MaulWalker
Sr Member
No, not Museum Replicas (the company that makes replica costumes from HP, Star Wars, etc.) In 2007, I saw a special exhibit at the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian and was struck by one of the dresses on display. The dress was a Blackfoot Indian woman's dress, circa 1910. This is a picture of the dress.
View attachment 38009
The challenges of recreating costumes from movie is one thing, but recreating a historical garment is something entirely different. Perhaps foremost is what else would be worn with the garment?
There is not a lot of reference material on the Internet, so I used the web to find the titles of anthropoligical articles/book that may have information I could use. I then used the Internet to find university libraries that had those titles in their holdings. You should have seen the happy dance when I found books published in 1910. Luckily, the Blackfoot tribe were extensively studied and I was able to determine that the original owner was not well-to-do, so that would affect material choices.
The museum description did include the materials used, so I started there. Wool stroud is still available, but not with the same selvedge edge. The original dress used basket beads, which are no longer available in large quantities of the same color. So, I substituted tile beads. Finding brain-tanned leather was fairly easy, although it was expensive. And rose colored seed beads took almost a year to find. I finally found them at an Indian pow-wow.
I made my own patterns, based on documented styles and completely hand-sewed all the garments.
View attachment 38010 View attachment 38011
The second post will include more details.
View attachment 38009
The challenges of recreating costumes from movie is one thing, but recreating a historical garment is something entirely different. Perhaps foremost is what else would be worn with the garment?
There is not a lot of reference material on the Internet, so I used the web to find the titles of anthropoligical articles/book that may have information I could use. I then used the Internet to find university libraries that had those titles in their holdings. You should have seen the happy dance when I found books published in 1910. Luckily, the Blackfoot tribe were extensively studied and I was able to determine that the original owner was not well-to-do, so that would affect material choices.
The museum description did include the materials used, so I started there. Wool stroud is still available, but not with the same selvedge edge. The original dress used basket beads, which are no longer available in large quantities of the same color. So, I substituted tile beads. Finding brain-tanned leather was fairly easy, although it was expensive. And rose colored seed beads took almost a year to find. I finally found them at an Indian pow-wow.
I made my own patterns, based on documented styles and completely hand-sewed all the garments.
View attachment 38010 View attachment 38011
The second post will include more details.
