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).

From left to right, they are : Saundra Ros Altman's Past Patterns # 403 Simple Edwardian Waist, Reconstructing History's Peplum Skirt, and Sense and Sensibility's 1914 Afternoon Dress.

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.

Centennial Dress Project: The Patternmaster Cometh

I set myself a goal that by the end of August I would have a pattern picked out and purchased. Well, we all see how that worked out -- August has come and been, and I have no pattern. I've subscribed to a lot more sewing blogs, done a lot more research, have made more plans to do even more research, and instead of putting me farther in front of the beast, I felt like all this prep work was putting me further behind the beast instead.  There are a lot of really talented bloggers out there, and they have some really beautiful work. 

To put it nicely, I was feeling that I wasn't talented enough, smart enough, or well read enough to complete a project and show it off to people. And if I was going to show it off to people, I was going to get my ass chewed out for not doing something historically appropriate.

Then I went in to volunteer at my living history farm the other day -- I wore my new skirt (sewn entirely by myself) and the apron that I made as my first sewing project at the Farm. I wanted to make sure my outfit looked okay (I wore a button-up blouse from my closet, just something white with a low collar that I'd bought because it looked vaguely historical and I needed white button-up shirts for work) and the first thing my supervisor said was "Wow, you look really good today!"

And that made me feel really, really good, because I needed a win in the costuming department.

I then proceeded to give three really stellar tours that day, collect 22 eggs from our chickens, and bake an entire apple pie, handmade crust to handmade crust, all by myself in a wood burning stove. I was a historical superwoman. It was awesome.

I decided after that that the dress really does have to happen, and I have to bite the bullet and take whatever flak the internet and my fellow alums and the theatre department and the history department  and whoever else decides to join throws at me.

But I still need a pattern first. 

Here's my shortlist:

1. Sense and Sensibility's 1914 Afternoon Dress Pattern

http://sensibility.com/blog/patterns/1914-afternoon-dress/

Some of the iterations of this dress have a different colored skirt, and the pattern itself seems to have a lot of options with it. Plus I hear good things about this company. (I don't like the pattern envelope image; I don't think it does the dress justice. Click through the link to see more pictures!)

2. Hint of History's 1912 Shawl Collar Dress Pattern

http://www.hintofhistory.com/2009/03/1910s-fashion-collection.html

Apparently it's only 'inspired by' a historical pattern, but I like the look.

3. Skirt and waist patterns from Saundra Ros Altman's Past Patterns.

Both patterns from http://www.pastpatterns.com/1900.html

These are reproductions of actual historical patterns; they come with little or no instruction, but they'll be accurate in terms of cutting. (Construction will be another matter, but hey, sewing machines are period in 1913.) They will be a heck of a lot harder, but possibly more rewarding as well.

Anyone have a pattern supplier they really like in terms of 1910s garb? Any suggestions, comments, tidbits to add? Which pattern do you think I should go for?

Hittin' the Books -- Back to School with the Centennial Dress Project

The little yellow signs are out at all the crosswalks in my neighborhood and traffic slows to a crawl just around 9 o'clock -- which means that school must be back in session. Unfortunately, I am not among the lucky little duckies going back to their classrooms for lots of learning and making new friends and breaking in your new box of crayons and whatever else back to school means. But I am not going to let that get me down, no sir! I am trying to get ready for my back to school as well, next June!

I'll be honest with you -- the dress project stalled out a few months ago. The reason? I decided, after lugging a folding table in and out of my room for about a week so I could finish my walking skirt, that I needed a sewing table, or at the very least a sewing cabinet that once housed a sewing machine. You know, one of these numbers where the machine flips down inside?

I already have a machine, so all I really needed was an empty cabinet that I can set it on top of. I went to all my local secondhand shops (at least twice) and the local ReStore, a shopping outlet run by Habitat for Humanity that, in addition to taking used or left-over building supplies, also sells reused furniture. (If you have one in your area, GO! It supports a good cause and they have all kinds of odds and ends.) They had a lot of sewing cabinets...in a corner of the sales floor where I couldn't go and look at them. So that trip was a  bit of a bust too.

I spent a weekend on vacation in the city with some of my school friends, and when I called to check-in with my family on Saturday night, my mother told me that she and her sister and found (and purchased for me) a sewing table they thought I was really going to like. So, when I arrived home on Sunday night, I found this little beauty waiting for me:

Helloooo, gorgeous!

It's a Sears, Roebuck, and Company cabinet with a matching stool, and after checking all the sites on the internet I could find, I still have no idea when it was manufactured or what kind of machine was originally inside. I also did not find a single picture of a table that looks a thing like this one -- it's in a sort of Japanoiserie/ Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie style, which makes me love it even more. Given the model number inside, I think it was manufactured in the late 1930s.

And they told me it was my birthday present. Thanks, Mom and Sis!

So, with my table problem solved, I went to the library, checked out a number of books on 1910s fashion, and continued with my research. One of the books I really wanted (and eventually found) was Dover Publications "Everyday Fashions, 1909-1920, as Pictured in Sears Catalogs". The other books I've found are nice, but not very helpful. My turn-of-the-century Bennie is not buying a Parisian couture dress by Lucille or Poiret.  She's probably getting a ready made dress from the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog, a significant investment for school that will set her parents back anywhere between $5.90 and $6.95. A hefty sum, considering the average salary of a US Postal worker was about $1124 dollars a year, and that of a teacher was a meager $547 yearly.  For hourly workers, wages could range from 21 cents an hour in manufacturing to 55 cents an hour in construction trades. (Statistics from The National Bureau of Economic Research)

And, as today's parents can commiserate, new clothes for school come after paying for school, which is also not cheap. In 1916, one semester at Saint Ben's would cost this Bennie's parents a whopping $172, not including boarding at school over Christmas and Easter vacations, which would have been twelve dollars more.
So, what does a six dollar, off-the-rack dress look like in 1913?

All of the dresses in this illustration, with the exception of the second from the left, fit the price range.

 Sears and Roebuck also state very nicely at the bottom of the catalog page that "All dresses will be furnished in skirt length ordered, but with open hem so that length can be adjusted to suit customer." Even if we buy a ready-made dress, we're still going to at least hem it so it fits. How interesting.

Sears also has a page of dresses for 'Misses' (I think this may be the 1910s term for a 'young adult') and 'Junior Dresses for 13 to 17 year old Girls.' Have we really been calling it the Juniors department since the 1910s? I never knew.

This is what the Plastics looked like in 1912. Big perfect hair and tiny ankles.

These dresses are being made up in fabrics like velveteen, mohair, whipcord serge, and broadcloth. Norah Waugh's 1968 book "The Cut of Women's Clothes, 1600-1930" reports that fabrics like voile or muslin were in use, as were materials like linen, cotton, and shantung for something called a tub frock, which I think might be another name for a washdress.

Next step -- Buying a pattern, and a trip to the fabric store!

The Centennial Dress Project: Potential Patterns

For starters, a closer look at that original photo --

The two young ladies here have two very different dresses -- it seems to me that the girl on the right has a much more modern cut to her dress with a wide skirt and drop waist. The girl on the left seems to be wearing the lace armlets specified for use with short-sleeved dresses. Not sure about the wingspan on those sleeves, but I  really like her belt though.

This girl seems to have  a sort of tunic -style skirt and shirtwaist. Love the skirt.

Another really fab belt.  I dig the three-quarter sleeves, because unlike the other sleeve in this picture, they do not look like something your grandmother would wear to bed.

These girls are seated, making it harder to see the exact  'fall' of the dress, but both  also seem to have three-quarter sleeves on their dresses. Two very different collars, too -- on the left she has a sort of embroidered bit at the front, while on the right she has a square neck and what looks like a middy collar. (I like both of these dresses a lot.) Also, we can see Left-girl's SHOES. They look like plain black pumps to me.

So, in summary, we're seeing a lot of three-quarter sleeves and more dresses in the older style (longer, slimmer cut, higher, nipped in waist) than the new dropped waists and full skirts of the late teens. Some of these girls appear to be wearing skirts and shirt-waists. Dress or skirt, some have wide belts in a contrasting color. A wide mix of collars are in view, from the higher straight collars of the early 1900s to a sort of ruffly short collar on out through a soft, flat collar very much like a middle or sailor collar. 

And honestly, the girl in the drop-waist in that first picture looks awful. Let's not do that.

Oh, and I have an introduction to make: Everyone, I want you to meet my new best friend for the duration of this project -- May Knupp.

I don't actually have a photo of May, but the archives did send me a copy of one of her letters, which is what this is taken from. It is dated September 1st of 1913, and in it, May reports back to her family that "I arrived here just fine. Everything has gone off splendidly so far." She has not, unfortunately, made it to college yet -- she and her traveling companion expect to be there tomorrow for dinner. 

It is not, in the main, a terribly interesting letter, but apparently the archives has a whole BOX of her correspondence, as well as several poems she wrote while away at school. Not helpful to the dress project in the least, although for the sake of price comparisons, I am sure they will be helpful -- May reports having three dollars and eighty cents left after car fare and hotel fees, and promptly tells her family not to worry about her. (I think my mother might worry a lot if I left the house with nothing but three dollars and eighty cents, let alone go off to college with it.)  

So You Think You Can Sew: The Centennial Dress Project

In the last episode of "So You Think You Can Sew" I attempted (and finished!) one Starfleet shirt for my Volunteer Appreciation Dinner. I'm happy to say the dinner went very well, all the volunteers felt appreciated, and I was one of the only people there with a costume. I was rather proud of that fact, since mine had not come out of a box and still managed to look pretty good!

Beam me up, Scotty!

So with my ego suitably inflated with my burgeoning sewing skills, I tackled the next project in my queue -- a  1900s style walking skirt for one of my historical interpreter positions. I don't have many pictures of that project, since it is still technically ongoing (damn you, waist measurements that seem to change from fitting to fitting) but it is almost nearly finished and I have learned several important lessons that I am going to apply to my next project. 

Because this next project is a big one. Oh yes, it is.

Next year, my college is celebrating one hundred years of education, and in honor of this accomplishment, the school is publishing a book on the school's history, and a group of students and faculty is putting together a volume of art and poetry commemorating the centennial. And after seeing a picture in my alumni magazine, I lit upon an idea.

The picture in question.

I wanted to make a dress, very similar to the ones on display in the photo. These women are the first class of 1913, and they're sitting on the steps of the main building (Saint Theresa Hall, I believe) with some school swag and a lot of Edwardian attitude. How very, very different from my own freshman class photo. Not a knee, ankle, or shoulder in sight -- and this is Minnesota in August, presumably. It's hot. They're all wearing white -- and in a lot of variations, too!

So began what I am calling the Centennial Dress project, or the 1913 dress project. Over the next eleven months (The Centennial will be celebrated en masse in June of 2013) I will research, find a pattern for, cut, and sew a dress similar to the ones worn by those original college girls, and wear it to the Centennial celebrations.

The first steps in my research have already been completed -- First I emailed the college archivist for pictures similar to the one above, and asked for any other resources she could put me in touch with. While I was waiting for her reply, I checked our digital archives online and found the 1916 College Catalog, a listing of the requirements for graduation in 1916, as well as a listing for what every girl had to bring to school with her in 1916. (I imagine the requirements didn't change much in three years.)

REGULATIONS FOR WARDROBE 

No uniform is required. For school wear, dress of any color, material to suit the season. A better dress for Sundays. An inexpensive white dress for special occasions. Dresses must not be low in the neck; sleeves must reach to the wrists or lace sleevelets may be worn with short sleeved gowns. Shoes must have rubber heels. 

And there we have it. The list of requirements goes on (a sufficient supply of 'plainly made underclothes', three changes of underwear for the winter season, four napkins and a place setting including a napkin ring with your initials on it, et cetera) and truly, you could make some kind of very interesting museum exhibit with a trunk filled with the average 1913 girl's possessions on one side of the room and a suitcase filled with her 2013 equivalent possessions on the other.

So the next steps become more difficult. Explore period sources for other dresses in the same style that would have been available to the average college girl in Minnesota (Probably out of the Sears Roebuck Catalog or a similar company in the Twin Cities.) Find a pattern similar to those garments. Find appropriate fabric, and cut, piece, and sew the dress. Find appropriate shoes, hat, and gloves. Continue research on average student experience at college in the 1910s in order to arrive at school in June in Edwardian style ready to talk about what I'm wearing and what life would be like for me in it.

Oh, and maintain my nerve. I do at some point actually have to create a wearable garment.