HFM '24: March - "Sappy, Sweet, Syrupy, but not Sugary": Jidáše / jidášky - Czech Easter buns

 

This post got a bit out of hand. I haven't done the Historical Food Fortnightly in... huh... ten years. WHAT. I've definitely done historical recipes in the meantime, but apparently I haven't managed to do it topically.

Which wasn't just my problem, actually. After years of languishing, the HFF, just like the HSF years ago, has dropped the final F and exchanged it for M: It's the Historical Food Monthly now (link to Facebook group, which seems to be its only official online presence now). More manageable.

So I haven't written anything food-y here in quite a while, and it turns out I have developed a lot more thoughts on the topic since 2014.

Anyway. Sorry for the wordiness. I hate recipe posts with lots of rambly text before the recipe just like any other person, but, well, this isn't necessarily a recipe post. I swear, there's no "I took my kids to school and pondered the meaning of life" here. :D Just quite a lot of explanations of what I did food-wise and Easter-wise, and why I chose this particular food, and what I did to it and why, and thoughts on my process and cookbooks and research, and... yeah, I think that's about it.

The brief for the March challenge was to make something sweetened by something else than sugar. So, as it happens, these are a bit of a cheat, because there is sugar in the dough. Also I ended up actually making them on April 1st. Oops. The intention was to make them on Holy Thursday (March 28), when most traditions say they were eaten for breakfast, preferably before sunrise, so that people would be protected from poison, snakes and wasps (it would not have been breakfast in my case, but I don't subscribe to the accompanying superstition anyway). That did not happen, so I thought Saturday (some mentions of that being traditional as well), but, well, Life Kept Happening.

My original original plan was actually to make something sweetened entirely by honey, most likely gingerbread - I found online a 1920 book all about honey and its uses in the household (that's the name of the book: "Honey and Its Use in the Household", in Czech that is) including tons of various recipes for gingerbread. The problem with those recipes is that the dough usually has to rest for at least a week before being baked, and then very often the gingerbread has to rest, too, to soften and be more easily edible. It's what traditional Czech gingerbread (imprecise word, that) is like. And exploring and sharing that would be pretty great for the HFF, but... But. Between a week of nightshifts and then falling ill for more than two weeks and feeling pretty miserable for at least one (it's just some sort of seasonal cold, not Ye Newe Plague, but it's been pretty clingy) and being still pretty tired even on Easter Sunday*... I ran out of time for that kind of shenanigans.

So because of Real Life, at the last minute I changed gears and made these, which do have sugar in the dough but then are brushed with honey on top.

The name means "Judases" or "Little Judases". Warning: it's morbid. I'm currently unclear on where the heck that tradition and the name comes from to begin with, but, morbidly, they are - at least in the form I made them in, there are many others - supposed to represent the rope Judas hung himself on (which, by the way, only Matthew mentions; the other gospels say nothing on Judas' fate, and Acts says something else. I've just checked.) So, ahem, there's that. But, really, they come in all sorts of shapes including basically hot cross buns so that connection is a bit tenuous anyway, and if you don't want to be morbid, you can totally do something else.

 

I did opt for this shape because it's pretty simple and I wanted to try it, but next time I'll probably just make round buns the way I always make them, plus cross. I don't really have childhood memories with jidášky (we usually just had mazanec, so that's what I primarily associate with Easter), but I think mom did make them once or twice, and did make basically mini-mazance / hot cross buns: that's what my sister also thought they were supposed to look like. And what I had thought they were supposed to look like once upon a time before the internet introduced me to different versions that almost everyone else seems to be making these days. I'm glad the utter confusion in historical sources helped me clarify my own. :D

My lack of true family tradition of them is, obviously, precisely why I wanted to try my hand at them. One mention I ran into - now I can't remember which one, I haven't been entirely organised with my research here - says "spirals". My main recipe lists "variously twist them" as an option. Primarily it has you rolling the dough out to be about 2 cm thick and, "with a smaller doughnut cutter", cutting out circles (Czech doughnuts without holes, not American doughnuts), and then cutting "a lattice" into them (so not even crosses). I could have done that, but I did not want to do that because that way you end up with dough cabbage**, and then you have to deal with said cabbage.

Some 19th century mentions just say "placky" (something like "flatcakes"), and I even found mentions that poor people just ate regular bread with honey.

So it seems the shape and style varied a lot depending on the region, or maybe even family tradition; so you do you. The main point is that they should be quite small, and go with honey - either they are brushed with it immediately after baking (or even before), or they are spread with butter and honey when cooled down, either cut in half like breadrolls, or maybe even just on top if in a more "flatcake" form.

... phew, that was a lot of options to cover.

Technically, I think I could have used honey in the dough, too, because that may very well have been done by rural people in the 19th century and it's not like I was sticking to one recipe, anyway. But I wasn't really up to trying to calculate a conversion like that, I don't have proof for it, and also, to be honest, the illness still kind of lingers (aaargh!) and I have even better uses to put that honey to.

The Challenge: HFM 2024 #3 Sappy, Sweet, Syrupy, but not Sugary

The Recipe: Combination of "Jidášky" and "České koláče I" from Kniha rozpočtů a kuchařských předpisů všem hospodyním k bezpečné přípravě dobrých, chutných i levných pokrmů by Marie Janků-Sandtnerová ("A Book of Calculations and Cooking Recipes for All Housewives for Safe Preparation of Good, Tasty and Frugal Meals"), 36th-60th unaltered edition (?!) from 1941 - which I own a physical copy of. "České koláče I" for the dough, "Jidášky" for what to do with it.

But for the latter I also referred to "Jidášky - pečivo pašijové" from Úsporná kuchařka ("Frugal Cookbook") by Anuše Kejřová, specifically a 1938 edition I found online, which, it turns out, differs from my 1990 reprint of a 1924 edition that does not have this recipe.

And then I looked through the Digitální knihovna website for other mentions, and found a bunch of 19th century ones that did not give recipes, but described various ways of shaping, treating and serving them, which resulted in the paragraphs above about the various options for shapes. Annoyingly, most of the mentions I found did not say which region which version applied to. In any case, in the end I basically combined all of my sources.

The original ingredients according to Sandtnerová (I cleaned the list up a bit to be clearer on the measurements, it uses dkg and fractions of liter which always confuses me in recipes) are as follows:

500 g flour
salt (just a little bit)
1 cm vanilla pod, "pounded" (huh)
lemon peel
20 g yeast
250 ml milk
100 g butter
70 g sugar
2 egg yolks
Then, possibly more relevant to the koláče recipe, it also has:
20 g for greasing the baking sheet and to brush after baking
1 egg yolk for brushing
10 g of vanilla sugar (and with this one I was unable to discern in the text of the recipe where it was actually supposed to go, but I am including it here because it's relevant to the changes to the recipe I ended up making)

I altered the ingredients a little bit. For that, and the making-of, see How Did You Make It below.

The Date/Year and Region: Czechia, first half of the 20th century. Well, technically they may have a much wider time-spread: allegedly they may go as far back as the Middle Ages, but I did not research that far back, I suspect older recipes will be different, and I did not even find 19th century recipes (just descriptions), so my recipes are from the 1930s and 40s and that's what I can fairly confidently say my version is more or less accurate for.

How Did You Make It: First off, I made a smaller batch. The original recipe says "for 5-10 people", and this is a two-people household. On the other hand, I knew they'd disappear quickly anyway :D, so I did not halve it; I re-calculated for 400 g of flour instead of 500 g, which in my experience is just about right to fit on my very limited number of baking trays, so I ended up with:

400 g flour
56 g of sugar
16 g of yeast
200 ml milk (full-fat)
80 g of butter
I did not try recalculating the egg yolks :D and just used two, and also I did not recalculate the butter for brushing after baking and simply eyeballed it.

I also changed some of the ingredients:

- I'm not sure what sort of lemon peel was intended, but I used dried because that's what I have (they conveniently sell it in the local "bring your own packaging" shop). Instead of "fresh" vanilla, I used a packet of vanilla sugar with real vanilla (and used slightly less regular sugar): I figured that was a pretty good alternative, especially when the original recipe also names vanilla sugar.

- I used active dry yeast (I think that's the type of dry yeast I currently have). I don't really buy fresh anymore, because it tends to result in half a cube of mouldy yeast... So I mixed about 5 g of dry yeast with a teaspoon of sugar and about the same amount of flour, and then a little bit of warm milk, just enough to create a sort of wet paste, and after a while I saw it bubbling a little bit and called it good and used that.

Following the recipe, I mixed the flour with the other dry ingredients (minus what I used for my yeast starter), then warmed up the milk (using a little bit for the yeast starter first), melted the 80 g of butter in it, then mixed the two egg yolks in it.

Then I used my now tried-and-true method of mixing the wet ingredients into the dry ones gradually. I plopped in the yeast starter, washed out its bowl with some of the milk mixture - about a third - and added that, then mixed it. Another third of the milk mixture, mix. Add the rest, mix. This way, I don't have to knead too much; it comes together quite quickly and I can then work it by hand instead of pouring all liquids in at once and then faffing about with the wooden spoon and tiring myself out while waiting for the dough to finally stop sticking to it. (Honestly I don't know why so many Czech leavened dough recipes tell you to do that; this way is much better.)

Unlike Sandtnerová's recipe, I did not sprinkle flour on the finished dough before raising; I just put a teatowel on top of the bowl and let it rest in the kitchen. Kejřová does not mention flouring it.

Then I divided it into 16 pieces, and rolled (well... partially just stretched) each piece into a long thin strand - ideally: Kejřová says "about a finger thin and about 25 cm long", but mine ended up... varied. Some were just about right, some were bigger. I think a larger number of pieces might have resulted in a better size, but 16 is way easier to do. :D If you do a full batch, maybe 24 pieces would work?

 

Based on all my sources, I opted to create simple "rope" twists, to place them on the baking trays to rest a bit, and then to brush them with the egg-yolk. I thinned down my yolk a bit, too, with milk. It was pretty thick and I did not want to fight with it and wanted to be sure it would be enough for all of the pieces. And I was glad I did. I did brush them fairly generously, but I'm not entirely sure how one un-thinned egg yolk was supposed to be enough for a whole full batch.

If I remember correctly, I baked them at 190-200 degrees Celsius (my oven isn't very precise) for about fifteen to twenty minutes. I put both trays in at the same time which... was a mistake: the upper batch got quite dark, and the bottom batch needed more time. I grew up with a convection oven in which you can bake more trays at once. I keep forgetting that my current regular oven isn't well-suited to that. :D

And then I brushed them with watered-down honey immediately after baking. Half of them. I brushed my half very generously with about two spoons of honey mixed with one spoon of water, and my sister's half with melted butter because she asked for no honey. (She likes sweet bakes like this very, very mildly sweet.)

And that was that. Done! Enjoy!

Time to Complete: Hmm... I think it took me maybe 20-25 minutes to make the dough (I'm a bit unsure on this), then about an hour for it to rise, then about 20 minutes to make the shapes, about 20 minutes rest on the baking trays, and about 20 minutes to make. Let's say 2,5 hours?

Total Cost: Ahem. I don't knooow. I honestly don't remember how much the various ingredients were, especially since some of them had been sitting in the pantry for a while; and then with some of them (honey, the lemon peel...) I only used a little. I'm really not up to approximating it. Let's say it's not a super-expensive recipe, but with the honey and butter and vanilla it's also a slightly fancier one.

How Successful Was It?: Most excellent, will do again. With the wall of text all around this statement, I need to stress it again: they were delicious and very more-ish. And even with the honey, not too sweet.

How Accurate Is It?: Well, I documented most of my changes to the recipe(s) above. While I used dry lemon peel and vanilla sugar instead of vanilla + sugar, I think those are both plausible changes and overall it's not bad at all on the ingredient front. The most inaccurate ingredient is the active dry yeast: it was invented in 1943 in the USA, so it doesn't seem very likely to have been available in Czechia at the time. My father, born in the mid-1950s, remembers his mother buying pressed yeast by weight.

When it comes to technique, I wasn't accurate to any one recipe, but I think overall it's also quite plausible. One major modern convenience I used was baking paper instead of greasing (Sandtnerová) or greasing-and-flouring (Kejřová) the baking trays. And one last change I did not squeeze into the above paragraphs is that Kejřová says to brush them with watered-down honey before baking, as an alternative to the egg yolk. I opted instead to do both, egg yolk first, honey after baking. I did not find a historical recipe saying exactly that, but some modern ones and family traditions do say that, and it seemed to me safer to not put the sticky sweet substance into the oven. Considering I nearly burned the top layer, I think that was a wise decision. :D

Last notes and what I learned:

My honey was runny, which is perfect for brushing, obviously. If your honey isn't runny (has crystalised), you can just melt it gently in a water bath, or in the microwave. If your honey is of the honey paste kind, it probably won't be great for this recipe, even melted.

Overall, I think this exercise was also, for me, a good proof of how I have become more experienced and better organised with following recipes / planning my cooking (if I try), compared to the days when I started doing the HFF. I was still pretty scatterbrained from the illness, but I was able to prepare most of my ingredients in advance and flow smoothly from one task to another, without getting much confused and panicky and losing time along the way. Aside from that one moment when I went "oh, bother, my milk is pretty hot already, I need to use non-buttery warm milk for the yeast starter but I also need to melt butter in the rest of it because I have already turned down the flame because it's pretty hot already." That resulted in me blowing on teaspoons of milk to cool it quickly so that I would not kill my yeast but still had milk hot enough to melt butter in. It worked out fine. :D People posessed of a microwave oven will likely not have this problem.

Last note along the lines of being organised in the kitchen is that the remaining egg whites went into a soup the next day. The egg whites are something you do have to find a use for.

As said waaay above, I did learn more about the various versions and traditions of jidáše / jidášky, although less than I would have liked. I did not learn which version comes from where, and why some 19th century mentions said they were something done specifically in towns when it seems from other mentions they totally were being made in villages as well, and whether that may have something to do with the different versions and regions. And what the heck exactly was Čeněk Zíbrt talking about in the late 19th century when he said recipes for them can be found in Old Czech cookbooks? Mr Zíbrt, could you tell me where? I'm not going to stress any of it, though; it's not my primary area of interest. If I ever have time and opportunity to learn more, I will be happy to, but I don't want to get lost in this rabbit hole right now.

I also learned that brushing rich, heavy leavened dough like koláče immediately after baking with melted butter or some sort of liquid helps keep it nice and soft. More precisely, I had already known that, but due to the craziness of recent years this was the first time I actually got around to doing it. And also I had never before seen mention of doing that with water (well, watered down honey in my case, so that may play a role), only milk or rum, but it seems it might actually also work. So that's one for the mental notebook.

Also also: Kejřová puts poppy seeds on top and Sandtnerová almonds, which I think is the first time I have ever heard of doing that (though now that I google pictures, I can see some - mainly poppy seed). I left them out, also because, somewhat annoyingly, Sandtnerová's recipe for jidášky redirects you to the dough recipe for koláče that does not use almonds, and she does not have a separate ingredient list for jidáše so the info of what else you need for that particular recipe is buried in the text. I wonder if those toppings are traditional (for somewhere), or 20th century "improvements". I wonder the same about the vanilla - Sandtnerová uses it, Kejřová doesn't.

The search for recipes was also, for me, a bit of a further proof of what I already suspected, that is, that while we tend to think of Rettigová's 1820s-1840s cookbook (which I've used before) as THE basis of traditional Czech cuisine, it actually does not have a lot of the recipes we now think of as typically, traditionally Czech, and Sandtnerová a hundred years later does. Rettigová is definitely where the modern Czech cookbook tradition begins, but hers is mainly the aspirational cuisine of relatively rich bourgeoise families of the Biedermeier, and I think a lot of what we think of as typically Czech originates in more rural traditions. If you want the sort of thing thought of as typical Czech cuisine nowadays, forget Rettigová***, "Sandtnerka" (first published in 1924, then many many many times more) is the golden standard.

Which is why I consider my copy one of my greatest treasures, even when it is, as we say in Czech, "a salad edition". ****

* Part of the reason there wasn't an Easter Sunday post this year, either. It was exacerbated by Easter Sunday being the same day time changed from winter to summer time. Extra awful this year, that. I went to church late, and arrived even later because not that far from there I had to sit down on a bench and sit there for about twenty minutes, bird-watching, because my legs had gone wobbly. And quite honestly I think after so many years of this blog's existence I have kind of run out of ways to write a generic Easter post. Easter is still happening, and it's still great, but I think I'm giving up on that self-imposed duty and I'll just write things around Easter from now on.

 ** AKA offcuts / remnants, a historical tailoring term. Its application to dough originates with Bernadette Banner and her years ago attempt at Victorian gingerbread. Sadly, it seems in her more recent switch to  professionalism she has removed that video from public listing, so you cannot bask in its beautiful nerdiness anymore. :-(

*** No shade on Rettigová. She definitely has some bangers that don't deserve to be forgotten.

**** Loose leaves, kwim?

Why I have not made the Bernhardt stays (yet). Also, J.S. Bernhardt is awesome and it is not stressed enough.

It's not for lack of trying. (Well, to a degree it is, but that has more to do with the past three years plus having been... A Thing.)

I wanted to make a variation on Fig. F - I did mention that some time ago.

 

But I just couldn't make the scaled pattern work for me. The operative words being "for me". They're great designs that clearly do the job and they explained a whole load of things to me - J.S. Bernhardt left an amazing legacy for people interested in Regency costuming (here's the original scan). But his gridded scaling method leaves a few things to be desired.

Funnily enough, the answer as to why does, I think, lay directly in Bernhardt's text.

"Such a body (i.e. "well-grown") has to have... the thickness and length proportional." (p. 43; 47 in the scan)

That, dear readers, is where it falls apart for me.

Not only is my torso proportionally longer, it turns out my back is probably comparatively narrower than my front. With Bernhardt's "measure the back and derive a square grid from it" scaling method, I ended up with a pattern that was a whopping 8 cm too short for me.

Trying to alter an essentially conical-shaped pattern by that amount of length is... frustrating.

I had to figure out where to do it, first. And I realised it needed to be done at both bust and above-waist level.

I might have been able to make it work, don't get me wrong. I got started. I just have too many other things to do, so it never got finished. At one point I managed to align my cutting lines wrong on my additional strip of paper, and there were too many curves to be trued over a pretty large distance and, well, there is such a thing as "more trouble than it's worth".

The good news?

Bernhardt may have provided us with a neat gridded sizing method, but it isn't the only thing he provided us with. He also shows how you can take a basic conical block and turn it into his stays designs.

So what I'm actually going to do is make a basic conical block for myself, and turn it into his stays design.

It turns out that drafting a basic block and messing about on paper is actually a perfectly historically accurate way to design Regency women's clothes.

Oh, by the way?

The book doesn't just feature stays patterns. J.S. Bernhardt is AWESOME.

(I've already cleared this image up because LOOK AT THAT MOTHERLOAD OF REGENCY AWESOMENESS.)

 

SLEEEEVES

 

ANOTHER SLEEVE! SKIRTS!

(Oh, and there's Part 2. With adjustments for posture, men's blocks, and stockings.)

I still need to properly read his text and see if he left any other pointers. Reading German in fraktur isn't the easiest thing for me to do; I can figure it out (with the help of online dictionaries), but it's slow going that tires me out quickly. So far I've learnt that I should start at centre front and draw the curves as they are on the body, according to sight, which... isn't particularly helpful.

(I mean, I do understand to a degree. I have successfully drafted a basic block for my grandma, long distance, applying the time-honoured method of eyeballing to some of the curves. The problem is that it's much easier to do that with the curve of a rounded back, which you can see clearly in a side view of the person, than it is to do it with the curve of a pattern piece wrapping around the body horizontally.)

No matter:

There's the arc method described in Patterns of Fashion 5, which right away takes into account torso length and different measurements for front and back. Which, phew.

There's Mariah Pattie's method.

I tried combining the two in 1:5 scale, and it seems theory does translate into practice thus far. I used two different radiuses for front and back. (Ignore the messy lines and unclear style, this is just doodling to see if theory translates into practice, and the 1:5 scale kind of messed with my numbers here and there.)

And then there's the... phenomenon... I came across when drafting my sister's folk costume bodice using a variation on Bilikis' (Nigerian) bodice drafting method.

I suspect my final method will be some sort of amalgam. I have an idea how I could combine the arc method and the... phenomenon... for an easy creation of curves.

Bilikis' method of aplying various lines for various vertical points on the body and differentiating underarm and full bust/chest definitely was another of the missing links that made me go "oh, of course!" I think basically the winning combination is doing that but on a curve.

(Mariah Pattie's method looks great and simple, but I have my suspicions regarding possibly too unrealistically large radiuses for some people. Generally, it doesn't look particularly friendly to small sewing spaces; until recently, I didn't have a good large drafting / cutting table myself. Also, in her basic method she has the same curve for front and back, and that's not what I'm seeing in Bernhardt's draft. But if it works for you, more power to you!)

It's funny, because this burst of Regency inspiration actually came about from my pondering of 1780s stays and possible local folk costume variations thereof. It turns out the local harvest festival in September (more or less a harvest festival) references the elevation of my current hometown to town status in 1788. Which gives me the perfect excuse to finally make the jacket-and-petticoat ensemble I've been dreaming of since 2015 (although it won't be happening in such fancy fabrics). No promises as to when - I have bad track record in that regard - but it's definitely going to happen. I have a printed cotton with personal significance that is waiting to become some variation on the Amalia jacket. I hope I can get a collar out of it, too.

Analysis of the proportions of a successful Regency dress

So you want to do early Regency but you don't exactly have a columnal figure...?

 

While searching for some other conversation I've found an old comment of mine in a Facebook group, a comment documenting the relative measurements of my Regency dress compared to my figure. I thought it was worth reproducing as a (more detailed) blog post for future reference for anyone who wishes to achieve this sort of early 1800s columnal style on a more "feminine" figure with bigger hips. Since mine was achieved through trial and error but I'm really happy with how it turned out in the end.

So here goes one person's experience:

I'm wide-hipped, approximately DD-cupped, but pretty slim.

My underbust measurement is c. 75 cm (29,5 inches), my hips are c. 102 cm (40 inches); 1,36 : 1 hips-to-underbust ratio. The vertical distance between the two is c. 40-42 cm (c. 16 inches). My bust span is c. 20 cm (c. 7,5-8 inches).

The dress has rectangular front and back panels, with gathers in the back and trapezoidal gores at the sides (more like side front I guess). The front panel is 24 cm (c. 9,5 inches) wide (= with 2 cm on each side in addition to my bust span). The gores are 18 cm on top and 29 cm at the hem (c. 7 & 11,5 inches). The back panel is 115 cm (c. 45 inches) wide, gathered into the waistline.

So it all adds up to 172 cm (c. 68 inches) at the waistline / underbust level, compared to my 75 cm (29,5 inches) measurement; 2,3 : 1 ratio. A lot of that is taken up in the back gathers. It's a drop-front dress, so there's also some overlap between the side gores and the back panel.

The skirt is 112 cm / c. 44 inches long at the front & sides (slightly longer in the back due to the raised waistline there).

The hem is 2,5 m (c. 98 inches & 2,7 yards) - so it's c. 2,5 : 1 compared to my hips measurement, and c. 1,4 : 1 compared to the skirt dimensions at the underbust level.

Update: I found this post trying to document the circumferences through the centuries, and my 2,5 m seem to fit in pretty well with the era I was aiming for - it's on the larger side actually, but then I suspect most of the museum items are in smaller sizes, as they tend to be (survivorship bias?). You can see how there's a fairly drastic change between 1790s styles and early 1800s styles - that would be the change from a skirt gathered all around to the typical Regency flat front.

All this in a very lightweight cotton sateen. There are tight gathers of the two rows of running stitch kind in the back; about 60 cm (c. 23,5 inches) gathered into about 10 cm (4 inches) - I'm not sure how much exactly it was anymore, this was just a very quick measure at the hem, but 60 cm kind of make sense to me as a number I'd have picked. :D I underlined the thin fabric with a strip of cotton plainweave so it's a bit thicker and not quite as much fabric is taken up in the gathers as it would otherwise take in something as lightweight as my sateen (it's a lot anyway - 6:1 ratio!). Then gentler gathers towards the sides.

Now you may not want to reproduce the exact proportions of my pattern pieces - my narrow front panel is a bit weird to be honest - but hopefully putting it down in exact numbers and proportions like this can help you decide how to proportion your dress if you're struggling with that. :-)

You see the trapezoidal skirt patterns more often on later, 1810s & 1820s dresses, but they do sometimes appear in dresses dated to the earlier, more strictly neo-classical era as well. Based on my own experience, they may well have been an invention to accommodate wider-hipped figures similar to mine who wanted the sleek columnal look with full enough skirts for movement and without putting too many gathers at their underbust level.

Good luck!

Drafting sewing patterns in Inkscape: Setting up your grid

If you want to draft patterns in Inkscape (which is a free vector aka line-drawing program, aka the free alternative to Illustrator), your best bet is to start by setting up the auxilliary grid. I find that with the help of grids, I can turn paper patterns digital even without mucking about with scanners (which I don't have myself) and the correct resolution - more on that later, hopefully. But the best part for us historical costumers? If you set up your grid right, you should be able to do scaled patterns or draft those block / apportioning rulers drafts straight into your own measurements. (With the caution that things like bust cup sizes still won't enter into it - always do mockups.)

Although that's a step too far if you don't yet know how to set up the grid to your specifications. Which is something I've only just discovered how to do properly myself, so I'm happily sharing.

I'm sure there are other tutorials for this out there; but I often find it's easier to read tutorials written by someone coming at the problem from the same angle as you... so here's from a pattern-drafter and historical costumer to others.

Here's my sleeveless spencer pattern, digitised with the help of Inkscape grid, still missing its side piece for some reason. I'll have to look into why I stopped at that point; I suspect it's because I lost the paper pattern...

Now, up front, I'm Czech and my Inkscape is in Czech, so sadly I'm not always sure about the exact English terminology. If you have the same version of Inkscape, things should hopefully all look the same, though. Mine is 0.92.2 (5c3e80d, 2017-08-06). (Which reminds me maybe I should look for an update.) You should find yours in the Help section under About or some such.

So, yes, I've only just figured this out properly. In the post about drafting a corset from pictures, I mentioned that I had trouble switching my grid to milimetres... It's because when you change units, Inkscape is clever and retains the dimensions of your previous grid! :D

Setting up your grid is easier when you work in metric. You don't usually have to worry about divisions much - Inkscape works with decimal numbers, and your units work with decimal numbers, so it's quite easy.

Inches require more math and theoretical mathematical thinking. Which goes to show that inches are an older unit from a time when people just did things with physical measures that could be folded in half, instead of with mathematics in their heads...

So, to set up a grid for the first time, you go to File Properties, under the Grid menu, and set up a grid by choosing the type of grid you want (apparently it's "Rectangular" in English) and clicking "Create new".

(BTW: If you want to draft hexagonal patterns for patchwork, the other type of grid can help with that - which is something I should have realised about a month ago when I mucked about and struggled with trying to draft out the Golden Wedding Ring block...)

Make sure you have checked that the grid is turned on and visible (important!). The last option says something like "snap only to visible grid", which means that if you zoom out enough that you can only see your major, red lines, your nodes will only snap to the red grid.

And then you define the exact properties you want your grid to have.

Once you have once set up a grid, you can just turn it on or off, and just change the properties as needed - unless you want the other type of grid, or unless you removed / deleted it somewhere in the process, in which case you have to create a new one again.

This is how I get a "milimetre paper" effect with my unit being milimetres:

 

You go to the Grid menu on the right, choose your unit, and then decide at what intervals you want your lines to be. As you can see here, I chose to have my basic, blue lines at 1 mm and my major, red lines at 1 cm. 1 cm is 10 mm, so that's easy. Your basic lines will be at every 1 whole unit, in both directions (along the X and Y axes), and your major lines will be at every 10 lines (that's the last setting there at the bottom).

You can also check (bottom left) that you want your grid to display only as dots rather than lines. But personally I find the lines much easier to see and work with.

Note that whenever you change any of those numbers in the menu on the right, you have to hit Enter or click in another menu "window" for the change to take place. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward.

Where it starts to get a bit confusing is when you decide to change units. If I switch my units to cm, I get this:

Suddenly my lines are at every 0,1 of my unit (since 1 mm is 0,1 cm). My major lines are still at every 10 lines.

This is why I had trouble getting mms out of my grid when drafting my corset pattern - I did not notice that the numbers had changed when I switched units, so I could not understand why the grid resolutely stayed the same...!

(You could also change where your grid is centered on the X and Y axes. Those are automatically centered in the left bottom corner of your page. Messing with that is more trouble than it's worth for our purposes - we don't need that because frankly the page does not enter into the drafting process at all the way I do it - except maybe as a rough gauge for how many pages the printed pattern will take. If for some reason you wanted to change where your grid is centered, you would have to know the exact coordinates of the point where you want to move it.)

Of course, you don't have to have your major lines at 10. I can do a "half-centimetre" version by setting them up at 5 mms:

The only thing that bothers me about this system is that I'm limited to two types of lines, so I can't have both a detailed "milimetre paper" and mark 5 or 10 cms as well. If I want that type of super-helpful grid, I have to add more lines manually... which can interfere with my drafting a bit as those "objects" get in the way. Maybe there's still a way around that but I haven't figured it out yet...

Now, inches. As I said, inches require more math.

To help you, the various divisions translate into decimal numbers like so:

1/2 = 0,5

1/4 = 0,25

1/8 = 0,125

1/16 = 0,0625

And if you're math-and-numbers-challenged, you can write down those numbers or print them out on a piece of paper to stick at some place where you'll have it in sight and won't lose it.

(You can get those numbers easily with the help of a calculator by dividing 1 : your division number. If you need, say, 3/8, you then just multiply your 1/8 decimal number by 3... But part of the point of setting up our grids in Inkscape is that you avoid that further multiplication and just use your grid as a ruler.)

So if you want an inch grid divided down to sixteenths of an inch, you set it up like this:

With your basic lines being the decimal number for 1/16 (i.e. 0,0625) and your major lines at every 16 lines.

Just for fun: Because Inkscape goes that detailed with its decimal numbers in these settings, you can go extra-detailed with... what is it called, thirty-secondths?

And now you can give Vanessa's tutorial a whirl regardless of whether your pattern draft uses cms or inches.

As a teaser for how you would do the apportioning rulers stuff: Your X and Y measurements don't have to match.

Here's the same grid in inches:

So... yeah... just with some help from a calculator (you most likely have one on your phone), you can totally do the apportioning rulers drafts to your own measurements. Or create your own apportioning ruler / tape measure for doing it by hand. But more on that at some later point...

How NOT to draft a women's sloper: Why the FreeSewing.org Breanna sloper for women does not work at all (unfortunately)

In the loquatious manner of old books, the full title of this blog post continues:

Containing therein an explanation of the fundamental importance of the difference between dart width and dart angle.
Or
What shenanigans Marmota gets into when she has too much free time on her hands and wants a quick solution to something (Spoiler alert: It was anything but quick.)

I have to say right ahead that this was written back in May so some of the info about how the FreeSewing.org site is set up here is dated. The problems with the pattern remain exactly the same, though.

I also have to say right ahead that the sum total of my knowledge of programming is a neat zero, so I have no idea how the actual code works and cannot unfortunately fix it.

I do, however, by now know a thing or two about drafting sewing patterns, and about measuring and altering them to make sure they fit - seeing as I'm exactly the sort of non-average person FreeSewing.org is targetting:

In their system, back in May, the closer you were to a standard size, the more your diagram looked like a perfect circle. Mine was a perfect splotch.

So I can at least offer an explanation of why it doesn't work. Why the way they take those detailed measurements (that for the most part do make sense to me) and turn them into this pattern... results in a pattern that does not work at all. Long story short: the very base of the women's sloper is flawed and does not seem to take into account some fundamental truths of sewing and pattern-making.

Namely how you deal with darts and angles.

I hope that this post will both work as a (very detailed) review for other existing / potential users to see exactly why that particular covetable pattern (custom slopers are covetable, right?) doesn't work right now, as well as hopefully help the programmers do things better in the future when it comes to women's patterns. Because I do love the idea of OpenSource patterns!

(And maybe it will also help explain some things about drafting your own slopers. I learned a lot from this myself.)

A simple trick for clipping / notching seam allowances

It's another thing I learnt from Bilikis. She doesn't even describe it; she just does it whenever she notches seam allowances (so it usually ends up being sped up!).

When you have a curved seam that needs to have the seam allowance clipped into / notched, it can be a tedious and slightly perilous job. But if you fold your piece at the spot where you need to clip, and cut into your seam allowance along the fold, both sides of the triangular notch at once like this...

 ... it goes much faster and it's much easier to ensure you don't snip all the way into your seam (without needing to bring a craft knife into your sewing room and move your project to a cutting mat!)

Really simple, eh? :-) It barely rates the name of tutorial but... it's supremely helpful, and clearly isn't common knowledge, so let's tag it with that, too.

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: #1 Mend, Reshape, Refashion

Welcome to the Historical Sew Monthly 2018! If you are new to this year-long event, you can read all about it on The Dreamstress’s website here. I've volunteered to write the inspiration post for the first challenge of the year, which is:

Mend, Reshape, Refashion: Mend or re-shape one of your previously made historical clothing items, or refashion a new one out of something not originally intended as sewing fabric.

 

Louis- Léopold Boilly: Passer Payez, c. 1803. Wikimedia Commons. Notice the patch on the man in the very left.

Now, if you’ve been making and wearing historical costumes for a while, chances are you do have something that needs mending, or updating to match your current skill set and knowledge, or re-shaping to fit your current figure (or somene else's) better.

Like I did for the November challenge of 2017 (which I haven’t yet blogged about, typical for 2017). I had never been satisfied (and finished) with the inside bodice flaps of my sleeveless 1800s dress, and one of them finally tore, and possibly also my bust has increased a little since I made the dress. So I finally replaced the unnecessarily fussy drafted shape of the original flaps with simpler, more historically accurate (and slightly wider) rectangles.

 
On the right, fussy flap shape drafted with modern drafting sensibilities (notice the neckline curve); on the left, the new rectangle

Mending is something that undoubtedly happened with clothes all throughout history because for most of history fabric was quite valuable; although conservation bias often leaves us with the special, lightly worn clothes rather than those that were worn within an inch of their clothing life.

While searching for things to showcase here, I came across Bránn's and Pat Poppy of Costume Historian's posts - they have already done some of the research into repaired extant clothes in the earlier periods I don’t habitually look into. So thanks to them, I came across extant clothes like the Bernuthsfeld tunic and these heavily patched sailor's clothes:

Shirt and breeches, linen and cotton, 1600-1700. Museum of London, 53.101/1a,b.

These are indeed clothes worn to within an inch of their life, probably by people of lower classes who had no other choice. But mending is not just like that...

Wedding dress of Maria Theresia Countess Czernin, née Orsini-Rosenberg, 1817, from the collections of the chateau Jindřichův Hradec (photos mine from an exhibition in chateau Dačice).

There is a patch here underneath the raised waistline. (I was so excited the photo came out blurry...) To tell the truth, I do not really know whether the patch was added during the countess’s life or during the ages since; what I like about it is the fact it proves that yes, these fine fabrics do tear and did tear. If they tore for Mrs Allen in Northanger Abbey and for Countess Czernin, it’s par for the course with them; go ahead and try mending them as neatly as too make Mrs Allen proud.


Reshaping clothes is another option. And because this often happened with clothes that were of better quality (so that one would get more wear out of the expensive and still nice fabric), you can, I think, find many more surviving examples of unpicked seams and other alterations than there are of patches, if you only peer more closely at museum garments and their online photos.

You can just adapt a garment to a changing figure, or perhaps you can make something for a smaller figure than the original garment was intended for...

Instructions for cutting a boy's undervest out of old lady's drawers in the Handarbeit-Wäsche-Wohnung magazine, 1933, Otto Beyer Verlag, Leipzig-Berlin

Or, what you could also do is reshape a garment to match new fashions (or new costuming interests). There is, for example, a number of 1790s-1800s dresses re-made from earlier ones; the huge amount of fabric in rococo dresses allowed the update to the more streamlined high-waisted fashions fairly easily. One of my favourite examples is this 1790s dress in the Met, in a fabric very unusual for the era; if you zoom in, you can even see the seam running above the hem where fabric was added to accommodate for the longer skirt of the raised waist – the join is nearly lost in the busy pattern but in the side view, you can clearly see there are non-matching vertical seams towards the front...

(Preferrably, though, don't do this to garments that are already antiques.)

Piecing was common historically, both for re-made dresses and just to get more out of the narrower fabric goods available in the past. So it can also be used with aplomb to get more out of something not originally meant to be sewing fabric: in HSF 2013 (back when it started and was still the Historical Sew Fortnightly), Sarah awed everyone with a pieced 1840s dress squeezed out of a tablecloth.

And there are many other fabric items one could do something with! Curtains and bed linen are popular with costumers (not just characters on film), because home furnishings these days often revive patterns that passed out of fashion for clothes decades and centuries ago. Perhaps somewhat less creative, but a perfectly good choice for this challenge.

Part of my fabric stash, with 18th-century-patterned IKEA duvet covers in the forefront - the same ones Magpie Tidings made a lovely reproduction of a 1780s dress out of in 2015. My plans for it are currently for a 1790s one.
The flowered golden stripes in the background are another clearly historically-inspired print - but unsuitable for this challenge because it's fabric meterage. Neither would the green sari work: it's also basically just meterage. (Leimomi says that a used sari is acceptable, but a new one isn't.)
In the lower left corner, a peek of embroidered panels & chain of an old frame bag I took apart to clean and remake, back when I did not have the good sense to realise how old the original probably was and take pictures. It's a project stalled for many many years by a lack of matching materials and bag-sewing confidence; maybe I could finally finish it now...

Even thrifted clothes can be used: I like them as a cheap source of smaller quantities of really nice materials I could not afford otherwise (like silk); which can then be used for example to make pretty accessories.

Pocketbook, silk, embroidered with silk and metallic yarns, Italy, 1675–1725. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Accession Number: 44.617

Václav Hollar: A Muff in Five Views, etching, 1645–46. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 17.3.1477

Positions on fur differ; personally, I think re-using them when they are already out there is more respectful to the animal than just throwing them away. And faux fur is always an option, of course.

Or you could even sew stockings out of thrifted knit garments.

Pair of Woman's Stockings, silk knit with metallic-thread embroidery, Europe, 1700-1725. LACMA, ID: M.2007.211.134a-b
Silk knit garments will probably be hard to find, so one may have to compromise on accuracy there. I have seen a couple of early 18th century stockings with such horizontal stripes at the top, which, if you're lucky in your thrift shop finds, could allow you to piece them out of several garments.

Or you can alter existing accessories, like reshaping hats into historical headwear, and trimming them.

Journal Des Dames et des Modes / Costume Parisien, 1828, Rijksmuseum

But if you are at the beginning of your historical costuming journey, making undergarments is a very good place to start your wardrobe, and the plain cotton fabric of something like bedsheets can work quite well for that purpose! (Especially since cca late 18th century – before that time, cotton was a more expensive option than it is nowadays, and linen would be used originally.)

Petticoat, cotton, American or European, third quarter 19th century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 2010.487.7

On the other hand, if you're feeling confident and adventurous, you could take the idea of the challenge even further and do as the maker of this bag did: they stringed cloves like beads. (Isn’t it wonderful that it survived to this day? There's also a cloves necklace from the first half of the 19th century...)

Purse, satin, glass beads, leather, cloves, Czech lands, mid-19th century. The historical collections of Národní muzeum, ID: H2-14256.

While for the sake of expediency we speak of fabric in the challenge description, you can use other techniques and unusual materials (as long as they form a substantial part of your challenge item). Seeds could also be used for jewellery: simple rosaries are traditionally made of bladdernut seeds in Europe, and Adam Mickewicz’s heroine Zosia in Pan Tadeusz (depicting events in Lithuania in 1811-1812) has a set of earrings made of cherry pits that she got from a childhood admirer. For those of you in the southern hemisphere, this might be a chance to enjoy the summer in brand new ways! :-)

Rosary, bladdernut seeds and brass, Bohemia, second half of the 19th century. The ethnographic collections of Národní muzeum, ID: H4-5045/Etnografické oddělení. Photo Monika Tauberová.

And those of us in the grey grip of winter could perhaps unravel a few thrifted items and knit ourselves something warm and colourful.

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