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A boy's 14th century
fitted cottehardie

Jean de Vaudetar / La bible historiale (1371)

Charles de Blois pourpoint (1360)

I have only 5 days before an event and 2 out of those which I wont be able to work on this because I have other engagements. So I've decided to cut short on some of the details and work out something around these two sources ;

I decided not to go with a "grande aisettes" design such as Charles de Blois' pourpoint and to simplify some of the major lines. I'll be going for the look of the Jean de Vaudequin illumination but without a collar. I'm sill not sure if I'll be going with various sizes of buttons yet neither as this will be the most time consuming thing in this project, which is my main concern at this point. I'm going for a particolor garment as well as this is meant to heraldicaly match my own particolor Moy. There are an incredible amount of sources for men's 14th c.  particolor cottes. Here are just a few exemples ;

A- Grandes chroniques de France_funeraille de Jeanne de Bourbon
B- Grandes chroniques de France_Sergents de Charles V
C- From an unknown Spanish manuscript
D- French bible (1350)
E- Jean de Berry's Très belles heures de Notre-Dame (1380)

Here's a quick layout that shows the difference between the patern that I've made versus the layout of the pourpoint of Charles de Blois ;

My son's fitted cottehardie

The pourpoint of Charles de Blois

November 07th, 2005

November 10th

Wow, I can't believe how fast this project went. I hardly even recall sewing anything and it's already over ! Perhaps it's because I'm used to sewing meters and meters of skirts all the time :-D

Anyhow, I'm done and I'm very pleased with the result, especialy the sleeves. It was the first time that I was trying out such a construction and I love it. As I said on my LJ, the ''elbow shape'' totally eliminates the creasing where the arm bends so that's obviously how they managed to make incredibly fitted sleeves with no apparent creasing what-so-ever. That type of construction would probably help with the problem that I,ve been experimenting with my baby-yellow Moy, the heavy wool totally cuts the blood circulation in my arms when I bend them because of the lack of stretchability in the fabric and at the end of a day I'm totally bruised. The roundish shape at the elbow's attachment really reduces the amount of extra fabric gathering in that area. God those people were total geniuses !!! I didn't make the sleeves really fitted to my son's arm but to mine. ha's how I can attest that it works so well. I really regret not making my son's jack sleeves that way, he'd really be more comfortable. But I needed to test this type of  construction before experimenting with more expensive stuff. Here's what it looks like overall, along with a close-up of the side opening ;

At first I wanted to make the buttons way more close together but I would have needed to make the buttonholes horizontally instead. Because vertically, they're almost already overlaping as it is. But still, I'm quite happy with the look.

I've cut the front panel in a big scrap piece of gold wool that I had left from my Moy, only to realise that that's all there was left. I thought that I had at least one meter of that wool remaining in the stash but I had totally forgotten that I've used it to replace the bodice of the Schilling gown this summer. So I've been puzzling my brains out to figure this out. I managed to fit the two back pieces on the bias of some smaller scraps but I had to cut-off on the seam allowance. I added a bit on the black side to compensate. But the sleeve pieces were simply impossible to fit anywhere so I had to remove 2 inches from the upper sleeve's length, add it to the lower part instead and make both the upper and lower parts into two pieces instead of one and I also had to cut-off on some seam allowance to manage to fit all the bits around the slim remaining scraps. So I had to eliminate the sleeve's buttoning concept all together, though I didn't feel that it was such of a big deal since many fitted cotte illumination don't show buttoned sleeves anyhow.

And here's the final result !

This cote is currently available for sale by the way, details can be found on this page ; http://cadieux.mediumaevum.com/garb-sale.html

And a picture along with the matching heraldic gown ;

Thank you for reading :)