Sketches from UTR

If doing something twice constitutes the beginning of a habit, then I have effectively formed the habit of doing little sketches of friends and acquaintances at reenactments.

I had enormous amounts of fun with this at Under the Redcoat, and even though I'm shockingly late posting about it, I wanted to share my drawings from the event.  Like last time, they are all fairly small (so as to fit in my drawing box) and are roughly 5x7" each. 

Nicole

Other-Sarah making ice cream

Sarah

I like this little sketch, but utterly failed to capture her likeness.  This was highly irritating.  See below.

Sarah (again) and Jenny

As you can see, for a brief while I switched from charcoal to graphite pencil... I was incredibly frustrated by my lack of ability to capture Sarah's likeness when initially using charcoal.  The second drawing was even worse (really bad in fact, and I can assure you it will never be posted anywhere online!) so I gave the graphite a try.  On this third go, this time in graphite, it wasn't totally awful so I let it be.

I feel like an invisible challenge has been laid down though.  Sarah is such an animated and vivacious person that capturing her in a flat, still format felt somehow a little unnatural and far more difficult than I had anticipated.  I will have to try again when I next see her.  And maybe again and again...

Abby

Right before I was about to leave for the day, I saw Abby walking across Market Square, rushed up to speak with her, and she kindly agreed to sit for me.   As we sat there (she very still and I sketching quickly) a lot of people apparently came up to see what was going on.   This included the official CW photographer who even videoed us.  I was blithely unaware of most of our audience however... I hadn't even realized how much I block out my surroundings when I'm drawing!  If there'd been an attack, I'd probably have died first.

Conclusion- I'll definitely be doing this drawing schtick again at my next reenactment.  I love being able to engage peoples' interest in a slightly different way than normal, and I'd really like to start building up an impression around the idea of a traveling portraitist.  Lots of very vague ideas at the moment, but it could certainly become something.

quarter back gown for UTR

Since I live in Williamsburg, it was kind of an imperative that I attend Under the Redcoat this year.  Not that I objected... I'd never really been to UTR before, and was really happy to be able to experience the event and see many wonderful friends and new acquaintances in the process!

And of course, I needed a new gown.

I used a medium weight linen from Burnley and Trowbridge that had small lavender, white and black stripes and lined the bodice and sleeves with a light-weight white linen.  My friend Nicole draped the pattern for the bodice and sleeves on me, and I cut everything out about a week before the event.  If I didn't work full-time, this would have been a perfectly fine time-frame in which to sew a gown, but as it was I nearly keeled over and died trying to get it done on time.  Even so, Nicole ended up almost entirely making my petticoat for me so that I could actually get a few hours of sleep the night before I was supposed to wear it.

The innards of the gown are pretty typical-

The seams of the back pieces are constructed with the "weird running whip stitch thingy" which is seen in a fair number of extant garments, and which Abby (Stay-ing Alive) thoroughly describes in a very helpful post.  As I tried it out, I fell utterly in love with this method of construction.  It's fast, easy, strong, and looks really neat and clean.  And, as you can see from the photo below, it looks totally normal on the outside.

I still want to add cuffs and trim to the sleeves, but I was pretty satisfied with how it all turned out.  It was fairly cool and comfortable to wear and I do kind of adore the fabric!

UTR itself was also highly satisfying, and I was able to take my little drawing box with me and do some sketches of people... but I'll save that for another post.