SC - Master Adamantius' lost cote

[Brett and Karen Williams]

Master Adamantius writes:

> The cote was made of off-white cotton upholstery denim, with a faint
> twill pattern, as most denim has. It was cut, ostensibly, as a cote, but
> behaved like a good-quality chef's coat. It opened up down the front,
> using little cloth buttons and loops, that allowed the garment to be
> torn open and quickly removed in case of being scalded by boiling oil,
> or fire, or something like that. Instead of the double breast of a
> modern chef's coat, this cote had a quilted breast, again, to protect
> against ambient radiant heat and burning liquids, etc. Extra long
> sleeves, with a double layer of fabric in the forearms to the edge of
> the cuffs, again, to protect against burns. Better protection still was
> available by cuffing up the sleeves a bit, which, as I say, were extra
> long (almost knuckle length).
> 
> Sleeves were inset, and there were these weird curved seams across the
> shoulderblades and down the back, creating a biased seam which allowed
> me to stretch my arms up or out without straining the fabric or exposing
> too much of my arm.
> 
> Oh, and there was a high collar, kinda like a Nehru jacket, to protect
> the neck from heat/burns.
> 
> I feel naked cooking in a dalmatica, for all the aprons and oven mitts,
> etc., that I have.
> 
> Ras, are you getting all this?
> 
> Adamantius

(grin) *I* am, and hey, you're talking about something of which I know a 
little. Me, I'm a cloth addict who likes to eat well, which is why I
lurk here instead of doing family law. 

The deeply curved armsceye seams sounds exactly like a description of
the 
surviving quilted and padded cotehardie-- a correct citation of which 
escapes me at the moment. One of the many Charles the ____ seems to 
spring to mind. Denim is 'cloth de Nimes', according to SCA scuttlebutt;
more to the point, it's 3/1 cotton twill which by virtue of the long
warp and weft floats over adjacent threads will be more forgiving of 
bias stretch and drape than a tabby-woven cloth (which means plain 
weave). I would personally prefer to use a linen twill (if you look 
at the Shroud of Turin in close up at its website, it's a 3/1 twill),
but they're hard to find. Linen has the unique property of being 
able to shed dirt more easily than other fibers (dissertation on the 
cell structure omitted for brevity). Linen is a little less likely
to go 'funt' than cotton.

At any rate, in Koehler, which is a mixed bag of uselessness and highly
useful information, there's a diagram for cutting a sleeve along these
lines on page 185, shown in a garment on page 184. While the garment
shown is one of those scandalously short houpelande-types, this sleeve
would 
accomplish the same effect of being able to swing the arm through a wide
range of motion. A modern armsceye (such as found on a mundane shirt or 
'sport coat') will not suffice. The full name of the book is "A History
of Costume", Carl Koehler (it's really an umlaut) and it's in print
from Dover Books as ISBN 0-486-21030-8.

The sleeve cited will fit into a squared-off armsceye rather than a 
rounded one. It's also sufficiently loose enough and square enough to
handle the quilting and long cuffs described. When I first read Master
Adamantius' description, my first thought was that someone who really 
knew cloth and its properties well had designed his garment with its
intended purpose exactly in mind-- a success in cloth. 

ciorstan
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