Bonnets are very useful items of historical clothing. Of course they add that little pinch of magic to complete an outfit, but their other benefits are numerous! They hide modern hair, or period bad hair days. They protect the face and eyes from the sun (well, some models do...), which is vital for time periods where sunglasses aren't allowed - oh, that's nearly all of them. They can add a certain anonymity by hiding the wearers face from view.

Bonnets, at least close fitting ones with deep brims (my preferred variety), also stay on the head significantly better than wide-brimmed hats, whether of the modern or period variety. Sunbonnets of soft cloth also have the advantage of folding up real small and then returning to their intended shape afterwards. I know the legends tell of foldable straw hats for modern people, but I've never seen one in the wild.

Now, I am a hat wearer in my everyday life. I dislike sunglasses because they pinch my temples, or they bump my eyelashes, or they are irredeemably ugly, or some combination of the three. But I also hate having the sun in my eyes and then having a squint-fest. Eventually squinting gives me a headache. The obvious solution? Bonnets! All the good qualities outlined above speak loudly in favor of bonnets. And, what do you know, I've already got a stash of them!

In Real Life the bonnet which I most often wear is this polka-dot sunbonnet. Period-wise its honestly a little dubious, with the embroidered dots (machine-made, part of the fabric, I'm not a loon), the very short neck curtain, front lace trim, and the weird scallops on the chin ties (again, a machine-embroidered edge treatment on the fabric. It began life as a set of baby-crib sheets, so.). This kind of soft corded bonnet was usually made for a day's work, and there's just a funny lack of many important workday features (like a curtain that really protects the neck) and too many funny fashion-y choices (the swiss dot, the lace). Its quite a hardy little bonnet, though - I think I've even machine-washed it, once! Cording takes a while to dry but is otherwise perfectly washable.

"So whats the catch?" you say. "There's always a catch." You know me and my black humor too well, my dear.
But you're right: there is one leeeeeetle problem.

Other people.

Now it's worth noting here that I dress pretty weird, in real life. There's a long origin story, but the end result is, I usually wear long skirts, tons of jewelry, regularly borrow articles out of my historical wardrobe, and generally stand out from the crowd. All this to say, I'm used to people looking at me. I'm even used to strangers asking me "What's the occasion?" as they walk by with a dog.

The thing about the bonnet, though? It's way worse. 10000x worse. Not only do people stare, they stare so hard that it crosses from "curious and probably rude" to "making a fool of oneself". I was waiting at a bus stop once, in my bonnet, and a passing driver slowed down and turned their head all the way around to keep looking at me for as long as possible. I'm literally causing distracted driving? Wild.

I also get more vocal attention. One particularly bad day I was walking home from work. At one end of the block a random guy asked me what play I was in. One minute later, at the other end of the block, a carful of pre-teen girls screamed "AMISH!!" out the window at me. I made eye contact with the car's driver. I hope those kids got an earful.

I've always found that my strange manner of dress elicits unusual responses from people, but something about the addition of the bonnet overloads people's ability to censor themselves.  And of course, all of this is from the days before "Handmaid's Tale" came into our lives. This summer I've only just started to get the bonnet out (because a girl can only stand so much attention at a time, har), but I wonder if people's automatic reaction to the sight will be changed by this new infringement of bonnets into America's popular consciousness. If, and How.

Perhaps sometime I'll make a whole post about my unusual fashion choices. The obnoxious questions people ask often make me more determined to keep "being myself" - the more people are exposed to random difference, the less likely they will be to be randomly rude to other people who look different.

Well, it sounds plausible, anyway.

The last two weekends I did a bit of Official Reenacting at the Old Manse (where, else, honestly). The theme was Christmas in 1824, so just on the edge of when New Englanders (and Americans in general) start celebrating Christmas is a way modern folks might recognize.

I played Cornelia van Hof (whose last name went through at least 4 permutations), who is an invented person visiting from New York, where they celebrate Christmas a bit more. The other reenactors (who were rather more casual than I, being ordinary guides drafted and outfitted to the task) played various members of the Ripley family, who lived in the house at the time. My character was stuck in there to give the Ripleys an excuse to have any Christmas, since they were a minister's family and therefore even a bit further behind the times than some others.

I also made Cornelia's family be Germans from Hesse (aka Hessians, I did a lot of research ok) so she could talk about Christmas trees and things, and sing german carols as well as english ones.

I only have mediocre selfies of myself, because I just took them in between tour groups. There I am in my gloriously silly 1820s day cap and somewhat magnificent dress. I couldn't manage to get any more of the dress in the shot, which is too bad, because it looks super Right. Aside from the plaid - plaid is accurate, but this specific plaid is... probably not.

And also there's the gorgeous piano I got to play with the Christmas carols. I spent most of my time on that, and when the tour came through I'd give them my little Christmas in New York spiel and then invite/force them to sing a carol with me. They mostly went for The First Noel, although we had a few takers for Here We Come a-Wassailing. I limited the repertoire to carols that were at least written before 1824, which leaves out many of the most popular modern carols.

I also was doing simple paper crafted decorations, since there's some textual evidence of that as a particularly Christmas-y thing even in the 1810s and 20s. I didn't have any gilt paper (which some text specifically mentioned), so I just cut chains of figures from construction paper. I did angels, 1820s-looking party-goers, a lot of doves, and some Christmas stars. Just by adding little details like the feathery look on the angel wings I got a lot of impressed responses from the guests.

I also tried my hand at paper flowers, tissue paper in this case. I guess dried and paper flowers were popular winter decorations generally, and especially as the Victorian period got rolling. I should like to figure out how to make roses some time, with like cut petals, out of stiffer paper, but for now the tissue carnations kind of gave the idea.

At the end of the whole program I arranged all my paper crafts around the parlors, amongst the greenery.

I really enjoyed myself this Christmas, but I think for next year I'll lobby to plan a bit more in advance and get more/regular reenacting folks. That way there can be more people throughout the house and it can be operated like an open house. Maybe have a few modern guides in there too, just in case there are like furniture-dating questions. I think (and my family who visited the house agreed) that its tricky for the audience to flip from "tour mode" to "reenactor mode" and I think they could learn cool stuff even if the reenactors aren't allowed to know anything later than 1824.
Also (surprise surprise) I wasn't satisfied with some of the other outfits that were going on in the house. Since I'm basically the only costume nerd I think they'll listen to me if I press for more authenticity next year. This could be a big fancy program! And I think I maybe want to make it happen.

- or on my bed, of course. Projects do like to spread all over everything.

Today I'm putting finishings on a medieval gown. It's generically 1200s, I think - some shaping in the seams but no openings which keeps it on the early side of the middle ages. It's made of suuuper dark blue wool coating, which is suuuuuper tightly woven and like very nearly waterproof (which I discovered when the iron dripped on it and formed a perfect little water ball which I could blow across its surface... is it wierd that that was my immediate impulse? "drop of water, oo, blow on it!" Right.). I bought the fabric in two 2m sections for 10euro apiece at a fabric market in Lübeck when I was studying abroad in Germany. It was like $1.30 per Euro when I was there but I still think it worked out to something of a bargain, especially since this fabric is ludicrously good quality. I think generally folks recommend lighter weight wools for dresses, but as I do attend outdoor garb events sometimes (and preferably in cold weather) I think the bulk is worth it. The drape is pretty good even with the thickness - its so heavy it sort of weights itself down prettily.

The color photographs badly. Or, well, but there's basically no visible detail. Here, the dress is inside out. I'm hand tacking the very large neck and cuff facings in. The fabric is a little on the scratchy side so I went for the extra large neck facing, and the cuffs expand a little bit down over the hand so I wanted the extra coverage there as well. The fabric is thick and stiff enough that some kind of facing seemed the easiest and most comfortable option to hem those edges. I suspect it's super a-historical, but I'm fairly firmly of the opinion that anything literally inside of your clothes can be fudged if the spirit of the thing is still honest. So of course all the seams are machine sewn - actually, on a sewing machine that I was randomly offered by someone in the dorm while I was abroad. This is the only project it ever worked on...
Now I just have to figure how far to hem it up. It drags about an inch on the ground at the moment. I really like the aesthetic of the very full length skirt on these sorts of dresses, but how close to the ground am I willing to put this gorgeous fabric..

Several months ago I posted about a black silk dress that I was revamping for the folks at the Old Manse. Well it is FINALLY finished!

Here's how it looked before:

And now, after!

And WOW does it look 1000 times better (if I do say so myself). Besides totally changing the style lines to place it more squarely into the fashions of 1824, the biggest change is that I flatlined the entire dress with muslin. It gives the fabric a WAY better drape for the period and helps it stay smoother (although some of the smoothness is just due to the fabric getting ironed for probably the first time in literal years).
The back of the dress is very voluminous partly because fashion, and partly because it's designed to be super adjustable in size.

The center back closes with three drawstrings, one in the neck and two in the waist. Then the waistband fastens over them. I don't know of any evidence of such a waistband-over-drawstring system in period, but it detracts little from the overall look of the dress while also allowing a lot of adjustablity. At the moment the silly buckle on the back just slides on to the waistband - it wedges in place pretty well, but for security one might put a pin in on the overlapping waistband section. There are still a few details that need working out.

The sleeves are poof above with a straight sleeve below, which is pretty much essential to early 1820s fashion. The sleeve poof stays poofy because of a set of four tapes sewn inside that are shorter than the poof itself. It's an imperfect system because the floof tends to droop down towards the lower sleeve, but it is better than trying to make sleeve supports. Next time I do one of these, I'll put in a fitted sleeve cap under the poof, and maybe stick a little ruffle in between along the shoulder edge to send the floof in the right direction.

The bodice front is shaped with three little pleats under the bust. It looks super wierd on my dress form but I hope it will be better when filled out with a normal soft sort of bust.
The skirt and sleeve hems are turned over and whip stitched to the lining, but the neck edge is finished with a self-fabric band. I just used straight grain and eased it around the curves - mostly because it was easier than finding bias on my fabric scraps, but I am also given to understand that bias cut finishing strips were uncommon until the late 1800s because, being cut on such an angle, they can be really wasteful of fabric.

There's piping in the armhole and back seams, and all round the waistband. The piping is straight grain self-fabric, stuffed with two strands of cotton crochet cord (the same material as the drawstrings, as it happens). Even with the cord doubled, the piping is so teeeny!
Oh yes, and did I mention, the whole thing was sewn by hand? Because that's a thing. The dress is intended to be able to serve as a teaching tool, so it needed to be done "the old fashioned way", and I think I may have gone a tad overboard on the teensiness of my stitches. The structural stitching is all tiny and even; I'm quite proud of it! In non-visible places I also left the gold basting stitches in (from marrying the fashion fabric and the lining), so that can also demonstrate sewing techniques.

After Christmas I may go back and put a row of roleaux trim around the hem, and maybe futz with the sleeves. I also need to write up an informational booklet to include all the historical information.

gosh it just turned out so pretty!! i just really love it.

Recently I have been researching nineteenth century political writing, especially about abolition; I feel very strongly about the modern counterparts to those issues and it's important to me to reflect that in my historical reenacting (because history isn't an escape from the present, it's context in which the present exists). I found the very excellent book "An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans" from 1833 on Project Gutenberg, and I wanted to be able to have it on hand while reenacting. But it would be annoying and silly to print the whole think off the internet, so I bought a cheap used paperback of it off Amazon (because of course some college or other used it in a class) and I rebound it!
I looked at probably 25 bookbinding tutorials of all sorts before I began - I found this one especially useful. I just read enough to get a good idea of the general steps and terminology, so that I could reapply the concepts to my project.

The book came with the original 1830s text and a modern section of introductions and appendices, so I split the text block along those lines. I bound the modern section first, so if I made mistakes I could fix them. I had a bit of trouble getting the text block glued into the cover straight; it ended up being a little cockeyed, but the actual book text wound up a bit straighter!

For the main text, I attached end-papers of brown construction paper, and a "super" out of plain thin cotton to be sure everything would stay together.

Then I put together the cover - two cardboard boards for the front and back covers, and another thin bit for the spine. That was all covered with a large sheet of white drawing paper. I stuck another "super" onto the spine section of the cover just to be safe that it would all hold together. Then I folded the paper around the cover, and glued everything carefully down into the grooves between the spine and cover boards.

And that is where I stopped taking pictures, of course.

I added fabric parts along the spine and on each corner for reinforcement (and of course because it looks cool). Then I glued the text block into the cover - I only glued the covers, not the spine, so it would be able to open more easily. And it wound up mostly straight! The covers of the book text and the modern section match, so they look like a set. I need to add some kind of label to the covers still. But the book has been really handy and very functional, and I'm quite pleased with it!

I have SO MUCH fabric

The shelves are just stuffed right full! My parents are always asking, "do you really need more fabric?" to which, as every stitcher knows, the answer is always "yeah, duh."
The frustrating thing is, I'm not even just collecting random fabric with no purpose. I mean, I am a little, but at this point I've stared at this fabric stash for so long that tons of this stuff has a plan, at least sort of - I just need the time to get these things made. And it feels like there's never time, or if there it I'm doing mending or something.
But let me take you on a tour of some of these plans. (Masses of pictures ahead!

And as I was putting this list together I kept glancing over and seeing other things that I have plans or tentative plans for. Giant pile of blue poly velvet? Elizabethan gown! Salmon colored cotton flannel? Overdye it red and make a 19th c petticoat! A million potential blouses out of quilting cottons! And that isn't including the leather-for-shoes and the upholstery-scraps-for-purses, and the scraps-for-quilting, which are in the boxes above and below the main fabric stash.
Oh yeah, and the Yarn Bench
And the 1000 mending and UFO projects lying in piles all over everywhere.

If only I had a sudden inheritance, and I could quit work and just do ALL THE PROJECTS. and then I could finally buy some new fabric, ha.

... a sweater!

The color is a little more saturated in real life, a nice pale teal. I just love it!! I'm knitting from the bottom up. It isn't from a pattern, I'm just making it up as I go. Its a sort of wide rib, k4 p1, 140 stitches around, size 8-ish needles. It's got these little vents on the sides.

It'll be mid-hip length. When I get to the top it'll have just ribbed arm openings, no sleeves. I think probably also just a ribbed crew neck, unless I suddenly decide I reeeeeally want a cowl. Cowls are just harder to combine, like I couldn't wear one with a collared shirt, so that's pretty unlikely, I think.

I like to have a lot of coats in winter, so that my coat can contribute to my outfit rather than hiding it. Two years ago (or so) I made myself this black coat out of an old coat I already had:

The old coat was a classic long black men's dress coat - I'm not sure how to describe the style, but you'd know if you saw it. The wool is lovely and thick and good quality (I got the coat second-hand; I forget if I bought it or if it was a Free Thing.). However the neckline made an inconveniently deep V for someone of my stature - I can only assume the coat's intended wearer was over 6 feet. And of course the skirt of the coat was straight up and down, so as my taste in skirts expanded sideways the coat couldn't keep up. So I made it over into this shorter coat, which is in the style of an 1860s coat with full sleeves and wide mid-thigh length skirts. It was recognized as probably 1860s by a stranger in a restaurant once so I guess it's not half bad.

Now because I was making one shaped garment out of another, there was a need for quite a bit of piecing, especially in the sleeves. In order to perserve as much width as possible, I pieced by zigzagging the abbutted edges of the fabric together, with a bit of hem tape behind to support it. But, while this wool is thick, it is not felt, so there are a number of places along the piecing lines that are trying to come apart.

I do not much like this state of affairs! Having worn the coat for some years now, I am quite sure there's enough space in there to make proper seams instead of weird zigzag nonsense. Unfortunately, that means I need to take the coat pretty much all to pieces and put it back together again...

Did you know I have one? I put the link on the home page already but it seems fitting to make an official blog post about it.
The store is HERE.
For starters I'm listing old things that I've made and either never wore or don't wear anymore. Its a massive amount of things, and I'm slowly putting them up a few at a time - not for suspense, it's just easier that way. All the stuff is clothes that's already in my clothing gallery. Some of the listings are linked in the gallery pages but I've been a little slow about putting links in.
I'm only up to about 20 listings right now, but boy will it just increase from there.

The quilting demo was a success! Everything went smoothly, the public liked us, and we had fun (which is kind of the most important part, to me). Here's a play by play, and pictures!

Before we left for the event I gathered all the clothing so I could figure out if we had enough underwear and that sort of thing. Some skirts got tucked up and I spent kind of a long time color-coordinating the aprons and the dresses so it wouldn't look too matchy-matchy

I prepared the quilt itself by laying out the backing, the batting and the top, basting them together with like 6 inch stitches, and rolling them onto two poles. For batting I used what I had at hand, which was loose polyester fiberfill. I sort of pulled it apart and convinced it to lie in an inch-thick layer throughout the quilt (and I guess I didn't actually take pictures of the process). I figured, on the one hand loose batting is historically more accurate, and then on the other hand the top and backing are both polyester (because that's the fabric I had lying around) so it won't hurt anything to put polyester on the inside too.

The quilting pattern that I decided on was a simple square type design: stitch-in-the-ditch on both the horizontal and vertical seams and then bisect those squares horizontally and vertically.

The whole roll situation on the quilt was my make-do solution to not having a real quilting frame. I stitched the short ends of the quilt (with huuuuge stitches, of course) to the poles and rolled them both inward, so that the poles themselves stuck out on the ends and could be balanced on something. Then we'd roll the quilt out just a little bit and quilt from the middle towards the ends (so if things were going to shift it would be as even as possible). I have this thought that such systems were used "back in the day" and that the poles would be balanced on sawhorses. Of course, really legit quilting bees used a full sized frame that could have the whole quilt out at once, but that was out of the question given space concerns, and the fact that there would be only 3 quilters instead of 10+.

I didn't have any sawhorses (at least, not any historical looking ones) so we set up the quilt poles between two ladder-back chairs. The chairs are not really historical but not horrendous eyesores either. On one side of this arrangement we put a bench, and I had planned to sit us all three on the bench, but it turned out to be a better arrangement if I sat around the other side on a stool.

Look at us, we look so good! I only made one brand-new dress for this event, which is the maroon one I'm wearing. The others just needed a bit of new underwear and some hem tucks. I loooove putting my clothes on other people with different body types. Like, clearly we're different shapes, and we fill the clothes differently, but we all look super good and period!

I did some hair research for this reenactment, because obviously my friends have short hair and I didn't want to do it wrong. Turns out, if one has got short hair in the 1860s, it should be center parted and tucked behind the ears. Super simple! And besides the usual "cut my hair to sell" and "cut my hair because I'm an invalid", apparently there was a bit of a fad for young but eligible ladies to wear short hair. I couldn't exactly confirm that fact - it was explained by youthful exuberance, or perhaps it was southern ladies sympathizing with the soldiers, or it was those crazy transcendentalists with their nutty ideas about relative equality of the sexes.

As a teaching tool I made a little sort of quilt sampler, which is the loose pinwheel block visible above. Its just one block with batting and backing, quilted and bound. I batted it with a little bit of loose wool that I had around (which is not sufficently processed to qualify as roving, I don't think). I left one corner of the block open to show people the components of the "quilt sandwich". And I quilted the four quarters of the sampler in different designs, sort of just for fun. Its sort of visible in that picture on the left, due to the bright light.

Although there were a fair few people around because of the "holiday", and because the Old Manse was hosting a concert that afternoon, we still weren't as popular with the passerby as I had anticipated. I think a lot of that was because what we were doing seemed obvious and familiar to people, so they didn't bother to ask questions. Or they sat 10 feet away with their small child and explained to said child in a very hushed voice that we were "princesses" doing some "sewing". I guess visitors think it's rude to interrupt us in our work, but it does result in a lot of people spreading misinformation instead of learning something new.

We did attract the attention of a number of quilters in the crowd, and one woman who had specifically come to see us to ask me a somewhat obscure question about signature quilts (which I could not answer). I didn't feel qualified to answer their questions, because I'm not a Quilter, but rather a seamstress dabbling in other arts.

In the whole afternoon, we only quilted about two rows worth of squares accross the quilt. I think it would have been much quicker to have masses more people working on it, but then we would probably have been even harder to approach.

We didn't have as much chance to talk about period-appropriate politics as I had hoped, because we talked more about our lives, and how quilts even work, and about why are we too frightening to talk to. I have some thoughts about how to remedy that in the future, though.