Obscure thoughts of the day

I love looking at the search terms people use to find my blog. "lilly pulitzer in the 1920s" - sorry, pal, you probably found me gloating that I could remove the Lilly Pulitzer dress from the exhibition. "museums and less than perfect extant clothing" - excellent topic. "what is a apron front panel cutting guide for 18th centur[...]" - what does this mean and where did you come from?

Had a thought yesterday about the term "kimono sleeves". Either it refers to flat, rectangular sleeves sewn to a slit armscye, and the previous registrars were idiots who used it wrong, or it's an inaccurate and stupid term and nobody ought to use it. What they meant was "dolman sleeve", I think, but I'm not fond of the term and prefer to say "cut in one with the bodice/body". ANYWAY.

I had the worst cramps yesterday. Almost went home around one, so I felt that taking tiny breaks to write bits of a blog post were justified since I was still getting more work done than I would have if I'd gone home. In the post I tried to explain my relationship with sewing vs. research and I don't think I did a very good job of it. It's hard.

Get ready fast

Mom called this evening to see if I wanted to go to the Artificer's Weekend at the Battlefield tomorrow, so I went "oh crap, I have to do a couple of things to make my ensemble wearable." I immediately wet down my straw hat and curved it into a nice shape - I think flat hats look fine if they're trimmed, but if they're not they're much better with a bit of a shape - and now I have materials out to make a new stomacher because my old one is way too small in every direction. I measured myself to see how long it ought to be, and then I got out PoF I to see about what size they are in there ... and the size is the size I've determined mine ought to be, so why on earth did I go ahead and make it 9" high in the first place? What is wrong with me? Oh well.

I don't like my cap's non-ruffle at all, but that won't show as much if I'm wearing my hat, so it's something to put off. (I'd bring stuff with me to work on it while I'm there, but I'd have to put in work getting that together when making the new stomacher is 100x more important.) And, of course, my shift is still too late for the period but whatever. Although ... I could always go in my thesis outfit. That might be interesting.

Well, I will put on concealer and have good pictures taken where I look less uncomfortable than last time.

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I was finishing up a rack of 1910s/20s/30s dresses and when I got to the end I was so happy for a minute because I thought I was into the boxed storage, which is like presents because you don't know what's in it until you open it, and then I remembered that there was still one last rack of men's coats and pants. :| I powered through it as fast as possible and was glad I did because the first box I went to was full of samplers. And the second had a Fortuny Delphos dress on top. Yeah.