to be able to talk more in depth about this aspect of my persona. I did end up realizing I left out a major section of documentation for the commonplace book, and that was on the rise of humanism in Spain, so I spent some time making sure that was also adequately addressed.
With both of those items finished and still a couple days left in the month, I started cutting and dyeing the pieces for the chapines. There were a couple more tools needed (a leather hole punch) and some strategizing for how to get the leather tooled, sewn, and formed in one fell swoop so it didn’t dry out of shape. I did do some testing with the previously dyed and tooled piece to see if re-wetting it after tooling was sufficient to get it workable for shaping in case they need to be done in separate working sessions too. I was able to make more progress than expected on the stamping, only to realize a critical misunderstanding about the construction AFTER I had already ruined all the work put into that stamping. Going into February, I know I’ll need to put some serious hours into this project to get it done though right now, having to revisit design concepts is making me feel kind of defeated.
We did have one other major casualty this month- my dress form. Her service over the last 4 years was valiant, but given that she came to me previously loved and entirely made up of plastic hardware, I wasn’t exactly surprised when she kicked the bucket. The hunt for a replacement continues, but it does mean that I have an easy answer of how to display the gonete outfit for Pentathlon. Since I cannot show it on a body form, I’ll be wearing it myself as long as the coordinators and judges see no reason to object. I was able to make some updates to existing clothes (a cofia and a camisa) so that they work better with this outfit. I think a future state project for this might be exploring both headwear and chest coverings though. I noticed when working on the data for the outfit that many of the women are wearing either a wimple or partlet and I’d love to fully complete the accurate outfit. One of my two inspiration pictures has an adorable little tubular black veil situation going on that I’m pretty enamored with that I might attempt (seen to the right). Her blue gonete, with its shoulder strap situation is also really interesting to me so I may expand a bit from my current outfit to add this one too.
The last weekend in January, once my two in progress Pentathlon items were complete, was spent finalizing my University materials for my electronic A&S class. I’m hopeful this will be a useful class for the attendees. Balancing the huge amount of possibility and tools available with making it manageable is a somewhat more daunting task than I anticipated but hopefully this class will be successful in that end. I’m addressing both design aspects of online A&S as well as documentation itself.
And so, my goals for February are:
Finish the chapines
Finish Pentathlon documentation.
