Tag Archives: Research

In Tents Tuesday*

06 Tuesday Jan 2015

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

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You know The Tent Article, don’t know? You do, if you’re camping 18th century private soldier style in your hand-sewn coat.

Scene of the Camp on Hampton Green, 1781

Scene of the Camp on Hampton Green, 1781

The Tent Article (hereafter The Document) pulls together documentation and research assembled by a team of living history enthusiasts dedicated to replicating the 18th century enlisted army experience in an accurate manner. Though the PowerPoint format affects the overall length, be warned: we are talking 300+ pages here.

No strangers to the pursuit of the accurate and never ones to shy away from an arduous task involving pointy objects and string, the 10th Mass assembled on Saturday afternoon for a round of tent sewing.

I first read The Tent Article in 2012, and was promptly ashamed of our hand-me-down tent which had everything to recommend it in terms of price, but wanted in terms of accuracy. In response, I began making 1/8″ scale models of tents to figure out how much linen I would need to buy in order to make a truly correct tent. Finally, all that edumacation in art and architecture had utility! Alas: distractions arose, cost overwhelmed, our then-primary regiment scoffed, and I abandoned hand-sewn tent plans.

Fast forward to Tyler Putnam’s blogging on The First Oval Office project, and I was once again intrigued. I began calculating how much vacation time I might need to complete a tent by hand in our living room. Well, thank goodness for finding fellow travelers, because lo and behold! The 10th Mass had tents in want of sewing, so I could learn a great deal without filling our home with excessive yardage.

“Sails.”

Progress was made last August in Newport, where the tents masqueraded as sails, but the canvas languished unsewn until last Saturday, when we duly assembled in Hopkinton and unfurled the vast expanse of linen. It was suggested that I might know some people with access to sail lofts (!), but in about 4 hours, a number of us managed to finish the final foot of backstitching and to flat-fell a little more than 60 feet of tent seams.

It's a vast expanse of linen.

It’s a vast expanse of linen.

The Document was consulted to make sure we were proceeding correctly, though the iPad misbehaved and forwarded us many pages to grommets. (I’m looking forward to those, as I enjoy sewing eyelets– and have just earned myself the dubious honor of sewing at least half of them, I’m sure.) We checked the images, threaded our needles, and off we went.

A few inches (feet) of felling had to be unstitched and resewn, but heavy linen is wily and some stitchers were newer to the process than others. But by the close of day, all seams were felled, needles packed, and tentage folded.

Next up, per The Document, are mud flaps. This should get interesting, as math in front of an audience usually is.

 

IMG_2728

I promised a pun, so here’s the worst. Somehow we got on to unfortunate reenactorisms, which collided with Star Wars, and brought us to the realization that what we needed were light sabres… ’cause it’s the 10th Massachusetts Regiment Light Infantry Company. We were punished for this hilarity by having to drive home on untreated roads into snow that looked like we were trying to take the Millenium Falcon to hyperspeed.

 

*It really happened on Saturday.

Scabbers Paints

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Living History, Museums, Philosophy, Reenacting

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Perhaps you know him as Timothy Spall, but the actor playing Mr Turner is best known in my house for his role as Scabbers, AKA Peter Pettigrew, in the Harry Potter films.

I am anxiously awaiting the release of Mr Turner, and have watched the trailer multiple times in anticipation of material for the authenticity and accuracy fires.I’ve also watched The Power of Art again, because I love Simon Schama as the David Attenborough of fine art, and I’ve enjoyed the way that Mr Turner’s titles appear to use a similar color-into-liquid trope as TPOA’s bleeding titles. Just go watch it.

Why am I so excited to see Scabbers paint? Because the trailer looks so damn good.

The color, the set dressing, the intensity of the colors, all suggest that the film team paid close attention to the material culture of the past, and to those tiny details that create a satisfactory, accurate closed world that helps us achieve experiential and even transcendent authenticity.

Of course I enjoy costume drama: you’d expect that, right? And messed up costume and material culture details can wreck a film or TV program for me, but what you might not expect is that there are some films I enjoy despite their apparent inaccuracy.

Take the Muppet Christmas Carol. That’s one of my favorite adaptations of the Dickens’ work, because it creates a world true to itself filled with believable objects and characters (even the ones I can’t stand), and returns authentic emotions. Scrooge’s headmaster was never an enormous eagle muppet: but the shabby school room works, much the way Beatrix Potter’s anthropomorphic tales work.

In The Pie and the Patty Pan, Duchess can’t bake– what dog can bake? But we can believe that Duchess is a greedy eater, and might well think she swallowed the patty pan. The touch of hypochondria in a greedy dog is intensely satisfying, I think.

Cat and dog at a tea table

Where is the Patty Pan?

What does this mean for historic house and living history interpretation? It means furnishing a believable world with accurate clothing, goods, and accouterments, based on primary sources with characters who convey authentic emotions and ideas to create a transcendent learning experience.

I even have a diagram:

The experience equation

The experience equation

And that’s why I want to see Scabbers Paint. Because anything that creates a believable historical experience is worth learning from.

Woolen Woes

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

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

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imageOn Saturday, I got a very nice piece of wool from Mr C’s Strategic Fabric Reserve, just the color and weight I’d been looking for to make a Very Specific Spencer. The VSS is not a replica, but rather specific to a gown: I want it to go with a 1797 V&A print.

Did women wear Spencers in 1797-1800 Providence? At least one tailor, Joseph Taber, advertised that he made Habits and Spencers, but as far as I know, there are no extant Rhode Island Spencers. Given how few collections are fully online here, and how few Spencers survive anywhere, I’m not too surprised. Julia Bowen’s diary covers Spring and Summer, when she’s quilting (mighty lazy work, she says), but she doesn’t say much about outerwear.

Providence Journal, 11-13-1799

Providence Journal, 11-13-1799

I’ve been on the fence about how common Spencers were– after all, the drawings in Mrs Hurst Dancing show women clearly wearing red cloaks– but might a Spencer and cloak combination have been just the thing to keep warm on a raw October day? With a wool petticoat and long wool stockings, you could be fashionable and warm.

There’s no firm documentation of any of that– which does not mean, as I once muttered in the general direction of some recalcitrant docents, that rich people in Providence hunkered naked in cold corners of curtain-less rooms gnawing on raw meat.** What it does mean is that much of what we make and wear is conjecture, based on examples from the same time period in other geographic areas.

Can I have a Spencer in New England? I’m not sure, but I’ve made another one anyway, and here it is, still underway. (The thing about Cassandra is that while she is a very patient model, she has terrible posture. I can verify the back fits me a great deal better than it fits her.)

Cassandra's posture is very different from mine. She will not pull her shoulders back!

Cassandra’s posture is very different from mine. She will not pull her shoulders back!

This wool is buttery and soft, and takes the needle well. Waxed thread glides through it and grips. It does have a tendency to fray a bit at the cut edges, but has a good pinked edge, and there are examples of pinked-edge facings in extant men’s wear. Sweet, right?

I’m not showing you this to boast about my skills, but to show off an dandy mistake. In working the folded edge of the collar, I trimmed a bit too much at the neck edge, and found the collar a bit small when I basted it in. Of course I removed it, and started again, easing a bit more as I went: Huzzay! It fit!

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

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

Oh, reader: rejoice not. I backstitched that bad boy on upside down. Expletive deleted! Mad Skillz: I even managed that bit of genius before my pre-work panic attack.

I took the garment in to work to seek council from my tailoring-class-educated friend who possesses native common sense and Yankee practicality. It came down to this: is it worse to have the collar upside down, or to have it not fit as well right side up? Decide with the knowledge that working the fabric more will affect the cut edge badly. My friend suggested stitching in the ditch with contrasting thread to make this flaw an Intentional Design Element.

Black trim on a Spencer?

That is a good idea, but I thought the flaw will still be too noticeable. Then it came to me: trim. Just as the construction guys are spreading drywall mud in the chinks around the window frames, I can spread some wool braid love around this collar. There’s certainly evidence for trim use on Spencers in fashion plates, and trim would push the men’s wear aspect of this garment even farther. As soon as I got home, I double-checked extant garments and fashion plates, Roy Najecki’s lace page, and measured my edges.

Four yards of quarter-inch black mohair braid should do the job, stitched around the edge of the collar and lapels, the cuffs and possibly the hem edge.

Do I run the chance of looking like a black-outlined cartoon drawing? Yes.

Did I just buy endless hours of tiny stitching? Yes.

This is a crazy, work-making solution that may leave me with a garment not suited to my class in early Federal Providence. But I think it’s going to look amazing when it’s finished.

**(The docents argued that textiles were SO RARE and SO PRICY in late 18th century RI that NO ONE in Providence had curtains. NO ONE. The lack of fire was my own bitterness coming out at this Great Curtain Kerfluffle which took place at a public lecture I gave explaining what we knew about the use of textiles to furnish Providence homes of people who would be as rich as Bill Gates today.)

Cold Scoops

30 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Clothing, History, Living History, Reenacting, Research

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What Cheer Day preparations must begin in earnest now, no matter how distracting I might find orderly books or silk shoes (not in my size, alas: no last can be found). I already have clothes enough for a housekeeper, though I still crave a broadcloth Spencer and am working on a petticoat. I’ll hardly go outside that day, so why am I thinking bonnets– especially when I have a known bonnet problem?

One of my favorite resources for Federal era Providence is Julia Bowen’s diary. Born December 1, 1779, Julia’s diary records her life in Providence in 1799, when she was 19. She records the daily activities of the second set of Providence women– daughters not of the most elite merchants, like John Brown and John Innes Clark, but the Bowens, Powers, Howells, and Whipples. Distinguished, but not super-elite. Many of the entries are as prosaic and superficial as you’d expect from a young woman in late adolescence, and thank goodness they are, or we’d never be able to imagine life in such fine detail.

Julia got me thinking about bonnets with her entry of April 12:

found the Major & Citizen Sarah & C. Angell altering their cold scoops into Rosina hats, so busily were they employed that the Major could not go a visiting, which deprived me at once of the greatest pleasure I anticipated in my visit.

(She used code names for her friends; some we can decode, and some we cannot.)

I haven’t been able to decipher what “Rosina hats” were, but cold scoops I could handle: coal scoops.
That colloquialism fits not just fashion plates but extant coal scoops and buckets.

Denham’s Auctioneers: Lot 418 A copper coal shovel and a brass coal shovel
Denham’s Auctioneers: Lot 153 A copper helmet shaped coal scuttle with brass shovel and turned wooden handle £20-40

You just have to imagine them turned over.

The Gallery of Fashion, 1797, Bathing Place, Morning Dresses.

The Gallery of Fashion, 1797, Bathing Place, Morning Dresses.

I went for cold scoop, with a pasteboard brim and olive green taffeta brim and caul. The mannequin is a 3-D sketch, if you will, of what the housekeeper plans to wear this autumn. At least until she can figure out what a Rosina hat is.

“As much so as we can”

26 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by in History, Living History, Research

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Captain Christopher Marshall Orderly Book, 1781. Society of the Cincinnati Library.

Captain Christopher Marshall Orderly Book, 1781. Society of the Cincinnati Library.

It’s been a tougher week than usual chez Calash, what with the AP Euro History and Honors English homework and struggles of the Young Mr, early mornings at work for window installation (finally, thank you!) and a round (lost) with an Orange Line Special virus brought home by Mr S.  The bright note came in the mail, though, and thank you USPS for your really reliable and right on (this) time delivery!

I have been working to get this book from the Society of the Cincinnati Library on behalf, and at the behest, of the 10th Massachusetts. The SoC have an pretty amazing collection, and they undertook a project to have their entire collection of British and Continental Orderly books conserved. These are incredibly fragile and almost ephemeral books: they’re the daily record of orders, courts martial, movements, complaints and requests for a regiment. It’s like the notes you might keep if you had to meet with your boss and other direct reports every day and keep track of many orders affecting the several hundred unruly, hungry, and possibly irritable guys under your command. But you’re taking notes with quill and ink, in longhand, and no one is going to email minutes out later that afternoon.

Bridget Connor turned up in an orderly book, so they can have a novelistic appeal (handy for those of us who approach military history from the social history world). So far, this book has produced no Bridgets, but it has not disappointed. Reader, I wept.

This book has moved me. Take this:

The disadvantage and difficulties which from inevitable Circumstances we labour under instead of depressing should inspirit us to surmount them. That we are involved in them is only our misfortune; not to make efforts to Conquer them will be our fault: and if we cannot be so well prepared as we ought at least let us be as much so as we can.

There are sketches of the “disposition of the New hampshire Massachusetts Rhode Island and Connecticut lines.” And, as I read to the Young Mr, there is unfinished business in nasty rooms.

Some part of the Camp and about the long Barracks in particular is relaxing into nastiness. Regimental QuarterMasters have been ordered to have them Clean and keep them so. An Officer of each Company has been ordered to visit the Barracks every day and to Confine & Report those who throw bones of meat Pot Liquor or filth of any kind near the Barracks. Yet all this has been done and no report has been made. it is hatefull to General Howe to Reitterate orders as it ought to be shamefull those who make it necessary.

Why, the Young Mr and I just had a similar talk last night…though, thankfully, there were no bones of meat involved.

This going to be a good read.

I know the SoC has a beautiful library and nice website, but folks, if you are into this history, throw them some love. I checked their 990s and they’re struggling just like everyone else. And if not them, please, support your favorite local historical site, organization, museum, whatever. Every place has something magical that will change your day. Your money– even a small donation– helps them do that work.