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YCLAS
Alianor de RavenglasAbstractI made this cyclas, or sleeveless overtunic, from two layers of medium-weight linen and hand-stitched it using linen thread. I based the stitching and lining method on those found on an 11
th
century lined linen shirt. An extant garment, commonly known as Herjolfsnes 37, inspired the pattern.BackgroundThe cyclas is a sleeveless overtunic. It seems to initially have been worn by soldiers over their armor, and came into common civilian by the end of the 13
th
or the beginning of the 14
th
century.This type of sleeveless garment appears on women three times in the Maciejowski Bible (datedto roughly 1250) and many of the women pictured in the Manesse Codex (dated to roughly 1325)wear them. At the earlier end of this time span, men wore these garments much more commonlythan did women; by the time of the Manesse Codex, men and women wore them roughlyequally. Illustrations 1 – 4 show this type of garment on both men and women.ConstructionThis cyclas is constructed from six main pieces: a back, a front, and four trapezoidal gores(inserted into the side seams of the garment). Illustration 5 shows the cutting layout I used; for a person of my size, it requires 3 yards of 59” fabric. The design resembles similar garmentsfound in the Herjolfsnes excavations, especially Herjolfsnes 37. The gores on the Herjolfsnesgarment are notched at the top, where they comprise the bottom of the arm opening; the resultingarm opening would resemble an upside-down teardrop. (See Illustration 6.) This type of armopening also appears in some of the garments in the Manesse Codex, as shown in Illustration 7and 8. I chose to cut the gores for my cyclas as trapezoids, which yields an arm hole in the shapeof a “D” turned on its flat edge. Cutting the gores in this manner made the garment fit awoman’s chest better than a garment with a teardrop-shaped arm opening would have. Had Ichosen to use triangular goes and a teardrop-shaped arm opening, achieving the body width that Idesired would have required cutting “shaped” arms openings, which I have not seen evidence of as early as the late 13
th
century. Illustration 9 shows the difference between D-shaped andteardrop-shaped arm openings.I chose to line this garment for two reasons. First, based on the illustrations in the ManesseCodex, it is apparent that these garments were on occasion lined. See Illustrations 10 and 11 for examples of this. Second, I felt that one layer of this particular linen would be too lightweightfor this type of garment; it would not drape the way I wanted it to. The lining doubles the weightof the fabric and makes the garment hang much better. The lining technique I used is a type of flat-lining; it treats the body fabric and the lining fabric as one; this technique appears in an 11
th
century lined linen shirt.
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It also combines the seam and the seam finish; all raw edges lie between the layers of the garment (see Illustration 12). The stitch used resembles both overcaststitch (in that it laps over the outermost layer of fabric) and herringbone stitch (in that it makesthe figure-8's characteristic of that stitch as it goes back and forth). This seaming method is fairly
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Jones
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