Trenton Ball 2015

Saturday night I took a jaunt up to Trenton for the 18thc ball - the ball and battle of Trenton reenactment are the same weekend, you may recall we did both last year. I think balls are generally more fun than battles though, so I don't feel the need to see the battle reenactment every year.

The ball was overall very enjoyable. It was in the Masonic Hall this year rather than the nearby hotel ballroom...which was much more scenic, but somehow had even less space for dancing! It's a nice-sized room, but as they insist on serving food and having tables and chairs, there was barely room for two sets of dancers. And I do mean barely! Take a cue from period balls and have the food in another room, and just have chairs round the perimeter...or if you can't get another room, don't have much food at all, I didn't show up because I heard there'd be sammiches. :P Really, I only danced two dances because I found the crush so unpleasant!

Still, I'm always happy to sit and watch a ball, and chat with my friends! Which is good, as that's mainly what I did.

I trimmed up my red/green/yellow striped 1770s dress a bit more for this outing - still not quite as much as I'd like. Still plan to do two more rows of puffer trim on the skirt, but I decided I wanted to enjoy my Christmas rather than doing last-minute sewing! Still looked quite nice if I do say so myself.

Silly puffers!

You may or may not remember that I had to take off the red silk trim from last winter when I wore this in July, as it was fraying so badly. Let that be a lesson to you - and one that I knew already, mind - pinking cheap silk will not have the same result as pinking nice tightly woven taffeta! I really still do like my original plan of contrast trim better, but as I had plenty of striped silk left, it seemed a little extravagant to buy more silk for trim! And I do like my silly puffers.

The trim is just strips of silk pinched in at intervals to make puffs. (The stripes came in very handy for this!) Many of the originals with puffy trim like this actually had padding under the puffs, but I decided 1/my dress is not that fancy, and 2/that sounded like more work. Silly puffer trim is actually very instantly gratifying...relatively speaking, in the world of 18thc dress trimming, haha.

Since it's a rewear I didn't make it a point to get very many pictures, sorry. And as you can imagine it was rather dark in there...

Too much duck.

Adrienne and I were amused to note we should have been wearing each other's shoes and stockings, as they'd have matched much better! Er, contrast is fun?? ;)

From Eliza...selfies, 18thc style!

And I was reasonably pleased with my hair...I finally managed to leave enough side-hair to get buckles (those rolled-up bits). Which naturally means I didn't bother getting pics of it. 

Just this one before I left the house. 18thc hair/makeup and TCNJ sweatshirt made for a nice contrast, I thought!

No feathers, as I did my hair at home and had a bit of a drive, and the flowers on top barely cleared the roof of the car...and I don't like being distracted by my hair sticking to the ceiling as I drive! So no feathers.

I don't do "fancy" 18thc hair enough to really be proficient at it, but I think I've reached the "quite presentable" stage! And no, I don't really like wigs, so that's my own hair piled on top of two rats, done with grey powder and pomatum, no hairspray. I'm quite a convert to historical hair-care; I know it won't work for every type of hair, but mine's been happy with it! (I might do a post on that some time if anybody cares...)

Next up is First Night (New Years Eve) at the Indian King Tavern - not sure how fancy I should go for that, so we'll see (this striped silk or my cranberry wool? hmm hmm) - and after that I've nothing til a probable Regency event in February, that I don't need to make anything new for, but might anyway. I really should work on ClothFair things for a while..