Category Archives: Fail

Temporal Anxiety

24 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Clothing, Fail, Living History, Making Things

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First draft, heading towards a Pierrot jacket.

I like to have a selection of things to wake up and panic about at 4:00 AM, don’t you? If it isn’t sewing, it’s some weird noise I think the car is making, whether the post office has lost a package, or if that noise is not the cat but instead a pending disaster. My brain generously provides me with a Whitman’s Sampler of anxieties.

To start with, that ball. For one thing, Mr S will probably have to wear his Saratoga coat, which means anything nice that I have won’t match him, temporally. For another, anything nice I think I could make in time is French and not American. So I have temporal and geographic anxiety disorder about something that is supposed to be fun. But there is this jacket I think I could make (and want to make), so I started playing with the pattern in my “sketching in muslin” method.

I haven’t got a lot of the purple, but I might have enough.

I know this is not party wear. I know KCI says jackets like this were worn with white muslin petticoats. But I note that this woman in a Pierrot is not wearing a white muslin petticoat, and I carry on. My other option is my brown wool gown, and perhaps I will wear that.

Mr S still needs a frock coat, so that has to be patterned and fitted; his breeches are still being sewn. He’ll need a wool coat no matter what, but whether it will be done by February is up for grabs.

The last two parts of my current crazy are a program in Newport on early March, with an early date of 1813, and programs in late March in Providence, which I have yet to develop. At least in Newport I don’t have to create the program, just dress and deliver.

Portrait of Sarah Comstock Coffin and Children, ca. 1815. Nantucket Historical Association, 1917.0034.001

Portrait of Sarah Comstock Coffin and Children, ca. 1815. Nantucket Historical Association, 1917.0034.001

1813 is a fun place to start, and I have been looking at images for inspiration.

At right, Mrs Coffin  is a nice example of a New England woman in 1815, wearing the kind-of cross-over, v-neck, apron-front gown I’m thinking of making. I have some fabric reminiscent of a gown at the V&A, and I have some purple sheer cotton, as well as some green silk, so there’s a whole set of what-ifs? to enjoy.

Because that’s the rub: I enjoy all this planning and fretting and picking over details. I just wish it let me sleep a little longer some days.

Overtaken by Events

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Events, Fail, History, Museums

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The Great Gale of 1815

The Great Gale of 1815

I had a plan for this week, but was overtaken by events. Eventually I’ll have a post for HSF # 25, along with thoughts about ways to estimate laundry tub diameters. Until then, make sure your emergency response plans are current and your sidewalks cleared of snow.

Pouting over Putnam

30 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Events, Fail, Reenacting

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James Malton, 1761-1803, A Military Encampment in Hyde Park, 1785, Watercolor with pen in black ink, with traces of graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige, laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

James Malton, 1761-1803, A Military Encampment in Hyde Park, 1785, Watercolor with pen in black ink, with traces of graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige, laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

This Saturday is the BAR event at Putnam Park in Redding, CT. This is an event with an early set-up time, one of those “early enough to be worth packing the car Friday night” events, as Mr S will need to depart at the time he usually gets up. I’m pouting not because of the early departure time, but because I won’t be going.

The Young Mr has his first swim meet Sunday, so Saturday he’ll have to get his homework done. That means someone has to stay home, or he’ll sleep till noon and spend the rest of the day eating meat and playing video games, all normal for a 15-year-old, but not helpful when most of Sunday will be spent marinating in chlorine.

I did a strange and awful thing to my back in an altercation with the face plate of an UPS unit for a server, and find that two weeks on, I still have a mis-aligned rib and occasional searing pain when reaching for Amelia Simmons’ cookbook to find something for Mr S to take with him to Putnam Park. At first, it seemed that it would be like Fort Lee, where one does not cook.

However, it seems that a camp kitchen is planned and there could be cooking, if only someone could tend the fire during the tactical, but no. I will not be there to stir meat of any kind, in any way, and the gentlemen, if one can call them that, will have to scrounge in the corners of their haversacks, take pot luck from the Boy Scouts, or find other means of nourishing themselves. I’ve also been told that it might be as well for me not to lace up my stays and push my ribs around, though on the whole, I think I might be better off wearing them more often. No matter what, home I shall I be, and the gentlemen will have to shift for themselves. Having seen them in action, I have no doubt that they will do well for themselves, and I might still bake them a pie.

The ‘Bigger’ Issues

18 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by in Clothing, Fail, Making Things, Reenacting

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What of those wardrobe issues?

1. The Cross-Barred Gown is Too Big. I will have to take it apart and make it smaller as it is too wide across the back in general and the shoulders. This is fairly simple.

2. The stays are Too Big. I can lift them up and do the shimmy inside them. Seriously. Eighteen months ago, when they were made, I had a two inch gap at the back and the front did not lace closed. Now I can lace them shut front and back.

Whether I have some body image issues or am just a crack-addled monkey can be debated among impolite company some other time, but to solve these problems, here’s the half-baked scheme plan I have in mind:

I re-cut and re-fit my bodice block for an open robe and made it smaller. (For the sacque, I need only trim the sides of the back because I haven’t gotten any farther than that, thank goodness! Now I have a better sense of the shoulder width I need to fill with pleats, also good.) For the Cross-Barred Gown, dis-assembly and re-construction can happen in the spring. Simple enough, and adjustable, too but…

Stay pattern mock-up, measured.

Stay pattern mock-up, measured.

The stays are a little different, and much more serious. I’m not yet sure what to do. I could unstitch the binding and the panels and remove some bones, re-stitch the seams and re-apply the binding…or I could start all over, but make the stays a size smaller. The cardboard mockup measures 33 inches across. With a tape measure snugged up, I measure 37 inches around. Seems like all should be well, no? Two inches, front and back?

32 inches, but they don't fit.

32 inches, but they don’t fit.

It is not. Here you can see the green stays and the yard stick: 32 inches. I should have five inches altogether, right? No. These lace shut front and back (see the back lacing, kindly trust me on the fronts).

How did I not notice this before?

How did I not notice this drop before? (The pale line is the tide line of petticoat waistbands & ties)

Then I compared the mock up and the stays. Curiouser and worser!

Somehow when I assembled this hot mess, I mis-aligned the pieces,and the fronts are lower than they should be. This explains much about the increasingly poor quality of fit as these slide down my ribcage…as you can imagine, the stays can’t do their job when they’re not in the right place to do their job.

If I am to reclaim these and my decorum, the first step will have to be dis-assembly simply to get the various panels into the their proper places. I think it would be fairly simple to do to the fronts, and then I could end some of the madness by sewing the front panels shut and converting these to back-lacing stays. It might be only a temporary fix, but that alone would be worth the effort. Fortunately, I won’t require these until November 23, and in the meantime, I know which gowns are too big, and need to be smaller. With open fronts, at least they’re pretty adjustable.

Catastrophic Wardrobe Failure

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in 1763 Project, Clothing, Events, Fail

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Table at the Bostonian Society, infant stays to the lower right.

Table at the Bostonian Society, infant stays to the lower right. Photo courtesy Sew 18th Century

Several weeks ago now, Sew 18th Century and I went up to Boston to be part of the People of 1763 event at the Bostonian Society. I hope she knows how grateful I was and am to her for her help and thoughtfulness in preparing an excellent table of examples. The infant’s stays were, by far, the most interesting thing people found all day. (While Sew 18th Century ate her lunch, I did hear about how a woman from California was appalled there were not more Boston terriers in Boston, and when I suggested that perhaps the financial district wasn’t where you’d find dogs, in general, but that the Common and the Garden might have more dogs and terriers in particular, I got to see cellphone pictures of her Boston terriers. I’m still intrigued by this conversation.)

Too big, and destined for re-making

Before total failure. Photo courtesy Sew 18th Century.

But all day I fought with my gown, which proves you should not wear something in public until you have fully tested it at home. Finally, packing out, the fronts and the straps separated with a flourish of leaping pins, and all decorum was lost. I began to wonder about exactly what had prompted earlier male compliments on the gown, especially when I discovered the loose stay lace at the top of my stays…and then found the lace had come untied and was unlacing itself from the bottom up! And of course, while outside looking for my husband (reportedly carried off by bears), my hat and cap blew off, and since the gown was coming undone, they were all the harder to catch, adding to the wardrobe mayhem and my discomfiture.

I have since re-looped and double-knotted the stay lace, so I hope it will not come undone again at the base (and of course I had no bodkin handy that day). But still, there were other, “bigger,” issues, to be explored tomorrow.