20 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Events, Living History
≈ Comments Off on Sunny with a Chance of History
We’ll be there: will you? I’m looking forward to trying out a new Paul Sandby-inspired persona, and figure my filthy “Bridget” gown is just about right for a street vendor.
It promises to be an interesting day with much to see.
09 Sunday Mar 2014
Tags
19th century clothing, fashion, living history, Newport, Newport Historical Society, Quaker dress, Quakers, reading, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptist Meeting House, style
Courtesy Newport Historical Society
Last Friday, I joined my friends in Newport for a program at the Newport Historical Society.
We stood in the Seventh Day Baptist Meeting House behind the NHS’s headquarters building and read excerpts of letters from the Williams Collection.
This is a simple, elegant concept for a program, and works incredibly well if the correspondence have the gift for expression that these people did. Even quotidian details–the price someone wants to get for their dining set, the likelihood of moving one’s mother, who must be carried ‘as carefully as a box of China’–take on humor when read aloud.
Courtesy Newport Historical Society
The best letter might well have been the last one, read by Sew 18th Century. The latest of the selection, the writer described a visit to Newport around 1844, arriving at the dock to the bustle of wagons, walking streets and finding a barber who knew the old fish hawker, the enormous jaw bone of a whale on a street corner, and even lifting the latch to walk inside the Seventh Day Baptist Meeting House where we were standing.
It was a lovely way to end the program, resonant with details the audience could connect with.
My dress turned out all right, and I managed to get it on and keep it on, which seemed a small miracle requiring only two pins.
When I tried it on at home, the front panel didn’t wrinkle, so I think I pulled it too tightly around me on Friday. I kept my bonnet on because I didn’t have time to make a new cap, so made do with the housekeeper’s cap from last fall. The chemisette was made by Cassidy, and saved me from the migratory ‘charms’ of a kerchief. The ‘shawl’ was a gift Christmas from my mother, who rightly saw it as a scarf, but those who wish to keep warm do not quibble when they cannot find exactly what they want. Before I wear the dress again, I have to attend to interior seams of the skirt and scoot the cuffs down to lengthen the sleeves. Four yards of 48-inch wide silk was just enough, but needs a little tweaking when you’re a tall as I am.
05 Wednesday Mar 2014
Posted in Clothing, Living History, Museums
≈ Comments Off on Criss Cross
Tags
Clothing, Costume, fashion, Making Things, museum collections, Museums, Newport, Newport Historical Society, patterns, Quaker dress, Quakers, Reenacting, Research, Rhode Island history, sewing
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.
17 Monday Feb 2014
Posted in Clothing, Events, Living History
Tags
18th century clothing, 19th century clothing, Costume in Detail, fashion, Nancy Bradford, Newport Historical Society, Quaker dress, Quakers, silk, style
Costume in Detail by Nancy Bradford, page 372.
I’m still struggling with the Quaker Dress conundrum, both because I want a challenge and I want to be as accurate as I can be.
So, not unlike my stubborn cat, I got an idea, and I just can’t shake it. The kind-of-cross-over, apron-front, v-neck day dress.
I’ve tried and failed before, but I got a little farther Saturday. When I went looking for the original, I was pleased to find that it had ended up at Killerton House, as part of the National Trust Collection.
You can find it here, but you can’t see it yet.
WOMAN IN GRAY DRESS
John Brewster Jr. (1766–1854)
New England
1814
Oil on canvas
29 1/2 x 24 5/8 in. (sight)
American Folk Art Museum, promised gift of Eric D.W. Cohler, P3.1998.1
I think it may look something like the dress in this portrait, but without the collar.
Bradfield’s notes indicate that the front, sloping edge is a “fine, 1/10″ selvedge very narrow of rich dull orange saffron.” Based on this note, I have tried using the selvedge for that edge in the lining. (Better to fail on the lining than on the silk, right?)
We’ll see… the next trial will be a drawstring, just to see if I can get this business to fit.
31 Friday Jan 2014
Tags
18th century clothing, 19th century clothing, authenticity, dress, fashion, living history, museum collections, Museums, Newport, Newport Historical Society, Quakers, Research, Rhode Island, Rhode Island history, style
The Newport dresses seemed a little strange to me, in that the collar treatment was more like what I would expect to see on a pelisse than on a gown. But I am willing to be wrong, and delighted to be wrong if that’s how I will learn something.
@silkdamask (that’s Kimberley Alexander’s twitter handle; she has a blog you might want to follow if you don’t already) posted a photo of the dress (above left) she imagined a young woman she’d been writing about might have worn. Housed at the Met, this embroidered American cotton and wool gown ca. 1806 has a cross-over bodice and collar.
Another day dress from the Met (above right) has a ca. 1820 date, but looks very much like the gown worn by Mrs Amelia Opie (she was a British Quaker) in this engraving after an 1803 portrait. (Other, similar gowns and portraits are pinned here.)
![Amelia Opie (1769-1863). Engraving by Ridley after painting by [John] Opie, 1803. Massachusetts Historical Society, Photo. 81.490](https://kittycalash.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/81_490_g_aopie_ref.jpg?w=175&h=213)
Amelia Opie (1769-1863). Engraving by Ridley after painting by [John] Opie, 1803. Massachusetts Historical Society, Photo. 81.490
Nantucket and New Bedford both hard large Quaker populations (remember Moby Dick?), and the Williams family in Newport had connections to New Bedford, so I looked in collections in Nantucket and New Bedford as well.
The gown below, now in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, was worn by Susan Waln Morgan Rodman (Mrs Benjamin Rodman), while pregnant; using a genealogy, we can establish pretty solid date ranges for the dresses at New Bedford Whaling Museum. It looks 1820s in style, and her first two children are born in 1821 and 1822.
Maternity gown worn by Susan Waln Morgan Rodman (Mrs Benjamin Rodman). New Bedford Whaling Museum, 1991.45.5.
A date range of 1820 to 1822 seems plausible. Susan Waln Morgan Rodman would have been about 20 with her first pregnancies. (Genealogies are on Google books.)
She seems to have kept up with style and to have liked clothes; a search for her name in the NBWM catalog returned some interesting items, though the catalog does not allow for linking to item records or searches. Mrs Rodman’s appears to have kept pace with style changes; that is, her wardrobe did not ossify in 1820-something, but evolved as fashions changed, and was appropriate for different situations.
Does that mean that all Quaker women kept pace with style changes? It’s hard to say; each of us today updates our wardrobe according to our fancy, our purse, our inclinations and our age. Are those Newport gowns going to turn out to look more like the Met gowns than I imagine? I don’t know, but it seems possible.
Kitty Calash 