And this is my kirtle, which I wore with just an apron and a linen headcloth during the day. I did bring a short wool jacket too, but it was too warm for me to need it. The kirtle is hand sewn in hand woven linen twill. There's two layers of it in the bodice and a single layer in the skirt. Though they probably weren't that common compared to woollen ones there is documentation for linen kirtles in the 15th century: for example a swedish document mentions a linen kirtle and then there's the remnants of two linen kirtles (one a woman's and one a child's) of northern german origin in the national museum in Helsinki, Finland. They have been interpreted as smocks, but I think it is just as likely that they are kirtles. I would never use linen for the top layer, but these kirtles are more like a kind of underwear that you can wear in public if you're a peasant or worker, so I decided that I was a working woman during the day. The headcloth is also hand woven linen, while my socks and apron are from wool and the fringe from silk, as I wrote on friday.
I think that I have too much cleavage in this outfit, but I made the kirtle to be worn with high necked smocks and when I needed a low cut smock to be worn under the velvet gown I didn't realize how it would look when worn without the velvet gown ;) Bringing two smocks would have been excessive anyway, since I only was there for one day.
