I thought I'd post some photos of the encampment I attended at the Halifax Citadel this weekend. We had lovely days for it. I'm so glad I made it to an encampment out here before heading back to Ontario. It was warm, everyone was friendly, the citadel itself was cool to spend a weekend at, and we didn't even freeze overnight.
The first day I wore my silk petticoat (borrowed from my robe a la francaise) because some reenacting friends were getting married at the citadel and we wanted to dress up for them. The second day I was sick of babying the silk around camp, so I borrowed Laura's linen under petticoat and just wore my smoke-purple wool under petticoat as a top petticoat. I also borrowed the silk bonnet from Joy, as I didn't have a chance to make one beforehand.
The fichu is a block-printed cotton batiste headscarf I bought, which I then modified by painting green dye into parts of the pattern and adding a wide border of nearly identical-weight cotton batiste (dyed green at the same time as I painted the pattern) so that I could tie it behind my back.
The fichu wasn't the only part of this ensemble that I painted: I painted the fabric for the caraco as well.
(Please ignore the pre-ironing and pre-re-hemming mess of a petticoat)
Also, very glad I made pockets before going. The joys of pockets cannot be properly expressed. I had my phone, a fountain pen, a thimble, my chapstick, two sleeve linings, part of a bodice mockup, my pin cushion, and some bobby pins in my pockets all Saturday, and you couldn't tell at all. It's like having a purse on each hip!
They're not the fanciest or matchiest - pink linen-cotton with a fine woven plaid, lined in white linen and bound in dark green cotton, on a lighter green cotton waistband - but they do the trick!
Overall I had a great time, although I have discovered that I need to re-bone my stays, since 180 pieces of flat steel makes for very heavy and non-bendy stays. They're fine for a couple of hours, but when it gets really warm and they don't move at all against my skin and they start to bruise my hips because the steel doesn't let the tabs curve properly it's no longer pretty. I'm not kidding about the bruises. They're little lines of dots down each hip, from where the end of the bones would press in as I shifted my torso. Lovely. The weight of them also resulted in a headache by Sunday afternoon, so I definitely need to do something about it. Always nice to find these things out before you try to spend a week in the costume piece, though, so this weekend was a great test run.
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