1800s Shade Shelter

And how eventful was my weekend? After a Lolita meet on Saturday, I had plenty to do come Sunday (and last night for that matter). They are all completed now, but my Dad and I were still working on my 1800s shade shelter. We did a trial run on Sunday afternoon, and realised that we needed to make a few adjustments. Namely, add eyelets to the centre for tying the fly to the ridge pole ends (the stitched ones just pulled off), adjusting the ridge pole connection on one end and shortening the ridge pole, as well as adding a couple of more ropes to tie down the corner poles. All in all, not that much to do, but it wasn't until last night that we were done, and now my shelter is ready to go for this weekend. I promise that there will be photos, but as we didn't have room in our yard to set up, we were in the park trying to be as quick as possible for the trial run.

Meanwhile, I spend most of the day on Sunday making cushions. Since I haven't been able to acquire any seating that I find particularly appropriate for regency re-enacting, I will just be taking along my picnic blanket to sit on. I don't find this completely unappealing, but I know that my butt is going to get supremely sore from sitting all day. After a dig through my fabric stash, I found some left-over fabric and a chunk that I had bought for a project but never used (perfect for cushions). I made it a fair way through, before I realised that I would need to make a trip to spotlight for trims, and cushion stuffing. And after all the mad dashing about and the speed sewing (no visible machine stitching since they are historical), I managed to get them all finished last night. Mind you, it was getting pretty late by the time I was done. There are six in total (3 round and 3 square). All of them are adapted from standard sewing patterns, and instead of a zip down the centre back, they just have an overlap for the cushion insert to slide in. The round one required me to make a cushion insert to fit (hence the stuffing), however for the square ones, I ended up cutting up a couple of spare (unnecessary) pillows that we had lying around in the spare room. I added a little extra stuffing and stitched them up.

So not only do I have cushions, they came together quickly and I managed to create extra space in the sewing room, by chopping up pillows that were lying around and using up some stash fabric. The only thing that I didn't consider is that once I return from History Alive, I will in fact have to store said cushions somewhere. I am thinking that once the spare bed is clean (it will happen one day) that they can be decoration. Of course this will require me to actually make up all the sewing projects that are draped over the bed.