Mistakes = Waste of money

Repost – This was originally posted in January of 2009

There are times when I look back and wish I would have followed my own current advise when I first started reenacting, especially the key points of research and planning. When I started reenacting I was in my late teens, in college, working at a museum I loved, easy with plastic money and very eager. This was a recipe for mistakes.

Now we all made mistakes when we first started. Mistakes are best avoided by good research and good advice. Here is my confession list of mistakes for you to avoid:

– The first ‘dress’ I made was a nightmare. I made a skirt from a pale blue bed sheet with badly had embroidered Xs along the bottom. That skirt weighed a ton! Wore it once and tossed it. Wasted time and about $5 for the sheet.

– The first wash dress I made was a poly/cotton. That dress helped me with heat exhaustion and a visit with the EMTs. Garbage. Wasted time and about $15 for fabric.

– Hats, bad hats and wrong hats. I was given the wrong advice to make hats from those teardrop wedding hats. These were just wrong no matter how cute they were. Waste of time and up to $100 for the bases and decorations. Ouch.

– Modern corsets – My first two corsets where modern ones. Both were synthetic materials that just didn’t breath. Synthetics = HOT & BAD. Neither of these gave the right shape or support. The first had cheap, thin metal boning that bent very easily when laced tightly. This became a big problem when a bone broke in my back in the middle of a museum play infront of about 500 people. I finished the play, dancing, with the metal sticking in my back. I still have the scar. I would have been better off with a custom made corset. Wasted about $180; gained a scar.

– Amish stockings and cute striped stockings – Yes the Amish ones are white cotton. But, they simply do not fit at all. These were like giant bags around my ankles that constantly needed to be readjusted. The striped ones fit much, much better. But, it turns out those are just for kids not adults. Wasted about $30 on Amish stockings; handed down striped stocking to little sister. Admittedly, I still haven’t found the perfect for me all cotton stockings. My favorite cotton stockings are 95% cotton, 5% spandex from a local merchant. My favorite wool stockings are from Sock dreams for $10. My dream stockings are 100% silk ones sold by a local merchant for $50.

– Enamelware – At different points I had a set of blue speckled enamelware and white enamelware. The blue were dishes. The white was a pitcher with a small round basin and a large oval basin. Both, not acceptable. The upside is I traded a crate of the blue stuff for an original piece of grayware which Grandma collected. I resold two of the white pieces. The oval one is a great cat bed. Not sure what I wasted there. The trade and resale probably broke even.