Friday 18 September 2015

regency stays research free on Foundations Revealed

A couple or 5 years ago I got a major nerd bee in my bonnet about regency stays, so I strip mined every online museum collection that I could find, and crunched the numbers.  A bit like my recent "they did wear colours in regency" nerdgasm, but back then it took hours and days over weeks to search & list & scrutinise & spreadsheet, not just 1 crazy night with pinterest. Partly because Pinterest didn't even exist when I started the research. I may not hve owned my own computer either, so I haunted my local library.  I started researching for a program part at JAFA (aussie Jane Austen Festival).  As more museums had expanded their online galleries I was able to found more garments and recrunch the analysis by the time it was published at Foundations Revealed in mid 2011.  Here's a link to the research article - recently made freely available for non subscribers.

http://foundationsrevealed.com/articles/corset-patterns/early-corset-patterns/273-regency-stays-1790-1820-part-1

I kept meaning to post a couple of extracts from it here, as the FR/YWU exclusive time (6 months from publication which can be 6 months from submission) had expired.  

The second article was about making myself stays from graph pattern of a garment owned by the Ohio Historical Society. If you're interested I can post it in a couple of segments.