A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

This afternoon, I took Mary over to the Whitall house at Red Bank Battlefield and set her up! She's going to live in the kitchen, and have a little setup explaining who she is. And since I've already talked about the outfit's construction in Part 1 , I'll just throw some photos at you and let them do most of the talking!

I'll do two posts; this one will be a catch-all with a couple in-progress shots and not-on-the figure shots (aka the less exciting post). As she was last night, lurking in my sewing room...

18thc, all the time! All the sewing time, anyhow. Most of the week was spent waiting for my Mary Heany/indentured servant outfit fabric to get here, so I worked on my striped linen dress. Evil bias stripes.

(Me posting about it is all free and clear, so here I go!) One of my good friends has connections , you guys. She'd been told about a project for an historic house, but as it wasn't really her thing, she passed it on to the rest of us. And since it seemed to be totally my thing, I jumped on it! It's for the Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield in South Jersey. The owners of the house in the 18thc were the Whitalls (you'd never have guessed that, right?), well-to-do Quakers. Ann Cooper Whitall famously refused to leave her house during the battle, and supposedly she was spinning when a British cannonball blew right into her room; she took her work down to the basement and kept spinning. Well, it's a good story, anyway! Anyway, in the records, there's a 1760s advert for a runaway indentured servant, Mary Heany. As is usual, there's a description of what she was wearing when she ran away. They wanted somebody to make a reproduction of an outfit from this...