Tiberius Tunica: Designer Notes

Tiberius was the first of the bunch, and also the simplest: a simple, nice tunica, inspired by the ones worn by Romans in the late republic, early empire (I can tell you that I read quite a lot of references and looked at pictures of statues and reliefs to figure out the “how long should it be?” question). This was a garment I wanted to make as part of a costume for my TTRPG (table-top roleplaying game) character, who is kind of a fantasy Roman. While writing down my measurements to make the tunica, I realised that this was such a simple parametric design that it could be a way for me to dip my toes into the coding part of Freesewing. And so I did. Even though it’s “only” a rectangle, I tried to put some things into it behind the scenes (seams?), some failchecks to ensure that it results in a wearable garment. Since it’s only a rectangle, there is not much wriggle room (pun intended) for fit, making it nice and easy but also challenging when you want to achieve a certain look (the length of the apparent “sleeves”, for example). One slightly hidden feature is the possibility to add positional markers for clavi, strips of colour on the tunica to denote rank and/or class. Quite fascinating,

The name is taken from James T. Kirk, by the way, who luckily had parents who seemingly liked some debatable Roman emperors.

Rika