Peerage Vigil and Ceremony Dresses

 In December, I was invited to join the Order of the Pelican and needed to make dresses.  I’ve been taking so many pictures so needed to resurrect my blog to capture the process.

My favorite time period for dress is the later part of the 14th  and 15th Century so I decided that I wanted a Cotehardie for my Vigil and a Surcoat for my Ceremony.  Originally I was thinking of just doing a party colored cotehardie with my device stamped on both sides in alternating colors and then I met with Christy for design discussions and came away with ideas for some major drama.  This is a lot of effort, but these dresses will be worth it. 

Inspiration dresses:

This is the inspiration for the Ceremony dress.  These are from The Cloisters Playing Cards from 1475-80.

And the vigil dress inspiration:  Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Westfalen oder Köln, um 1360.

The next posts will be able out the dresses and the process for the construction.  I luckily have the base patterns completed as I have these dresses before, just not to this level of design