November kind of snuck up on me this year. It's not so much that I was surprised when it arrived. I just sort of felt like there aught to have been another week of October around somewhere. But here we are on the fifth and this evening was the first day this week I've had a chance to work on my October dress or share my Hallowe'en costume with you guys.

I was caught a little off guard on the costume front. I've dressed up for Hallowe'en at work before but I tend to be the only one in the building so I was thinking of just wearing a pair of fairy horns this year and calling it good enough. About half way through Thursday afternoon, however, a flurry of emails when around the office about who would be dressing up or bringing goodies and it turned out that there were going to be plenty of costumes around on Friday and I wanted to be one of them.

As soon as I got home I started hunting around for something to wear. I've done the Jane Austen thing a few times so I didn't really feel like wearing a regency dress unless it was the only thing left (besides I get to wear them every June). I liked the idea of medieval but wasn't sure if the dresses I'd made a few years ago would still fit. Miraculously the underdress fit perfectly. Unfortunately the overdress had lost a bunch of eyelets in the back and was only comfortable if I didn't move my arms. I considered wearing the underdress all by itself but it really looks like there should be something over it. There followed some hasty internet research and some grabbing of fabric to make a garment I've always thought would be kind of fun to wear:

Somewhere in some university course of medieval art I learned that the sideless surcoat had been nicknamed "The Gates of Hell" by the Church. The teenager in me has always wanted to wear it for Hallowe'en. I can now cross it off the list. Why the nickname?

From the front it looks reasonably demure but when you turn sideways it is actually very revealing considering the very tight garment that goes underneath it (the name for which I can never remember).

For a pattern I just used the front and side pieces of the underdress pattern and measured on myself where I wanted to sides to cut down to. The surcoat came together very quickly but was a lot of fabric to deal with. It's red because the only other fabric I had enough of was pink. The binding on the sides is blue mostly because there was enough of it but also because the dusty blue next to the red kind of reminded me of some medieval pictures. I wish I'd had enough binding to also do the neckline but I didn't so it's just hemmed. The bottom isn't hemmed at all. I sewed the binding on after I got up on Friday morning and decided I just wouldn't bother with hemming. I kind of liked the look of it. I think it would be a fun way to ... er ... finish a skirt of many layers of soft cotton (I've a feeling I've got a book somewhere with something like that in it). Hmmm ... summer sewing project? I'll have to remember that one.

ps. It's so much fun to walk around all day in a huge skirt!

pps. I took these pictures on Sunday just before handing out candy on (on the rather dim porch). I was wearing a more neutral coloured bra on Friday when I wore this to work (with the fairy horns - just for good measure).

ppps. We had 116 kids come trick-or-treating at our house! I'm pretty sure last year it wasn't more than 40.