I am so useless on Mondays - I always have been but when you're still at home it's so hard to make yourself go back to work.

Have y'all seen Emma? I'm pretty enchanted with it, apart from some of the casting (Jane Fairfax looks much older than Emma, Frank Churchill isn't very handsome or charming, and Harriet is supposed to be gorgeous - Harriet being very ordinary-looking in the movie annoys me both because I wrote a whole fic based on the sexual tension of Emma admiring her and because I also read a great chapter on how Austen played with the 18thc trope of the deserving, lovely illegitimate girl who gets taken up by a great lady and turns out to be legitimate after all). While I've thought before that the world doesn't need any more Austen adaptations, I would actually love to see a Pride and Prej movie in this same brightly lit and ironic-but-realistic style. 2005 is of course heavy on the realism but for the sake of playing up the romance (muddy, farmy Longbourn vs clean, monumental Pemberley) and 1995 looks ironically at the grotesque characters and seriously/romantically at the others while using realism for that '90s candlelight-drenched heritage-film experience. An adaptation that makes Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy look a bit silly at times, like Emma holding up her skirt in front of the fire/getting a nosebleed or Mr. Knightley being dressed by his valet/flinging himself on his parlor floor, and filmed with bright colors and wide-angle shots of the landscape overlaid with Maddy Prior singing English folk songs, would be a welcome addition to the canon.

First spencer test has come in, and I've screwed up the shoulders! Need to lengthen the front from them (and therefore grade the collar). Sometimes I just don't adequately visualize these things. Original post: https://chocolatepot.dreamwidth.org/1029745.html - please comment on Dreamwidth: https://chocolatepot.dreamwidth.org/1029745.html?mode=reply

I try to take fiction breaks between non-fiction book, or every couple of non-fiction books, and this time I picked up The Ring and the Crown by Melissa de la Cruz, a YA novel set in a world where magic is real, Merlin is borderline immortal and helped England win the Hundred Years War, and in 1900 the heir to the Anglo-French Empire is being married off to the Prussian prince to end a serious war. Very interesting concept, but in the end it's YA, and so I wasn't very surprised when it turned out to be more like Gossip Girl or Elite or some other show about rich teenagers having relationship drama. Then in the last chapter or two it suddenly went WHOOOOSH and a ton of plot landed. Apparently there was supposed to be a sequel but the sales weren't good enough, which ... the author has all my sympathies because I sure know how that feels, but I can also understand why the sales were bad, because it's not a great book.

( More details ...Collapse )

Working from home allows me to put on mindless television, which has led me to watch Married at First Sight, a reality show where people submit themselves to be paired up with someone to marry, and they literally first meet at the altar. The show sends them on a honeymoon and makes them move in with each other, and if they decide they can't take each other they have to go through the divorce process. It's terrible but I want to know how the couples turn out (one broke up during/immediately after the honeymoon). Also interesting to watch around the same time as Unorthodox, a drama about a woman fleeing the Orthodox community in Brooklyn.

In more earnest entertainment, I've been watching The Princess Weiyoung, a Chinese historical drama on Netflix. With no knowledge of any Chinese history beyond the broadest possible strokes, I can never get hung up on inaccuracies, the costuming and most of the actors are gorgeous, and the story is full of delightful DRAMA. It's similar to Magnificent Century or Empresses in the Palace in that it's what I call a "harem drama" - lots of "she is hurting our position, we need to get her out of the way while appearing polite and kind, let us make her trip and spill tea on the most high-ranking woman, then she will be banished" kind of stuff, which I love for whatever reason. The basic story is: a prince from the Northern Wei kingdom kills the royal family of the Northern Liang kingdom except for the princess; she gets away and is helped by the illegitimate daughter (technically not illegitimate, but the daughter of one of his concubines - they just always use "illegitimate" in the subtitles) of the Northern Wei prime minister, who was sent years ago into the country and who gets killed by an assassin on the orders of the prime minister's official wife. She poses as the daughter and moves into the family home, falls in love with the brother of the prince who killed her family, etc. I'm trying not to binge it because the episodes are similar enough that it gets boring when you watch them back-to-back.

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There are a lot of people on Tumblr who are so smug about their highbrow taste and their non-fannishness but are also obsessed with UST between male characters who will never be in a relationship in classic lit and tv shows. Just saying!

Because I am so very busy, I of course restarted the novel I've been working on for 15 years. Excerpts to come in a bit. I am loving reflecting on the honking big differences in my style from 17 to now (total ripoff of Sorcery & Cecelia -> authentic period voice) and in my plotting (villain going to do Big Bad Magic Thing -> smaller scale and focus on social relationships). I also love that a character I initially stuck in a few years ago because "all the women other than the protag are bad, she should also have a female friend" leapt onto the page as a real cool customer and now she's the love interest. The original love interest will be just a friend and financer of their Boston marriage.

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Finished Sorcerer to the Crown, time to update my analysis! (Very spoilery.)

( Definitely liking it more than I was halfway throughCollapse )

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Time for my traditional halfway-through-review, when I write about the book I'm currently reading because even though it's not finished, I have a lot of thoughts!

( Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen ChoCollapse )

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(Although I don't overly benefit because I obviously can't wear them - my measurements are roughly 44-35-44.)

I shared video of them live on IG and saved it as a story, and then posted two of them as plain old Insta posts, if you want to see them. But I'm going to be long-winded about them here, too.

- The "Very Easy Crinoline". They've had several of these in the shop for a while and I've considered them for potential patterning, but only now actually bought one. It's basically an A-line skirt of stiff net with a ruffle on the bottom, the waist edge and ruffle hem bound, raw edges basically just pressed to one side and sewn. In just this evening I've fully turned it into a graded pattern and saved as letter and A4 printouts; I've sent it to be printed so I can have physical patterns as well. (I'll eventually print the Bessie patterns, but I want to figure out how many I really need first as they're like $7 apiece to print, they're so big.) I don't think I even need testers, the grading is so basic. It runs from a 21" waist to 51".

- Fancier crinoline, the "Barbizon Petti-Beau"! It's a gold nylon-orlon with two black net ruffles on the underside. The way they're attached is so interesting - basically, they're set in place, then the nylon is pinched up with the top edge from the outside, and that whole bit is bound on the outside, so you get some extra stiffening. Elastic waist, just slightly too small for me, depending on your definition of "slightly". Technically also pretty easy when you get down to it, but it doesn't look very easy.

- Dressing gown, pattern as yet unnamed. It has a "fashioned by Delro" tag, but that doesn't really have the cachet of "Barbizon", so I'll probably give it a lady's name. Rayon, somewhat translucent, with a black, pink, and blue floral print; reddish purple piping. Fairly broad lapels with pronounced point, and it fastens with two buttons in a kind of double-breasted configuration. Magyar sleeves with cuffs. (No sleevils!) This might actually fit me, but I haven't tried it on yet! Although I do know that it's super long, it would drag on the floor if I wore it.

- Green wool skirt suit - I'm having a hard time dating it because it's a little contradictory. Overall '40s styling with the jacket coming down over the hips and a just-below-the-knee skirt, but it has only the most minimal shoulder buildup and the skirt is straight. I'm thinking it's early postwar, maybe? The back-of-the-neck label is for McLean's, a department store that was in Binghamton, which is some pretty cool local history, and then there's a label inside the front for the designer, Rafi. Some cute detailing with these applied horseshoes on the jacket. Once I turn this into a pattern I am definitely making this for myself. I would kind of like to name this "Phyllis" for my grandmother, who would have probably liked to have worn a suit like this in that bank job she had right out of high school but could not at all have afforded it.

- Last but very much not least, a black velvet cocktail dress from the early 1960s. (Possible names: Holly, Audrey, Tiffany.) It has a boat neck in the front and a deepish V neckline in the back, where it fastens in a crossover trimmed with a velvet bow. It's so cute and also so small that I will never ever have a hope of fitting into it, but I think it would look fantastic on my mother. It'll probably not be too tricky to grade, although it has bust and waist darts, which I haven't really dealt with yet.

In general I don't want "modern" stuff to be an overarching theme for my shop, because my #brand is historical and I'm more interested in making interesting museum garments available to the world, and also I don't want to step on Lauren M's toes (though I don't really have to worry about finding 1930s and early '40s stuff at Underground Attic, most of what's there is 1960s and later).

The shop owner came in as I was making my purchases, which was great as I hadn't seen her in months, and I got to tell her that I'd really started my business. She told me she has a lot of stuff that isn't in good enough condition to sell in the shop which she'd be happy to make available to me for patterning - plus her personal collection of antique clothing. We talked a bit about my doing a multipack of 1890s capelets because she has some interesting ones!

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Hey, anybody interested in two free tickets to the Chester County (PA) Historical Society? I got them in a silent auction at the CSA symposium and then forgot about them. I think a bunch of you are in that general area - I'm happy to stick them in the mail if you think you might actually go! But they expire on October 19 so I've got to do something with them.

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It's an interesting show. (Amazon Prime.) The basic premise is that humans and the fae - represented in two varieties, one with ram's horns, one with wings - coexist in a secondary world setting; some humans have been killing the fae and chasing them out of their lands, which leads them to flee to The Burgue, a human city somewhere, where in many ways it's a basic immigrants vs. natives story. Which does lead me to wonder, why bother making it secondary world fantasy? As someone who routinely makes up non-magical secondary worlds just for the purpose of writing alternate history without the pressure to make everything but the one changed thing the same, I shouldn't be so judgy, but there's a part of me that wonders, "If you want to make a show about prejudice, nativism, classism, deportation, and so on, why not just make it about our world instead of fantastic racism?" But then, the main mystery did rely on magic. (The fae themselves don't seem particularly magical. The ones with wings fly. I'm not sure if they're legit called pixies and the ones with horns are calls pucks, or if those are supposed to be racial slurs.)

The costuming of the wealthier characters is very interesting. At first I didn't like it: it's 1890s but with bustles, and there's one outfit I really hated with an Edwardian shirtwaist and one of those pointed belts with a smoothly-cut Edwardian skirt ... but it's also cut to smoothly fit over the bustle. It was ugly. But as the show went on, I found myself wanting to actually make some of the gowns, particularly Indira Varma's kind of vampy, bold princess-line gowns with 1890s sleeves, very reminiscent of that one Worth teagown. Tamzin Merchant also has some fantastic ones.

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Gosh, Tumblr is particularly insufferable lately. There are always a few posts floating around re: "I was labeled gifted/smart in school and it gave me anxiety/meant I never learned how to study," but for some reason this week they seem to have set off a bunch of scorching discourse on why it's bad to do programs aimed at high-achieving students and if you enjoyed or benefited from them it's because you think you're better than everyone and are probably racist. Which is interesting, because I never thought my elementary/secondary school administrators were on that site! *rimshot*

Finally got the lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant. Went for quantity over variety and just ate a ton of chicken tikka (delicious but not spicy at all) and about ten pakoras. Then a serving of cream of wheat for dessert. Got my money's worth! it was good, not the best, but it is actually in town so that does a lot. I gave them a five star rating and review on Google to encourage other people to go there so it will stay open. Then went to a nearby thrift store and got a set of four goblets and two small tumblers with cute little silhouettes and the words "OLD FASHIONED" on them, because I did not previously own actual glass glasses. Hey, I came of age into a recession!

Did a little housewares shopping later in the afternoon as well - I got three of those cube boxes (in turquoise) for the cube storage unit I bought ages ago and barely ever touched, which let me put some of my sewing stuff away that had been sitting around. Also new cushions (turquoise) for my chairs, plus two smelly candles. And a couple of other functional things: a rack for toilet paper and a sponge-holder. (I really need to find some kind of organizational solution to my bathroom cupboards - they are extremely narrow, like 5" wide, and deeper than arm's length.) After getting the sewing stuff a little neatened up, I pushed three boxes of books into the hall and put them on the short bookcase out there. No more Box Island in the middle of the sewing room!

There's still a lot left to do in the apartment as a whole. I suspect I'll finally have everything put away by the time I move. I'm writing interpretive plans for a few of the period houses at work to explain how they should be furnished - I think I need to write one for my apartment, lol.

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I kinda stopped wearing scent when I started the new job because I'm already pretty weird, didn't want to also be "the perfume lady". But some days I spend a lot of time alone, so I've gone back to it. Some from the "unreviewed" pile that I've been going with lately:

Languor: An opiate torpor, soporific, trancelike, and sublimely languid. A poet’s morphine dream, a listless journey into a gentle dream and the precipice of intoxicated madness. Paperwhite and black narcissus, three lilies, black poppy and tuberose and a hint of hypnotic opium den haze.

I have categorized this as a more "perfumey" scent because it's not based on florals or foods as far as I can smell, but according to the description above, it, uh, is based heavily on florals. It just smells nice to me, and lasts all day. I guess I get narcissus and lily? All of these flowers are ones I don't really have a particular smell memory for.

Hunger: Evokes sheer, unadulterated carnal lust. An undeniably warm and sensual scent. Black narcissus, orange blossoms, and vanilla.

I always love how extra BPAL descriptions are because I'm so basic. Smells nice! A bit like Languor, but sharper, which I think is the orange blossom. Also long-lasting, nice to sniff at in the afternoon when it's calmed down and soft.

Tushnamatay: Pure internal harmony and spiritual bliss: the perfected meditation blend.

The one I wore today and last Friday. To me, it's a very lush and blooming floral - not that I can pick out any of the notes, but it shouts "flowers!" in a way the others don't, even though they are apparently also florals. People in the forum talk about sandalwood and incense, which I think are what bring out the floral. Also, they're clues that I can't identify smells without knowing what the smells are supposed to be, lol.

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and just a great movie in general

1) The stepfamily have carefully drawn characters - they aren't just stock stereotypes. Do they still fit within some pretty obvious tropes? Yes, but each one has their own motivations. The stepsisters are also intelligent, which is often not the case in more recent Cinderella movies. Marguerite is clever and her well-planned flirting would work on someone less jaded; Jacqueline is obviously presented as the less-pretty and less-clever sister, but she's never stupid. The old family retainers don't get much to do, but they have their own strength and resilience, and their own moments of emotion.

2) Danielle is set up from the start as tomboyish, fighting with Gustave in the mud, and she's never shown doing anything "girly" - most of her work on the estate is physical - but there's no dialogue pontificating on how she's not like other girls. It's clear enough from what we see that she's scrappy and that she does things (whether out of inclination or because she's ordered to) that ladies in general and her stepsisters wouldn't. Likewise, she's both intellectual (reading and internalizing Utopia) and clever (taking Henri as "anything [she] can carry"*), but she's never set up to knock down a cardboard sexist who thinks women are dumb. Essentially, the filmmakers put her strength and unconventionality into the story, rather than coming up with ways for people to announce and signpost it, apart from one line of dialogue from Henri, where he's admiring her many abilities.

3) Danielle's best friend is Gustave, who is physically less strong, generally averse to conflict, and an artist - not traditionally masculine. At the same time, he never resents her and also isn't a Nice Guy. Solidarity!

4) The costuming is top-notch. No, it's not an accurate representation of sixteenth-century French dress (it's more like fifteenth-century Florentine), but everything fits and is well-made. The details are excellent and the fabric looks real; worn clothing looks tired out from actual wear. Nothing stands out to my eyes as chintzy or cheap, or like a dozen were made from the same pattern.

5) It sticks to the Cinderella framework enough to feel familiar, but only uses it as a framework, rather than a stencil that must be filled in. Probably the biggest divergence is to make the ball the scene of Danielle being found out and rejected, the opposite of its function in the fairy tale, but using Leonardo da Vinci as the godmother and then working the godmother into the story as a mentor for both Cinderella and the prince is inspired.

I just ... really love Ever After, okay. It holds up!

* Okay, if there's one way it's not a great movie it's the use of the Roma as plot element and threat, and then a way to show how enlightened Danielle is

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( The BoysCollapse )

The tl;dr is that it's sexist and racist, but mostly by omission. There are some horrifyingly bloody scenes but there's a lot more talking than violence.

I also watched the new season of GLOW, but I don't have much to say about it because I just loved it to bits. Maybe tomorrow.

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I got a guitar last week! A parlor guitar, to be exact. I have never been able to play regular guitars comfortably because my torso being so short means that they're too hard to get my arm around, especially sitting down - but this is closer to a ukulele size (though still bigger than a ukulele) and fits me perfectly. I'm taking "lessons" via JustinGuitar.com, and have done A-D-E, as well as the corresponding minor chords. It's a great site! It's also pretty cool to come to learning an instrument as an adult, when you have the self-motivation to practice, particularly exercises - one of the JustinGuitar things is to do changes between two chords back and forth for a full minute, which is the kind of thing I would have found painfully stupid when I was 12 but I can see how much I improve every day from it now. Just this evening I transposed "Look For the Silver Lining" into A from E-flat and accompanied myself. So much easier than trying to do that with a piano!

I attended the opening of the Schuyler sisters exhibition at the Albany Institute last week, and it was great, but I was a bit sad to see the underbust stays from Historic Cherry Hill on display labeled as ca. 1760. Howevs, HCH posted on IG about the stays with my research, crediting me, which was very nice. You should definitely see the exhibition if you're going to be in the area.

Last Sunday, I went to Klea Blackhurst's one-woman Ethel Merman tribute show, "Everything the Traffic Will Allow," at Glimmerglass Opera. It was fantastic! I got to tell her afterward how much I love this music when she signed my CD booklet (yeah, I bought the CD - that's how much I liked it, I'm a Spotify Millennial), and I felt like we connected.

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Today I dressed a dress form for the museum's gala, which went trickily. I'll quote myself from elsewhere:

See, the original gown I intended to use (a grey silk damask evening dress made by Moshier's of Utica around 1895) turned out to have been made for a woman whose build did not match any of the dress forms. She was rather robust, with broad shoulders and a long torso, but her waist was still somewhat narrow. I tried a male dress form first, but the waist was not small enough. I tried a female form next, and it proved impossible to get the shoulders big enough because the padding squished down and in and the bodice just kept falling off.

After more than an hour of futilely wrestling with this, I tried another dress. Needing something that didn't require much under the skirt, I tried a beautiful late-1830s evening dress made from an 18th century brocaded blue silk. A little clumsy, but so pretty. But late 1830s evening necklines are quite wide, and I ran into the same problem. On a mannequin, with a relatively full body, you have arms to help hold up a wide neckline, but on a dress form, just very soft stumps at the shoulders. Finally put it back.

Third try was another mid-1890s evening dress in various shades of purple-grey. (It was worn, according to the donor, to one of Mrs. Astor's famous New York balls with extremely restricted guest lists. It's not what I would call ball dress, though ...) This had a narrow neckline, not-too-broad shoulders, and a shorter waist, and it went on the form ... I wouldn't quite say "without a hitch", because I had to do some jiggery-pokery with the skirt to get it to stay on, and I also missed a button halfways down the bodice and had to undo and redo so many small silk buttons. But it fit and I was able to walk away, and that's the important thing.

It was a pain in the ass. But it was soooooo nice to look through hanging storage! Just ... so many beautiful things. So many fan-fronts. There's a white organdy and satin dress with short sleeves and a half-high lining, so adorable! And this luscious early 1830s dress in an intricate cotton print with a crossover. And so many pieces from this era, I can't get over it, so many details and tiny points of perfection. Honestly, I do always get kind of choked up when I see historical clothes in a collection I manage. It's hard to describe - it's like this intense feeling of gratitude that I'm able to see them close up, and admire them, and interpret them to other people. A warm glow!

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Last night I finished reading one of the most poorly-written books I've ever fully consumed, and then I dreamed I went to Albany to meet ktlovely and drive to GCV with her (despite it obviously being in 100% the wrong direction to meet up with her IRL). In the dream, I had managed to curl the front of my hair into two perfect bunches with a wet set. I think this is a good omen, although for some reason I had decided to go late 1820s and wear my yellow checked dress to an 1812 event. Hmm.

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This evening I figured out how to turn an Adobe Illustrator file into a both a plain and a tiled PDF, so I'm basically unstoppable now. The final stone in the Infinity Gauntlet. (This is especially good as the thing I thought I had to do where I imported the AI file into Photoshop was not effective.) (I should probably upgrade to proper AI instead of continuing to use the free CS2 version.)

I've been poking around drawing up the patterns for a fancy Swiss waist kind of thing (it has straps and a peplum ... I don't quite know what to call it) and a very simple ca. 1911 dress (the entire bodice is one piece, with a narrow gore under each arm). The former has lots of pieces but the latter takes a lot of paper. Not sure which is better.

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( The Spanish QueenCollapse )

I should write essays à la limyaael but for historical fiction. (Because I need a sixth hobby on my plate.)

( The FiveCollapse )

( Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945Collapse )

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The patterns are almost ready! I wrote the instructions tonight, and I just need to update a couple of words on the pattern itself to reflect changes I made doing the previous - I'll be printing them out tomorrow at OfficeMax, but I probably won't be able to put them in the mail until next weekend. robinsnest and atherleisure, can you PM me your addresses?

---

I don't think Lucifer is a particularly good show, but every so often it delivers well on the emotional iddy stuff and it does make me understand the appeal of wingfic, I guess. Also, Tom Welling got OLD and tbh I think he's hotter as a salt-and-peppery beefsteak than he was as a really old "teenager". After Tom Ellis played an amazingly sucky Claudio in the ShakespeaReTold version of Much Ado About Nothing (with Billie Piper), I didn't think I could find him sympathetic ever again, but he's good. So, grudging single thumb up.

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Okay! I love the theme of this exchange.

( cut to spare the flistCollapse )

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