Revisiting, Re-Making.

Many years ago,back in the twothousands, I did a reconstruction of a dress from c 1200 with long pendant sleeves - a variation that can be seen in illustrations from that time.

Back then, I was still a student, so the budget was limited. That led to the use of a chemically dyed fine wool fabric. That is still something that I'm fairly okay with; the colour may not be the perfect woad blue, but the fabric is, altogether, something I'd still see as acceptable for a dress in that style. It's a very fine wool fabric, densely woven, and dyed an expensive colour - it will pass.

What would not pass, however, is the decorative band that I had sewn to the edges of the sleeves and the neck opening. It was a tablet-woven band. That, per se, might be okay... but it was woven in linen (chemically dyed, of course). Even worse, it was a very simple threaded-in pattern in the typical modern 4-forward-4-backward-sequence... so not acceptable at all.

The dress got a bit of wear when it was fairly new, and then it spent a lot of years in the wardrobe due to different reasons. One reason was that I'd wear more practical, more common-person dresses for my work at the market stall. The posh dress is surprisingly comfortable and it's perfectly possible to move in it, but it's still not the thing I'd choose to wear for getting the housework done. So simple, plain dresses got worn instead. There also was a timespan when I would not have fit into that dress... which I now do again.

As this year's Archäotechnika is about the medieval elite, though, I took the dress out of its storage, and got ready for a little bit of updating. The old band was removed, and instead I stitched a plant-dyed silk band onto it. 

There was the temptation to decorate it with a band woven in silk and gold, but the one I have was, sadly, a bit too short. Plain fine silk is not as posh and valuable as the gold-and-silk band, but that sort of fits in with the dress itself being wool and not silk, if you ask me. I'm going for "noble, but not filthy rich" here, sort of. 

I'm still debating if I should add a second band with a little gap in between the two...  should I?