Remembrance Day 2019
Nov. 25th, 2019 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mandie_rwLet's see if I can be very diligent and get this writeup finished tonight...
The weekend didn't get off to a promising start, as I got up Thursday morning to find thatkoshka_the_cat had canceled her flight and wouldn't be joining us, as she was sick. Worst timed flu ever! We missed her very much. The only time we didn't was when robinsnest and I were listening to Christmas music on the drive out (as Katherine's not a fan and we wouldn't inflict that on her! but we really do enjoy it)! ;)
We stayed at Swope Manor in town this time - much swankier than any of the other places we've stayed. Fancy and delicious breakfasts, tea and coffee and light snackies available 24/7, and complimentary wine (!). It's huge, with several sitting rooms and places for guests to socialize, in a gorgeous 19thc building. My favorite part was Thursday night, when Robin, Jessica, and I were the only ones in the whole place...so we ran around the entire house, poking into all the rooms and enjoying all the nooks and crannies and staircases. Also retrimming Robin's creamsicle plaid ballgown and getting fuchsia threads all over the carpet.
A "how does this MODERN CONTRAPTION work?!" pose...and that's the secondary staircase. Yes, of course there were two!
The only real down side of Swope Manor turned out to be that it was extremely well-heated! Like "we turned off the radiator in our room and it was still warm" well-heated. Like "OH GOD the windows are painted shut NOOOOOO!" well-heated. I brought my ugly flannel nightgown and slept in my shift! Too hot. I guess we could have said something but also suspected that the other guests might be more inclined to like a hot house (*cough*oldpeople*cough*) so...we didn't.
On the other hand, somebody somewhere in the area was very, uh, creative, with their wireless network naming, which gave us much entertainment...
(I never could get them all on the same screen, they came and went... I can only imagine what some of our more upright fellow houseguests thought of the other networks. *snorfle*)
Anyway. Friday Adrienne and Alice joined up with us at various times, and the day was spent toddling around town, looking in shops and checking out the vendors in the hotels and suchlike.
The 'normous mirror by the front door was very useful. Also had a few coat hooks, which we shamelessly piled our stuff on before any of the other houseguests showed up. Hey, when there are no closets, your options are limited...
Robin made me a shawl in exchange for a (still unfinished, cough cough) spoon bonnet. The wool didn't take the dyes as well as we anticipated so it came out more Easter-eggy than planned, but I love it. It's so cuddly! The sad irony of course is that I really didn't need it in the B&B at all during the weekend, but as we keep our house temperature at least ten degrees cooler than Swope Manor, it will get plenty of use!
Super didn't match my Friday day dress, but as that was really my only opportunity to wear it, I cheerfully clashed and wore it anyway.
In the midst of shopping, Robin took mercy on Dave of Victorian Photography Studio as he was too busy for a lunch break, so she brought him lunch. And while we were there...
Just for fun! I hadn't intended it, but I love that I got to see how the salmon and mint shawl reads as one color. Matches perfectly in a tintype, LOL.
Robin and I also took a few minutes to go to Civil War Tails, which was probably the quirkiest thing I've seen in a long time. It's dioramas of Civil War battles...with tiny cat figurines instead of regular soldiers.
Tiny cats. With beards and mustaches. Some of the figures were a little bigger, but the large-scale ones with hundreds (thousands?) of soldiers, the cats were about an inch tall. As somebody who spends a lot of time on what some people might think is a silly hobby, I can't really throw shade, but...Well, it's definitely unusual. Hey, whatever makes you happy!
We made sure to give ourselves some down time between shopping and the Friday evening ball! We usually do the Saturday night ball, but this year they couldn't have it in the Gettysburg Hotel, so it was a buffet (!) at the Visitors Center (so not walkable, which was 50% of the reason we wanted to stay in town in the first place), and more expensive. Soooo, Friday night it was! Tartan-themed this year, hence all our plaid bits in the following pics. Except on the Imaginary, who was going to get a new dog collar but I ran out of time. He was sad he didn't have anything new, because deep down in that T-shirt and unremarkable jeans-clad man is a dandy LOL.
I ended up being the last one ready for the ball...I had to dress Tom as well as me, and he got stuck in traffic so was later than anticipated. He hasn't been doing this long enough for me to trust him to dress himself, no. Plus that embroidered satin vest juuuuuust fit; I was afraid those coin-covered "buttons" weren't going to hold and then we'd be screwed, because that's all I had to put him in. Somebody appears to have tubbed up a bit since April...thankfully no buttons exploded. And then I left my phone in the room so didn't have any pictures to contribute to the communal photo album, although it's always too dark in there for decent pictures anyway!
Dinner was perfectly acceptable if unremarkable, as usual. We didn't have enough people to fill a table so got put with two others who hopefully didn't think we were too annoying. And during the interim between dinner and ball we had the weirdest "interview" with a woman who is putting together some sort of desperate appeal to younger reenactors and so wanted to film us? On a cell phone in portrait mode in a low lit room with a lot of background noise? I'm sure that came out well. Also for some reason I was the lucky one who actually got to give a soundbyte. "Tell us why you like to do come to reenactments etc etc." Ummm okay? I had two minutes of prep and two glasses of wine at dinner so I'm sure that was a super coherent answer. Hilariously Tom also got roped into talking during the soundbyte, and his contribution was "She dresses me, I'm here with her." LOL. We were VERY helpful, I'm sure. If that footage ever surfaces I promise to share that shining example of coherence.
"Yeah I bet that footage is going to be highly useful..."
Robin thoughtfully did get some pictures of my tartan-trimmed dress - which astoundingly didn't have any explosions or rips or anything of the sort. Which is a first. I actually really like the tartan, so I think I'll leave it if I need to wear it again. I really thought this was going to be it for this dress, as I can see the threads underneath starting to pull apart at one of the side-back seams, like happened when the CF frayed apart. It held through this ball though, so we're good for now!
The tartan is just strips of hemmed dupioni silk from Silk Baron, and the rosette has navy velvet ribbon as well.
And I was totally working on the fly with the net, but I really like how it came out! More of the velvet ribbon, knife pleated with narrow silk on top, more tartan silk, and a bunch of flowers stuck on. A net is totally the way to go for ball hair (that sounds...wrong), it keeps everything in place!
This dress does flop very attractively.
I didn't dance as much as I usually try to...I think I laced a little too tightly and was feeling just vaguely unsettled in the stomach area. Not enough to want to leave, but enough to not want to push it. Did stay til the end though, as I wanted to do the last Virginia reel. Not nearly as good as the one with Mick and Shane last time, where everyone knew more or less what they were doing, and had a good concept of how many counts things should take. (Which, by the way, is my main pet peeve at balls. I'm not a good dancer but I CAN count! If something should take 8 counts, you're fucking up the dance when you make it take 13. GOD.)
The boys were only invited for the Friday night ball (use 'em and lose 'em, right?), so they stayed at the Marriott slightly out of town after the ball, and left Saturday morning. Not together, as Rob had an early shoot and Tom is down in DC. And they didn't talk to each other because boys are weird. Robin threatened to get them one king-sized bed instead of two queens, and it would have served them right. SNUGGLE AND GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER, YOU'RE STUCK WITH THIS.
(I kid; it was in fact very sweet of Tom to drive all the way up for one evening of something that's really all my thing and not his! Although, despite the fact he wouldn't ever do this on his own, he doesn't mind and even has fun with it. So he says. We're past the "I need to pretend to like the things you do to impress you" phase so I think he's sincere!)
Saturday was Rational Dress Excursion Day, which I will take full credit and/or blame for. Jess didn't make a rational dress so decided to hit up Needle & Thread to do some fabric shopping while the rest of us explored the battlefield a bit. We still don't know anything about the nuances of the actual battle (this is why I wanted a battlefield tour on horseback! but noooo, none of the companies wanted our money. so fine), but I don't feel guilty about enjoying the place as just a beautiful national park as well as a memorial, so that's what we did.
There are a TON of pictures of us wandering Little Round Top and Devil's Den, most of which are pretty much the same thing, but I merrily collected everyone's into my flickr set because I love them all.
It's funny because I'm not REALLY an outdoorsy sort of girl, not that you'd know it from my insistence on Going Out To The Battlefield Come Hell Or High Water! I just adore a scenic vista and I do love being out in nature, not doing anything too terribly active or sporty, just being out and enjoying it. I guess I'm a Romantic at heart, under all that prickly sarcasm! (You can pretend that's a book of Tennyson, not a cell phone, hehehe)
If you remember my plans for the bodice last time I talked about this outfit, clearly the design changed up a bit...
I do plan to do a reasonably detailed post on blogger about the outfit, so I'll link that when it's done and won't go into that now. (Also if I did, I'd never EVER finish this post!)
I was also happy Alice wanted to play mountain goats with me! Robin and Adrienne weren't as big on tramping through underbrush and climbing on rocks of dubious footing with me. I of course am not actually that active on a day-to-day basic, and can still feel it in the backs of my calves today, two full days later. Owowow.
Fun while it lasted though!
After playing mountain goat for probably two and a half hours, we went back into town for lunch (during the parade is a great time to get a table in a restaurant, btw) and misbehaved generally.
After puttering back down around town to check on Dave and his lunch situation (he was set for that day), we hung around Swope Manor for a bit before changing for dinner at the Farnsworth House. (And Alice and I nipped in for some of that complimentary wine. Cheers, gentlemen.)
And at that point, we finally lost our luck with the weather - the rain had mostly held off, apart from a few spatterings on Friday afternoon, but the rain on Saturday set in just in time for the walk to dinner, and kept up pretty well for most of the evening.
Dinner was okay - the food was good and plentiful, but the service wasn't great. They generally seemed to be flustered by the amount of guests in their restaurant...which, considering I'm pretty sure most of them had reservations plus this is Remembrance Day weekend...don't be so grumpy about it?
This would be a "I think I've got a pin stuck in my armpit" face.
After dinner, we headed over to the photography studio to get "as many tintypes as we wanted"... which turned out to be two. The usual mass-buyers of tintypes weren't there, plus Jess had to leave right after dinner, so Robin got one of the rational dress group and I got one of me and Robin.
These our our post-mortem faces. "Obviously if our heads are propped up we must be dead! That's how the Victorians did it!" *snerf*
This is more like the actual poses but I haven't scanned it yet! I think it came out really nicely though. We have an evil plan to give our men mugs with that picture on it for Christmas, just to remind them that they have to share nicely LOL.
Although I think this would also have made for a nice tintype pose.
After tintypes, we splashed back home (still raining. still didn't have umbrellas. although rational dress was much better for having to walk blocks in the rain, shocker) and got back into loungewear to hang around in our sitting room with tea and cookies. Drowned rats...
And we were regaled with tales of one very nice, very sincere, crazy cat lady fellow B&B guest, who told us all the ways her various cats had died from various medical problems. And that she had thirty of them when you counted the outdoor ones. And the ones she took care of at the barn where she stabled her horse (also now dead), but that was ten minutes down the road so they aren't really her cats... We somewhat regretted sharing our popcorn with her after being held captive for at least ten minutes, but oh well.
It was hard to get out of bed on Sunday morning - partly because I was still sleepy, but primarily because my calves were all TOO MUCH ROCK HOPPING NOPE NOPE. Still raining a bit when we packed up the cars, but it did clear out in time to walk down to pick up the tintypes and poke around a little in the shops to waste time til we all wanted lunch. It's always best to do an event "post-mortem" over lunch when possible, preferably in a chain where it doesn't matter if you camp out at a table for 2 hours. So that's exactly what we did at the Panera on the way out of town: brainstormed, reviewed, analyzed, and even took notes (because Alice is the smart one and had a little notebook).
So that's Gettysburg 2019 in a nutshell: a very large nutshell! I liked my chartreuse dress, but I loved my rational dress and thought it was such fun to wear! That's by far my favorite.
And I won't even go into What's Next On The Sewing List yet...although of course there's been planning. We're very very good at planning...
Flickr album: Gettysburg 2019
The weekend didn't get off to a promising start, as I got up Thursday morning to find that
koshka_the_cat had canceled her flight and wouldn't be joining us, as she was sick. Worst timed flu ever! We missed her very much. The only time we didn't was when robinsnest and I were listening to Christmas music on the drive out (as Katherine's not a fan and we wouldn't inflict that on her! but we really do enjoy it)! ;)We stayed at Swope Manor in town this time - much swankier than any of the other places we've stayed. Fancy and delicious breakfasts, tea and coffee and light snackies available 24/7, and complimentary wine (!). It's huge, with several sitting rooms and places for guests to socialize, in a gorgeous 19thc building. My favorite part was Thursday night, when Robin, Jessica, and I were the only ones in the whole place...so we ran around the entire house, poking into all the rooms and enjoying all the nooks and crannies and staircases. Also retrimming Robin's creamsicle plaid ballgown and getting fuchsia threads all over the carpet.
A "how does this MODERN CONTRAPTION work?!" pose...and that's the secondary staircase. Yes, of course there were two!
The only real down side of Swope Manor turned out to be that it was extremely well-heated! Like "we turned off the radiator in our room and it was still warm" well-heated. Like "OH GOD the windows are painted shut NOOOOOO!" well-heated. I brought my ugly flannel nightgown and slept in my shift! Too hot. I guess we could have said something but also suspected that the other guests might be more inclined to like a hot house (*cough*oldpeople*cough*) so...we didn't.
On the other hand, somebody somewhere in the area was very, uh, creative, with their wireless network naming, which gave us much entertainment...
(I never could get them all on the same screen, they came and went... I can only imagine what some of our more upright fellow houseguests thought of the other networks. *snorfle*)
Anyway. Friday Adrienne and Alice joined up with us at various times, and the day was spent toddling around town, looking in shops and checking out the vendors in the hotels and suchlike.
The 'normous mirror by the front door was very useful. Also had a few coat hooks, which we shamelessly piled our stuff on before any of the other houseguests showed up. Hey, when there are no closets, your options are limited...
Robin made me a shawl in exchange for a (still unfinished, cough cough) spoon bonnet. The wool didn't take the dyes as well as we anticipated so it came out more Easter-eggy than planned, but I love it. It's so cuddly! The sad irony of course is that I really didn't need it in the B&B at all during the weekend, but as we keep our house temperature at least ten degrees cooler than Swope Manor, it will get plenty of use!
Super didn't match my Friday day dress, but as that was really my only opportunity to wear it, I cheerfully clashed and wore it anyway.
In the midst of shopping, Robin took mercy on Dave of Victorian Photography Studio as he was too busy for a lunch break, so she brought him lunch. And while we were there...
Just for fun! I hadn't intended it, but I love that I got to see how the salmon and mint shawl reads as one color. Matches perfectly in a tintype, LOL.
Robin and I also took a few minutes to go to Civil War Tails, which was probably the quirkiest thing I've seen in a long time. It's dioramas of Civil War battles...with tiny cat figurines instead of regular soldiers.
Tiny cats. With beards and mustaches. Some of the figures were a little bigger, but the large-scale ones with hundreds (thousands?) of soldiers, the cats were about an inch tall. As somebody who spends a lot of time on what some people might think is a silly hobby, I can't really throw shade, but...Well, it's definitely unusual. Hey, whatever makes you happy!
We made sure to give ourselves some down time between shopping and the Friday evening ball! We usually do the Saturday night ball, but this year they couldn't have it in the Gettysburg Hotel, so it was a buffet (!) at the Visitors Center (so not walkable, which was 50% of the reason we wanted to stay in town in the first place), and more expensive. Soooo, Friday night it was! Tartan-themed this year, hence all our plaid bits in the following pics. Except on the Imaginary, who was going to get a new dog collar but I ran out of time. He was sad he didn't have anything new, because deep down in that T-shirt and unremarkable jeans-clad man is a dandy LOL.
I ended up being the last one ready for the ball...I had to dress Tom as well as me, and he got stuck in traffic so was later than anticipated. He hasn't been doing this long enough for me to trust him to dress himself, no. Plus that embroidered satin vest juuuuuust fit; I was afraid those coin-covered "buttons" weren't going to hold and then we'd be screwed, because that's all I had to put him in. Somebody appears to have tubbed up a bit since April...thankfully no buttons exploded. And then I left my phone in the room so didn't have any pictures to contribute to the communal photo album, although it's always too dark in there for decent pictures anyway!
Dinner was perfectly acceptable if unremarkable, as usual. We didn't have enough people to fill a table so got put with two others who hopefully didn't think we were too annoying. And during the interim between dinner and ball we had the weirdest "interview" with a woman who is putting together some sort of desperate appeal to younger reenactors and so wanted to film us? On a cell phone in portrait mode in a low lit room with a lot of background noise? I'm sure that came out well. Also for some reason I was the lucky one who actually got to give a soundbyte. "Tell us why you like to do come to reenactments etc etc." Ummm okay? I had two minutes of prep and two glasses of wine at dinner so I'm sure that was a super coherent answer. Hilariously Tom also got roped into talking during the soundbyte, and his contribution was "She dresses me, I'm here with her." LOL. We were VERY helpful, I'm sure. If that footage ever surfaces I promise to share that shining example of coherence.
"Yeah I bet that footage is going to be highly useful..."
Robin thoughtfully did get some pictures of my tartan-trimmed dress - which astoundingly didn't have any explosions or rips or anything of the sort. Which is a first. I actually really like the tartan, so I think I'll leave it if I need to wear it again. I really thought this was going to be it for this dress, as I can see the threads underneath starting to pull apart at one of the side-back seams, like happened when the CF frayed apart. It held through this ball though, so we're good for now!
The tartan is just strips of hemmed dupioni silk from Silk Baron, and the rosette has navy velvet ribbon as well.
And I was totally working on the fly with the net, but I really like how it came out! More of the velvet ribbon, knife pleated with narrow silk on top, more tartan silk, and a bunch of flowers stuck on. A net is totally the way to go for ball hair (that sounds...wrong), it keeps everything in place!
This dress does flop very attractively.
I didn't dance as much as I usually try to...I think I laced a little too tightly and was feeling just vaguely unsettled in the stomach area. Not enough to want to leave, but enough to not want to push it. Did stay til the end though, as I wanted to do the last Virginia reel. Not nearly as good as the one with Mick and Shane last time, where everyone knew more or less what they were doing, and had a good concept of how many counts things should take. (Which, by the way, is my main pet peeve at balls. I'm not a good dancer but I CAN count! If something should take 8 counts, you're fucking up the dance when you make it take 13. GOD.)
The boys were only invited for the Friday night ball (use 'em and lose 'em, right?), so they stayed at the Marriott slightly out of town after the ball, and left Saturday morning. Not together, as Rob had an early shoot and Tom is down in DC. And they didn't talk to each other because boys are weird. Robin threatened to get them one king-sized bed instead of two queens, and it would have served them right. SNUGGLE AND GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER, YOU'RE STUCK WITH THIS.
(I kid; it was in fact very sweet of Tom to drive all the way up for one evening of something that's really all my thing and not his! Although, despite the fact he wouldn't ever do this on his own, he doesn't mind and even has fun with it. So he says. We're past the "I need to pretend to like the things you do to impress you" phase so I think he's sincere!)
Saturday was Rational Dress Excursion Day, which I will take full credit and/or blame for. Jess didn't make a rational dress so decided to hit up Needle & Thread to do some fabric shopping while the rest of us explored the battlefield a bit. We still don't know anything about the nuances of the actual battle (this is why I wanted a battlefield tour on horseback! but noooo, none of the companies wanted our money. so fine), but I don't feel guilty about enjoying the place as just a beautiful national park as well as a memorial, so that's what we did.
There are a TON of pictures of us wandering Little Round Top and Devil's Den, most of which are pretty much the same thing, but I merrily collected everyone's into my flickr set because I love them all.
It's funny because I'm not REALLY an outdoorsy sort of girl, not that you'd know it from my insistence on Going Out To The Battlefield Come Hell Or High Water! I just adore a scenic vista and I do love being out in nature, not doing anything too terribly active or sporty, just being out and enjoying it. I guess I'm a Romantic at heart, under all that prickly sarcasm! (You can pretend that's a book of Tennyson, not a cell phone, hehehe)
If you remember my plans for the bodice last time I talked about this outfit, clearly the design changed up a bit...
I do plan to do a reasonably detailed post on blogger about the outfit, so I'll link that when it's done and won't go into that now. (Also if I did, I'd never EVER finish this post!)
I was also happy Alice wanted to play mountain goats with me! Robin and Adrienne weren't as big on tramping through underbrush and climbing on rocks of dubious footing with me. I of course am not actually that active on a day-to-day basic, and can still feel it in the backs of my calves today, two full days later. Owowow.
Fun while it lasted though!
After playing mountain goat for probably two and a half hours, we went back into town for lunch (during the parade is a great time to get a table in a restaurant, btw) and misbehaved generally.
After puttering back down around town to check on Dave and his lunch situation (he was set for that day), we hung around Swope Manor for a bit before changing for dinner at the Farnsworth House. (And Alice and I nipped in for some of that complimentary wine. Cheers, gentlemen.)
And at that point, we finally lost our luck with the weather - the rain had mostly held off, apart from a few spatterings on Friday afternoon, but the rain on Saturday set in just in time for the walk to dinner, and kept up pretty well for most of the evening.
Dinner was okay - the food was good and plentiful, but the service wasn't great. They generally seemed to be flustered by the amount of guests in their restaurant...which, considering I'm pretty sure most of them had reservations plus this is Remembrance Day weekend...don't be so grumpy about it?
This would be a "I think I've got a pin stuck in my armpit" face.
After dinner, we headed over to the photography studio to get "as many tintypes as we wanted"... which turned out to be two. The usual mass-buyers of tintypes weren't there, plus Jess had to leave right after dinner, so Robin got one of the rational dress group and I got one of me and Robin.
These our our post-mortem faces. "Obviously if our heads are propped up we must be dead! That's how the Victorians did it!" *snerf*
This is more like the actual poses but I haven't scanned it yet! I think it came out really nicely though. We have an evil plan to give our men mugs with that picture on it for Christmas, just to remind them that they have to share nicely LOL.
Although I think this would also have made for a nice tintype pose.
After tintypes, we splashed back home (still raining. still didn't have umbrellas. although rational dress was much better for having to walk blocks in the rain, shocker) and got back into loungewear to hang around in our sitting room with tea and cookies. Drowned rats...
And we were regaled with tales of one very nice, very sincere, crazy cat lady fellow B&B guest, who told us all the ways her various cats had died from various medical problems. And that she had thirty of them when you counted the outdoor ones. And the ones she took care of at the barn where she stabled her horse (also now dead), but that was ten minutes down the road so they aren't really her cats... We somewhat regretted sharing our popcorn with her after being held captive for at least ten minutes, but oh well.
It was hard to get out of bed on Sunday morning - partly because I was still sleepy, but primarily because my calves were all TOO MUCH ROCK HOPPING NOPE NOPE. Still raining a bit when we packed up the cars, but it did clear out in time to walk down to pick up the tintypes and poke around a little in the shops to waste time til we all wanted lunch. It's always best to do an event "post-mortem" over lunch when possible, preferably in a chain where it doesn't matter if you camp out at a table for 2 hours. So that's exactly what we did at the Panera on the way out of town: brainstormed, reviewed, analyzed, and even took notes (because Alice is the smart one and had a little notebook).
So that's Gettysburg 2019 in a nutshell: a very large nutshell! I liked my chartreuse dress, but I loved my rational dress and thought it was such fun to wear! That's by far my favorite.
And I won't even go into What's Next On The Sewing List yet...although of course there's been planning. We're very very good at planning...
Flickr album: Gettysburg 2019
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Date: 2019-11-26 08:44 am (UTC)I love your recap, but waaaaaaahhh!!!
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Date: 2019-12-04 11:34 pm (UTC)Oh, and I also somehow get more outdoorsy when I'm in costume. I'm really not sure how that happens...