Wimple Wednesday: 13th Century Kerchief and Plain Wimple

Experiment time: let's play with some medieval and early modern women's head-coverings.

[Context: I got frustrated with a person online (quelle horreur!) making opprobrious comments about the use of head-coverings by women in the modern world.  These comments may have been directed at practitioners of a certain non-local-majority religion. As such, I decided it was time to remind people that 'western' costume, until very recently, included head-coverings for men and women outdoors; indoor and outdoor hair-coverings for women have been part of that same tradition for over a thousand years, though they declined in popularity by the mid-19th century.]

I'm starting c.1200 CE, because that gives me an excuse to play with all the fun forms in Thursfield's The Medieval Tailor's Assistant, and to start week 1 with an actual wimple. The overall theme is 'unstructured/semi-structered hair coverings', but we don't have any days that make a good alliteration with 'veil' or 'kerchief' or 'coif', so wimples it is.*

Still not good with selfies.
The soft linen is quite comfy, though.

The wimple (the bit under the chin and over the ears) is a 12" by 36" rectangle of fine linen; the kerchief (bit draped over the head) is a square yard of the same. I'm tempted to experiment with a slightly shallower rectangle here instead of the full square--it's a good length along the front but perhaps too long down the back.

Both wimple and kerchief are pinned to the fillet, a double-layer bias-cut band of linen which is tied around the head. It's made of the same lightweight linen (3.5 oz handkerchief weight from Fabric-store.com), with two pairs of 1/4" wide linen tapes to fasten it at the back.  The wimple and kerchief are attached to the filet with three pins; I used the brass clothing pins from Burnley and Trowbridge.

*Not all offerings will feature throat-covering wimples. They all will cover some/all of the hair. I'm sticking to less structured items like headrails, kerchiefs and caps, both because it takes a ton of time to make hats, bonnets, and elaborately padded headdresses, but also because these things frequently cover the hair in addition to a outer bonnet or hat, and also in situations where outer headgear is dispensed with.