A Gable Hood

My gable hood was made to go with my 1530s Tudor dress. I used the pattern in The Tudor Tailor. It's made of buckram, millinery wire, white silk taffeta, linen, black cotton velvet, freshwater pearls, garnets, and yellow patterned silk.

To fit the hood, I approached things a little backwards. I started by shaping the main piece that goes over the top of your head. I then fit the back piece to that, and only when the hood was done, did I trace the shape of it to make a pattern for the frame in front. This worked very well as starting with the frame, I was having no luck.

The first step was to wire and cover the top piece. This picture shows the inside of the hood. It's mostly lined in linen, with a little silk where it will show.

I've already bent it into shape, but I covered it before I did that.

This is the outside of the hood. It's all done in silk, with a layer of linen below to hide the buckram, which will show through silk.

The next step was to sew the back on. First, I covered the back in silk, leaving the inside unlined. There's really no need to and the roughness of the buckram helps it stay put. I sewed the two finished pieces together with a whipstitch.

Once the back was sewed on, I bent the cheek tabs until I liked the shape.

A side view of the same.

And a back view. You can see the stitches that hold it together. They look like little bumps in the picture.

Next, I added the striped silk. Since striped silk is so hard to find, I made my own. You can see pictures of the process here. To help balance the hood on my head, I added rolls of linen behind the silk. This keeps it from tilting forward and smushing the silk.

Next up, the black box on the back. To start, I made a box that was open on top and covered all the sides with velvet. The velvet you see below this is the tail.

I covered just enough of the bottom of the box so the parts that are seen will be covered.

I then whipstitched the veil to the black box.

Then I sewed the box to the back of the hood. I did this before adding the top piece so I could just stab stitch through all the layers. Then I sewed the already covered top of the box on using a whipstitch. You can see the top is already sewn to the right side of the black box.

Next, I sewed the decorations to the silk that would cover the frame. Details on how I sewed the pearls and garnets can be seen here.

I then wrapped the silk around the wired frame...

...and sewed it shut.

To finish, I carefully pinned the frame to the hood and sewed it together through the silk on the back of the frame and the very edge of the hood. All that was left then was to put the lappets on, which are really just tubes of fabric cut to the right size and pinned up.