Walburga Wappenrock
Designer notes
Walburga is the odd one out of the three patterns, because it still is “historically inspired”, but does not actually follow any real historical garment. It is based on tabards (“Wappenrock” in German, hence the name starting with a W), handwavingly placed in a western European middle ages setting. To be honest, it is inspired more by the Legend of Zelda than anything real.
I created this pattern because I needed something for my TTRPG character, basically a fantasy Roman, to display his heraldics on, and since I could not find anything in the literature about Romans doing this in a reliably documented way, I went the “it’s all fantasy anyway”-route. (And I had a weird fascination with tabards as a kid, so it was a natural fit.)
Coding-wise, I spend some time on it because I wanted the triangular terminations to look just right, so I fiddled with the golden ratio to ensure it looked nice, no matter what the size.
The name comes from me thinking about vaguely mediaeval names starting with W,
and somehow walburga popped into my head.
Rika
Lunetius, Tiberius and Walburga really come as a set. Not only were they born at the same time, they are designed to work together to form a full outfit. Not that this means that they can’t be made separately 😉
See also: Lunetius Designer Notes and Tiberius Designer Notes.
The further we go back in time, the less extant garments we have to base research on. Often there may be scraps of fabric left behind by stroke of luck but most of our information starts to come from (in archaeology) secondary sources like written texts from contemporaries.
This is especially true for the Roman and Mediaeval eras, not to mention that a lot of the available research is behind a paywall.
We can’t be 100 percent historically accurate, because we’re living in a different time, and everything we use to sew is different now from before. Even fabric is woven in a different way.
How ‘accurate’ you want to be is up to you, there is no wrong way to do this and research is not required – though it can be fun!