Twenty-four hours on, this is where we are: Poofy, shoulder-popping sleeve of doom. How can that be a uniform sleeve?
Well, Pilgrim, this is how:
Oh. They’re all Infernal Sleeves of Doom.
So glad I have that near-feral hunting shirt, because without it I would have ripped this out completely. Could the Poof of Doom be there to allow movement?
Subject was detained for photography.
Before school, even.
Arm out, doubts remain. Arm down, less terrifying.
I do feel sorry for him, but at the same time, I have to fit it to him.
It’s possible that the poof at the apogee of the shoulder is due to the intense pressing I gave this to retain the center line, and the fact that, despite washing, the linen is still pretty stiff. When I compare the two– the completed shirt and the in-progress shirt, I can see that while both display a tendency to drift up, the gathers on the adjutant’s shirt are more evenly distributed. You know what that means…and that’s why the sleeve is only basted in. Might as well change it now as on Sunday, because it must be done. So in the end, I am ripping it out completely, but with the knowledge that 1) the upward angle seems to be correct as shown in the finished garment, and 2) evening out gathers may reduce the Poof of Doom.
We were invited to join a Massachusetts regiment after the event at Old Sturbridge Village last summer, and we did. This has been a good thing, though it’s sometimes a little tricky to figure out which unit to “be” with. It is also a challenge because even though the Rhode Island unit has careful (if unwritten and slightly out-of-date) standards, the Massachusetts unit is another thing altogether.
Gathering the sleeve heads. Saturday is soon!
The women last weekend kept asking what I was working on so assiduously. It was the hunting shirt (to become a frock) for the Young Mr for the new unit. Cut by the master, entirely hand-sewn by me. This is not something they would do.
“Sewing for The Adjutant, ” I said, “is another thing altogether.”
“Don’t even try. Who can sew like that? He’s a professional,” I was told.
What we’re aiming for.
Well, yes.
So wouldn’t that be the very thing to reach for? It’s not like he’s not helpful. I have his shirt to copy, he answers my questions patiently, and I haven’t yet felt like an idiot.
The skill I have I owe in part to my mother and grandmother, and to the Dress U workshop with Sharon Burnston. Stroke gathers, two-by-two stitching, using the tiniest needle possible are all things I learned or honed in Sharon’s workshop. And thanks to that workshop, this hunting shirt-(perhaps)-soon-to-be-frock is a great deal easier to tackle.
The other part of skill is practice. It’s as true for piano or soccer as it is for sewing. Just keep stitching, and it will come.
After fitting comes fringing. That’s for someone else to do.
What I find hardest is fit: not only is it hard for me to judge how much to take in a garment to achieve 18th century fit while maintaining enough ease for the wearer to swing an ax (or to accommodate teenage wriggling), alterations annoy me. I suspect that the key may well be not to fit at the end of a day, but at a beginning, or at least a middle. Fitting after a long day of sewing could make you think you were tossing away a whole day of work. It also feels, still, like taking a car to the mechanic or the cat to the vet. There’s something wrong, and I don’t quite understand it. Yet. But with Shoulders Roll Forward and Monkey Arms, I bet I’ll understand more soon.
Last weekend was the BAR School of Instruction at the New Windsor Cantonment in Vails Gate, NY. April is an interesting month for travel: changeable weather can land you in a serious fog/cloud, some places aren’t open yet, but the crowds are, mercifully, small.
The meetings and discussions were interesting, and I think its useful for reenactors to continue to ask themselves questions about what they do, and how they do it–questions beyond authenticity. I still think there are great unspoken truths in the Temple Building: in the 21st century, a male dominated, volunteer-run organization will not thrive in its current form.
Chase with sticks. He needs drum instruction.
Movement towards demonstrations that make effective use of the actual numbers of soldier who turn out makes sense. as do roles for men retired from the field. More formal interpretive roles for women might strengthen the organization … but for now, I’ll try to learn as much as I can. Laundry: that’s something to work on.
Patina, not dirt.
Of course, they don’t want their clothes washed. That’s not dirt, that’s patina. I have this for a time to help me figure out how to put together one for the Young Mr, and eventually, for Mr S. It’s less crunchy now that it has hung up for a while, and I do understand the desire for patina. Mr S likes to get his overalls filthy, and his hunting frock. But where would that leave the washer woman?
Mending, I suppose, though I know women were employed by RI state troops to make shirts (there are receipts). We don’t need shirts right now, we need hunting shirts, which it turns out were probably actually hunting frocks, tied at the front with tapes.
Alterations ahead?
Alterations will be ahead for this, though can you call them alterations before the thing is even finished? I started on Wednesday with just the cut pieces, and got this far, plus a completed but not attached sleeve, by mid-day Sunday. (Photos here.) As one of the women at the SOI said, “Without us, they’d be naked and hungry. You think they’d learn to appreciate it.” Probably not until they are actually naked and hungry…
Les Fleur d’ Inde
For relief from the plain linen, I cut out a chintz jacket; the remnant was just enough to get a front-closing short jacket cut. It shouldn’t take too long to make, and will be a nice thing to have in warmer months. And it’s just enough pretty fabric that I might have been able to afford it.
Evan McGlinn for the NY Times. Click for slide show.
My friend wrote on Tuesday about battle reenactments, and whether or not they’re appropriate or even, well, decent, in a way; she has been thinking about the Battle Road event, Patriots Day, and the Battle at Lexington Green in light of the explosions at the Boston Marathon.
She helped me remember the reading and thinking I had done this past fall when people at work asked if reenactments (and even museum exhibitions) glorified war, and when I started to wonder why, exactly, I was in this hobby. I read Vanessa Agnew on “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present” in Rethinking History 11:3, 299-312 (2007) and “Mobile Monuments: A view of historical reenactment from inside the costume cupboard of history” by Stephen Gapps, also in Rethinking History 13:3, 395-409 (2009). I’m still working my way through “Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment” by Simon During, again from Rethinking History, 11:3, 313-333 (2007). There’s a good bibliography at the University of York, but getting at these takes JSTOR or ProjectMUSE access; check with your local public or university library. For list of books about commemoration, History, Memory, and Monuments: An Overview of the Scholarly Literature on Commemoration by Kirk Savageis an excellent starting place. To find out more about why reenactments differ on different sites, and to discover more about the sometimes-fraught relationship between the NPS and reenactors, you can read this on the role of reenactors at National Parks.
The article that resonated most was Gapps. He wrote about a variety of reenactment types, but what made sense to me as a member of two military reenactment groups, both part of the Brigade of the American Revolution, was his writing about the military reenactments. Gapps focuses on Civil War reenacting, and that is an area in which I’m not interested, but his central tenet rang true to me:
…the performance of history has been largely dismissed by cultural critics as a form of nostalgia, but … it actually has a significant role to offer – particularly as a form of public commemoration of shared remembrance of historical events.
Mr S between the Adjutant and the Dollmaker. Thanks to JacobMar1ey on flickr.
Public commemoration is a large part of the reenactments I’m involved with, but they work differently for participants and spectators, and for different kinds of participants. For a recent example, Mr S and I spent Monday morning in Concord at the North Bridge ceremony, and had two very different experiences.
He came back from the bridge and said, “I was really scared. For a moment there, crossing the bridge and seeing all the British forces, I had a sense of what it must have been like.”
On the North Bridge. Thanks to JacobMar1ley at flickr.
While he had been on the bridge, I was in the gardens with the public thinking, Those poor British soldiers, while I listened to the crackle of candy wrappers and people giggling about their dogs. The crowd spread out on the hill that leads to the Concord River, festival-style, and I was appalled that they came for entertainment to what I thought of as a truly ceremonial and commemorative event. The NPS rules about engagements and casualties suddenly made a lot of sense.
My friend wrote specifically about how reenactments can never portray the reality of fear and horror that is war. She is right. NPS agrees: Even the best-researched and most well-intentioned representations of combat cannot replicate the tragic complexity of real warfare. The activity and logistical support for modern battle reenactments is inconsistent with providing a memorial atmosphere. There is something about reenactments that I cannot fully embrace even as I love them. I have a difficult relationship with “patriotism,” as I have a difficult relationship with America, and much as I have a difficult relationship with my family and friends, whom I also love dearly, though rarely demonstratively.
Naked Raygun, Chicago.
I have been grappling with the concept of America and history and the meaning of American symbols—semiotics—since I started making art. I came of age in the punk years in Chicago, stapling photocopied collages to telephone poles. Reagan was president, nuclear war seemed imminent. I made sculpture and installations about American architecture and literature, as a way to explore American history. I remain skeptical about the political process, even as I engage in it.
So why am I a reenactor? It isn’t always easy. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable, personally—intellectually—it can be difficult to fully embrace sometimes. Recently, with online discussions of gun control and the relationship between rifle/black powder clubs, the NRA, and reenactors, it has been difficult to grapple with all of the different points of view and to be true to one’s beliefs. Most of the time people don’t air their opposing views. Some of us do, as one writer noted, hold our noses and pay our dues. I knew this going in.
But reenacting, in a way, is an art form for me, a very personal one, one that this blog is part of.
Another friend avoids the military reenactments and sticks to living history through museum work. Mr S enjoys the farm work as much as the battles, because he likes working hard. He likes the physical experience of both; he likes the people, too, and whether he’s chopping wood with the hat maker or crossing the bridge with the adjutant, the shared experiences mean a lot to him. For me, the most profound experiences of women’s history have come at the farm, probably because that is the truest means of reaching the past for a woman I have yet to discover. Can I find that moment in military reenacting? Perhaps, by working hard at recreating the army follower experience.
Unlike monuments, reenactments have the potential to create more open ended and contextual historical commemorations. (Gapps, abstract)
One thing I do not like about the battles is the public. I stand on the public side of the rope line, and think, “Those are my people out there, on the field.” The public—the predatory photographers, the hooting guys, the texting teens, the snacking people—seem so out of place to me. I know it’s entertaining, but it’s somewhere between real and not real, and I can’t forget that it is often about something that was real.
Photo by Evan McGlinn for NY Times. Click for slide show.
Mr S hears spectators yell, Get those British bastards! but that doesn’t mean he likes to hear it. It’s not just because we have friends among those enemies, but because they represent men who, just like the Americans, were scared and wounded, hungry and dying. They were here doing their jobs in a place claimed by the British Crown. Does that yell miss the point of the reenactment as commemoration? Is it simple boorishness? Does the comment show the relationship between reenactment and spectator to be too close to blood sport?
Or is the problem that some of the military reenactments fail to adequately contextualize the ‘battle’ as a commemoration or demonstration? Does narration help? We discussed this in the car on the way home from Battle Road: amplified narration and role-playing can deepen the experience for visitors and reenactors alike. What are the better ways to present history for the public? (We’re not suggesting narration for Battle Road: we were comparing notes on different events, and the different perspectives we have from two sides of the rope line.)
I think it’s encouraging when reenactors, even some who might be stereotyped from a distance as old guys who’ll never change, ask themselves questions about what they do, and how, and why. Questions are where we start, and conversations. I’m glad my friend started a conversation. We won’t all like or agree with every statement, but we have to keep talking.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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