Sometimes, life cries out to imitate art. By which I mean that I saw this painting and my entire brain started screaming, “WANT!” And so, I did. The inspiration for this outfit is the painting below, “Saint Felix Preaching” by Joan de Burgunya, 1520, Esglesia de Sant Feliu de Girona.

This whole outfit has been an amazing labor of love. It began a year ago (in August of 2021) as an almost completely different idea than what ended up happening in actuality. I have this sari- it’s a beautiful periwinkle with multi-metallic embellishments- that I envisioned using for this dress. In order to prove concept before I cut into my special fabric, I decided to make a test run. I figured if I’m going to put in all this work on a tester, it might as well be one I want to wear too. This mentality proved to be both a blessing and a curse because I fell absolutely in love with my proof of concept and ended up taking it much further than intended and completed the project.

To say that I love how this turned out might be the understatement of the year. I adore this dress. I think it is incredibly flattering, elegant, and achieves the feel it should. Additionally, I love how something as simple as solid lines can be such a powerful embellishment on a garment. This dress was a nice dress before I added the embroidery. After I added the embroidery, the dress is striking. I love how the jewelry and neckline of the camisa pop, as does my apprentice belt. I don’t think I’m ever going to be a veil person, but honestly, it also looks good with my heavier hood and I bet it would look lovely with a rollo too.

The outfit in the painting has a lot of moving pieces, each with its own questions and challenges. Disclaimer: this started off as one post discussing each of these elements but that was LONG, so I’ve split it up into multiple posts.

1. A blackwork camisa with what appears to be two rows of blackwork applied to a band that holds the gathered neckline in place.

2. The voluminous yellow saya with two part sleeves, a waist-line hidden by the equally voluminous arms, and stripes down the bodice, arms, and skirt.

3. Headwear (link to the post here):

   -A square linen cofia that is held in place by something black that may or may not be contiguous with the black ribbon that holds the tranzado.

   -A very sheer velo with a heavy gold front band, possibly pinned into place onto the cofia below.

4. Jewelry (link to the post here):

   -A metallic headpiece that appears to stay in place by sheer force of will and good posture.

   -A gold and pearl choker necklace

   -A rectangular gold necklace on a dark ribbon that is likely a religious icon.

5. A long black belt with a glorious tassel on the end. This is the one piece of this outfit I chose not to make. I have my apprentice belt and that is more than adequate for me.

6. Very probably chopines or other platform shoes as seen on the woman next to her in black. These are in process, and are going to be part of a Persona Pentathlon entry in 2023.

The Green Saya

The first element I began was the dress itself. Because I was beginning with what I believed at the time to be a proof of concept, I did not want to start on the little things only to find the main piece did not work. I made a few design choices here that merit discussion:

First, I gave this garment a waist-seam. The sheer volume of the skirt and the sharp bunching at her back (which admittedly, could be caused by a stool) led me to believe that this was the way forward. The trade off was that doing so made the later applique of the skirt ribbons much more challenging. However, a pleated waist allowed for an incredible amount of fullness that I believe I would have struggled to achieve seamlessly with the size or quantity of gores this dress needed. Also I just hate gores.

Second, I assembled all the constituent pieces of this dress individually. This means the bodice, both parts of each sleeve, and the skirt were fully constructed before I assembled them. This made for finishing each piece and pleating it very easy (each of the sleeves also has some pleats for ease of fitting). If I had been really smart, I would have completed each piece and added all of the embroidered embellishments onto those pieces first and THEN assembled the complete dress. Alas, I was not that smart, and so I assembled each piece, then pieced the dress together, and finished with the embroidery. The sleeves, being unlined and having the bottom portion detachable, were fairly easy. The bodice and skirt were a challenge to say the least. That skirt is effectively a 108” wide circle with two layers of fabric. It is heavy and bulky and adding the ribbon made it even more so. Maneuvering that skirt in order to apply that much applique to both a bodice and then having to do so over the pleats was not the smartest plan.

Thirdly, I made cut the lower sleeves at an angle, thinking the additional weight of a camisa in them as well as the tie on locations to the upper portion of the sleeves would smooth out that juncture. I was not correct. These look a little blockier than I would like, and the fact that the fabric is fairly stiff doesn’t help their cause. However, that’s small peanuts all things considered.

The dress itself is constructed out of 9 yards of Kona cotton and 1/2 yard of cotton canvas. The sleeve ties are a polyester ribbon that I have in spades that was a gift. The applique ribbons are a polyester velvet. There are a total of 63 pieces of ribbon applique in 5, 16, and 50 mm widths. I purchased a total of 25 yards of trim and do not have much spare left over.

The embroidery wore on me and it definitely reached the point where I had to budget the spoons I had for completing it while balancing with other projects. I definitely think that the previously mentioned division of “make Part A, embellish Part A, make Part B…” and so on would mitigate some of that.

With these considerations in mind, and the fact that I still have the original sari that inspired this recreation to begin with, I’m probably going to end up making another one of these dresses. There are women with similar styles of embellishment on their sayas in this painting that I would love to reference as well, so it won’t be an exact copy of the original. Particularly there is this woman in a red dress (pictured to the left) with similar striping but a different sleeve shape and some interesting stuff happening at her neckline. I also really love that here the trim is gold, basically the reverse color pallet of our lady in yellow, but with similar design elements that would make the items cohesive. It is also very possible, given the black at the neckline, that the red dress is in fact a brial over a saya and that’s a very interesting route to be considered as well.

The Camisa

The camisa for this outfit was actually the last thing I ended up making. I had a few ideas for how I wanted to approach it and could not decide which I wanted to pick. An album of this camisa can be found here.

The first idea was to go the route of making the camisa as I normally do and gathering everything into an unadorned neckband, then applying embroidery over the gathered stitches. This is very possibly what the painting indicates. There is very little definition of where her skin starts and the camisa ends except for the two rows of black lines at its edge. However, I thought that doing it this way would really challenge getting the crisp corner we see where the front piece and the sleeve of the camisa connect. That might be an uninformed opinion, and I would gladly learn otherwise, but in my experience, that sharp corner indicates a neckband of some sort.

The next possibility is that the small black lines extending down from the edge embroidery are further designs going down the body of the camisa. We do see stripes of embroidery going down the body and sleeves in both Spain and Italy in this time period. If the embroidery was applied to the front piece before that piece was gathered into a neckline, these indeterminate lines would likely be possible. Furthermore, the lines going into the bodice area occur at regular intervals, indicating some sort of even spacing. I’ve indicated these lines in the picture above for reference.

These considerations produce two things I’ve never tried before on my Spanish kit: an embroidered applied neckline and embroidered body pieces. I decided to tackle one of these at a time, and started with an embroidered neckline.

I will admit that this is where I started to take some creative liberties. I did not just want to do two straight lines, as that seemed boring. I consulted a favorite resource of mine, The Geometry of Hand-Sewing, and chose to do a Woven Double Herringbone stitch for this collar. It produces a line of embroidery that is thick enough and has a defined upper and lower edge, like the painting. I did mine in black and gold, for a little bit of pop, and to tie in the warmer tones of the jewelry.

I call this piece my Herringbone Camisa in my August recap post and discuss it a bit further there. First, I cut and ironed the neckline to fully enclose the gathers like I usually do. Then, using a ruler, I drew out the grid for the embroidery. I began with the black herringbone and when that was done I wove the yellow into it. You can see the reference pages in the album of how I did this stitch.

After the neckline was done, I assembled my camisa the way I usually do. There are two large rectangular pieces for the front and back, two slightly smaller rectangular pieces for the sleeves, and four right triangle gores connecting them. The seams are done in a running stitch and then flat felled and the hems are all rolled/whipped hems.

I am very please with this piece for a first try. I would like to get a better scale of the neckband in proportion to the embroidery next time. I think there is a little too much space on the neck side of the band.

For my next iteration, I plan to do both an embroidered neck band and embroidery down the body. While I still need to do some digging, I believe both the front and back panels would have been embroidered in this case, and possibly the sleeves as well. There is one piece at the Met I’m thinking of in particular that this reminds me of. Alternatively, the Salome camisa that I’ve done test runs of has the embroidery bands down the sleeves, but we see no part of the body of her camisa to place them there.