Category Archives: Living History

To Name a Thing is to Know theThing: Vocabulary Exercises

08 Tuesday Aug 2017

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Today’s CoBloWriMo prompt is vocabulary, which in my case usually means blue, NSFW, or unprintable in the New York Times according to their Style Guide, (but now OK in the New Yorker, thank you Tina Brown).

Captain Haddock proclivities aside, I find myself trying to remember to use period-correct terms as I work, which means trying to figure out what the terms mean. It isn’t always easy, but there are number of printed and online sources.

Here, for example, is the Robe de Marcelline fashion plate I’ve been obsessed with since at least 2011, when Sabine made hers. I finally tracked down some dark green gingham fabric in Framingham, but, d’oh! It’s cotton and not marcel(l)ine.

Google Books provides many useful lookups, through dictionaries and, best of all at the moment, The Dictionary of Fashion History, which helpfully illuminates marceline as “a brilliant but slight kind of sarcenet.” That helps narrow down “lining fabric for women’s clothes,” and confirms that this is a lightweight, probably plain weave, silk.

That doesn’t solve my fabric issue, but given that I am still lack full-time work outside the house, Imma stick with my remnant table cotton. But at least I know what I *should* be using, and have expanded my vocabulary along the way.

Wrap it Up, I’ll Take it: Made for Someone Else

07 Monday Aug 2017

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Banyan, 1750-1775. T.215-1992, V&A Museum

Banyan, 1750-1775.
T.215-1992, V&A Museum

Disclaimer: This is an adaptation of an earlier post, so if you think you’ve read this before, you probably have.

Banyan or wrapping gown: both terms are used,  but the wearer and I call this a banyan for brevity’s sake. Despite its simplicity, this project took longer than I wanted, mostly because I have a tendency to take on too many things at once and promptly get sick. I like to think of this ability as a very special talent.

In any case, this simple garment was made more fun by piecing– it’s the challenge that keeps you awake, when the majority of the work is in teeny-tiny back stitches.

I took the subject’s chest, arm and back length, and bicep measurements, and made up my own pattern, using the chintz banyan in Fitting and Proper and this one at the V&A as models.

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Measurements in hand, the patterning was straightforward: you know how wide to made the body, the center back length you need to achieve, how wide to cut the neck hole, and how wide and how long the sleeves need to be. Really, not that hard.

You can use a diagram like this to start you off. I did wing the bottom width, guessing at the angle to give the garment a fullness similar to the chintz at the V&A.

Pieced more than once.
A lining in two colorways.

I didn’t have quite enough fabric to accommodate the recipient’s full height, nor could I get enough of the red print lining material; I had to piece both the stripes and the lining.  Trying to match up the stripes was remarkably satisfying, both when I succeeded and when I was  little off. Life Goal: Dizzying, please.

It contrasted well with a blue woven coverlet, making a nice bright note as I prepped rooms for What Cheer Day 2016. This was the effect I had hoped to achieve waaay back in April 2016 when I failed to finish anything I wanted for the After Dark program thanks to a bout of strep throat.

Jimmie and Billie, unwell and unable to dress themselves without Gideon’s aid. Photograph by J. D. Kay

By October, though, I was able to finish the entire item and make a matching cap, allowing Billie Bowen to recuperate in style from an evening at the Cold Meat Club. I’ve drifted away from making things for other people (except to sell) in part because the Giant, heading to college, has drifted away from living history and thus occupies far less of my sewing time.

Bad, Mad Skillz: An Origin Story

05 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by in Clothing, Fail, Living History, personal

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Aragorn: one of many modified patterns

I’ve been sewing clothes off and on for while, and sewing pretty constantly since the 1990s—baby quilts, piped slipcovers for vintage chairs, knitting needle cases, costumes for the Giant, and sundry other items. Making calms me, and since I tend to operate at a pretty high RPM, I make a lot of things.

Historical clothing took off for me after the Giant decided he wanted in on the living history thing. Hunting frocks, overalls, and shirts gave way to stays, petticoats and gowns. I’m largely self-taught, and although workshops with Sharon Burnston and Henry Cooke helped immensely, much of what I learned about fitting and draping I learned by reading (books and tutorials, especially Koshka and Sabine) and by making mistakes.

The best way to succeed is to fail, and I am an accomplished failure —you have only to look through the archives here, and you will find waistcoats sewn by drunken, crack-addled monkeys , upside-down Spencer collars, and stays gone wrong. I’m okay with those mistakes, because they helped me (and, I hope, some of my readers) make progress towards better sewing.

Really, I’m not sure how this happened. But there it is: upside down.

I’ve made things of late of which I am proud, or at least pleased with; I have taught myself new skills over the years from pad stitching (still working on that) to hand knotting (getting better) . I’ve gained patience (which is a skill itself) as I’ve learned new techniques, and that counts for a lot.

Hand-knotted lapis bead necklace: a new, slightly frustrating skill

Way back when (for the true origins), struggling through a design studio, I realized that the greatest frustration typically comes just before a breakthrough. That understanding is really the origin of my historical sewing: getting frustrated means you’re making progress. And what’s more frustrating that replicating a historical garment?

Au courant? Un canezou

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Clothing, Living History, Research

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Collier de Lapis. Canezou a Manche[?]

This.

Because, August (or Aôut). The Salem Maritime Festival is nearly upon us, so there’s a flurry of bonnet and accessory and other making happening chez Calash as there usually is in summer. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and this year I was asked if the millinery setup could be more of a demonstration.

That’s a kind of relief, actually, as it allows me to bring bonnets from multiple years in a variety of levels of completion, which allows me the luxury of talking about evolving styles and a variety of construction methods. Whether or not I’ll manage a drawn bonnet is still up in the air; it’s a lot of hand sewing for someone with carpal tunnel.*

Because any trip to Salem affords me the opportunity to join the mercantile class, I like to take the opportunity to make something new and non-working class when I go up there. This year, I was taken with the canezou. What’s a milliner to do, but stay as up-to-date as possible? What the heck is a canezou?

Well….roughly, from the French and English costume history books, the canezou is a short, Spencer-like garment, often in white, lightweight cotton, worn over another garment. The canezou seen here clearly has sleeves, and the plate is dated 1811, giving the lie to the wikipedia’s assertion that it’s circa 1835. (The later evolutions have become more scarf or fichu-like, but are again worn over other gowns- though apparently it enjoys a brief time as the cambric blouse worn with a riding habit. And then there’s another definition, by another fashion historian, in which the canezou is described as being like a man’s shirt.

Well, that’s all cleared up then….

With this information in hand, and the fashion plate before me, I perused the contents of the Strategic Fabric Reserve, and lit upon those popular Ikea curtains which have appeared here before as a gown and as a petticoat and now as a canezou.

I modified a Spencer pattern for the base lining of white cotton, and then draped, stroke gathered, and stitched the curtain fabric to form the floofy bodice. The lace on the cap sleeves is reclaimed from a late 19th century negligee lurking in Drunk Tailor’s collection of usable old fabrics, while the lace at the bottom was reclaimed from an antique petticoat before I picked it up in Sturbridge, MA a few years ago.

To complete this, a bodiced petticoat with an embroidered hem (machine embroidered, of fabric I may have picked up from a remnant table in Pawtucket, RI), a pair of trimmed shoes, a necklace (here of sapphire blue stones, unless I can teach myself hand-knotting by Friday), and a bonnet of blue and white check silk that arrived just in time from India. Five new items in two or three weeks: the price of fashion is slightly mad.

*Hand-sewing everything has, at last, caught up with me. I find soaking my hands in cold water helpful, as well as sleeping in those super attractive hand braces. Imma need some surgery, but for now, braces, Aspercreme, and ice water must do.

Style Council

28 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by in Living History, material culture

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National Gallery of Art furniture gallery, May 2017

One of the critiques leveled at historic house museums is that they’re often “frozen in time,” specifically a particular moment, rather than reflecting the changes that happened over time. This charge is sometimes leveled at period room installations as well, when all the furniture in a room is from a tight time span– a year, maybe five– when for most of us, the furnishings in our homes and the clothes in our closets reflect a number of years, rather than a tight twelve or eighteen months.

So, when we go out “into the field” (or the house or the milliner’s shop or the tavern), shouldn’t our belongings reflect the multiplicity of years of objects? If I’m a woman Of A Certain Age, won’t I have possessions, from jewelry to ceramics to clothing, from multiple decades? Well…. yes and no.

It’s true that as far as we can tell, John Brown moved his 1760 furniture into his 1788 mansion, but we also know he bought new furnishings, including a large (188+ piece) set of Chinese Export Porcelain (see above).

Up-to-date, stylish, expensive: table settings signaled wealth and sophistication as much as clothing and manners, so whatever JB had before 1788, he wasn’t setting his new table with it. What might he (or Mrs B) have done with it? Consigned it to use by grandchildren and servants? Given it to less fortunate relations? Possibly. And if they had creamware, it would not have been singularly out of place in 1788 or 1800 on any table– it was only 40 years old, and heaven knows my “best” china is from the 1930s– but would they have used earlier pottery, even in the kitchen?

All pottery is not the same: North Devon pottery, while imported to North America in the late 17th and early 18th century, is not what you would expect to find in a late-18th century farm kitchen. It’s here, sure, into the mid-18th century, but in 1799, it’s not the form you would expect to see. So what does that mean for living history folks? Does it matter what you use?

You know what I think: there ain’t nothing like the real thing and that means paying careful attention to details. If you’re portraying a camp follower in 1778, or tenant farmer in 1799, you are not likely to have, say, a Jackfield-type figured tea pot, just as you are not likely to have a salt-glazed squirrel-relief cream jug, no matter how much you adore it.

Time and style matter. The people of the past read each other the same way we read each other. Remember Clarice Starling, with her “good bag and her cheap shoes”? Get on a train anywhere, and you can read your fellow travelers: you can guess income and education levels, marital status, and sometimes interests and hobbies if you look closely. You make assumptions about people based on their appearance, whether you’re conscious of it or not– and so did the people of the past. To portray them accurately, and to help the public learn to read the past, the details matter.