I’ve seen these around and always thought about making one. I always felt a little intimidated by the impossibility of its simplicity. About the only thing that gives it any recognizable shape is the long liripipe hanging down in the back. The mantling over the shoulders can be any of a thousand shapes from just a big oval to pointed in the front and back to any kind of dagging your imagination can conjure. For my first one, I just wanted to prove that I really could take only two measurements, cut something out of only one piece of fabric and sew only two seams to achieve something that would actually fit properly. I got some polyester fleece that was on sale at Wal-Mart. It’s far from a period material, but it was dirt cheap and if I wanted to experiment with dagging I could dag away till the cows come home and it wouldn’t require any sewing! (Polyester fleece doesn’t need a finished edge, you can just cut it to shape and it won’t unravel). So cut I did indeed. It came out just fine. A tad large, because I overshot my seem allowances a little, but it’s close enough to be functional.
Liripipe No. 2:
For this one, I wanted to use a period material and achieve a period look. Remember that nicely matching blue color I made my shirt out of? I made this liripipe out of a 100% cotton twill that matches that blue exactly. Again, I hit up the sale at JoAnn’s and got this twill while it was marked down to $3.99/yd. It took 2 yards - 1 yard blue and 1 yard white. I now had a pattern to work from, which included these nice onion-top dags, which came in really handy because the dags had to be all drawn from the same pattern so they would match exactly. I took my blue fabric and folded it in half and cut out one liripipe hood (so I had 2 sides), cutting them as two separate pieces (not attached at the top). Then I did the same with the white. Then I laid all four pieces on top of each other and made one slightly curved cut across the neck to separate the hood portion from the mantle portion. Then I mix-n-matched to make right and left inside and outside from alternating colors and started sewing them together. I sewed the neck first, being careful to remember which was right outside, right inside, left outside and left inside so I knew which way to face the seam. Then I sewed R&L outside together and R&L inside together. Then I turned the inside hood inside out and stuffed the outside hood (right side out) inside of it to sew the dags. Itsounds all wrong, but don’t think too hard about it, just go with it. Then after sewing the dags - be careful, you have to go right along the very edge - I played with it until I got everything turned the right way and poked out all the dags, right down to the tiny little tips. Then I did a stay stitch around the dags in the blue thread (which actually looks really cool against the white) and then folded in the edge around the face, pressed it and double stitched it for durability. The end result was a totally period-looking, totally reversible liripipe hood.
Things I learned:
(1) Yes, Virginia, it really only takes two measurements - A) the circumference of your head and B) the circumference of your face. These are probably about the same if not exactly the same. Those (divided in half) are A) the distance from nearest points of the back seam and the front seam, and B) the height of the face hole.
(2) Dags are intimidating when you look at a whole finished garment, but when you take them one at a time, a dag is easy!
For more on hoods from someone who knows far more than I, go to:
How to be a HOOD-lum, by Cynthia Virtue
I also got some invaluable guidance from my shire MoAS (Thanks Victoria!).
Grüße!
Wilhelm
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