Tag Archives: Making Things

Mail Call!

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, Making Things, Reenacting

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writing letter0001Gentle Readers, would you be writers?

You can join the fun this year by providing mail for the HMS Acasta‘s mail bag at the Jane Austen Festival. Maybe you can’t go, but why shouldn’t your letter?*

Read more here about the suggestions for types of letters, and the characters to whom you may write. It’s on my list of neat things to try to get done.

*Hot tip: Jo Baker, author of Longbourn, will be there. Creative writing, author talks and dressing in high-waisted gowns? Why am I not going? (Because I have too much to do in July!)

Criss Cross

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Clothing, Living History, Museums

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Dolly Eyland, by Alexander Keith, 1808. (c) The New Art Gallery Walsall; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Dolly Eyland, by Alexander Keith, 1808. (c) The New Art Gallery Walsall; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

I like Dolly. The colors, the textures, the style of her gown, shawl and cap all please me. She’s rocking some serious class for a woman headed towards a certain age. And she’s wearing a cross-front gown, which is what I settled on for my Quaker costume. 

Taffeta dress, ca.1800-1810, Originally found on Villa Rosemaine site, where it does not appear now.

The trouble with making a gown based on an artistic sketch in a book is that you don’t have the most complete sense of what that garment looks like, or how it goes together.

Not to worry, I went ahead anyway, because this is as close to Everest as I will ever get.

But I wanted comparable garments to help guide me. Ages ago I found the gown at left on a French costume site. That’s helpful, in that it explains the trickiness of assembling and wearing this style of garment. Three pieces coming together in the front may be one piece too many. 

In making up my pattern, I used the pattern for the Spencer as a starting place because I knew that the set of the sleeves and arm scye were what I wanted. No reason to re-invent that process!

That left me with the luxury of concentrating on the neckline.

That took a few goes with the tracing paper and muslin:  I did lose count after a while. There may have been tears, there definitely was swearing. Mr S at one point made jokes about this process appearing on the Discovery Channel’s “How it’s Made” as “the Quaker dress.” He’s really very patient, and I do understand the selective deafness he’s had to develop as a defense against the dark arts of sewing historic clothing.

Thank you, Cassidy, for the chemisette!

Eventually, I had a decent lining and even some silk bodice fronts. I fiddled with the fronts, and settled on gathers instead of pleats, but couldn’t quite figure out where the casing went. Some days I can process drawings into objects, some days I can’t. I’d just about reached the point of cutting it all up into the gown I always make when I discovered that the excellent women of the 19th US had patterned the gown from the drawing, too. (If you don’t already use this site, I highly recommend it. Excellent work.) Those pattern pieces look like my pattern pieces, so I decided it was worth carrying on with what I have.

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.

Miniature Miniatures

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Living History, Making Things, Museums, Reenacting

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Images arranged in Illustrator

Images arranged in Illustrator

I admired the Pragmatic Costumer’s post on painting miniatures, but recognized that my desire for immediate gratification was going to run headlong into the small workspace formerly known as our dining room, where it would crash into my lack of practice at painting and result in unhappiness for all.

In recognition of my family’s right to peace in our time,  I made like an ’80s artist and appropriated images.

Separated and ready for trimming

Separated and ready for trimming

After selecting gentlemen and an infant from 1761-1776, I downloaded the files and placed them in Illustrator where I could size them to one inch diameter circles. Why so small? Because to test this plan, I used rawther cheap little cabochon kits from Michael’s, and they were only to be found in the one inch size.

After cutting the images out generally, I trimmed them to the black line I created in Illustrator. (I don’t yet have a non-Illustrator answer to this process; I am lucky enough to have an ancient copy of CS Dawn-of-Time; let me think about a workaround.)

Henry Knox, the first trial

Henry Knox, the first trial

Here’s Henry Knox, my first trial. I was willing to ‘sacrifice’ him because although I admire his fortitude in dragging artillery across Massachusetts, he was a beast to Joseph Plumb Martin about post-war bounty land in Maine. I’m Knox-conflicted.

Some squishing and fiddling with the self-adhesive fronts later, here are three of the four miniature miniatures.

Three sandwiched images

Three sandwiched images

Finished tiny miniatures

Finished tiny miniatures

Yes, this is so ridiculously easy as to be evil.

What would I do differently next time?

I’d order proper cabochons and fronts in a larger size (I may convert these to bracelets).

I’d give painting a try, perhaps over the winter break at work. I’ll need time to get that right.

I’d string them on actual silk, and not polyester, ribbon. (It was handy, and the proper size).

But for a cheater’s way to miniature jewelry in under an hour, I suppose they could be worse.

Whatever you do, if you follow this example and “appropriate” images, don’t sell them. The Met may have millions in revenue, but it’s still wrong.

Hunting Frocks, Again

11 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by in Clothing, Living History, Reenacting, Research

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They’re not Mr S’s favorite thing, and I can understand why. Hunting frocks lack pizzazz, buttons, tape, lace, lapels, skirts and all the things that make him so fond of the Ugly Dog Coat worn by the 10th Massachusetts in 1782. (I think these are the coats captured from British supply ships and dyed at Newburgh and West Point in tanner’s vats.) But what he has right now is a hunting frock.

Here’s the kid in his new hunting frock, and a hand colored copper engraving by Johann Martin Will from 1776.

You gotta hold your tongue just right when you drill.

Americaner Soldat, Johann Martin Will. Ann S. K. Brown Collection, Brown University.

Americaner Soldat, Johann Martin Will. Ann S. K. Brown Collection, Brown University.

And then there are the colored and plain engravings, “1. Americanischer scharffschütz oder Jäger (rifleman) 2. regulaire infanterie von Pensylvanien,” engraved by Berger after Chodowiecki.

Library of Congress

Library of Congress

Berger after Chodowiecki, Ann S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University

Ann S. K. Brown Collection

I started thinking about these again because not only am I reading Hurst’s thesis, but I’m fresh from helping the guys get dressed and arrange their capes and straps. I have been doing that as long as Mr S has been wearing historic clothing.

Early days of draping

Early days of draping


Drapey capes

The hunting frock drifts if it does not have some kind of fastening at the neck. The two halves migrate in opposite directions, and while belts help, the light infantry bayonet shoulder belt does not contain the hunting frock as well as one might like. So the thing to do, I think, is to attach a loop and button at the neck to hold the garment in place. From the period engravings, I think that’s acceptable. The garments all look as if they are closed at the neck. From the evidence in the field, and from the images, I plan to make loops and attach buttons, and hope that will limit some tendency to wander.

The image of the two soldiers together suggests another wrinkle in the hunting frock quandary, since the left hand soldier’s out garment looks like a long pocket-less coat with applied fringe and only a very small cape at the neck. Thank goodness that soldier is a rifleman, and thus outside the realm of immediate relevance. (And on a side note, I know a gentleman who very much resembles the Pennsylvania infantry man: identical calves, and even a similar face.)