16th Century Starching and Setting, Test Ruff 1
These things don't just set themselves!
Sunday morning I started the process of starching and setting the first test ruff I made. (Previous posts about experimentation with different types of starch and silk ruffs can be found here.)
First step: Make up a batch of starchy water. I'm pretty much settled on wheat starch these days, and I decided on a ratio of 8 parts water to 1 part starch. So I boiled the water and stirred in the starch. You know what? Don't do this. I would actually recommend to mix them together at room temperature, which is what I'll do in the future, because if you mix in the starch with already-boiling water it forms into clumps. So, mix, then boil, let cool, then strain. I used the same straining set up I've been using all along.
Once the starchy water has been strained, dunk the ruff in the water and get it good and saturated, like so:
The next thing I did was wrong, but I didn't know at the time, which was to hang it up in the bathroom to dry:
It turns out, this is not a very good method for drying 10 yards of linen pleated into 16 inches. Four hours later it was still dripping wet. According to the engravings and accompanying text in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 4, ruffs in starching houses were commonly hung in front of a fire, and gently moved by an assistant to stop the layers from sticking together as they dried. So, dry heat being the way to go, I pulled out the drying rack that came with my new dryer, attached it inside the drum, spread my sopping wet ruff on it and set it to dry.
I started with 10 minutes on low heat but that wasn't even close to enough, so I think in the end an appropriate setting would have been about 30-40 minutes on medium heat (this note is for my future reference).
In the meantime, my sweet husband modified my only curling iron to remove the spring clip and thus create the closest on-hand equivalent to a setting stick (which you can see several versions of in the woodcuts from 1570 and 1590, scanned from PoF4):
One of the downsides of using a modern curling iron is that they almost always have a plastic tip that stays cool. Great if you're feathering your bangs, not so great for setting a ruff. The other less-than-ideal situation is that this curling iron is too fat for this ruff. I need a setting stick with a slimmer barrel (both of these should be remedied by things I apparently [according to Best Husband Evar!] have on order from ebay as we speak, btw!)
Ok, first step is to gather the tools: A 2-liter bottle to use as a setting block, setting stick, a glass of water for damping, and a blow-dryer (more on that later).
The glass of water is for damping. Because once the ruff has dried, it sets and hardens into whatever crazy shape it wants. Most of the pleats have hardened to have sharp, pointy creases, which is not a preferred shape. So, I started by setting the bottom side pleats, I would wet my fingers, damp down one pleat at a time then shove the setting stick into that pleat until the fabric dried. The inside portion of each pleat, right in by the neckband, was still quite damp from the drying process, though. I used the blow-dryer for drying the inside of the pleat toward the neck where the curling iron's cool plastic tip was doing nothing for me. However, when I get the setting stick that's metal all the way to the end I can, hopefully, dispense with this portion of the program.
Working all the way around, just doing the pleats on the bottom (which I had turned to be facing up, so just the pleats facing me - the bottom pleats) took about 2 hours. This is because there were, if I recall correctly from my pleating math when I made this ruff, 86 pleats in this ruff. Each pleat has to be individually dampened and heated on the stick until it's dry (ON EACH SIDE!), so approximately, say, 2 hours for each side (top and bottom) if I only heat each pleat for less than 2 minutes each. But, some of them took longer than that so I spent, overall, on both days, a total of 5 to 5 1/2 hours.
Back to the technique: I found that if you dampen the fabric unevenly then it rumples as it dries, which is a less than optimal result. BUT - if you get too much water on the pleat you're heating in an attempt to evenly wet the whole area, the water will spread onto the pleats next to it on each side when they come in contact, one of which you've already set, which is also less than optimal because it will soften again into an undesired shape and dry that way if you don't catch it!) Here's how it looked after setting the bottom side pleats (plus bonus cat):
At that point I was convinced that I was probably going to need a LOT of experience to get this thing to look right, and I was only half finished but it was bedtime Sunday night so I went to bed and decided to finish it another night. I left it on the 2-liter bottle with the top side facing down, however, so that gravity would pull it into the shape I wanted as the linen inside nearest the neck finished drying.
Last night I was ready to finish it by setting the pleats on the top side, here's how it sat before I began:
For some reason, last night's session took over 3 hours. I did the same thing I'd done Sunday night, only on the other side (the top side of the ruff) and maybe because I'd learned what I was doing or as I progressed my standards for what I wanted to see went up, but it took a very long time! I think the results were...good. There's room for improvement, because I have a day job and can't spend years perfecting my technique I will have to accept this result for now, but hopefully improve as I continue practicing on future ruffs. I will say, for the record, that I don't believe that the next test ruff needs to be 10 yards. I think 6 will probably suffice.
Here's my final result from every angle (one with bonus cat, unimpressed as usual):
Sunday morning I started the process of starching and setting the first test ruff I made. (Previous posts about experimentation with different types of starch and silk ruffs can be found here.)
First step: Make up a batch of starchy water. I'm pretty much settled on wheat starch these days, and I decided on a ratio of 8 parts water to 1 part starch. So I boiled the water and stirred in the starch. You know what? Don't do this. I would actually recommend to mix them together at room temperature, which is what I'll do in the future, because if you mix in the starch with already-boiling water it forms into clumps. So, mix, then boil, let cool, then strain. I used the same straining set up I've been using all along.
Once the starchy water has been strained, dunk the ruff in the water and get it good and saturated, like so:
The next thing I did was wrong, but I didn't know at the time, which was to hang it up in the bathroom to dry:
It turns out, this is not a very good method for drying 10 yards of linen pleated into 16 inches. Four hours later it was still dripping wet. According to the engravings and accompanying text in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 4, ruffs in starching houses were commonly hung in front of a fire, and gently moved by an assistant to stop the layers from sticking together as they dried. So, dry heat being the way to go, I pulled out the drying rack that came with my new dryer, attached it inside the drum, spread my sopping wet ruff on it and set it to dry.
I started with 10 minutes on low heat but that wasn't even close to enough, so I think in the end an appropriate setting would have been about 30-40 minutes on medium heat (this note is for my future reference).
In the meantime, my sweet husband modified my only curling iron to remove the spring clip and thus create the closest on-hand equivalent to a setting stick (which you can see several versions of in the woodcuts from 1570 and 1590, scanned from PoF4):
One of the downsides of using a modern curling iron is that they almost always have a plastic tip that stays cool. Great if you're feathering your bangs, not so great for setting a ruff. The other less-than-ideal situation is that this curling iron is too fat for this ruff. I need a setting stick with a slimmer barrel (both of these should be remedied by things I apparently [according to Best Husband Evar!] have on order from ebay as we speak, btw!)
Ok, first step is to gather the tools: A 2-liter bottle to use as a setting block, setting stick, a glass of water for damping, and a blow-dryer (more on that later).
The glass of water is for damping. Because once the ruff has dried, it sets and hardens into whatever crazy shape it wants. Most of the pleats have hardened to have sharp, pointy creases, which is not a preferred shape. So, I started by setting the bottom side pleats, I would wet my fingers, damp down one pleat at a time then shove the setting stick into that pleat until the fabric dried. The inside portion of each pleat, right in by the neckband, was still quite damp from the drying process, though. I used the blow-dryer for drying the inside of the pleat toward the neck where the curling iron's cool plastic tip was doing nothing for me. However, when I get the setting stick that's metal all the way to the end I can, hopefully, dispense with this portion of the program.
Working all the way around, just doing the pleats on the bottom (which I had turned to be facing up, so just the pleats facing me - the bottom pleats) took about 2 hours. This is because there were, if I recall correctly from my pleating math when I made this ruff, 86 pleats in this ruff. Each pleat has to be individually dampened and heated on the stick until it's dry (ON EACH SIDE!), so approximately, say, 2 hours for each side (top and bottom) if I only heat each pleat for less than 2 minutes each. But, some of them took longer than that so I spent, overall, on both days, a total of 5 to 5 1/2 hours.
Back to the technique: I found that if you dampen the fabric unevenly then it rumples as it dries, which is a less than optimal result. BUT - if you get too much water on the pleat you're heating in an attempt to evenly wet the whole area, the water will spread onto the pleats next to it on each side when they come in contact, one of which you've already set, which is also less than optimal because it will soften again into an undesired shape and dry that way if you don't catch it!) Here's how it looked after setting the bottom side pleats (plus bonus cat):
At that point I was convinced that I was probably going to need a LOT of experience to get this thing to look right, and I was only half finished but it was bedtime Sunday night so I went to bed and decided to finish it another night. I left it on the 2-liter bottle with the top side facing down, however, so that gravity would pull it into the shape I wanted as the linen inside nearest the neck finished drying.
Last night I was ready to finish it by setting the pleats on the top side, here's how it sat before I began:
For some reason, last night's session took over 3 hours. I did the same thing I'd done Sunday night, only on the other side (the top side of the ruff) and maybe because I'd learned what I was doing or as I progressed my standards for what I wanted to see went up, but it took a very long time! I think the results were...good. There's room for improvement, because I have a day job and can't spend years perfecting my technique I will have to accept this result for now, but hopefully improve as I continue practicing on future ruffs. I will say, for the record, that I don't believe that the next test ruff needs to be 10 yards. I think 6 will probably suffice.
Here's my final result from every angle (one with bonus cat, unimpressed as usual):