This farthingale is for my 16C Spanish garb. I decided to use Juan de Alcega's pattern in his Tailor's Pattern Book, published in 1589. I didn't want anything too stiff and heavy for the fabric, although it still needed to be sturdy, so I went for a cotton/linen blend. It's approximately 130cm wide, so cut in half lengthways, it's only a little wider than the fabric used in Alcega's pattern. In all, I expected the circumference of the skirt at the bottom would be approximately three metres, which was too big for what I wanted, but once I had the hoops in the skirt this would easily be adjusted.

Fabric & Materials

Fabric: White cotton/linen blend
Hoops: Have tried both 10mm plastic irrigation piping with connectors and Roman Blind Batting.

Construction

I followed the (very basic) instructions in the Alcega book (below), so I won't type them again here.

With a graph pad and some basic maths, figuring out the distance between the hoops and the circumference of them was simple. The bottom hoop is in the hem of the farthingale, and the top hoop is just within reach of my hands, so I can pick it up for easy movement. For the hoops themselves, I first used Roman Blind Batting, which was simple to use, readily available (I got mine from Spotlight) and relatively cheap.

Unfortuantely, once I'd cut them and fed them through the channels, I realised that firstly I needed to somehow join the ends of the hoop together, because they kept springing open and secondly that they kept twisting in the channels. Both of these things made sure that the farthingale didn't retain it's 'bell' shape for long.

Next I tried using plastic piping, the sort you'd use for home irrigation. I used about 10mm thick piping, with plastic connectors to join the ends of each hoop together. This stuff work really well - it's very cheap, you can get it from any hardware/gardening shop, it's light, easy to cut and you can join them together. It's also easy to feed through the channels.

Once the channels were in I could put the farthingale on and adjust where my waistband needed to sit, and how wide it needed to be, and tweak the hoops - which didn't need much.

For the waist fastening I used ties, so I could easily adjust how tight/loose it needed to be.