the codpiece

Haldo! And here we are with another installment in the never-ending thrills of "Making the Most Boring Outfit On the Planet" starring, my husband's butt. Happily, no pictures of his backside today. No pictures of him at all, as it happens. Today's feature is about the making of the codpiece. I'm going to have to say that this has been the part I've been dreading the most, primarily because I had zero idea how to make one and also because this is the one piece that I really didn't want to screw up due to the pointing-and-laughing potential. I mean by others. I'm allowed to point and laugh. And after Julie's not-so-little misadventure resulting in the walrus (point and laugh! point and laugh!), I was especially apprehensive.

Here's a brief description of how this came out. I'm posting this because I think it's moderately period, mostly because it's based on a period pattern.

I started with the first codpiece depicted in Patterns of Fashion, belonging to one Cosimo I de'Medici (drawing on page 53, pattern on page 54). This one is possibly more modest than those shown in the Flemish paintings, but suits my modern sensibilities. I did a little mockup with a straight enlargement of the pattern, to which the husband cried "make it larger!" Well ok then. The second mock-up I made a bit larger and with a bit wider pouch. I also added more length to the bit above the pouch, since Cosimo's doublet came down to somewhat of a point in front whereas Aaron's will be quite short. I wanted a little more fabric there to work with. (I ended up shortening it by an inch or so, incidentally).

 


Possibly because I'm not too bright, it took me a bit of effort to visualize how these two pieces would go together to make this 3d object. So although I suspect most people would find this obvious, here it is, stepwise. Mind, I'm not entirely sure this was what I was supposed to do, but it seemed to work.

1. I sewed the two pieces together around the curved part and up the center front. After clipping the curves, I turned it right side out. This made an amusing little puppet. Sort of like a walrus.

2. I then made sort of a pleat across the bottom and basted it into place. This is equivalent to the underfold that Janet Arnold depicts on page 54. I also ran a line of stitches about halfway down from the end of the curve to enforce this fold, making sure to leave an opening for stuffing. This isn't how I was supposed to do it, but it made the whole thing much easier to work with.

 


3. Once this was done, I flipped it around and sort of gently flattened the pouch into shape, like so:

 


4. Then, working by hand, I stitched it down into the outline I wanted. Mind you, I have no idea why the outline I wanted was so asymetric, but, ahem, that must have been what I wanted.

 


5. After this, it was a simple matter of stuffing it lightly with leftover scraps of linen, whipstitching the opening closed on the back, adding a backing piece (the original had a lining that showed through some slashes, but since this was plainer, I thought the backing would simpler), then making some bias tape to bind it with. The bias tape I have no real justification for except that I thought it would give the edges a bit more form. Possibly I should have just stitched the front and back together and flipped them, but I kind of like the effect:

 


So there we go. One codpiece. Pretty modest too. Not yet attached to the peasanty short-shorts, but hopefully I can get that done today.

Ok, you can start pointing and laughing now.