Girly German coat

One of the next things on my list of SCA clothing that I want to make is a schaube, or German coat. A coat is so much more useful as a keep-warm garment than a cloak or mantle - your arms are free and not weighed down by metres of fabric, and coats don't slip off your shoulders and try to choke you to death. I have been wearing one that BT made for her ex, that didn't fit him, and now I feel that it is time that I made my own.

The first hurdle was to find sufficient pictorial documentation of chicks wearing coats. More to the point, of chicks wearing coats that I liked, and weren't huge, shapeless sacks. Needless to say, although it seems that men wore coats all the time, women... not so much. The piccies are out there, one just has to look a bit harder.

Here are a few examples:
There are two in this one - I like the collar on the green one, but the sleeve treatment on the grey one.

Oooh, big pink coat.
This is St Helen, so the ermine is out. This is a seriously gorgeous coat, though.

The images above all came from REAL, which is a fabulous resource, although very damaging to your spare time. To find these images I did a search on Kleidung (clothing), and then narrowed the field to Schaube, between 1500 and 1530. It still gave me hundreds of pictures to look at (most of them with men with coats on), but all of them included someone wearing a schaube. The site also rather handily notates who is in the painting, what they are wearing, what colour it is, and any objects of interest that are also able to be searched. The only kicker is that it's all in German. It's amazing how much you can figure out on your own, though, and for the rest there's Babelfish...
This is one from Bildindex that Baggy Trousers found for me. The chick standing behind the little model church has a very cute coat on.

This one - "Portrait of a Woman aged Fifty-Seven" by Hans Muelich, 1539, is going to be the source for my colour choice. Some time back I found some faux cashmere (this is what it was called) at Spotlight. It was on special, so I bought some. It's a wool blend, mixed with poly or acrylic, and is a napped fabric, with a soft, velvet like feel, hence the faux cashmere moniker.

Many (read: most) of the schaubes, whether for men or for women, were fur lined. As I have no desire to die from heat exhaustion, I will not be lining my schaube in fur of any description. This last pic, with it's silk lining, seemed to be the best option. Not very exciting, colour-wise, but I do like the textural differences, with the velvet ribbon trim to set things off.

Taken in bright sunlight so that the differences can be seen at all. The whole thing is going to need to be interlined and probably make use of a bunch on the really expensive iron-on interfacing as well. None of it is really coat weight. Still, it will look pretty spanky when it's done (I hope)

I will keep you posted!