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.

(This is basically a rant, I think. It takes me a minute to get to the point but this is my rant style.)

I'm talking about "snaps", or "poppers" for the Brits amongst you, that garment closure with the onomatopoetic name(s). They look approximately like this:

They function because they have got two halves, one that pokes out and one that has a dent. These two components snap (HA) together and are held firmly in place by those funny squiggly springs that you can see inside the dented half.

Now, when you are sewing these things to a garment, you have to be a bit careful about which side you put where. You can see that the dented side is a good bit thicker that the pokey side. This makes a difference when you are sewing them.
The pokey side, with its flat back, attaches very cleanly to the fabric:

Whereas, the dent side tends to pull on the fabric, creating a visible disturbance on the other side:

Of course, the exact details of one's attachment method makes a difference, as does the size of the snap, but this is generally true. Since a snap is (usually) supposed to be an invisible closure, it is (usually) best to attach the two components so that the flat-backed pokey side is against the outer side of the garment, and the rounder dented side is against the body - in fact, this is considered a rule by most costume people, which of course may be broken sometimes but should be considered the default.

Ok, so that made sense, right? It's a logical system, easy to see why it's a good system.

Well, let me tell you how that was explained to me.

"Alright so there's a male side and a female side, and the male one goes on top"

Excuse me?!!!???? This is literally so many shades of yikes??!!!??
And I discovered shortly thereafter, that this Highly Icky terminology is used for lots of other things too.
Plug? Male. Socket? Female.
Pokey part? Male. Denty part? Female.
The WORST was when I heard it applied to Velcro. VELCRO. There's perfectly acceptable non-gross terminology for velcro -  the scratchy side is teeny hooks and the soft side is teeny loops, so call it hook and loop. But nooooooo, the hook has to be "male" and the loop "female".

IS NO ONE ELSE BOTHERED BY THIS? GOOD LORD.

At first, I didn't really know what about it made me uncomfortable, but I have figured it out:
Thing 1: cisnormativity
This terminology basically reduces the concepts of "male" and "female" to "penis" and "vagina" (or "poke" and "hole" if you prefer euphemism). There is SO MUCH more to gender (and to sex) than "penis or vagina", but using this kind of terminology reinforces the extreme old-fashioned binary.
Thing 2: heteronormativity
Snaps (and other such things) only work when the two opposite parts are put together. A denty side will not snap with another denty side. This is NOT TRUE of humans, but the application of human terminology to this system reinforces the idea that only a male and female ("penis" and "vagina") can/will fit together.
Thing 3: EWW
If the snaps are male/"penis" and female/"vagina" that means that every time you snap a snap (or plug in a lamp, or stick together some velcro), you're simulating the act of sex. Does no one else think that's weird? Did it never occur to any of my teachers that, by assigning hardware genders based on similarity to genitalia, they are turning everything into sex, everywhere all the time? Closing a shirt? SEX. Setting up a television? SEX. EEUUEGH its just so icky to think about. And there's no room for consent in there either. What if those little snaps don't want to have sex? TOO BAD, you needed to close up that shirt to go on stage.

I know this sounds ridiculous, but you can't tell me it isn't running in the background of this whole nomenclature system. You can't say "that looks like a penis, lets call it male" and then also say "this has nothing to do with the function of the hardware, it was just a handy term".
I move that we abolish this linguistic shortcut. I am 1000% sure that every piece of hardware that it is applied to can be referred to differently. Some of them already have established words - for Velcro, hook and loop; for electrics, plug and socket.
I've not yet heard a set of terms for the parts of snaps, so I humbly suggest "innie" and "outie". Like bellybuttons! And I think it can be said, that snaps do bear a certain (limited) resemblance to bellybuttons.
Let's abolish cis-het normativity in our work terminology, kids.
There's no good reason to keep it.

YAY! On Columbus day (that's three days after this posts), I'm debuting a new reenacting program at the Old Manse! And it's a quilting bee. This is the quilt top we'll be quilting up:

It's medium period. I went for a basically round design in homage to the medallion quilts of the 18th century. And it is technically made of "scrap fabric" but in this case that means "polyester", because I refuse to make real clothes out of polyester. It's parts from a bunch of different sheet sets that I had in large quantities to make this very matchy pattern. I really like how it looks, with the white and the two-tone "carpenters star". Up close its pretty obvious that this is a beginners quilt, and that the fabric is widgy, and I wasn't suuper careful about cutting all the pieces exactly the same. I suspect it'll have a different effect all together when it's in the "quilt frame" for the reenacment. I hope I get it together to photograph and post about the event, it should be interesting.
I'm going to have two of my friends with me, all in 1860s clothes that I made! And we're going to hopefully talk amongst ourselves about politics, because I ascribe aggressively to the idea that a gathering of women is not only going to "gossip" (whatever that's even supposed to mean). I read that in every online summary of quilting bees that I came across: "there were no men and the women would sew all day and gossip". And just, considering the influence of women in reform movements of the 19th century, I think it isn't at all odd to think that women in women's spaces might discuss politics and society. Maybe that's what people call "gossip" nowadays, I dunno.