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The 12th night outfit I'm making for

xrian consists of a white linen undertunic and a slate blue woolen gown. The gown is going to be a fairly straightforward geomtric/gored gown after the multi-panel garments from Herjolfsnes. The linen undertunic is modelled loosely after the linen tunic associated with St. Clare, with details taken from various other similar garments that have decorative gathering on the side skirt gores. This is the gathering technique that I've been working out and teaching this season. The gathering will be the most labor-intensive part of the project but having made a good start on it at Darkovercon I have a notion of how much time to budget. There are two gathered panels, each 60" wide (to be gathered down to 6"). Each involves 72 rows of gathering stitches, but since each row (or rather, each pair of rows) decreases in length (forming a triangle), the work goes faster as it progresses. It also goes faster because I'm getting more practiced at it. Still, I need to budget an average of 5 rows completed per day to make satisfactory progress. I've discovered a couple of shortcuts. I'm using drawn threads as guidelines to keep the pattern from "migrating". The overall pattern breaks down sideways into 16 repeating units, so I've drawn a vertical thread between each unit to give me an anchor point for the repeats. In order to avoid having to count every single stitch, I draw a horizontal thread every 16 threads (4 rows of stitches -- I only do one drawn thread at a time so it doesn't close up on me). This means that I run the gathering threads by eye relative to the gap and don't have to count threads vertically but get a "hard reset' every four rows. Alternate rows of gathering have the stitches offset from each other so in every other row, I'm careful to line the stitches up with two rows before, but the other set of alternating stitches just get eyeballed midway between the stitches in the previous row. This makes the work go a lot faster without ever getting too far off true.

I'll post some in-process pictures later, although since I'm using a gathering thread that's just barely off-white, it can be hard to get good shots with contrast.