Category: Reenacting

Some Velvet Morning

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Living History, making things, Reenacting4 Comments

Sewing velvet is a strange experience. I’m working with a cotton velvet from a remnant table; it has a nice hand, but still crumbles and covers the table with fabric soot when I cut it. It’s not easy sewing black fabric with black thread, even in strong morning light, and “Some Velvet Morning” is an unhelpful thing to have stuck in your mind (especially the Lydia Lunch rendition).

With just one yard of 44″ wide stuff, cutting a Spencer took a little doing and some minor piecing. I borrowed techniques from some waistcoats I’ve seen recently, and pieced in linen at the back collar lining. That seems to be pretty common, and makes sense from a wear and hair perspective.

I patterned this on Monday morning before work, basing the pattern shapes on an 1810 fashion plate and an original at the MFA Boston. The MFA’s Spencer is particularly satisfying because of its connection to Lexington, Massachusetts. A New England-made Spencer is a happy find.

Frivolous Friday: A Feather Kerfluffle

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Events, Fail, Frivolous Friday, History, Living History, Reenacting, Snark3 Comments
Miss Caroline Vernon by François-Xavier Vispré (c.1730 – London 1790). pastel on paper. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond.

I troll the interwebs in the fishing and not the under-the-bridge sense: there’s a lot to read out there. Still, I’ve kept one eye on the feather-and-flower kerfluffle that erupted in certain circles this week, but have been much more interested in documentation of one kind and another.

Miss Vernon is really my favorite image of feathers on hats, and I wish I could say that a) I have replicated this fabulous creation or b) that I have seen such a thing, but alas! I have not.

Still, scouring sundry repositories for tayloring manuals (more on that another time), I found this delightful broadside. We can’t use 1782 to document 1780, and no means of using any of these items is mentioned or implied. Still, there they are, those inflammatory terms: Feathers, Flowers.

1782 Broadside. Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 45771 (filmed)
1782 Broadside. Early American Imprints, Series 1, no. 45771 (filmed)

To paraphrase Max, Let the wild rumpus continue.

Surreal School

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, Reenacting2 Comments
On the King's Highway, behind Knox's HQ
On the King’s Highway, behind Knox’s HQ

The School of Instruction is always interesting, and this year was no exception. One of my favorite activities is walking with the troops (well, behind). The experience is usually surreal, and the walk we took behind Knox’s Headquarters met expectations.

Clash of the Time Periods
Clash of the Time Periods

Knox’s Headquarters was a new location for us, with new activities: we played a Jingling Match, which resulted in as much giggling as jingling, and felt like the Walking Dead met the 18th Century.

Jingling without Giggling is the hard part
Jingling without Giggling is the hard part

The game is pretty simple: mark out an area, blindfold as many as are willing to play, and set one without blindfold loose. The object is to touch the person ringing the bell, and it is a hilarious and merry game indeed, though I do agree with Mr McC that playing with a number of men full in their cups, or at certain sites (Stony Point comes to mind) would be too dangerous.
WildJingling

Still, it’s simple and fun, if a little Kubrickian when you first tie on the blindfold. The person who catches the jingler is the next one to taunt the blindfolded.

tomBrianwill

Next stop? Bell research, of course. I definitely want to play this in Newport later this summer.

Battle Road Made a Man 

On By kittycalashIn Events, Living History, personal, Reenacting9 Comments

(with apologies for the child-centered content.)

Well, sort of.  The Young Mr sported a brand-new, all-hand-sewn frock coat and breeches, as well as brand new size 15 shoes (thank you, USPS Priority  Mail and Robert Land’s stock of the rara avis size 15.)  He was spotted in photos that were shared with me later, and there he is, front and center, in his new, blue wool broadcloth suit. (I do like the side eye Mr C is giving as he checks on the second row.)

When he was dressed on Saturday, the Young Mr had a real presence. There is something about a suit that changes a man– well, in this case, a boy into a man. On the ride home, he told his father, “Now that I’m growing up, it feels weird to call you mom and dad. I think I should call you by your first names.” (I’ll wait here while you finish laughing. Yes, it is funny. No, we did not laugh at him.)

It’s a curious idea to us now, marking transitions with clothes. For some, coming of age is marked with a car or at least a driver’s license. For others, it may be a first job, or apartment. But once, stages were marked in clothing, as boys moved from gowns to breeches, and later from dresses to short pants to long pants.

 Our clothing is so much less formal, that we are less accustomed in most cases to seeing men in suits. Even as young as I was in those last “Mad Men” years, I remember more formal times, and shopping with my parents, seeing coats marked up in chalk and thread for my father, and the ranks of shirts and heavy-hangered trousers and coats at Brooks Brothers downtown in Chicago.  (I went there once as a teenager with a friend to buy a present for her father; we were not warmly welcomed in our punk clothes, but the glass cases were unforgettable.)

For the Young Mr, that kind of formality is lost. There’s not much point in buying him a modern suit: he’s all t-shirts and hoodies and hand-me-downs from a friend at work he’s rapidly growing past. He’d never wear a suit, except as he steps into the past, and his fittings happen in private homes or workshops, and not in front of a three-panel mirror.

The Young Mr steps into the past to step into adulthood, and comes back to a present where he has many more years and rites of passage before he will truly be an adult.