Her loving attention to her craft could be seen in the smallest details of the stitching and tasteful ornamentation. True, the individual pieces of fabric hadn’t been overlock-stitched before assembly, but that technology hadn’t existed when she created his clothes. Instead each piece had been “pinked” and machine overstitched to keep the edges from raveling and the pieces had been assembled with a technique that had fallen out of vogue when sewing machines were invented.
Modern sewing machines make thirty-five stitches per inch at most, but medieval tailors assembled clothes by hand-stitching each piece together with as many as seventy-five stitches per inch. At it’s highest form, medieval tailors matched the woof and warp of the weave one-to-one with their hand stitches so that each thread was individually tied to a corresponding thread of the matching piece. The resulting garment had the same strength as if it had been woven as a single piece rather than being constructed of many parts basted together with relatively large stitch lengths.