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Elizabethan High Necked Smock: Additional Sampling Required

After I went to bed last night, I admit to being plagued by a few doubts on how my smock was going to turn out. Creating a pattern on your own, even with some direction in mind, can be a little daunting. What added to my doubts was that I have very little linen to work with. If I make a mistake, I will have to order some more and then wait to work on my project. So in order to give myself a little confidence boost, I decided some additional samples were in order. Test samples also appeal to my engineering brain so I made them with pleasure.

The first thing I wanted to do was to try out a worked bar tack at the bottom of the neck slit for my high necked smock. Elizabethans used these to reinforce the neck slit against tearing. As anyone who has torn open a bag of chips part way and then later has had the bag continue to rip open from the wear of hands reaching inside to grab chips, knows that the interior of a crack is a weak spot. Tailors and seamstresses in the Renaissance were aware of this as well and created a method to counteract the weakness of the interior radius, no math required. The solution: a few lines of thread covered in a buttonhole stitch or what we like to call a thread bar.
POF4 Thread Bar  from page 26. The thread bar is from a white linen shirt worn by Claes Bielkenstierna when he was wounded in battle. It is from a collection in Livrustkammaren, Stockholm.
My thread bar doesn't look nearly as good. I can attest though that these things are strong.I mean, seriously, this thing held up in a battle! If you manage to rip a thread bar, you have superhuman strength. I pulled on the one I made several times, and then I made my husband try it, and neither of us ripped it.

My attempt at a thread bar. Not as neat but that will come with practice.
From what I have tested so far, I really have to express how impressed I am by the engineering of their garments. They put a lot of thought into making their garments last. In today's world, if something rips or gets a stain that cannot be removed, most of us give no thought to getting a new one. In the Elizabethan world, those garments would be turned, recut, reworked or repurposed to have new life. I love learning how these small things that they did in tailoring or sewing had such phenomenal results.

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