An understated 1930s heroine's wardrobe

 

A look in the calendar informed me it's the nameday for Erna (a pretty unusual name in Czechia), which makes this the perfect day to post about Erna Ženíšková's wardrobe in Děvčata, nedejte se! (1937).

It's a 1930s film with shenanigans: Here, a single mother starting in a new job temporarily deposits her baby with her no-good former partner who is so no-good that he immediately puts his own baby daughter in his neighbour's room to get rid of her, and skips town. Said neighbour is a good-hearted teacher who is just about to head out to his new job at a girls' boarding school, also in a different town... and because he's good-hearted, he won't leave the accidentally acquired baby behind. Hijinks ensue. The baby acquires a schoolful of young "mothers"; the teacher acquires a young admirer, but then also, ultimately, a prospective wife to go with the baby. The baby acquires a father and her mother acquires a far more responsible if rather scatterbrained prospective husband.

The whole film's now legally free on YouTube, courtesy of the Czech National Film Archive. It was already previously there temorarily during lockdowns, in what I understand was probably some sort of lockdowns measure?, which is how a couple years ago I found out that I LOVE what Erna Ženíšková was wearing there.

And that I want that dress.

My understanding of what's going on here is that there's a centre front seam. There are darts going down from the shoulders, hiding behind the collar here - shoulder darts seem to be the standard solution at this point in time. The bottom of the bodice appears to be bloused. There's definitely a waist seam. I'm not sure if there are or aren't darts in the skirt. The dress has a side opening on the right, where the belt closes with two shank buttons.

The skirt appears to be fairly narrow but not too restrictive, although my screengrabs fail to convey that properly. Maybe bias-cut?

And the collar exists only in the front.

The sleeve heads have only a slight puff, and there are darts there.

 

Plus there's that thin line of white at the sleeves that, in an understated way, ties it all together.

It's like an upgraded Little Black Dress, and I love it. I do wonder if the white parts might be made interchangeable, snapping in, so that it's a proper LBD that you can change the look of with accessories?

It looks very similar - though it's not identical - to this vintage pattern, which gives me those interchangeable accessories ideas:

I found this image here. If anyone knows which pattern this actually is, please let me know!

Erna's also wearing a sweater in the film! This is, in fact, her first appearance.

 

Actually I think it's a cardigan... there appears to be an overlap at the hem here...

 

I don't really see any obvious buttons and buttonholes in my screengrabs, though. Not enough detail. :-(

In any case it's quite fitted, shaped largely by being ribbed, and I think the basic construction could just as easily be applied to a sweater. And I love that it goes a bit further down the hips than many other 1930s knits. A practical garment for an active person!

The skirt she wears in this first scene is another thing I'd love to recreate - it appears to be a simple flared gored number.

Not sure if this is the same skirt or a different one:

I think that might be another knitted jumper? With a lacy collar.

And that's all there is from her! I also love the storytelling in her clothes - I showed it out of order, but she starts out with the very simple cardigan-and-skirt combo, as someone almost at the end of her rope. Later on, already getting on her own two feet with a new job, she has more confidence which shows in the more spiffy, put-together number - we can perhaps imagine she bought that lacy collar to spice up her existing outfits. Then, when she goes to the school to find her daughter, she's obviously put on her very best clothes to present herself in the best possible light.

Erna wasn't a big name actress, in fact I think she wasn't an actress at all - her sister Marie was. And in this film the big-name actress was Adina Mandlová, who's in a greater part of the film. But Erna is "the endgame". :D She was the mother of the baby who got cast, and in the end she got cast in the role of the struggling single mother herself.

It's entirely possible that the clothes she's wearing in the film are her own... What struck me about them, and what I fell in love with, is the fact they're quite understated and practical. Not the usual 1930s film heroine look. These are 1930s clothes I can picture myself wearing!!!

(Well... aside from the greater number of buttons. Koumpounophobia.)

Obviously I don't have Erna's willowy figure; but a big part of what I find alluring about these clothes is that with the appropriate adjustments for fit and proportions they'd probably look good on just about anyone.

Plus I love, love, love her everyday-person hairstyles!

And her winning smile that also won over our good-hearted hero.

Seriously, though, that dress. I have a very very dark navy lightweight worsted wool earmarked for it. It's happening! I don't know when, but it's happening.

I think Victorian corsets are in fact still conical stays

Technically. At least some of them.

This is, sort of, a follow up on my last post, and sort of a follow up on an older one that preceded it. A while ago I posted about this 1840s corset from the Met Museum, and how, when I broke it down to pattern pieces and looked at the grainlines, it reminded me of J.S. Bernhardt's Fig. F pattern.

Corset, American or European, 1839-1841, silk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ID: C.I.38.23.10b-d

Well, now that I've looked at Bernhardt's book and not just Sabine's Short Stays Studies...

Nevermind Fig. F; look at Fig. B!

It has exactly the vertical seaming over the bust that certain mid-19th century corsets like the one above do. Also, hip gusset in the back.

Compare Fig. B to my rough draft of the Met corset:

 

Divide the back pieces of Fig. B differently - cut at the "i" hip gusset slit that's closer to the front and incorporate the gusset itself into the back piece (notice that that particular spot lies around the underarm line both in Bernhardt's draft and mine!) - and change the remaining tabs into a large hip-hugging gusset; raise it over the bust a bit... You've got yourself a mid-19th century corset!

Of course the pattern pieces are tilted slightly differently in my rough draft, because I wasn't drafting it on a conical plane. And in fact, I think the grainlines are the main difference between Bernhardt and the later corset - Bernhardt, or at least Sabine according to him, lays it out with the centre back on the grain and everything else fanning out from there, with the centre front almost on true bias. The 1840s corset also has the centre back on grain, but the tilt of centre front is more akin to its tilt on the draft itself, as if you left the draft as is and just rotated the back pieces so that they are on grain... 

On the other hand, though, if we consider Bernhardt-style stays as a precursor, it suddenly makes a lot of sense why a lot of Victorian corsets cut the side pieces tilted, on bias! Which otherwise comes rather out of nowhere if you're instead looking at them as a direct descendant of straight-cut Regency stays.

Fairly randomly chosen 1878 US corset patent from haabet.dk

All in all, it's fairly clear to me that if I started out with a conical block a la Bernhardt, it would actually be way easier to get exactly the results I need for this particular style - I would have far less counter-intuitive places to do subtracting of empty spaces in. The conical draft already wraps around the body the way you want it to and accounts for its non-rectangular nature; you just cut it up into sections where you need to and take it in so that it really hugs the body and supports the bust. Does that make sense?

Like so:

 

It's a quick and dirty draft and I forgot a couple things, like taking it in in the back. But you get the idea. One day I'll do it properly; it's pretty clear to me now that I will have to. :D

A teeny tiny detail, but even the fact the hip gusset is cut on bias now falls into place for me - it seems many late 18th century stays cut them that way.

Ergo: Victorian corsets are still conical stays!

But that's not all! There's another fun image to support my working theory!

The working theory is that professional staymakers continued cutting things the way they knew, and just kept gradually updating the styles. That the straight-cut gussetted columnal stays we think of as Regency stays, that we think of as the direct precursor to Victorian corsets, are, in fact... well, not an evolutionary dead end, I think they may well have contributed something. But it seems to me it makes a lot more sense if they contributed less than we think. I think that the picture will be more complete if we think of it as Victorian corsets having at least two ancestors, not just one. That all the experimentation of the long Regency era resulted in the subsequent designs picking up features from all over the place.

Which brings me to the aforementioned another image. This is a detail from a satirical print from 1823:

"Painting"´, William Heath, 1823. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Well, if that doesn't look a lot like what we consider to be 1790s transitional stays. In the 1820s! (And the picture can't be much older than its publishing date, what with her hairstyle, puffy chemise sleeves, and the dress to the left of her that I cut out from my selective image.)

I see two not immediately striking but I think very important differences in the image, compared to "transitional stays" like these:

Corset, 18th century, Met Museum, ID: C.I.41.94

One, the pronounced curve of her busk - really quite similar to the 1840s corset, especially in how it curves over the stomach instead of the more or less straight belly line of 18th century stays.

Two, the fact the bust cups do not look gathered but smooth.

Somewhat like these:

Corset/stays, dated to 1820s-1840s, Glasgow Museums, ID: E.1948.31.a

 I am currently aware of three 19th century corsets / stays with smooth cups of this sort - the Glasgow example above stands out among them by having seamed cups (really they seem quite similar to a modern bra), likely to accommodate a larger bust. Three still isn't much, but it already is more than the one I knew of years ago, and goes to show that this was, in fact, a Thing. The third one is in the Czech National Museum, was featured in Stays, or a Corset?, and unfortunately has no online presence that I know of. It also has fully corded cups, in a diagonal pattern that I am tempted to say I am seeing in the Heath print, but I think what's actually happening in the print is simply shading.

The three extants are all, more or less, stays of the columnal style, so seeing it done on the conical plane in this picture is super-interesting. And it supports my theory that there was a lot of experimentation and variety going on in the first half of the 19th century, the styles were by no means set in stone, and they did not necessarily conform to our modern ideas of what was happening when.

A pattern for the stays in the print could basically be achieved by combining Bernhardt's Fig. B/Fig. D with the bust cutouts of his Fig. C - although, based on comparison to the pattern draft of the stays from the Czech National Museum, you should probably make the cutouts a bit narrower and deeper - there needs to be a busk in the centre front going all the way up, and since there are bust cups in the cutouts, the bottom should likely reach the bottom of the gusset slit:

So, yeah. This patchwork of styles apparently existed. Or at least likely existed - we still have to keep in mind it's a satirical print. But since the stays don't seem to be being satirised and therefore don't seem overly exaggerated, and they show quite a lot of detail that actually makes sense in the larger context of early 19th century corsetry, I think the likelihood of them being a complete fabrication is low. Tabs in 1823 are a bit surprising, but the bust cups are not, and thirteen years earlier Bernhardt did include tabbed drafts in his book and apparently said one could and should mix and match according to taste. So... there definitely is more to corsetry of the first half of the 19th century than we used to think.

It makes a lot of sense to me that, as there began to be more emphasis on the natural waistline again, at least some staymakers simply returned to cutting stays the way that worked for that. They just added the experience gained from Regency styles to it - such as a greater reliance just on the cut of the fabric for bust support, as opposed to fully boning the stays and/or packing them with strength layers. And using gussets in more places than just the back hip.

Throughout the long Regency period there had been old-fashioned ladies who still preferred the old smooth cut of stays over the bust gussets (Bernhardt also mentions as much in 1810). And people in more remote, rural areas had not made the switch so swiftly - sometimes never. (Czech folklore collectors noted / recorded that fashions could take up to about twenty or twenty-five years - basically a generation - to filter down to regional dress more remote from urban centres at that point in history, and that's just talking about the elements of fashion that did filter down into it.)

The period of raised waistlines was not so long that all the old staymakers would have died out and taken their knowledge to the grave. It's not a breach and a complete change, it's a gradual evolution.

It actually possibly continues all the way to the Edwardian era, when we once again get an openly conical design with the "Corset Radical" that I did a Deciphering post on years ago:

Corset "Radical", Federer & Piesen, Prague, c. 1905. The Museum of Decorative Arts Prague, ID: 104484

One of the joys of my nerdy existence is that someone has actually made a corset like that since then!

Again, US patent from haabet.dk

Now that I have the idea of a basic conical block to compare it to, this design makes even more sense. I wonder how exactly A. P. McGraw (or Federer & Piesen?) arrived at it? Even if it was not through a conical block, I think my ideas of creating one could easily be applied to it...

More on those ideas later, I hope.

Deciphering Historical Clothes: A c. 1840 corset & Drafting a pattern from photos

I've been stuck at home with a flu for over a week. After the first couple of days when I really felt awful, I now feel mostly okay except for a bit of a cough, a bit of a temperature and the fact any sort of physical activity tires me very quickly.
So I'm stuck mostly sitting down and trying to invent ways not to go crazy with boredom and do something more productive at least with my mind.

Which in Marmotaland sooner or later means DECIPHERING HISTORICAL CLOTHES.

I have corsetry on my mind, what with deciding that I need to make myself new Regency stays (my size has changed so much that I eventually figured out altering my old ones was probably more trouble than it was worth, alas). Along the line, I got to wondering about some 1830s-1840s corsets without bust gussets (I always have the 1840s low-key in my mind because the discontinued kacabajka adventures hang over me), and that led me to this c. 1840 corset in the Met.

Atelier Nostalgia (who has recreated it and whose blog post directed my attention back to this particular one) noted that it has no bust gussets. Which she says was unusual but I think it was actually quite common at that particular point in time and soon ceased to be so for some unknown reason - plenty of the c. 1830s corsets are simple "princess seamed" affairs. She also noted that the museum helpfully provided lots of detailed photos.

Those photos are, of course, ideal for deciphering.

Behold my usual messy colour-coded pictures:

Blue is for seamlines between pattern pieces.
Purple is for boning and the front busk.
Red is for the very narrow boning channels which may involve narrow baleen (is it possible to make baleen so narow? I have no idea), or cording, or even reed - which you can totally still use in Victorian corsets! To which this 1863 patent by Lavinia H. Foy attests with this sentence: "Rattan and whalebone strips can be inserted in the usual manner..."
Green is for grainlines. Sorry for making it so pale; I didn't want to cover the details underneath too much with all my scribblings, and went a bit overboard on the transparency. It should be easier to see in the full size. (What's not accounted for in my pictures and what I did eventually figure out is that the front hip gusset is also cut on bias. I am still not entirely sure about the back gusset but I think it might be on straight of grain.)

The corset is made from satin, which is a beast for determining grainlines even in real life, let alone in photos. Luckily, some of the photos are VERY detailed, allowing me to make a better guess, especially because in some places the fabric is a bit worn, which exposes the yarns more and makes it less of a quesswork. Also the lining (see additional photos at the museum site) is plainweave, which also helps; although I think the lining doesn't quite match the outer, it does more or less correspond to it.

What struck me was that the centre front was not cut on straight of grain, and neither was the side piece - leading my train of thought straight back to my Regency stays enterprise and the Bernhardt stays, specifically Fig. F.


There are definite similarities between this corset and the Bernhardt stays when you look closely (aside from the aforementioned, the hip flare is basically just an addition to bring the corset lower down the hips). That got me so excited about this corset as a possible sort of missing link between Regency and Victorian styles that I went ahead and roughly drafted out the pattern for myself in Inkscape, more or less following the principles lined out in Cathy Hay's Corset Making Revolution article. (ETA Nov 2020: Sorry, that's no longer available. The Foundations Revealed website has changed the way it works and there are no free articles now.)

And it worked.

Well, obviously I haven't made a mock-up yet. But my experiment did yield a pattern that looks like a good starting point for that. It's also similar to this possibly early 1850s corset on the Abiti Antichi site (which still has shoulder straps and on the other hand seems to have some sort of proto-opening-busk), so it's probably a very good basic style for the 1840s mid-19th century.

But more than that, as Atelier Nostalgia also noted, it's also a style that you can find it later corsets as well. And not just the 1850s. It looks surprisingly similar in principle to a couple corset patterns in patents from the 1860s and 1870s on the Haabet site.

And, from my browsing of museum collections, it also looks like a style that, with slight variations, carried all the way to the 1880s. Most 1880s corsets tend to have wider fronts, though, and are usually more along the lines of the gussetted or princess-line corsets you can find in commercial patterns. But you can still see elements of this sort of construction even in some later corsets.

1870s-1890s corset from the Tasha Tudor colelction sold by Augusta Auction

The difference being mostly the fact later corsets have opening front busks, cross-lacing, and tend not to go so low on the hips. Many of them also utilise bust gussets instead of the bust seams of this particular style.

All this basically means I've developed a method of drafting a certain kind of Victorian corset pattern that can work, with various alterations, for a period of about 50 years from the end of the 1830s to 1880s! It's different enough from the commercial patterns I'm aware of, and yet ubiquitous enough in museum collections that I think I really hit on something here.

This is what I eneded up with. It will still nead fine-tuning, especially in the underbust area, but it's definitely a workable start.
(The exclamation mark on the left means my division of the waist is imprecise because what I really needed was decimal point numbers and I couldn't do those quite so easily in Inkscape without changing the grid - which is a bother, so I'll get around to that in paper stage. Basically at this point there is zero waist reduction and I think there needs to be at least a little bit of it.
The exclamation mark at the front hip gusset means that particular seamline is in serious need of truing - and the hip gusset will need some slashing-and-squishing after I get around to altering the waist.)


In order not to make this post too long (more than it already is), winding and difficult to navigate, and in order to make it easier to make stuff linkable (I'm not flattering myself to think this will be linked, am I?), I will eventually put the whole drafting method for this particular style in a separate post, probably after I've had a chance to make a mock-up and really see how well it works. Although now that I have shared an actual flat pattern draft, I guess you could also just apply Cathy Hay's method to it without waiting for the next post. :D

And when I get around to physically drafting this pattern, I'll definitely do some sort of further pictorial comparison between it and the Bernhardt Fig. F to prove my point. It's not quite immediately obvious - especially because the distribution of seams is a bit different - and I don't think I'd have thought of it had I not been drafting the Regency stays just before. But that front dip, slight bias in the front and bias on the side (also just slight in the Bernhardt stays) did make me wonder. If you lengthened the two back pieces and the front tip of Fig. F, and introduced hip gussets, you would get something approaching the 1840 stays and all those subsequent styles!

What I will share here regarding the drafting is this: I knew, instinctively, that this drafting method might work because I've done it before with my first Regency stays. I looked at lots of photos of extants. Focused on seamlines and where they sit on the body. Drew myself some technical drawings. And drafted the thing in a grid following my own measurements in a method similar to what Cathy Hay does - except that I used a lot more measurements to make sure it really fitted me.

So yes, this can totally be done just from photos - as long as they are decent quality and you have more than just one view. Look where the seamlines sit on the body. Find the underarm line (3 in my plan below). Find the waistline (C) and underbust line (B - in this case it's a lower underbust). Figure out the grainlines. Go from there.

In this particular case, I was lucky because the museum even provided a flat photo, so I could use that as my rough starting point for a flat plan (and use some common sense to account for the distortion).

If you don't have a flat photo - I didn't for my Regency stays, both because there aren't that many online in the first place and because the stays were an amalgam of many individual garments - draw yourself a sort of gridded flat plan first, not bothering with exact measurements for now. Make several such plans if it helps you to make sure you understand how it goes together.

And then you fine-tune that plan with actual measurements. Make your default horizontal lines the length of the biggest measurement of the main pattern pieces (excluding gussets), minus your preferred lacing gap, and go from there, leaving gaps where your other horizontal measurements are smaller. Or (like Cathy Hay) go with the bust, overlapping your pattern pieces in places where you're bigger (hips).

Meaning that for this particular corset - with its bust seams - I went with the bust measurement for my horizontal lines (and added the gussets for my hip / upper hip measurement, which is slightly bigger than my bust). For my Regency stays, I went with the underbust (because I was using both bust and hip gussets and really needed them to fit snugly at the underbust).

If you're drawing on paper, it may help to start with a scaled down pattern (in pencil!) to see at one glance if you're really going in the right direction. Your scaled down first draft can also double as a draft for your boning layout. (Or do it like I did now and draft your pattern in a grid in Inkscape or similar vector graphics program - that has the advantage of allowing you to correct mistakes cleanly, including the "back" function.)
That draft is your first dry run. It will help you catch any mistakes and things you forgot to take into account before you draft full-scale on paper. (There will totally be mistakes and things you forgot to take into account. On my first run through this pattern, I completely forgot to take into account the bust-to-waist difference in the back, and the fact you want your corset to dip in the underarm area. Among other things.)

And even then, always make mock-ups. :-)


You could apply the method to other items of clothing as well, but what with them not sitting close to the body like a corset does, and involving things like pleats and gathers and sleeves, that will involve even more trial-and-error. But it can totally be done, as Sabine of Kleidung um 1800 and Bránn both demonstrate. Especially if you start with something simpler like an apron, and something in a patterned fabric like a check that makes it easier to determine pattern shapes.

So that's my five cents concerning drafting from photos. And 1840s corsets. Some people seem to think the 1840s are boring. I hope I've just proven they're far from that.

HSM 18 Inspiration: #8 Extant Originals

The Historical Sew Monthly challenge for August 2018 is Extant Originals: Copy an extant historical garment as closely as possible.

First and foremost, we would like to encourage you to simply give it a go - have fun with it, make that garment you love, find a garment you love, get yourself something you will love wearing. This post - fair warning, it is quite long - tries to compile further guidelines and advice if you want to up your game and do your best.
Sometimes, the idea of doing that may seem just like a very unrealistic dream: for example, I love this c. 1790 silk jacket from Severočeské muzeum in Liberec to bits, but I have not yet come across a good modern version of those late rococo silk brocades with scattered flower bouquets.

With this inspiration post, I would like to guide you towards finding a realistic and perfectly doable version of that dream. You may have to start small, but small steps can eventually lead to a full historical outfit.

Right up front, I’d better clarify what exactly we mean by “extant historical garment” and “as close as possible”.
We certainly don’t insist you actually find a historical garment to physically hold and study and copy exactly. What we want you to do is what many of you already do – find a picture, preferably more pictures, of a garment in a museum collection or on a trusted auction site, and make a garment for yourself (or a family member / friend) that looks as close as possible to it.
(If you’re lucky enough to have physical access to your chosen item, or have an heirloom / personal collection item from the HSM time range you can recreate, that’s a plus but by no means a requirement.)

“As close as possible” is definitely, at least to a certain extent, up to you and your circumstances, just like the historical accuracy of your HSM entries is to a certain extent up to you. If you have not yet, read Leimomi’s post on the various ways of approaching historical accuracy – that alone may help clear some things up.

1790s silk taffetta jacket, Abiti Antichi.

I love this one equally as much, and solid-coloured silks are easier to find. (Although I actually have other plans for this challenge, the comparison serves as a good example.)

What we would like to see with this challenge in particular, however, is a greater attention to the pattern shapes, techniques and details that make a historical garment historical – try to really recreate the construction, the seamlines and trimmings, and get inspired by garments genuinely worn in the period rather than prints and paintings (although those may also offer you insights the extants alone cannot).

#CoBloWriMo 8: Vocabulary - Moravian-Wallachian clothing items

It's time for some explanation of terms for things to come.

And things not to come, at least not any time soon. This post is also a bit of a stand-in for the Historical Sew Monthly August theme of "Ridiculous." I have the ridiculous thing - I'm just not going to make it now.

This was the first historical image of Moravian-Wallachian folk costumes I ever came across, in Langhammerová, Jiřina: Dějiny odívání - Lidové kroje z České Republiky, Lidové noviny, Prague 2001. Annotations are mine.

Some things are fairly obvious; šátek is šátek (kerchief) everywhere, one learned about the shirt called rukávce, the bodice / vest called kordulka, the apron aka fěrtoch, one even knows of the traditional leather shoes - krpce (though I only learned the socks worn into them are called kopytce later).

What left me puzzled was the woman's leg- and footwear. I thought the author was applying some artistic license there. It looked ridiculous.

Years later, I found out he did not use artistic license; when I came across the book Lidová oděvní kultura by Alena Jeřábková (Masarykova univerzita, Brno 2014). In there, I finally learned more about Wallachian folk costumes in history. And that the black things on her legs were a special kind of stockings, called ubírané punčochy.

They were made of dark wool (not just black), originally cloth, later knitted, and they were very, very long. And then gathered / scrunched up, and felted, like so.

It's part of the reason I'm not going to make them: I have nothing to gather and felt them on. (The other reason is: ridiculous. And not worn with the folk costume anymore nowadays, so it would be just a historical experiment I don't have time for right now.)

The shoes are also correct, if slightly distorted. They are called střívjata, which I believe is just a dialectism for the general Czech střevíce. They are made of wool broadcloth, with latchets that don't overlap and tie with ribbon (which is what those blue bits are in the picture) or cord, and an often long tongue that folds over the top of the shoe.

Like so:

These are from Valašské Klobouky; photo was snapped by me at an exhibition of Moravian folk costumes in the chateau in Strážnice.

These are from Luhačovické Zálesí - a region that lies between Wallachia and Slovácko, both geographically and style-wise - the folk costumes are very similar to some Wallachian regions, so I guess it's a bit difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The picture is from a visual guide to that exhibition in Strážnice.

Deciphering Historical Clothes: Czech wristwarmers from the 1880s

The HSM theme for March is Protection. Looking through my pins of Czech historical garments, I was left uninspired in that regard. (I try to focus on Czech collections in this series now, because it's a good way for me to study and showcase my own country's history!) Until I remembered an item I'd already wracked my head about, an item that protects from cold, so it fits the theme beautifully. Even more so because we've got snow now! Makes my plans of finishing a straw hat or covering an umbrella / parasol kind of less attractive than taking up my needles...

Yep, I'm doing a different thing this time around: I'm looking at a knit garment. Well, an accessory of a super-simple not-shaped kind; but made interesting with lots of colours.

Apologies to my non-knitting readers, and a warm welcome to those who knit. :-) I'm still something of a beginner intermediate in the world of knitting, but things like this inspire me to get better!

There isn't much knitting to be found in Czech online collections so far, sadly; it seems knitting, on the whole, wasn't such a big part of Czech folk culture as it tends to be in colder climates. Or at least not big enough for museum collectors to focus on it. :P But I've still found a few very interesting things (notably, Moravian Wallachian socks!). And one very, very striking thing was this pair of patterned wristwarmers that not only uses seven colours, but one of those colours is even metallic silver!

Knitted wristwarmers, wool and silver metalic thread, Czech lands, 1880s. The ethnographic collections of Národní muzeum, ID: H4-5999ab

Not a sort of thing you'd see in Moravian Wallachia, I think. The description on Esbirky unfortunately does not specify where exactly these do come from; but it does give another very helpful detail for deciphering and possible recreating: the dimensions. Cca 20 cm around and 12 cm long. I'd slate them for a woman's wristwarmers based on that, although that's obviously just a guess.

Looking at the opening in the big photo and counting very carefully, I've arrived at the tentative stitch count of 88 stitches: it seems to be somewhere in the area between 80 and 90, and it has to be divisible by four (because of the patterning). It doesn't strike you immediately from looking at the photo, but it also has to be a small gauge (and given the density of the knit, likely a combination of tiny needles and slightly thicker yarn, my favourite way to knit :D): 88 stitches in 20 cm gives me the approximate gauge of 11 stitches per inch. (<= 44 stitches per 10 cm / 4 inches)
The silver threads are somewhat thinner than the wools, and distort the knitting.

It's knitted flat: notice the seaming inside.  UPDATE MANY YEARS LATER: I'm actually not sure what I was looking at - it's just the "step" you get from joining to knit in the round and not bothering to correct for that...

Knitted wristwarmers, wool and silver metalic thread, Czech lands, 1880s. The ethnographic collections of Národní muzeum, ID: H4-5999ab

Notice also that the museum photographed one of the wristwarmers upside down. The trick to deciphering a knit garment is first and foremost looking closely and deciding where upside/downside is. Much like the grainlines in woven fabrics. In the above photo, it's the piece on the right that's upside up.

"Fair Isle" knitting is fun and easy to decipher, especially on a "flat" object like this, because you can see the individual stitches clearly and really all you have to do is chart it out... It's the purled beginnings and ends of the knitting that gave me some trouble here, and I had to resort to trying it out.

My first two-coloured attempts weren't very promising:

It actually is super simple - it's just garter stitch - but I still struggle with visualising how multi-coloured purls work... When I switched to my final mock-up in the actual colours, I still had to unravel it a few times, and as you can see, I still made a mistake in the upper section of it (it should end up looking like orange-yellow, not yellow-orange). But it's a mistake small and obvious enough for me to know how it should really go.
(My yellow is much thinner than my green and therefore distorted in that section, but it's correct.)
 

I knitted this test piece with 12 stitches, in yarns calling for cca 3 mm needles according to the maker (most of them are remnants of unknown description, though), on 2,5 mm needles, and it came out 5 cm wide, so for the original size, you'll want to go about half that...

* * *

So, here goes the pattern as deciphered. If there are any experienced knitters among you, used to English charting conventions etc., I would appreciate knowing if this makes sense to you or if you'd write/do some things differently.

If you want to knit this in the round, just knit every "wrong side" row of the garter stitch sections instead of purling them. In my experience, stranded colourwork is easier in the round; but to be historically accurate to the original, flat knitting it is. (AHEM)

Beginning in garter stitch
cast a number of stitches divisible by 4, in red (88 with a gauge of 11 st / inch for the original size)
1. (right side) purl red
2. (wrong side) purl orange
3. (r) purl orange
4. (w) purl 2 stitches in yellow, purl 2 in green, repeat
5. (r) purl 2 stitches in green, purl 2 in yellow, repeat
6. (w) purl red
7. (r) purl red
---------------------------

Stranded colourwork in stockinette
66 rows, starting on the wrong side
(The museum description says the rows of motifs repeat thrice, but they don't really, which was the original reason I tried to decipher it. :D)
Chart starts at the bottom. Grey stands for silver, obviously. The blue dots at the side indicate fifth rows, red dots indicate tenth rows, for greater ease of keeping track and count.

---------------------------

End in garter stitch
1. (w) purl red
2. (r) purl red
3. (w) purl yellow
4. (r) purl orange
5. (w) purl red
6. (r) purl bind off in red

* * *

In case you are wondering, I made the chart in MS Paint by magnifying, utilising the grid and the pencil tool to colour individual pixels in the magnified grid, and then hitting PrintScreen and working with that as my picture afterwards. It's a quick and "cheap" method, and it made charting very easy with opening the MS Paint window on top of the photo of the original. If I do this more often, though, I'd probably prepare myself a grid to colorise (using the Can of Paint tool in that case), skipping the magnifying and PrintScreening, because it comes out a bit small this way (so I can't insert any notes and stuff into the chart itself if they are necessary).


One day, I'll make these wristwarmers and post this pattern to Ravelry so that there will be a traditional Czech pattern out there. *rubs her hands with a supervillain snigger*