research the messy edition

[glittersweet]

I’ve managed to work my way through 48 garments or ensembles of extant gowns, robes, and bodices from 1515-1639, with about 50 more, and then so many hats. (There are a good 50 more suits, then there are the pearlwork textiles.) It’s taken months to sort my digital archives, and these are all intended to be webbed in a similar way to my North Rhine images, and the tailoring manuals so that eventually I can create some way to look up a tailor’s manual to find the closest matching extant garments and compare to images. I can do this as static pages, but I’m hoping to get a good search function. It really is more suited to a PC but I’ve now reached more than half of my site visitors using mobile devices. There is a lot of work that goes into making a site respond, and I recently had to fix some css that was broken by an update.

It’s very useful though.

There is a lot in there that reveal the very specific regional variation in cut that then allowed for variation within a region based on fabric and decorative choices.

All the extant garments are going to wind up in my own pattern book, so they will be adjusted to fit my system and I am working on the text to explain how different tailors manuals and garments show different ways to resize, and it’s a lot easier to do than explain. But I think it would help as the more ways you can use scale diagrams the better.