18thC day at the shoe box

It has been decided that every second Thursday we will be stitching at the shoe box.  This is mostly for 18thC costume friends as our summers tend to get busy with eventing and we are in ramp up mode now for the upcoming season and have projects we want to get done.  It's good for Mum and I because we can dedicate a day to work on the projects we want for the hobby and away from school projects which can take over all our brain space.

Right now, we are both working on wool bedgowns.  They are also both almost done, so we may be able to cross things off the list by the end of day.  Exciting!  We are also both almost at the topping out phase of our wardrobes.  I have some tweaking to do on mine, mostly little things, like a working apron.  Mum's needs a bit more work, mostly in finishing a couple of gowns and reworking an old gown into a petticoat, also, I need to shorten a jacket for her.  I have some work to do.

In other news....
The first chunk of the thesis was turned in yesterday.  I have some reading and writing to do this week, mostly on theoretical stuff.  I have to organize the den a bit this weekend so I can find stuff again.  I think I need to send stuff to the storage locker too...gah, the thought of that...
My collection is on hold for a month or two.  Things at NSCAD are in flux at the moment and it's not working out for my schedule right at the moment.  I have made a list of what needs to be finished though, and will get back to it once things clear up a bit.  Perhaps in July, once we get back home from Louisbourg.

Well, I have housewifey things to do before the ladies arrive...make it a great day!

A fourth, fifth, sixth look at Norse trousers

A long while back, my first year at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, I began looking at Norse trousers.  We were bringing in an exhibit from Parks Canada on the Norse at L'Anse aux Meadows and they were going to provide costumes for our interpreters to wear.

Well let's just say I stuck my nose in a little where the costumes were concerned and changed some things up a little both at the Provincial and Federal levels.  The costumes they were going to send down looked to me to be early 1970s SCA Viking clothes, and I knew there had been more research done in that area.  I went to my boss and asked if I could make two outfits for the museum for the exhibit.  I would buy the fabrics, make them on site and the museum could wear them for the summer, after which I would get them back...first steps in becoming their head of wardrobe, at the time I was working front cash and interpreting the Robertson's store.

So I looked at the Hedeby  trousers recreated by the Viking museum in Haithabu.  I made a little paper pattern of the pants to figure out how they went together, and then I made a pair in a silk wool blend.  And I quickly realized they were a huge suck up of fabric and thought, self, if you were weaving this cloth, you wouldn't be wasting so much of it!  I am a huge fan of zero waste clothing methods, so this really grated on my last nerve.  So I wrote a paper about it and brought the trousers and paper to Great Northeastern War that summer.  I have no idea where that paper is now...somewhere out on the internet...

As our SCA family grew, with boys looking for comfy clothes to wear that they could make themselves, I thought more about these trousers.  Then Parks Canada contacted me about redesigning their interpretation clothing collection.  So I spent some time that winter making pants, researching the Norse and ended up sending them a four inch binder of stuff along with paper patterns for new clothes...and  recommendation to buy the book Woven Into the Earth.  My theory is that instead of short pants like those worn at the museum in Haithabu, the puffy Norse pants were adaptations of earlier thorsberg trousers, morphed with the style of pants still worn by nomadic tribes in the Middle East today.  Once my guys tried the short pants, they quickly realized that wicklebander, or the leg wraps will not stay on the leg with short pants.  So Parks got the longer version, that came to the ankle.  Further still, the long pants rode up, under the leg wraps, making the ankle cold and exposed.

hummmmm.....

So Rave comes into our lives through the SCA, and he too wants the cool clothes of the Norse, but wants to do his own research, not wanting to just take my bible and go off with just what I was telling him...good researcher that he is...
He kept coming to me, each week at our weekly fight practice and arts gathering, telling me that he'd found me once again on the internet and that my research was pretty cool.  He did take the bible of Norse things, and he did make some really cool clothes from the research, but he wanted to try out something.  Feet.

Rave was looking at the Thorsberg trousers and noticed they had feet in them, we both agreed that feet would make the trousers stay down around the ankles better, and also keep the leg wraps on better.  Whoot! Success! They did.
So Pierre is still wearing that first pair of Viking Museum trousers, only because I haven't had the energy to rip them apart and remake them, but I am so happy that my younger Norse guys are all experimenting with my first thoughts and are helping me to experiment with new ideas on how they were made and worn...now if only I could figure out a better way of cutting the damned things to make better use of cloth, then I would be a happy costumer.

Thanks to Garth for finding this article http://urd.priv.no/viking/bukser.html it's a great look at a broad range of the trouser styles.  I'm probably going to be doing some experimentation in the near future!

Definitions:
Norse: the people
Viking: a verb to describe the process of travelling the globe on trade and other missions
Haithbu:  the place in modern Germany where the museum is located
Hedeby: the period word for the above place.
Thorsberg:  a place where a fully fashioned pair of closer fitting trousers, with feet were found, these trousers date from roughly 600ad, about 400 years before the L'Anse aux Meadows site, but fashion changed pretty slowly then.

It has been almost a month!

A month of end of term madness.  Getting my own sewing done had to take a back burner when I realized that the anxiety in the room was making me very anxious and so in order to not contribute to it, I stopped sewing on the collection.  I made two summer dresses instead, one of which I had to put the skirt on multiple times and when I looked at it yesterday to put on, realized I had sewn it on wrong yet again.  Monday it will go back to the studio for a final attempt.

My students did really well this term, nobody below a B.  Even the ladies that had a bit of issues managed to get through with pretty decent marks.  Just proved to me, once again, that you really have to work at failing my class.  There may be a lot of projects, but they are all useful in the end.

Today I will be dealing with the beginning to write the paper.  I have no clue how many pages I should be looking at writing, so I am just going to wing it and see what happens.  Today I want to write the formal introduction and methodology section of the paper, first draft.  Then I need to get my political paper from David Howard's class back from Randi and go over that with a fine tooth comb.  I am sure once I start this beast, that things will go better, I am just really anxious about starting for some reason.  Oh well, into the breech I go!

on our own schedule now!

I passed the proposal defense with flying colours!  I managed to get four outfits completed for showing, a powerpoint slide presentation and answered questions like I knew my shit.  Yeah!
Outfit number three had a sweater I'm really not happy with, so I am reknitting it.  The yarn I chose originally didn't hold up to softness once it was washed for blocking.  it feels like plastic now.  I went rooting in the textile bins at school though and found a fairly nice worsted wool and I am working on reknitting now.  I donated a bag of yarns to replace the cone I took, so I'm still working within budget.  The fourth outfit was a shirtwaist dress with full 1950s skirt in black cotton and a bought moto jacket in pleather that I am reworking with ruffles and such.  I had planned to have one made in leather, but then this season they became "fashionable" and I bout the pleather one for 70$ at Reitman's.  Last Thursday I spent the day inserting a grosgrain ribbon frill into the collar.  Red on black.  It's striking.

Today I am taking the day off, working on housework, like laundry and such.  I'll knit for a bit, then it's off to a Cultural Studies party this afternoon at the Mount.
Tomorrow I am back on schedule!  I have five outfits left to complete, and a major paper to write, the first deadline being mid May with my intro and historical background and political art movements that contributed to UK punk.  I want this project finished by end of August.

One week until Proposal Defense

I finished the second outfit yesterday, the tailored suit took a lot longer than planned.  The third outfit, I am not quite happy with, but I'll finish what I have and deal with it after next week.  Tuesday I start the fourth outfit, which I will wear on Friday.  It's a cotton day dress with a bought jacket that I hope to rework a bit with some trim.  I just couldn't pass up the deal, 75$ for a pleather version of the one I sketched out, and the pleather matches skirt fabric I bought for another outfit.
Today I did some last minute revisions to the thesis proposal, changing dates around really, to better reflect the current timeline.  Looks like I will be finished in September if I stick to the plan.  I think I can do it if I really apply myself and keep writing.  That would give time for edits and I could graduate in the winter...not too far behind.

I've been looking at schools for the PhD, I'm not sure where I really want to go, or what I want to study, other than fashion.  I don't want to be having to take courses completely unrelated to my chosen path again, it was hard enough for the MA.  I really want to work with a school that agrees that fashion is important...Now to find one that I can financially deal with.

Feeling like I should have gone down to the studio today and gotten some work done.

more on linen

This past weekend at a local living history farm museum, they ran a program called Just the Flax.  It was a one display, short program concerning the processing of flax fibres.  In just 45 minutes I learned so much!  I could not get over how quickly the flax can be processed into fibre, it was like magic.  I was able to spin a bit of it too...first time sitting at a wheel, I only have every spun from a drop spindle.  I was so easy, I cannot stress to you how easy it was!

So after some serious thinky thoughts since Saturday, I am wondering if I could have gotten a tighter weave structure on my shirt linen if I had gone with a finer weft thread.  This is something I am going to have to experiment with once I get my loom set up.

I am also left wondering why we as a province producing more flax and linen.  We have the perfect growing conditions, it really should be a crop that we produce...more thinky thoughts...

here is a link to the living history farm http://rossfarm.novascotia.ca/

back at the computer...

The thumb drive I uploaded my presentation to would not speak to the computers at school, so I had to fly by the seat of my pants and do my presentation old school.  Thank god I brought my sketch book.  I felt pretty shitty about the whole thing, but I know that it was a test run for my thesis presentation coming up.  I may bring the laptop for that one, and a mood board, and hopefully three of my outfits.  It'll happen mid March now, I suspect.

Why so late you ask?  Well, I have one last rewrite to do, stating the obvious in my opening paragraph what my thesis is.  I am sitting at the computer to do that today.  Then I will send it off in all directions and set up the meeting of the committee.  I will be ready for that!
I am well on my way of having two outfits finished by the end of reading week next week, and hope to have the third patterned out and cut in good cloth.  I will wear one of the outfits in the presentation, and have the other two on manikins.  I also will put together a mood board of the women of Punk that I'll be referencing in my thesis.

I am excited to finally be working on the project.  It's been a rough year but I made it through.  Dr Randi talks about the project to everyone she can.  I hope that with this thesis project, we can open up the space for a broader conversation, and we can, as a discipline, stop trying to put people into boxes they don't need or belong in.  In other good news, Dr Randi has not just been voted Best Professor in Halifax, but it's looking like she'll be Chair for the Cultural Studies department for the next couple of years.  This is exciting news!  I may be in a women's and gender studies program at another University, but my thesis advisor is the Chair of a department that I would have rather been in, if they had a Master's Program.  Here's hoping that my project can open that door as well.

Well, I should go write...I have someone sitting on my shoulder, piss nooshing me in the ear...