I hope your peach tree is ok!
Do you dress up for the CW reenactment? As a teenager my DD dated a boy whose family was CW reenactment participants. She had to have a dress, so I made her one. It was short sleeved but it was going to be cold that night, so I made elastic banded slip on “long sleeves” that she could wear. Plus I put in seam deep pockets in the skirt and none of the other ladies had pockets in their dressed. There was a clothing vendor on site with dresses that weren’t as nice as the one I made, selling for up to $600!
Yes,
@baymule, the going price for a well made and authentic (no zippers, no elastic, no fishing line to gather the skirt materials, is around $600.00
DD bought fabric to make me a new gown, but:
1) we are running out of time for May 3-4
and
2) I am working hard to have a smaller dress size
so, it's all good.
I have a dress that I wore last year, and we located one that middle DD made, youngest DD washed it and it and the shirt and vest is now hanging in my closet.
We have purchased online a black tweed vest, so black shoes, teal OR green skirt, white shirt with fabric covered buttons and black shoes and I'll cheat with leggings and we'll all good.
We were part of a very authentic--if you don't count me as a "cavalryman", (but, they were MY horses, so price was paid for that,) Union Infantry, the "Cumberland Guard," out of Indiana.
Everybody went their own way of study, and one member found that he liked first to construct period shirts, then period uniforms.
Best practice was for everything you wore to have been accessible in 1860, and the "stitch Nazis" would check to see that it was no more than 15 hand stitches/inch/CW Uniform, not what a sewing machine could do.
Hand sewing a woman's garment had no such requirement bc, of course, hand sewing can have tiny stitches and can be fastidious.
For a day dress the undergarments protected the outer garments and those were washable.
IF you wore a hoop, you would be considered poor if there was no significant petticoat between the hoop and skirt and/or you could see the hoop boning through the skirt.
You could wear a number of petticoats under the skirt.
If you were in camp, you could forego the hoop with a day/work dress but most CW reenactor women want to show off.
We have a couple of dresses that we inherited that are well made, a little bit worn, and the best place to sell them is At a CW event.
I will also clean up a couple of McClellan saddles to put up for sale there, too. We might bring my two wooden sawhorses, cover them each with 1/2 of a shelter tent to put them on instead of the aluminum saddle stands.
There is only so much inauthentic hyprocrisy that I can bear!!
