We had a busy weekend, as I suspect most people did, though we don’t do “Black Friday” shopping. There’s plenty else to do, especially when you have greatcoats on the brain, and an annual meeting to attend. By nine o’clock Sunday night, Mr S and I were unwinding while watching the Wizard of Oz, when the Young Mr announced that he had forgotten that he needed to be a tree on Tuesday. An apple tree, actually, for the Wizard of Oz segment they’re doing in theatre class.
The three of us came up with a solution involving tan or brown trousers, a green t-shirt or sweatshirt, paper leaves, Christmas ornaments and the stapler.
Fortunately, I had to run errands last night after work, so I was already headed towards the craft store, where I found a green t-shirt and three sheets each of dark and medium green paper. We drew templates on scrap cardboard and cut the brown leaves from paper bags.
And yes, picky stitcher that I am, we stapled those leaves on, and the apples, too.
The apples really are Christmas tree ornaments, left over from St. Louis when we lived in big old row house with very high ceilings, and once got a tree far too large for our living room or the number of ornaments we had.
He seems pleased enough with his quick costume. Maybe next time the Young Mr will remember just a little sooner… though I doubt it.
Yes, finished! And just in time, too! The braid arrived in the mail three days before the Spencer was wanted, and fortunately I had finished the garment by then, and the baking could take care of itself after a while, and I managed not to get eggs beaten with sugar on any lovely wool or mohair.
I think it looks well enough with the gown and bonnet, though I am fairly certain the darts are too far to the sides in this iteration. How that happens when you use the same pattern twice I do not know.
As mentioned previously, the cuffs are pieced, but this is a perfectly accurate way to deal with a shortage of material and/or cuffs.
I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out, and very pleased with how warm it is. Over the cotton gown, the Spencer was plenty warm– and I certainly wished I had it after we left the house and went down to the river!
On the whole, I suppose I’m pleased…as pleased as I ever am …which means you can expect pattern revisions in the future!
Chopping wood: it takes a lot to cook and to keep warm in 1799
In the post-What Cheer Day aftermath, when I was very tired and two houses were very messed up, I started thinking about why I bothered with living history. What exactly is this thing, and why I do it? Those questions made me think about the very best moments I have had in this business of re-creating the past in cloth and smoke and time.
In no particular order:
1. Going up to the field at Coggeshall Farm to call the boys down to dinner after spending all day in the kitchen. I was desperate to get out, and finally knew first hand how limited women’s lives could be in the 18th century, especially non-elite women.
2. Running upstairs at the John Brown House with Eliza, giggling over a joke to be played on Mr Mason. I don’t know what Mr C thought of it but I felt twelve years old, silly, carefree and light. John Brown’s housekeeper surely never felt that way, but a naughty maid might have, and for an instant I knew what it was to have no responsibilities.
We didn’t even notice the background at the time
3. Chasing the Young Mr, a wayward apprentice, across the street; mobbing Mr Howard’s house; and arguing with the Stamp Inspector, all during the Stamp Act Protest in Newport It was not until I looked at the photos that I realized we really had been in front of a theatre, and that there were actual cars! A friend confirms that he, too, forgot about the cars, to the point of nearly being hit whilst running to Mr Howard’s house.
4. Assembling with a group of friends to take tea with Mrs Silsbee in Salem, sorting ourselves into a group on the sidewalk and venturing out, only to meet Mrs Silsbee on the street. That is the most Jane Austen/Mrs Gaskell I have ever felt. The wretched cobblestones do not count, as they were from the 20th century, but walking out on the wharf, and meeting a friend who brought an umbrella as the rain began was also very Austen-esque.
Perhaps more Gaskell than Austen, here
None of these are military events, and the majority of them happened this year, in past three months. I think this may be because we have been to fewer military events, and I expect the concentration is due, in part, to finally getting better at this practice. They are also site-specific, and trending toward first-person interpretation.
Those coats.
For reasons explained better by the NPS and in the excellent study of NPS-Reenactor relationships, no battle reenactment can ever capture the truth of the war it attempts to recreate, and that is true even when the battle takes place on the same site, at the same time of year, and even when soldiers are dressed in as-close-as-possible replicas of the uniforms worn at that battle, on that field, on that date, 236 years earlier, and no one has brought a spinning wheel or tent chandelier to camp.
My best guess as to why military events are not transformative for me is that, to this point, the business remains too much like camping in funny clothes. As I experiment more with 18th century methods of cooking appropriate rations, and as I strip away the gear we carry into the field, the military events are better (as at Bennington). But I already know how limited women’s perspectives could be (see item 1), and while Bennington was instructive in how ridiculously different the experiences of men and women could be, the military events remain more instructive experiences for the men.
Domesticity in the Field
Why? Because the specificity of site plays out at those events in the battle, and not in the camp. The point at Bennington and at Saratoga and at Stony Point was to use the site as it had been used. The men experienced the landscape in ways as close as possible to what soldiers and militia had actually seen. And women stayed in camp and got smoke in their eyes, cut up vegetables, or washed clothes, which is pretty much what happens at any outdoor event where we can have a fire and, with differences in technology, is pretty much what I do when I get home from work every day.
All that leaves me wondering what to make of military events, and what I want to do in the coming year. No matter how much of this is “for the public,” it still has to be rewarding for the practitioner.
On 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
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!
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.
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.)
We had a busy weekend, as I suspect most people did, though we don’t do “Black Friday” shopping. There’s plenty else to do, especially when you have greatcoats on the brain, and an annual meeting to attend. By nine o’clock Sunday night, Mr S and I were unwinding while watching the Wizard of Oz, when the Young Mr announced that he had forgotten that he needed to be a tree on Tuesday. An apple tree, actually, for the Wizard of Oz segment they’re doing in theatre class.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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