Part II or, the acquisition process
Now that I know how much fabric I am going to need, all I have to do is find fabric.
Preferably, as I'm still a poor student, cheap. But at the same time, as I want to wear this kind of thing at pseudo-medieval events in the end, it should still be authentic materials...
I knew right from the start that I'd deviate from the gown worn by Mary Magdalene in the picture. For starters, I'd use different colours. As my main LARP character tends to wear mostly reddish/brown/tan, I would use a brown colour scheme rather than the greens of the original. Hurrah for recognisability.
I also wouldn't stick to the materials as depicted.
The gown appears to be made of wool, which is fine, and appears to be lined with something fluffy, presumably some sort of short-haired fur. I didn't want to do that. These days, few inside locations are as cold as they used to be in the Middle Ages (and outside I'm wearing a cloak anyway) so that'd be way too warm to wear. Besides, fur is rather heavy, and a woolen gown would be heavy enough in its own right without the additional weight of the same amount of fur. So instead I was looking for light wool. I was lucky: on e-bay, I found a lovely soft woolen muslin that due to a few flaws was sold really cheap. It was undyed, but that was not a problem: I had been intending to do some fabric-dying experiments sometime anyway, and it was October - walnut season!
So when the lovely fabric arrived and I'd washed it, off into the dying vat it went, along with the green outer skins of walnuts, which are rich in tannins and other colourants and one of the easiest means of getting brown fabric.
As it turned out, this year was a bad walnut year, and apparently a bad year for the walnut skins, too. Instead of the light bark-brown I had expected, it ended up more gold-ish.
That's nature for you.
While this was not intended, I liked the honey-colour quite a lot and decided simply to go with it.
I also found a reasonably cheap woolen flanell (with a small percentage of polyesters... hush!) in a nice dark brown. After some more washing and the nerve-wracking cutting process (I hate cutting fabric)...
everything was set to go!