Yes, I am a material girl. The Strategic Fabric Reserve has grown beyond the allotted cupboards into plastic containers hidden under living room furniture and my desk. Reader, it’s true: I have a fabric problem.
But here’s the thing: you want to work with the best materials you can afford, and that means fabric, scissors, needles, thread, even measuring tapes. As a carpenter I know once said, “Life’s short; buy a good hammer.”
Just enough!
I’m currently working with a remnant of wool camblet from a friend’s stash, left over from making someone else’s coat. There’s just enough to make me a Spencer (with a little perfectly-accurate cuff piecing), and I’m finding that running the needle through the wool is like a knife through butter. Baby, it’s smooth.
And that’s the thing: working with better materials is actually easier than working with lesser goods. Maybe you’re buying from the remnant table (I know I do): just buy the best stuff you can afford, and as much of it as you afford.*
It’s taken me a while to learn this, and I’ll confess: I still have IKEA furniture, because I still have a teenager living at home, and three insufferable cats. But we swap out as we find affordable better things, because they are more beautiful and more pleasing.
Shears: former fabric and current fabric.
You can do the same with your sewing (or cooking or carpentry or cat husbandry) tools. My former fabric shears finally gave up after 15 years; I replaced them with better Ginghers (thank goodness for coupons) and downgraded the formerly “best” scissors to pattern-cutting duty. I have small thread scissors for home, and scissors for events that I’ll shed fewer tears over if I lose, because event sewing is often mending and not garment construction.
Second best for events; best for home.
Buy it once: that’s an ideal that can be hard to achieve in reenacting. Research moves on, everybody makes mistakes**, but you can never go wrong buying the best you can afford. Ease of use and finished beauty will make it worthwhile.
*They laughed when I bought that striped velvet from Wm Booth at Bennington– until they saw the originals I had in mind.Quirky can be right and even amazing, but cheap requires caution.
**I hear this in my head as the refrain from a New Order song at least once a day. And then I sigh. But it’s true, and worth taking to heart without beating yourself up over it. You will survive whatever unfortunate yardage or pink-handled, blistered-inducing scissors you now regret. There’s always the office Yankee Swap or Goodwill.
Hard to say which, but I am ill at ease and dissatisfied with my costuming. You might even call it bratty. But I don’t wanna be like Bridget Connor!
It started the week of the Stamp Act protest, when I felt quite tired of being the shabby, unrefined woman of the regiment and street vendor, and wanted a nice cozy shop like the milliner had. I was also looking forward to being a housekeeper again, and several weeks of moving boxes and volumes with red rot at work had me feeling generally filthy and unappreciated. Bratty.
When in doubt, sew. A new dress can’t help but cheer you up, right?
Well… sort of…
Last Thursday, we did a reprise of the Williams family letters program at the Newport Historical Society. The Williams family were Quakers, and the letters were from the early part of the 19th century, so for the program in March, I made a green silk cross-front gown based on the Quaker gown in the back of Costume in Detail. (Check out the schematic on the 19thus.come page; I didn’t see this until I was mostly done with the dress, but thank goodness I got it right!)
But it’s September, and Thursday was expected to be quite warm, so I salved my bureaucratic wounds in the $1.99 loft at the local mill store, and made a new Quaker gown, also suitable for a maid.
I ask you! Even though it’s my very own pattern based on sketches of original drawings, even though it fits, even though it cost $10, even though every seam is overcast and the whole thing is made with period correct stitches, it still fails to make me happy and cheerful and delighted.
This brattiness has resulted in a reappraisal of my approach– and a trip to Sewfisticated in Framingham. What did I buy there? Yards and yards of pink taffeta? Gold taffeta? Blue taffeta?
No.
Because they didn’t have the right colors in the right weave– too slubby– or in enough yardage. Brace yourselves: I bought brown.
Many thanks to Sew 18th Century for taking the photos!
It appears I do not learn from my mistakes. When I think, “Gee, I’d like a pretty dress,” I end up buying fabric based on the texture as much as the color, and I have to tell you, that brown taffeta has the most wonderful l hand and sheen, and I will look much more like a Copley portrait than I ever have before, so that’s something.
It seems I have created a set of mental rules for myself, a mission, if you will, for the historic clothing I sew and the roles I take on, and I only play within those rules.
It’s usually for selfish, petty reasons: for all I swear that I didn’t see the trash compactors and cars in Newport, spinning wheels, cast iron, and candelabra in dining flies made me nuts at Bennington. Why the difference? In Newport, the modern things were all backdrop and unchangeable. At Bennington, reenactors had choices.
Why would someone else’s cast-iron kitchen make me want to pack up my sticks and go home? Maybe because I’ve been very tired this summer. But more honestly, I have a streak of self-righteous grade-grubber: “I work hard at this, why can’t you?” was surely my internal whine as I surveyed the mess area at Bennington.
My emotional immaturity aside, I think that same “I get this, why can’t you?” is felt by a lot of reenactors/interpreters when they stand in their well-researched, hand-sewn, and agonized-over clothes in a Spartan camp watching the public interact with sofa-print-gown- or baggy-breeches-wearing cooks bent over cast iron in camps littered with slat-back chairs, folding tables, and candlesticks.
We feel unappreciated. We feel like no one recognizes our hard work. We are not getting the grade we deserve.
We need to get over it.
Don’t abandon the authenticity: abandon the attitude. Abandon the eye-rolling, the snubbing, the sneers, and the turning away.
Comparison is the enemy of contentment. Even when you think you’re better.
Stop playing the “I’m more authentic than you” game. It sucks. It makes people want to quit this hobby. It makes people want to skip events.
You want to have events where only people who meet your personal authenticity standards can play? Knock yourself out. Keep it private. In privacy, be as catty as you like with people who enjoy it, but keep it in the real world and not online. Online, it comes off as passive-aggressive cowardice.
We’re visual creatures: we can over-focus on what we see. We focus on the clothing being worn instead of the person inside those clothes. But really, it is the person who is important.
So maybe we should lighten up a little.
Individual choices don’t always affect a group. When choices do affect a group—cars in camp past stated removal times, weapons and fire safety violations—then I think anyone can and should speak up. But violations of published and easily accessible standards should be pointed out to event organizers, and not handled at the individual level. When there are no published and readily accessible shared standards, there’s nothing to enforce. So consider stepping down from the fashion police and enjoying yourself instead. I’ve been to very few events without redeeming factors.
All that iron at Bennington? Forgotten when I focused on what I was doing: cooking something new in camp, and forgotten even more when I shared the pudding and compote with my friends.
That’s why I don’t quit this hobby: it allows me to share amazing experiences with my friends, I learn new things all the time, and I get far outside my petty worries.
Solving romantic troubles is not my forte, but just as your first crush may not be the person you spend your life with, the first living history/reenactment group may not be your last.
Some folks are serial joiners, just as there are people who engage in a series of medium-term relationships: as long as everybody knows what’s going on, things should be fine and no one will be set anyone else’s goldfish free and leave each other twisting in the wind. But some of us want a long-term home in history: what should we consider?
In no particular order, I offer the follow areas to examine:
Communication Style & Frequency
Surprised to discover members of your group at an event you thought they weren’t attending, so you went with someone else? Find yourself alone at an event that people said they were attending, but dropped at the last moment? Just because all life is like middle school, there’s no need to recreate scenes from Gidget in historic clothing: communicate.
Everyone requires different amounts of information, but after considerable time working, I think it’s hard to over-communicate. Folks, if it’s too many emails, hit the delete key. But if you do not get the basics– a list of events and potential attendees, reminders as the event approaches, coordination of food, canvas and powder supplies– and end up powderless and alone at an event, you may want to reconsider your allegiance.
Level of Activity & Engagement
“It’s just event after event after event,” whined the Young Mr last summer, and I hadn’t even made him march to Fort Ti and sleep under a brush arbor. Some people need to mix primitive camping in funny clothes with a few days at the beach, others spend their entire summers living life as old-school as they can. Some perform the classic turn-your-back maneuver described on Peabody’s Lament (pro tip: don’t do that!) while others actively seek opportunities to engage the public. Some like to be in first person, and others are always and only in third person.
How many activities can you fit into your year?
What’s your preference? If you want to try immersive, first-person interpretations, you need a unit that will support that, and opportunities to try it out. And if you want to go out often, you may need some flexibility in time period and activity.
But even beyond the times when you’re dressed in historic clothing and working with the public, you want to be with a group that includes people who are set a variety of RPMs. If you’re all super-intense original garment/gear/methods copying maniacs, you might not be balanced. As a newcomer, you need an environment that mixes challenges and support– like a good kindergarten.
Authenticity Standards
On that super-intense original garment/gear/methods copying theme, if the group doesn’t manage to meet a certain level of authenticity, or is not striving to improve, and to learn and try new things, is that the right group for you? I find that a curious mind is a necessity, one willing to accept that research advances and what we thought was right in the past may be proven wrong.
The other key here is, how does the group help you meet standards? Are there workshops to help you make up kit or improve what you already have? How deep do the standards go: clothing only, or to camp set up? What about how you cook, what you eat, and what you eat it with?
“Furniture”
Are the compromises people make balanced and understood? My family and I ar among the people who go to events in “wearable but not done” clothes, and that’s OK in our world. While we have period shoes, they are not always perfectly correct: the gents wore buckles in 1812 and the Young Mr definitely doesn’t get a second pair of shoes until we know his feet won’t grow larger than they are now….
Interpretation and Imagination
Did you have one, maybe two, really-really best friends in grade school? Did you play dress-up, imaginative games, engage in narrative play? Did you enjoy the school play (and insist on leading the writing of a research-based script)?If you did, you are probably looking for folks who played the way you did as a child.
What kind of interpretation do you prefer?
Good interpretation requires that someone in the group have an active and vivid imagination, and that people are willing to take risks. Interpretation is a risk: will this portrayal of a captain’s death, a washerwoman’s trial, a wayward apprentice’s punishment, actual work? Do we trust each other enough to slip into new roles?
Trust is key: will the other people in the group bail you out if you freeze, encourage you if you run with an idea, and meet you in the same moment? You will have to spend time with people to find out how well you can all play together but, happily, you will quickly learn if you cannot. If your questions about who you are, why you are in a place, and if you should be wearing a 1781 coat at a 1777 event are rebuffed, you may need to consider other options.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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