The Clarissa Dress (Part One)
![Image](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigtqxJVTxcUBHpSLnrDpE3-UuSOlr8B4Pdb4Ykh3ZzJlmv-egiY65lmz3ssV_ioFTc1zPuQUE6sFefyoocZ5XAf0OP1k2WOCmrDVqMU1pxVhNv_fp0n2hRbYT_FeRryhPCFVQNw40_Mh4/s640/105821.jpg)
I like giving my projects names - in this case, it's the "Clarissa dress" because I made it to portray Clarissa Moody Wright (1804-1871) in Canton's Dairy Festival Parade. It was difficult to figure out exactly what date to aim for: Clarissa was ten years younger than her husband, but the man who was going to portray Silas* is ... well, there's a larger age difference; I also look young for my age by modern standards and very young by early nineteenth century standards. So should I dress as Clarissa would have as a long-married woman, or as the age that I look? In the end, I decided that a) it's not much of an educational event, as I won't be doing any actual interpreting, b) nobody in the crowd bar three or four people is going to have any idea that I'm representing a real person, let alone who she is and when she was alive, and c) I really wanted to sew the green checked dress from the mid-1820s from Regency Women's Dress . That seems fair to me