OK, I know that I have not posted much at all to my blog these last few weeks, but life has a strange way of getting in the way of my hobbies. Take a look at these:
This is what has consumed my life of the last few weeks. I am a guitar player for the Belles of Bedlam, and my wife sings as one of the sisters in the group. The group decided that we were going to branch out form our typical Renaissance genre of show, and try our hand at another time period. There are many reasons for this, but the big ones are that it allows us to do a wider variety of shows, and allows us to be more available for corporate entities to pay us to perform for their employees. Why does this mean I spent the last few weeks holed up in my apartment? Take a look at the costumes again.
You see how Hardy is wearing pants, and a waistcoat (vest for those who don’t know the difference)? Yeah, my loving wife made those for me. She made them with no real patter to work off for the pants (she did her best guess), and a patter for the Vest that took both of us to figure out how the hell to put together. And that was the easy part. Now take a look at her costume.
The only thing she is wearing that was not made by her own two hands is the white blouse she is wearing, and the socks. She made the hat, the jacket, the skirt, and the belt. How did she do this? I cut out the fabric, ironed the fabric, and fed her various kinds of chocolate and sweets as she spent two solid weeks at the sewing machine. Every ruffle, every gather, every rose, every stitch of that dress was one lesson after another in how to sew a Victorian Period costume. You see, this is only the second costume that my wife has ever made, and only the second thing she has ever used her sewing machine for. In other words, she really has a limited amount of experience when it comes to sewing, so when all was said and done she was ready to kill the person(s) who suggested we do the Dickens faire this year.
All said and done, my wife is the most amazing woman in the world. Yes, we had moments where we were ready to just throw the sewing machine out the window and give up, but she came through in the end and did a fabulous job. She showed a lot more patience and perseverance than I would have in her position, and had a number of faire people complement her on how beautiful her dress is. And, I received a large number of comments on how cutie I looked in my costume. Both are completely her doing, as my experience with a sewing machine is limited to watching my mom use hers when I was kid. I’m learning, but my wife did all the real work.
Now that things are back to something close to normal (if there is such a thing in my life) now we can turn our attention back to other things. Things like bloging, watching new movies with our Netflix, and spending time with friends we have not seen for weeks.
If you would like to see more great pics of one of our shows, and the going on of the faire in general, one of the Fans of the Belles of Bedlam has an awesome website for all kinds of stuff he takes pictures of. Visit Rich Lowe here at http://www.renaissancefaire.net/Dickens-Riverside.htm
