A Most Beguiling Accomplishment

I completely forgot about posting a fashion plate this morning - because yesterday I suddenly found out that the Chapman's grant came through and they could hire me back for another three months to work on cataloguing!  I had to get up at 6:30 again and posting from the queue didn't cross my mind.  (If I could work out how to schedule posts to go up automatically, if that's even possible, that would be so great.) And then I meant to make this apology post with a picture of this adorable Art Nouveau scale and a yarn holder, but of course I left my camera cord at work, because this is me we're talking about!  Instead I will leave you with a few older fan pictures. These two are both from the 1910s.  The first is one of the very popular Neo-neoclassical fans which I love; the second is an advertising fan from Coney Island. An 1880s fan with mother-of-pearl sticks and a heavy silk leaf, printed with an eighteenth century woman in a sacque.  Lovely sil...

I spoke about what I'm doing at my internship in general terms before, but I wanted to go into it with some specific examples. Lately, I've been going through a lot of medical supplies.  Three or four donations were made that consisted entirely of equipment, medications, etc. and fortunately just about everything in them was numbered.  Unfortunately: One donation doesn't have a list of items, just a gift agreement form that says, "1988.26.1-80: mostly medical equipment". One donation has some items labeled on the gift agreement, but with stretches of objects marked "unidentified medical tool". There are many boxes that are just full of stuff and took quite a while to go through.  On Tuesday I managed to get through roughly two shelves, when my usual rate is a whole shelving unit. I documented my process with one of the more tightly packed boxes to give you an idea of what I'm dealing with.   The box after I unpacked a small section of ...

I have now finished my first week at my new internship at the Chapman Historical Museum !  It is going so well.  (You can see some examples of their photograph collection here .) My job there is to catalogue the collections in PastPerfect while identifying objects that could potentially be deaccessioned or that need accession numbers.  I usually talk about fashion history research here, but I thought I'd go into more detail about this side of museum work.  And now I will answer the questions you probably don't have.

My qualifying paper has been accepted!  There are a few additions I need to make to it (patterns), but I am basically finished with grad school now, and someday this summer I will get my DIPLOMA. I have also gotten an internship at the Chapman Museum in Glens Falls for this summer.  It is temporary, so I'll need to start looking for either another internship or a job fairly soon, but for now I am secure and doing all right!

Tonight is the reception for Great, Strange, and Rarely Seen: Objects from the Vault at the Albany Institute of History and Art.  Please come if you can!  Or come later, but you really should come. To whet your appetite, I've taken a few pictures of my area of the exhibition (and have permission to post them).

I've been a little nervous about the dress forms for the Great, Strange, and Rarely Seen exhibition ever since I worked on the pattern for the ca. 1837 dress, which was quite small, and I got even more nervous after working on the ca. 1867 pattern (the last one I took).  The dress forms are modern (eight European size 8s, the smallest in the catalogue, and two of the larger children's forms), the dresses are historical - is this going to work out? Yesterday, I started to dress the forms, beginning with the ca. 1800 gown as it was fairly simple.  While the form was far too large, the adjustable nature of the dress meant that I could still make it look all right, even if the shoulders weren't quite in the right place.  As I didn't have my pocket hoops with me, I decided to leave the ca. 1765 sacque for next week, and skipped ahead to the two 1920s evening dresses and the Lilly Pulitzer sheath; the former fit perfectly on the women's forms, and the latter on one of ...

Today I spent about six hours taking the pattern of the sacque and petticoat that will be displayed in Great, Strange, and Rarely Seen - so I thought I might post the rough draft up here for comments, critiques, &c.  I'm going to redraw it in ink for the final version, move pieces around (rotate some), write directions in better handwriting, all that sort of thing, but is there anything that seems odd or confusing or messed up in some way?

It looks like I will be taking the patterns of ten dresses* for the exhibition!  And the very good news is that the patterns will be available as PDFs on the museum's webpage. Of course I would love to have ~my own published book~, but the expense and the timing (the exhibition opens in April) just don't make that feasible.  Still, this way you can take just the patterns you want, and maybe they'll get a wider audience.  So exciting! * I'm going to ask about the possibility of putting a few extras on the web - there are some garments I think would seem great and strange to academics, reenactors, and costumers but probably not to the general public.  Cross your fingers! And thank you to everyone who congratulated me on 100 posts!  I can't believe I've been posting for eight months.

This is probably a little premature, but.  This week at my internship, I looked at dresses.  I looked at all the dresses.  I've got a shortlist of cool garments for the upcoming exhibition , although it's a bit of a joke to call it a shortlist since it's far too long and I'm going to have to cut out so many.  Anyway, some of these dresses are so cool that I really want to take patterns of them and share them with the world.  I'm emailing my supervisor to find out if there's a possibility of publishing them in conjunction with the exhibition. So, what I'm wondering is: how interested would you be in buying a book of ten to twenty (depending on if we were to go with only the dresses in the exhibition, or those plus some other very cool ones that there just isn't enough space for) Janet Arnold-type pattern diagrams from a range of about two centuries?  If so, would being able to see the dresses and ensembles in person make you more likely to attend an ex...

I'm not posting any pictures of my corset mockup, because it is disgraceful.  But I've taken it in quite a lot around the hips, evened out the bottom edge, and taken an inch off the CB edges.  I think the sizing issue might be that the line I made to indicate the hips on the pattern was actually too high, and the pieces of course kept flaring after that. If you look at the right sidebar, you'll see that I've created pages for current and finished projects, and my collection of extant clothing.  All the pages are very much under construction, but there's some stuff up on them, if you'd like to look. I spent some time today on the New England Museum Association website, and I've found three relatively paid internships that look promising!  One is at Old Sturbridge Village (curatorial), one is at the American Textile History Museum (also curatorial), and one is in the Newport Historical Society (museum studies).  Wish me luck!