At the beginning of May, Vancouver’s own Hemwick Regency Society met for a spring picnic.
I wore my green floral round gown, and added several new accessories: vintage gloves and a modern reproduction shawl, and several pieces I’ve recently made for myself – a new chemisette, paste earrings and set of chain necklaces, and an enormous straw “Spanish” hat.
I had spent a week making an early 1800s capote for the picnic, but the night before the picnic, I discovered that the finished hat didn’t fit over my curly regency wig. (My own hair is so explosively susceptible to humidity that even my wigs seem to go BWOOOMPH when the dewpoint goes up!) There was no time to buy – let alone shape – a hat blank, so taking the bergere with the deepest crown in my stash, i quickly steamed it into a “Spanish” shape over a pot of water on the stove.
I trimmed the steamed straw with vintage moire ribbons, but even a deep bergere is a shallow hat, and I faced one last panic when i couldn’t find my hatpins. This final dilemma was solved by a friend, with exactly two words: “Knitting. Needle.”
And it worked – brilliantly in fact! Over a whole afternoon, that hat sat happily on the back of my head and didn’t budge.
I also busted out a less visible accessory: my heavy winter petticoat. The petticoat is bulky under the cotton dress, but even though the sun was shining on the picnic, it was only 13 degrees C when we started. As the afternoon warmed up i discarded my shawl and gloves, but even when the day was at its coldest, the layer of thick brushed cotton beneath the floral voile kept me warm as toast.
It was an absolute joy to meet all the wonderful other “Georgian” people in the Greater Vancouver Area!
I also meet in person an online sewing friend, the glorious Jeandelamottevalois, who had dressed for the event in a stunning new striped satin open robe!
Beyond meeting new friends, I learned a few things at the Hemwick Regency Society Spring Picnic.
The first: that croquet is quite surprisingly intense for a lawn game.
The second: that I am really, truly, terribly awful at it. I can whack that mallet nice and hard, but directing a whack within 50 degrees of where it’s meant to go…. this skill is not in my gift. While the rest of the players were discoursing knowledgeably about speed, wind direction and how the dandelion patches on the lawn were functionally analogous to sand traps, I was failing endlessly to get MY ball through the starting wicket. At all.
At least I had a great big Spanish hat to hide beneath!
