As soon as the cat will decide she has snuggled enough and will get up from my left forearm (which is apparently a very nice place to hang out on), I will turn on the printer to print out drawings of the surviving 14th century doublets that I have found. The goal? Try and reconstruct a way to, well, construct them.
It's fairly clear that there are some key body measurements that will go into the doublet measurements (such as, well, the waist, rather obviously), but one of the authors writing about the Chartres pourpoint has an interesting theory about how the pattern fits into a rectangle, and I would like to take that idea and try to run with it.
It would be nice if that would be the key - and otherwise, if the running should not work, I'll just fall on my face and try to figure out something else.
Speaking of something else - I have been introduced to the idea of making the holes in sprang by un-crossing a crossing of the previous row, and have looked a little more to find it seems to be the common version in both the Norwegian tradition and the Eastern European tradition. The Dutch book that I have, on the other hand, does the holes not by un-crossing something from the previous row, but by actively making a hole in what is usually called the plait row (the one starting with a double thread). This is very, very interesting - and now I wonder how it was done in today's Germany, back when it was a little more en vogue. Were we leaning to the Dutch way? Or the North-Eastern way? Or was there a mix? Would it be possible, if looking at enough early modern instruction books, to find out where the border was?
Questions. We'll never run out of them, right?