kass

Dirty Billy is a legend in hatware. There is no one better ! Shoes... didn't even know he did shoes...

I won't be getting up there until the end of January, but I will certainly share what I find out. I LOVE broadsheets!

Oh THANK YOU, Lady Seahawke! I have a friend visiting this winter and we're going up to Boston for a weekend. He will LOVE this! Thanks for posting it!

Why not have a kind of mini-timeline? Then you can represent BOTH specific years and the breadth of the Golden Age of Piracy. I'm sure the public would love to hear about all the differences in this short time period.

Andy is brilliant. And I've never been more comfortable than wearing his shoes. And might aren't even custom made! I just bought what he had.

Buy goodies for the kids, Midnight. RH705 will be here in January too.

You could just buy the Reconstructing History Sailor's Jacket Pattern. We've already done the sizing for you. Plus you could read quotes from the original Admiralty Slop Contracts, get information on extant jackets from the time period, and all sorts of stuff. :) And support a fellow Pub member...

It's a good 'un. :) You're gonna post pictures of this fabu jacket when you're done, right?

Very appropriate I'd say, Midnight my friend. Sounds not unlike the jacket worn by the guy on the armourial bearings of Lord Alymer (granted 1718): Picture courtesy of Ed Foxe's Mariners of the Golden Age of Piracy site

She's not a cat! She's a panther... :)

No, I think three is a very good number, Midnight.

Well, Midnight, we can't really say if the buttons on sailor's jackets were purely decorative because we simply don't have any sailor's jackets extant. So there goes the best kind of source. However on the extant coats we have from the period (which are arguably MUCH higher class than these), buttons are sometimes decorative. But even on those coats, most of the buttons on the coats are functional. Usually it's the buttons on the backs of the sleeves that are purely decorative, not the pocket flaps. In the Admiralty Slop Contracts, a certain number of buttons are specified. And frankly, buttons are expensive. You don't put them on a common sailor's outfit just for pretty. At least the Royal Navy wouldn't! So I would expect the buttons on these common men's jackets to be functional or not to be there at all.

Good question, Midnight. Obviously this extant flap has no buttons, so that makes the argument against them. Even if buttons had been attached to this flap and were lost, there would still be evidence that they were there. But buttons usually aren't on the flaps; they're on the pocket beneath. The buttonholes are on the flap, and there are definitely none of those here. That's not to say other sailor's jackets didn't have buttons on the pockets... On most of the short jackets in the pictorial record, we can't see the pockets well enough to tell. So that's no help.

Yup. It sure does. Just a little bit. And the top is a good 4-6cm narrower than the bottom. :)

Nah... You won't be shot! Just flogged a bit... Debbie, most people don't realize pirates didn't wear boots until they start really researching the subject. Years of Howard Pyle paintings and Errol Flynn movies have deluded us all!

My two hounds are so lazy, they think every piece of fabric stretched out on the floor is for them to lie upon. This becomes fairly dangerous when that "piece of fabric" is actually the train of your skirts and you go to take a step!

Hee hee hee! Hey Jacky, I could never tell time anyway!

Hi Deanna and welcome to the Pub! Don't worry about not knowing the "lingo" yet. I've been here for over two years now and I still can't talk it! Relax, enjoy, make friends, find the forums that interest you and feel free to ignore the ones that don't. And your signature is fine. See mine? Now how about buyin' us a round of drinks!

Hee! Never thought of that... Although it wasn't the colour that made me think the embroidery threads were pulled from the cloth. It was the look of the threads. They appear to be the same thickness and twist as the pocket flap. :)

Hmmmm... 2/2 twill ground with embroidery... looks like embroidered with threads pulled from the same cloth... Are those centimeters on the bottom there? Nice one, Foxe!

That sounds perfect, Midnight! I have to admit that I often build my impression around a piece of clothing. Go figure... Good luck with it!

Hey! You seem strangely familiar... :)

Jack, I want you to imagine that... except with two lanky greyhounds.

Nah, I don't think you need go that far, Midnight. I think you'd be fine making the jacket with buttons on the back sleeve seam and simple rectangular flaps on your pockets. Nothing fancy. If you err on the side of the simple, you'll never be wrong. The English Civil War ended thirty to fifty years before your time period. So kinda think about it as your father's generation if that helps. It's familiar to you, but "old fashioned". By the 1680s men's fashions had changed drastically from those of the 1640s and it was evident even in the lower orders. Check out the pictures I posted links to. They are a gold mine of information!

Correct me if I'm wrong, Foxe, but do you think the fact that the Slop Contracts were issued and reissued and changed so frequently indicates that they were not being adhered to by the Slopmakers?