Kaftan and leveling up in weaving complexity

Last year, preparing for War took a great deal of effort. I had enough kit for weekend events at most, and in moderate to cold weather. Great Western War would be five days long and hot, which meant I needed to make more garb pieces, and prepare for heat. This is before counting the dozen-Hedeby-bag project.

This year, going to West-An Tir War, my goals were much more modest. All my old gear still worked, so I wanted to have a new piece of showy garb. I already had a section of diamond twill linen from Woolsome.shop, and patterns from my winter kaftan, so putting one of those together would be easy. The hard part would be the four yards of tablet weaving necessary to trim it out.

 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A-II-2_guldgubber_depicting_a_man.jpg

For the kaftan itself, I went for the simple bathrobe-style wrap coat, as depicted on carvings. I did a couple of muslins to check the fit, since I wanted to use my more tailored, newer sleeve pattern, but didn’t know how the length of a tunic pattern would interact with the different body panels from the kaftan pattern. The kaftan pattern, being older, didn't necessarily have the same width body panels as my tunics, and the different handling of the neckline meant that the fabric around the shoulders might behave differently. 

 

The old pattern was for a multilayered coat, and all the pieces I could find were for the layer marked “B.” Was that the outside, inside, middle… who knows, past me didn’t think to write that down. Or maybe I did, on the layer marked A. Maybe I figured it would be obvious when I held the pieces up to each other and one was slightly larger; either way, with no comparison, a muslin was the only way to be sure. The new kaftan would only be one layer of a fairly breezy fabric, so I would only need to match the lining for size. Then I needed to verify if I still needed gores and make sure the neckline was adequate.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/473159504599083340/

 

My old coat left the back of the neck as a straight cut, since I wanted the collar to rise up and give coverage from weather, and then the inner front panel was shaped differently than the outer. This was partially to close off the neck more, and partially to emulate the bottom center museum illustration, which seemed to show both panels at different angles. The new one warranted carving out the back of the collar for aesthetics, and also adding a couple of inches of straight vertical before starting the angled edge. This would give me a closer fit around the back and sides of my neck, which I prefer for sun protection.

I also reduced the bottom width of the front panels, as I had made a realization during fabric layout: I had purchased my usual 3m of fabric for making a tunic. A normal tunic doesn’t have two huge front panels, so I would have to be judicious about my fabric use.

When I reached my final muslin, I was close enough that I knew the result would be wearable, so I made it from one of my old linen bedsheets that got damaged in the wash. This received some Pom Pom and tacky flamingo trim, and I wore it for the Selviergard Spring Offensive Ball.

Many thanks to Kinehild for the loan of a serger for this project. The diamond check linen is a fairly open weave to begin with, and then it’s also linen, so it prefers to violently fly apart if left unattended.

My initial plan for the weaving was a fairly wide, simple double face pattern consisting of long, solid rectangles. The idea was that it would have been easy to make, but unusual for either tablet or inkle patterns. But, as I was looking through my pattern books, I realized that it was a very unusual opportunity to have more than eighteen inch length to show off, and wouldn’t it be cool if I did the Skjoldehamn ankle bands, which was the final pattern in my current favorite book. So I cursed my hubris and started warping in my spare time at work, strewing linen thread across most of the lunchroom. 

 

 

The ensuing pattern was six pages long, took thirty inches per repeat, and took a week to weave one of those patterns. Getting confident near the end, I could shave a day off that, but there’s still only about six, maybe seven repeats.

 

At the very end of the band, I dropped the end of my weaving frame half off the table, which this time broke my frame apart. I tried to use the surviving parts to backstrap weave, but that simply broke the front. So, that was where that particular band ended. 

 

 

Post wash, I ended up with 12 feet of weaving, with just enough left after trimming to have most of a repeat to show off as a sample.

 

 

The complexity of the band let the ends match up really well without any particular effort on my part. I keep the trim seam offset from the sleeve seam so that I'm not stacking the multiple thicknesses of everything in the same place and ending up with a massive thick spot. Even though this band only has two threads per card and is thus rather supple, it's still a much thicker thread than the fabric it's attached to, so folding the ends under creates a lot of bulk.

 

 

Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out. Given a little more room in the fabric, or less snaggy material, I might have made it a little longer, but it's super comfortable as a single layer, and it breathes fantastically.