Walburga: FreeSewing's Warlburga Wappenrock
About Walburga
Walburga is a tabard/surcoat, a historical garment from medieval Europe
- 🤯🧵🧵🧵🧵🧵( difficulty = 1/5 )
- 🏷️bottomshistorical( 2 tags )
- 🪡hem( 1 techniques )
- 📐Rika Tamaike( designer )
- 🧑💻Rika Tamaike( developer )
- 💡Sewing Instructions for Walburga
- ✂️Generate a bespoke sewing pattern for Walburga
- ❤️#FreeSewingWalburga( Hashtag for social media )
- Linedrawing
- Measurements
- Design Options
- Design Parts
- Fit
- Head ratio
Controls the size of the head opening
- Head ratio
- Style
- Length
Controls the length of the garment - Length bonus
Allows variation of the length of the garment - Neckline
Controls whether or not to draft a neck opening - Neck opening shape
Controls the shape of the neck opening - Width bonus
Allows variation of the width of the garment
- Length
| ID | Description |
|---|---|
walburga.base | Base |
walburga.back | Back |
walburga.front | Front |
Designer Notes
Walburga is the odd one out of the three patterns, because it still is "historically inspired", but does not actually follow any real historical garment. It is based on tabards ("Wappenrock" in German, hence the name starting with a W), handwavingly placed in a western European middle ages setting. To be honest, it is inspired more by the Legend of Zelda than anything real.
I created this pattern because I needed something for my TTRPG character, basically a fantasy Roman, to display his heraldics on, and since I could not find anything in the literature about Romans doing this in a reliably documented way, I went the "it's all fantasy anyway"-route. (And I had a weird fascination with tabards as a kid, so it was a natural fit.)
Coding-wise, I spend some time on it because I wanted the triangular terminations to look just right, so I fiddled with the golden ratio to ensure it looked nice, no matter what the size.
The name comes from me thinking about vaguely mediaeval names starting with W,
and somehow walburga popped into my head.
Rika
Lunetius, Tiberius and Walburga really come as a set. Not only were they born at the same time, they are designed to work together to form a full outfit. Not that this means that they can't be made separately 😉
See also: Lunetius Designer Notes and Tiberius Designer Notes.
The further we go back in time, the less extant garments we have to base research on. Often there may be scraps of fabric left behind by stroke of luck but most of our information starts to come from (in archaeology) secondary sources like written texts from contemporaries.
This is especially true for the Roman and Mediaeval eras, not to mention that a lot of the available research is behind a paywall.
We can’t be 100 percent historically accurate, because we’re living in a different time, and everything we use to sew is different now from before. Even fabric is woven in a different way.
How ‘accurate’ you want to be is up to you, there is no wrong way to do this and research is not required -- though it can be fun!
What You Need
To make Walburga, you will need the following:
- Basic sewing supplies
- About 1 meter (1.1 yards) of a suitable fabric (see Fabric options)
- (optional) about 3 metres (3.3 yards) of bias tape or trimmings to finish the raw edges
Fabric Options
Walburga can be made out of almost any woven fabric. Historically "accurate" would be linen, wool, and, to an extent, cotton. If you care about authenticity, research this a bit. In any case, natural fibers without any stretch are the way to go.
Depending on the social status you want to portray, choose coarser or finer fabrics. Different colours are also possible.
If you want to embroider or appliqué on your Walburga, make sure that your main fabric will support your design.
Cutting Instructions
Walburga consists of two parts, a front and a back piece.
Apart from the cutout for the neck opening, front and back are identical. It is therefore enough to print only the front part.
- cut 1 front, on the fold
- cut 1 back, on the fold