To the reenactors!

If you are an 18th C reenactor, please listen!

The very basics of 18th C knitting:
1) No Shawls.
2) No flat hand knitting. No straight needles with bobbles on one end. Knitting in the round presages flat by hundreds of years.
3) No Shawls.
4) No ribbing. None. Zilch. If you are wearing purchased machine knit gloves/stockings, if you can hide the ribs do so. If you can't, replace ASAP! There is No Excuse for any hand knit ribbing....that shows a lack of care and research (unless you have found an extant ribbed item, with a good provenance, in which case, TELL US!!!!!).
5) No shawls
6) frame knits are VERY fine, upwards of 20 sts/in, knitted flat and seamed. Should you choose to mimic this by hand, you have my admiration, but it's not demonstration appropriate! These are the only knits that should have sewn seams.
7) No shawls
8) DO NOT cuff a cap high like they do on Colonial House, unless you WANT to perpetuate farby reality TV (AKA crown or Jughead style, like the idiot in the old Archies cartoon). Caps should sit near the hair line (that you had as a child, should it be receding), and really should have a bit of space at the crown, for a simple one, or a lot, for stocking caps. I cannot find a period drawing with this style of cap....just can't find any! See these guys in their caps (Hogarth)? They are messy, caps ajar and falling off..but not tiny beanies, still. Soft, squashy caps....heavily fulled caps with brims sticking out...no Jughead beanies!
9) (repeat with me.....) No shawls

10) no cables, almost no lace

So, what *can* an 18th C reenactor wear for hand knits?

Caps

Gloves

Mittens

Fingerless mittens/gloves (often called mitts or half mitts)

Stockings

all conforming to the numbered descriptions, above.

Caps typically have decreases all around, not two lines. (a common one is k2tog, k3 around, knit 3 rounds plain, then k2tog, k2 around, knit 2 rounds plain, etc) The Dutch Museum (Rijksmuseum) has many caps....use one of the following patterns for the shape, and get a stripe pattern idea from here! You can make any of these larger, to be felted, and stretch the bottom into a brim. The hat in George Neumann's Collector's Encyclopedia of the American Revolution is, basically, the same as a Monmouth cap, with the brim stretched out during the felting process....you can see the edging shape, which is quite clearly a 3 needle bind off, as I used in my Monmouth cap pattern.

Sally Pointer, Mara Riley, and I all have researched patterns available.....I haven't come across any others I'd recommend, so far. If the pattern doesn't have a bibliography and reasons for the choices made, be skeptical!

Sally's Voyageur Cap, a felted doubled cap, can be made to flop or to fit closely.
My Monmouth Cap, as close to stitch for stitch as I could get to the original, which is 1600s. (none of the original caps I can find have a purled turning row!) If you must make a Monnouth, this one has all the details....but a stocking style or doubled cap is likely more common for 18th C.

My 18th C plain old striped cap, a generic cap pattern, can be made long or shorter, of course. If enlarged, it can be felted. Its color pattern is copied from Zoffany, where the man's cap is falling off, but you can see the basic shape...it looks odd, I think that the artist was making it look like it was falling off, but didn't bother with getting it realistic, which it clearly is *not*.
Mara's fingerless mitts (I'd add a couple rows of garter to the finger edge of the hand).
For plain old mittens or gloves I'd suggest using this vintage (1950s) pattern, replacing the cuffs with a few rounds of garter, then plain knitting, and keeping the whole thing in plain knit (The period mittens I've seen have all had round tops, I expect to find more, with different shaping, but have not, yet...these are super easy and, without the ribbing, completely accurate).

The General Carleton of Whitby cap pattern is coming...several people are working on one. The only pattern currently available (in the book from the ship wreck), has been deemed to be not worth the book, by all I've discussed it with. But the color pattern is straightforward and standard shaping applies. It's the only cap I've seen, to date, with a rolled edge (with neither felting nor hemming)....but it has fringe/thrums.

End of the season

We had a great time at Hartwell, doing a foodways presentation of preparing and preserving food for the winter.



I got to hold Ginger the Chicken. She's a Buff Orpington, just like that silly lady kept in Busman's Honeymoon.



Sabra orchestrated a fabulous lunch...and as Sue said, we eat best in the Fall, because it's harvest!





We used the market stalls that Ken built...they are just so terrific, and they look so much like the drawings! I love having realistic tools and furniture.



Ginger had quite the fan club.


Rick built the cart kit that the park bought. We all used it to shlep our gear out. It worked great. Harry was able to pull it up all by himself. You have to balance it carefully, and tend it while loading and unloading, or else it tips over...not hard to keep it from tipping, but you do have to watch it!