Opening Weekend!!!

This past weekend was the official opening of the Museum! I can't believe that the season is already here, although it feels like an eternity since the last one. I'm eyeing my pile of sewing yet-to-do very nervously, here, this is a very busy May for me and I know it's going to be some late nights getting all of my Needs done. 

Anyway, opening weekend we always have a fashion show! We bring out some of our best clothes here to show off in a representation of fashion from the time of the American Revolution to the sinking of the Titanic, and the public seems to enjoy it because we always get a good sized crowd coming considering all the other things going on at the same time elsewhere on the Museum grounds. My first year doing the fashion show was the year before last. You can see the video here. Yup, I did 1830s - and you can see very clearly that the 1830s hadn't grown on me yet, because I certainly wasn't thrilled to be wearing it. I was a newbie to the Museum and was really only interested in the late 1850s-first half of the 1860s and not the craziness of the 1830s. Now the 30s is one of my very favorite decades, I just prefer the second half of the decade, when they toned down the crazy sleeves a little. This year, I represented the first decade of the 1900s, which I think of as "the S-Bend period" because of the corset style that was most popular then. 

I Hate ELHOS (or, Making a Pair of Mid-19th Century Slippers, Part the First)

“So, tell us how you really feel about the book Every Lady Her Own Shoemaker, Lydia.”

Well, dear reader. Sit yerself down for a little rant, here, about false advertising. Perhaps you have heard of ELHOS but haven’t picked one up, perhaps you own a copy or have a friend who will loan one to you, perhaps you’re thinking to yourself ‘good repro shoes are pricey! How complicated could it be to get this book and teach myself?’

Here are some excerpts from the prologue of this book:

“No apology is offered for presenting the present small work to the attention of the ladies. Every lady ought to know how to make every article of clothing that she wears….The art [of shoemaking] is so simple that it may be learned by any person of ordinary capacity; and it is not so laborious to make a cloth shoe, but that any lady of tolerable health, can make the whole of one without experiencing any injury.

            “The comparative ease with which we make our own…has induced us to publish these instructions for the benefit of all the ladies.

            “The first pair of our own making was the handsomest we ever had; no one would have suspected that they were not made in a shop by an experienced workman.”

            

HA! I say and again, sir, HA! 

You see, the anonymous writer (I would want to stay anonymous too, if I was publishing a book that would cause so much suffering to modern lay-people) wants you to believe that shoemaking is easy, that the pros who spent decades learning the craft were twiddling their thumbs for most of those years. They weren't. Shoemaking is not something you master in one pair of shoes, nor is it something you master after two pairs, or three, or four, or five. Learning one method of shoe construction (because there are at least a half dozen different ways of constructing shoes) to perfection takes months if not years of working at it every day, as a full time job. Even your most basic turned shoes cannot be mastered on the first try. Also, that without injury thing – totally not true. I hope you’re up on your tetanus shots and don’t need to worry about getting a little blood on the leather and/or fabric. You’re working with leather – not glove leather, sole leather, which can be almost half an inch thick and not easy to work with – and you’re working with extremely sharp tools (or tools that need to be extremely sharp). Don’t place any bets that you won’t injure yourself at all.

            

But really my biggest complaint is this – the book professes to be practically a For Dummies book, when in actuality this “complete self-instructor” will leave you wondering why on earth you haven’t produced museum quality shoes on your first try. I recommend finding a historical shoemaker to give you advice, taking a class teaching how to make a pair of shoes based off of ELHOS, or getting supplementation for the instructions.

           

Speaking of supplementation for the instructions… following shortly will be my supplementation, tweaked so that you’ll be able to make a pair of mid-19^th century slippers (as those seem to be on the up and up in terms of popularity), without ripping out your hair or ending up with junk or ruined materials. 

HSM Challenge 1: Foundations/ Or, “Facing my Fears”

“HSM? What’s HSM?” You ask.

“Historical Sew Monthly,” I answer. 

“Lydia, you aren’t doing so hot keeping up with HFF! AND you have yet to post your series on making pegged shoes! Why on earth are you doing another historically themed “challenge” series?! Don’t you have enough on your plate?!”

And to that, dear reader, I have absolutely no reply.

So to avoid that awkward topic, here’s my entry for the HSM’s first challenge after the jump.

HFF Challenge 16: Celebratory Foods

This challenge is about coming up with a historical dish that is made for a celebration - either New Year's or otherwise. In my case, this celebration is for the discovery that I didn't owe as much as I thought I did on a car insurance payment. Small pleasures in life :)

My wonderful boyfriend took me to the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York a few days after Christmas. Even though it's mostly about planes and motorcycles, which I consider to be more "guy stuff", I really enjoyed myself (I saw a MASSIVE circa 1860 hair wreath -un-joined, so not memorial - that contained hair from 15 [or 16, now I can't recall] people!). Knowing how much it costs to keep a museum, especially a little one, going, I couldn't leave without getting a little something. So, I bought this interesting little cook book.

The recipes in here really aren't all that weird to me, but then, working at the Museum, I'm kind of jaded to things like brains, tongue, and chickens encased in aspic as food items.

I decided to make chocolate apricot cookies from the 1940's section of the book. This is a secondary source, which makes me twitch a little, but I don't think that the author has altered the recipes all that much to suit modern palates. Here's my end result (there was a little misunderstanding with the flour and the first sheet that went in the oven was wasted, so I only ended up with 9 medium sized cookies. But yummmm.

Not too chocolatey-looking are they?

The Date/Year and Region: 1940's America

How Did You Make It?: It's really a basic cookie, and like my historical counterparts, I'm going to assume you know how to make a basic cookie.

Time to Complete: 20 minutes, max. You know I never time these things, haha!

Total Cost: I honestly don't know, my father was going to the supermarket and offered to get baker's chocolate and dried apricots for me. He never did tell me what I owed him for it.

How Successful Was It?: HAHAHA After the disastrous first tray, where my cute little cookies just oozed all over the place? Very good! The chocolate flavor is much more delicate than we're used to these days, and the apricot flavor even more so (in the future I might add a little apricot jam, just to boost the flavor), but the cookies were perfectly baked, to toot my own horn :P

How Accurate Is It?: Assuming that the recipe wasn't altered (other than the author recommending the addition of chocolate chips, to boost the chocolate flavor), pretty accurate. Of course, I didn't bake them in a 1940's oven, or mix them by hand, and I used butter instead of shortening because...butter.

I'll definitely (tweak these a smidge and) bake them again!