Amateur Bard

It’s officially spring, which means it’s time to wake up from hibernation!

(I don’t intentionally mean to spend the dreary winter months doing fuck all, but I am three houseplants in a trench coat so I basically don’t function when there’s no sun.)

I meant to do a breakdown of my costume last year after Ren faire season wrapped up to show off individual pieces and to cover the upgrades and new pieces I wanted to make for 2026. Better late than never, y’know? Thanks to my peerless skill with my phone’s camera’s timer function, we can take a brief look at my shirt.

I made my shirt back in ~2016ish, when I was going through a BBC Musketeers phase. I followed the instructions from the Costume Historian’s blog for a shirt appropriate for circa 1530 to 1660. This style of shirt is actually quite simple, once you wrap your head around the non-modern construction. The rectangular shape of all the pieces means that you can be extremely economical with your fabric, which is important when you’re likely to need several shirts. These shirts are worn as underwear, the closest layer to the skin, so they were laundered regularly. Outer garments, especially fine pieces, were rarely subjected to the harsh laundering processes that a shirt or shift would go through, because the underlayers protected the outer garments. Depending on the period, shirts were also produced at home rather than being purchased from a skilled tailor.

I made my shirt out of cotton muslin because, well, this was my first attempt at making this style of shirt. Also, I have champagne taste on a beer budget. Despite the popular opinion that wearing cotton rather than linen underlayers means that you’ll immediately die from being smothered in your own sweat-soak garment, it’s a very comfortable piece to wear. Moisture may not evaporate out of cotton as quickly as linen, but I am used to wearing cotton in the Midwestern summer.

The original version of my shirt had a simple band collar and cuffs. In order to make this shirt more appropriate for my Ruffle Bard, I removed the bands and reattached them with additional ruffles.

As I was doing research for another, more historically based costume, I learned that the more sedate ruffs that are typical of the early styles were actually a figure 8 ruffle sewn to the shirt’s collar. So I’m working on ripping out the collar ruffle to make a proper ruffle.

I’ve also started working on a second shirt, so that I can do a whole weekend as the Ruffle Bard. More on that soon (I hope!)