Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Centennial Dress Project -- The Fun Has Arrived!

One would think that graduating from college would give a person more time to do things like update their blog, but it has become apparent to me that real life takes it out of a body more than school life does. And two jobs does not time for dress projects leave. However, I think I can safely say that in three months (goodness me, three months!) I have made some pretty significant progress.

Item One:

I have purchased my patterns. (Huge hurdle to jump through).



Item Two: 

I have purchased a large quantity of good muslin, and have made what amounts to one good muslin mock-up of my shirtwaist!

Historically correct garment in historically correct setting -- the Farmhouse.

This also involved setting my first sleeve, which I was VERY proud of, since it turned out lovely.  The second mock-up will be forthcoming in January when I actually have several days off.

Item Three:

My sewing table no longer has a hole in the middle where the original machine used to sit. It now has a lovely little door. Hip-hip-hooray for my father's carpentry skills!

Item Four:

I have met May.

Wait, you're asking yourselves, who on God's green earth is May and why is she so important that she gets bolded, italics, and underlines? Well, as I told you several months ago when I learned of May's existence, she's my new best friend  And I finally got a chance to meet her.

Not in person, unfortunately, although I would have liked that a lot. May died in 1993 at the ripe old age of 96 years old. I got to met her through her letters, now housed at the Saint Benedict's Monastery Archives -- three years of correspondence that she sent to her mother and freinds at home between 1912, when she enrolled in Saint Benedict's Academy for one year of high school, through 1915, when she graduated from Saint Benedict's College as part of its first college graduating class with a degree in Music.

Internet, meet May. May, meet the Internet. They'll love you just as much as I do, I promise.

 I got to read about her fears about being far away from home for the first time, about her despair that she would never be a good student (and then watch her grades climb to straight As by her last semester of college) and listen to her tell her mother about all her hijinks with the other girls in her class.

Saint Ben's in 1913 -- so cool we had our own postcards.

And oh boy, did those original Bennies get into some trouble sometimes. One of May's good friends, a girl named Denver McCloskey (Yes, I know, Denver! In 1912! I couldn't make this up! ) had "a kodak (sic)...and she's been taking pictures of different ones. Somehow the sisters always avoid having their picture taken." May goes into great detail about the various tricks the girls played trying to capture the nuns on film. She relates another hilarious story where, when a visiting dignitary was going to be shown the dormitories and one of her friends had stopped by to visit in her pajamas, the friend was shoved in the closet until the visit was over. She wrote home to tell her mother that she had bought her first piece of 'school swag', "One of the Saint Benedict's pillows. The colors are red and white," and, she adds with pride, "and I'm going to work it." ('Work it' as in, embroider over it even more, not 'work it' as in, show it off and be awesome with it. Although I'm sure she did that sometimes too. It may even be the pillow featured in this picture.)

She wrote about her freshman five (well, four and a half) with pride -- pride! -- when she wrote home to her mother after only a month at school and proudly declaimed that she was now 101 1/2 pounds. (At seventeen years old. Goodness me.)

To be quite brief, her letters were a wellspring of goodness and delight. I wished that I had known May -- I wished that I had gotten a chance to go to school with her. I wrote a poem memorializing my time spent abroad in Ireland to the great delight of the rest of the people on my trip. May did that, too, for all the girls in her graduating class. It was published in her yearbook. That was in her file, too. I might as well have been reading the letters of the 1912 equivalent of...well, of me.

This is part of the memorial poem. She donated this lovely type-written manuscript to the college and it contains a few really wonderful pieces.
But one of the absolute jewels of May's letters (and there are many) is her letter home to her mother in her senior year, in which she details a long list of items her mother will have to supply her money for. New music for the graduation recital, gloves, shoes, new stockings, new corset, photos for the year book, graduation announcements, calling cards -- a list I am sure Bennies graduating today would recognize in some form or another. Today's parents, however, will probably not recognize the price -- May asked her mother for a princely ten dollars to cover her expenses. I include a selection here where May details some of her finances to give you a better picture of the buying power of a dollar in 1915.

Of course, if you could send me a five dollar bill, I'll have enough to defray all my expenses there [in Saint Cloud.] I don't know how much things cost, but I suppose my slippers will come to about three dollars, my gloves to a dollar and a half, and my stockings to about the same as the gloves, and then as to a corset -- I suppose that will be two dollars. My last one cost that much, I think. There, you see, that comes to eight dollars already and I only have four dollars to my name...

And in the midst of all that, she took a solid page to tell her mother how she wanted her graduation dress to look. Riches!
...Yes, I got that dress that you cleaned for me. By the way, don't make my sleeves on my graduation dress too long. Perhaps three-quarter length sleeves would be better. I wanted long sleeves but they won't look good with long gloves. I want the sleeves to lay over the gloves at least three inches -- if you make short sleeves. You see I'll have to wear that dress at my recital and I want the sleeves to come to about 4 inches below my elbow so I won't have to wear sleevelets at my recital. 
So there we have it. Three quarter sleeves to lay over longer gloves and no sleevelets. The historical record has spoken.

I talked everyone's ear off about these letters after I got home from Minnesota. I couldn't quote them enough, reference them enough, rhapsodize about them enough. Now my parents think I should look into seeing what it takes to get letters published along with some sort of supplemental material for use in women's studies classes and the like. I think that would be a tremendously fun project.

But I still have to make a dress first.