Scarf (through the ages)

Recently, when I have finished my doublet and shirt I've noticed that the neck opening is really wide. As so it does not provide much of protection in cold weather. A natural way out of thi problem would be to wear a hood. But I have not noticed hood-wearing Landsknecht soldiers. So maybe a scarf? Then it all started - when scarves were used? do we have any proof of it's use before modern times? A scarf seems to be extremely simple piece of garment but from some reasons it is not as popular as expected.

For now I want only to hoard some pictures that I have found up to date. Maybe somene will be able to update my list and will help me to find any proof for a scarf in XII/XIII or XVI century.

But, starting from antiquity:

Romans wore two type of neck-wear: focale and sudarium. Both of them used, as far as a I know by the military and civilians. Focale was used as a protection against cold and, by legionnaires as a protection against armor rubbing against the neck. Sudarium was used rather as a sweat cloth. These scarfs were made from linen or wool.

A focale on a modern roman reenactor

In early medieval the scarves were also used, although not as often as by Romans. I have managed only to find one clear depiction. Additionally I heard some stuff about scarf usage by the vikings but without any proof whatsoever The source is Stuttgart Pasalter from the first halve of the IX century:

And following that we have Lubin Codex from the II half of XIV century:

For better picture see here - http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=4360&handle=zm#

And finally, long after medieval times, we have the cravat from the '30s of the XVII century:

Portrait of Ivan Gundulic, 1622.

Cravat is a piece of garment adapted by the French from Croatian (hence the name) mercenaries. After that cravat-scarf is more or less gaining its popularity very fast, and the rest is well known (and not really interesting for me).

Okay, so we have antiquity - IX c. - XIV c. and XVII c. without anything in between (?). Seems odd.. I'll be investigating the thing further. Contact me if you have any additional info.

XVI century shirt

Last few days (or rather few weekends) I was busy making a shirt for the XVI century Landsknecht kit. Finally it's ready and I can show me new shirt. It looks like so:

And with the doublet:

The pattern is classical for this kind of garment. (see below): 

Basic medieval shirt pattern (adapted from The Medieval Tailor Assistant)

I have only omitted the side gores, that are sometimes used (not in this pattern), as the shirt is very wide and the gores are totally unnecessary. Of course I have kept the underarm gussets, as they seem to be crucial for a period shirt. The point is to make everything extremally wide. The 

The smocking around the neck is based on this painting:

A young man (Holbein 1518)

I have used this tutorial in order to learn how to do that and must say that this is amazingly fast and easy. The only mistake I made was making the marks 2 cm apart. It would be much better if they would be 1.5 cm or 1 cm apart giving a finer smock.

And that's all. I hope it looks as good as expected. The next thing - a hood based on Sebald Beham woodcut :

Months - December(?) (Beham 1546)

Loudspeaker - part 3

Okay, so today I have found some time to work with the enclosure. It was covered with a thick layer of acrylic filler, that was applied some years ago. This filler turned out to be too brittle for my use, as I wanted to have all the angles as sharps as possible. In order to obtain that I decided to use a totally different filler, a polyurethane filler, that is two part filler. I chose Finish (Novol) to obtain as fine grain as possible, yet have a hard filler layer.

Firstly I sanded really hard the acrylic filler to remove as much as possible. To do that I sanded it hard with 60 grit paper until most of the filler was removed. Additionally I sanded some of the MDF front to fit the shape of the enclosure.

Finally after sanding and blowing all the dust out I sprayed the sanded enclosure with acrylic primer (Motip, cheap one). The primer serves two roles here - firstly it helps the polyurethane filler to stick to the surface, secondly the primer fills small cracks and holes on the surface. The second role of the primer will be very useful later, as I will apply the same primer on top of polyurethane filler, before I paint the whole damn thing.

Primed enclosure (on the left), and box before priming (on the right).

Using a water based primer had a bad outcome on the OSB. Although the OSB I use is said to be waterproofed (with same kind of wax on the surface) one piece of the boxed absorbed the primer and swelled - fortunately only a little. Unfortunately this was the top part of the enclosure, so anything here would be very visible. To make things right I sanded this part (again), even harder to sand the wood of the OSB, to hide the swelling and primed it again. Still, it is very rough but this will be hidden underneath the filler.

At this point (and all further points, regarding the paint job) I would like to thank Saskia from elektroda.pl, that helped me a lot in understanding how things should be made. I bow before your master knowledge.