Friday 12 July 2019

News from the shoe

Just after my last post, I got a midnight message from our favourite Boxer breeder in Nova Scotia asking if I could take a repossessed puppy. She was driving to New Brunswick to take two dogs, one of hers, one from a sister breeder in Ontario, from a home that was breaking up. We quickly made the choice to meet her in NB and take her dog home with us, sight unseen. We had no idea what to expect, neither did she, but we arrived to find a healthy dog, albeit untrained. He took to Pierre right away, big relief, I was worried he might be afraid of men, and I'd have to do all the rehabilitation on my own. This is a photo of the three of us, shortly after our breeder drove off in the other direction with the female puppy to send home to Ontario. I think he might like us. His name is Beer, Dutch for Bear. His birth name from the breeder. He likes the cats, and is mostly trained now. He is a smart boy and may one day soon be able to walk off leash.

So our lives have been dealing with house training, and puppy rehab, but also car issues...and finally a research trip.

My trip had been planned for months. I was ready to go back in April, right after passing my proposal defense. Museum schedules and our own life kept pushing things around though. Finally I decided to fly down to Nova Scotia, and Pierre booked my ticket, so I was going, whether everything was ready for my trip or not!
I landed in Nova Scotia on Tuesday the 2nd of July, and Lacey Bean picked me up at the airport and drove me to Bear River, my headquarters for the week, the home of friends Jenny and Jayar. Jenny is my research assistant extraordinaire. She has edited most of my work on this PhD, and knows how to road trip well. We packed coolers and the car on Wednesday morning and headed off to our first museum on Wednesday morning.

The Museums by the Sea in Shelburne, Nova Scotia are jointly run by the Nova Scotia Museum and the Shelburne County Historical Society. If you ever get to go to NS and are a fan of the eighteenth-century, you need to visit this town. The waterfront district is as close to as it was in the 1780s as humanly possible in 2019. The museum site takes up a full block with the Ross-Thompson House and Storehouse along with other buildings that house the modern Historical Society museum exhibits and collections.
I knew there were menswear pieces from the last quarter of the eighteenth-century at Ross-Thompson, mostly because friends have taken photos, but also through my own visits there. There are three separate menswear outfits, one complete ditto suit in green corded silk, one frock coat and matching waistcoat in brown and polychrome striped silk, and one silk satin frockcoat that used to be the colour of turmeric. When I saw the striped suit of clothes in the flesh, I was vibrating, and so started with that one.

This suit doesn't look like much in this photo, but OH. MY. GODDESS! It is impressive! The stripes of polychrome are in three shades of green, another couple shades of pink, and blue threads in a narrow fat quarter inch silk satin woven stripe. This alternates with twill woven stripes of gold coloured silk threads. There are death head buttons in the polychrome colours over a horn button mold in a six spoke style. The buttons on the waistcoat are also polychrome, four spoke style over a wooden mold. These pieces took me until Thursday noon to finish drafting. We took lots of photos. These will all be in my dissertation along with patterns and construction notes. The week went up from there as we found more hidden treasures in the pieces. I finished the first batch of work at the Ross-Thompson house Saturday morning. The rest of the morning, we took photos of things I want to look at more closely the next time I am down, hopefully in October. Three different pair of shoes and a man's leather pocketbook are in the collection of the Historical Museum that will need a day or so of detailed notes, measurements, and photos. But they will have to wait until the museum closes for the season.

We stopped in to visit the Barrington museums (another Nova Scotia Museum site) on the way back to Bear River. No costume pieces really, but good information from our friend Sam who is the director there. And hey, any time we get to visit friends in the system is a good excuse to stop the car for an hour or so.

Sunday, Jenny was being filmed for the CBC TV show Still Standing. The episode will air in the Fall of 2021. It is exciting to see her Millinery business featured on a national broadcast. I hope it will be good publicity for her. She is an amazing hatmaker and milliner. She is my go-to for trims and frills when clothes require them. I am a cutter first and foremost. I don't usually do decoration.

Monday, we had planned to meet up with the Bean again at Ross Farm museum in New Ross Nova Scotia. No relation to Ross-Thompson, but another site in the Nova Scotia Museum system. The farm is the only working farm within the system, and was founded by a Loyalist soldier at about the same time my own family's land claim/grant was being finalized in Pictou county. The site is interpreted at 1820, but costumed interpreters! In working class clothing! It was supposed to just be a wander around to see how things are done through the dissertation lens. I had an opportunity land in my lap to see things up close and behind the scenes though, as the site is also looking for a new costumer, their current one is looking to retire in the next two years. We sat and had a good chat with their new Site Director, and I was asked to come back on Wednesday to meet the costumer, let her meet me, and for everyone to get to know each other a bit better. I am on board with their, "could be up to two years" timeframe for employment. I am also perfectly fine with the seasonal aspect of the job. Hey, if it means we get to go home to NS, and I get to work in my field at a really cool site, I could work this job into retirement. I have no illusions of grandeur for after finalizing my PhD. I could very easily go back to working at Atlantic Fabrics or Fabricville!

The thing that really hit home this week was the lack of a good working budget for all of the sites I visited. The NSM is trying to make-do across the board with nothing. It is no wonder that sites can't hire actual trained historical costumers. They really can't afford to hire summer students to be interpreters. They certainly, often, can't afford the site director's (very low) salaries. The second thing that many were frustrated with were situations where they just didn't have the expertise to be able to put up beautiful and accurate exhibits, again, lack of staff. There is a small curatorial staff in Halifax, that are trying to bring a massive system into the 21st century that was broken when it was first developed. The pubic also doesn't fully understand how museums should work, and so donate tonnes of things to the sites that may have no actual provenance or use to the museum. Just because it's old, doesn't mean a museum can use it, or has the means to store it properly. Keep your auction finds in your private collections unless you know and can relay the backstory of the item to be donated. Also, the museum isn't your Salvation Army drop-off point for housewares you no longer need. Most of the stuff donated to the Ross-Thompson house to be used in their costume interpretation was garbage. Polyester drapes and housewares that have no use for making historic costume, if they had anyone to sew said garments.
This week could also be summed up by interpreters and living historians asking me if their clothes were accurate, and me having to reply 'no', but that I understood why, for many, various reasons, but not limited to no money and no trained staff.
This next week will be finishing Pierre's sexy full gaiters and a neck roller for his French Canadian impression for Fort Ti's Montcalm's Cross event next weekend, and trying to finish a ditto suit to send home to George for a fitting before August. Then it's on to other contracts, writing a chapter for the dissertation, and some new modern clothes for me.

Busy Grrrl is Busy.



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