Marsaili ingen Andrais is being the garb goddess that she is and is not only collaborating with me on my Anna Meyer project (for which she has already made me my favorite outfit to date), but is also making me a gown based on Holbein's Lais of Corinth painting for this upcoming 12th Night. And what does she want in return? Oh, not much; just a little blackworked partlet based on Queen Elizabeth's in her Phoenix portrait.

What a fun challenge! I agreed to put together a pattern for the blackworked partlet if she would be so kind as to prepare a marked piece of linen for me. Me not being a seamstress and all, I haven't a clue as to what shape a partlet takes before it's been made into a recognizable form. It was, of course, no challenge for her!

But that left me with my own dilema: come up with a pattern. I went onto the Web Gallery of Art and found a good sized image of the portrait. I zoomed and I sketched, scratched my head and finally gave up. I could not get a clear enough close shot to get a good feel for the pattern, and what I was copying was distorted and unbalanced.

So I turn to my trusted source for all things purchasible: Amazon. Lo and behold, they had a poster of Miss Lizzy for about $12. Considering all the manual labor I'm getting from Marsaili out of the deal, I found it a worthy investment. Besides, once I was done with it, I could frame it and hang it on my wall, or donate it to an auction, or something useful like that.

As soon as I got the poster, I got nice and close and copied away. Only to find something interesting: the pattern kept changing. Like, a lot. Both in size and in imagery. The imagery I can understand, as the Elizabethan patterns I've seen embody the very spirit of variety. It was the size and shape of the painted pattern that irked me - it kept changing! And not only that, but it was distorted from the folds painted into the fabric of the partlet.

Grf! How very frustrating. After some time, I really got the feeling that the painter Hilliard wasn't nearly as finicky with representing exact patterns in the way that my beloved Holbein was. I got the distinct impression that he painted enough of the pattern to get across the idea that it was an embroidered partlet, and left it at that. So it was up to me to come up with a workable pattern. The scan I have here is a very rough sketch, but when I sent it to Marsaili she said that she felt I had captured the feeling of the pattern. That's enough for me!

That was on July 2. It's been a while, and I've been asking for the partlet ever since. Unfortunately Marsaili had a really bad case of Life and was unable to spend time on anything, much less this project. However, I have heard rumblings from our mutual fighter Baccus that she will not only be at the Baroness' Masked Ball this Saturday, but will also have the prepared linen for the partlet. Ohboyohboyohboyohboy . . I get to start! What great fun! Why did she have to wait until I had already taken on a gazillion other projects? Who cares? I get to do my project! YAY!!

My plan is twofold: one thing is to make a large paper pattern of the prepared linen she'll give me and use that to create a full-scale refined pattern. I'll use that to fit and transfer the pattern to the shape of the partlet. The second thing is to scour my copies of Janet Arnold's Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd and every other book in my collection that has the merest hint of description and instruction of Elizabethan blackwork and find out everything I can about what silk and techniques to use.

First picture borrowed from the Web Gallery of Art: Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, by Nicholas Hilliard, 1575-6.

Scan taken by myself of my own sketch from the painting, July 2, 2007.