About

It’s hard to explain my irrational passion for this subject.  

I started off making caps from other peoples’ patterns for myself and my Revolutionary War reenactor friends, then moved to making patterns from documentation in books just to see if I could, then taking patterns from originals so I could reproduce them. Each one is a little work of art, with its own challenges and questions.

Along the way I had to master minute hand stitching. You cannot make these with a sewing machine; machines can’t replicate the construction or stitching used in the 18th C. I learned about cloth and thread, needles and pins, new stitches — one new stitch, the rolled gather, took me more than a year to master.

I also delved into the history of cloth, clothing manufactures, the Atlantic trade, the work of tailors and milliners, the making of pins, the social and cultural place of women and sewing. . . . There is still so much more to learn! This body of knowledge adds to my understanding of this one little piece of clothing.

I’ve been doing this research for more than 15 years.  There is so little in print that I had to use a few pages from this book and a few pages from that book to get started. These gave me hints where to find artifacts and portraits to document my theories as the evolved. It’s been a treasure hunt.  I hope with this blog to fill this gap in knowledge.

In real life, I am a librarian, mother, poet, crafter, dancer, reenactor, wife, friend.  I have a Master’s in Library Science, with 30 years’ experience in college libraries. Librarians at my university get assigned fields of study for which to become the research expert. One of my specialties is costume history. I am a member of the Costume Society of America, and exhibited my museum reproduction caps at their conference in 2016.

Copyright.  I publish this blog with a CC-BY NC  license.  That means you can refer & link to this blog, but you must reference me and this blog.  You can’t use my words, images, or parts of my words or images to make any money. You can’t take my notes and turn them into caps or patterns that you sell (that would go against several museums’ policies, too). You can’t use my words, images, or ideas  and call them your own.  The CC license has more meanings; even if I didn’t outline them here, that’s what I mean.

A suitable citation might look like this:

Saines, Sherri B. (7 Jan 2019) “Sisters: two lappets side-by-side.” The Capalog: Investigating 18th century American women’s caps. https://capalog.blog/2019/01/07/sisters-two-lappets-side-by-side/.

Comments to this blog are welcome; all comments are moderated.

Final.