Thursday, February 10, 2011

Off Time...

I gave Max the night off last night and wound up working on some sewing projects (have the bleeding fingers to prove it!) that I'm doing in preparation for some living history events I have lined up on April and May. As usual, Max will be accompanying me but he won't be getting any new clothes. :-)

One of bad things about living history is having to procure the necessary clothes (I refuse to use the term "costume" because I work and function in period clothing.) and sundry accessories and gear. In some cases, this also requires various firearms. And all this stuff adds up fast, cost-wise...

Worse, if you are portraying anyone mounted, you then have to consider proper saddles and tack and then it gets REALLY expensive. And unlike clothes and gear for myself (at least for most time periods), often times nobody makes the proper reproduction horse-tack or if they do, it's wildly expen$ive. So, you often have to improvise either by re-dressing a modern saddle that's sort of close or just completely fudging things. So far, I've been lucky in this but that's not always going to be the case...and I'm not up for learning the art of saddlemaking.

Lately I have been involved in recreating the American Revolution and Napoelonic Wars eras and what uniforms and such that can be found are either not right or wildly expensive. Hence my developing interest in sewing. Lucky for me, my wife is a long-time wardrobe designer so she can help me through some of the technical challenges (and much as I love my wife, trying to get her to sew for me is a real pain in the rear)

The struggle continues and I'll try and post some updates here from time to time. :-)

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