“I know a guy”

On September 27, 2013September 27, 2013 By kittycalashIn Uncategorized

The Banishment of Roger Williams, RIHS 1943.3.1

It’s an oft-used phrase in my state of residence: I know a guy. Even I use it, because I do. Know a guy. A bunch of guys. They are mostly contractors, but they get stuff done and if they can’t, well, then they know a guy.

My favorite guy, Billy, union carpenter and accidental poet, is a descendant of Roger Williams, and has shown me his genealogy to prove it. He’s a multiple-great-grandson of Roger’s youngest son, Joseph, and Lydia Olney. As it happens, not too long after my encounters with Billy, I visited a donor in the rural but wealthy Quiet Corner of Connecticut. The widow of a man descended from a Rhode Island governor, Natalie showed me her late husband’s genealogy.

Yes, the children of the very wealthy scion of lawyers and governors and bankers are some kind of cousin of a construction superintendent who lives in area known as “Rhode Island’s Alaska.” I was immensely gratified and smug all the way home from that donor visit.

As we try to calculate how many domestics are involved in making John Brown’s house run (perhaps nine), though we think the domestics aren’t family members, it might be worth considering that in Rhode Island, you can be relatives and still not be family. You might just “know a guy.”

Always the Lady’s Maid, Never the Lady…

On September 26, 2013 By kittycalashIn Clothing, Events, Living History, Museums, Research

but that’s fine, actually. I like to get dirty. The red Virginia cloth dress is now clay-splashed, and while it was made especially for the “People of 1763” event, it may no longer work. Fine for cherry-sellers, fine for hand-bill hawkers, it will not do for a lady’s maid, and I don’t especially want to clean it. Hope I can get my stays wrangled back into shape and that my cross-barred gown fits…but if not, I’ll be a recently promoted lady’s maid.

My other upcoming role as a maid will be at the John Brown House Museum, on October 5. This has required quite a bit of thinking and stewing about appropriate clothing and realistic background. I finally settled on a black-and-brown combination of petticoat and open robe, with the style of the open robe based on Paul Sandby drawings and extant garments, but determined by the scant three and a quarter yards of brown worsted that I was able to find.

Winter, 1795. The British Museum, 2010,7081.509

The bodice back is based on the 1795-97 cross-front gown from Museum of Costume in Bath shown in The Cut of Women’s Clothes. The front is meant to be transitional: a little bit of gathering at the neck, but not a great deal, with the edges still pinning closed. The sleeves are long and slim, and will button at the wrist once I’ve gotten the length worked out.

The skirt will pleat, with fullness centered on the back triangle and decreasing to the front. For the black petticoat, I used the double inverted box pleat of the 1790s open robe in Costume in Detail. As you might imagine or just plain hope, they work! I’ve also made a small pad to help lift the skirt in the back and create the right profile; I’m thinking of adding buttons and loops so that it can migrate from gown to gown.

Chemisettes

On September 16, 2013 By kittycalashIn Events, making things, Museums, Research1 Comment

The Shooting Star: Snowy in *his* “best bib and tucker.”

Chemisette or tucker? By the time The Shooting Star was published in 1941-42, “bib and tucker” had wandered away from their original meanings. Tuckers were worn under women’s and girl’s bodices, taking on the role of neck handerchiefs or fichus, and what some people like to call “modesty pieces,” though the phrase always makes me think of the front panel of desks.

Janet Arnold includes chemisettes in Patterns of Fashion I, and you can buy a very nice one indeed from Cassidy at her Etsy store. (Reviewed here, and modeled, too!) But can you have one in Rhode Island in 1800? That is, of course, the question.

Hannah Weaver Peckham, RIHS 1958.3.2 — Hannah Weaver Peckham, RIHS 1953.8.2

Turns out you probably can. Scrolling through the miniatures gallery, there was Hannah Weaver Peckham in her best tucker, and Miss Rhodes, while later, is also sports a chemisette or tucker. (Mrs Peckham looks a bit cranky, doesn’t she? Perhaps her busk is poking her.)

What you’d call it remains an open question.

The 1933 Oxford dictionary we have in the office defines “tucker” as “A piece of lace or the like, worn by women within or around the top of the bodice of the 17-18th C.”

The same dictionary tells me “chemisette” is 1807, from the French, diminutive of chemise. “1. A bodice, more or less like the upper part of a chemise. 2. An article, usually of lace or muslin, made to fill in the open front of a woman’s dress 1844.”

While I think that one could, in Rhode Island in 1800, wear a garment that filled in the upper part of a bodice, I’m not sure what one wold call that garment. The simplest thing to do is to wear a white kerchief like Phoebe Smith Rhodes. Have I ever settled for the simplest thing? Not if I can help it.