I’m delighted to (somewhat belatedly) announce that at the start of May I accepted the position of Senior Tutor, Costume Construction at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School. Toi Whakaari is New Zealand’s oldest and largest performing arts school, and offers the only tertiary course focused on costume construction for stage and screen in New Zealand.  The two-year Diploma course covers everything from dyeing and corsetmaking to leatherwork and worbla.  It’s very small, with a maximum intake of only 8 students each year, and very competitive.   Teaching at Toi is the perfect job for me: it gives me the opportunity to teach both academic and hands-on craft skills, and to expand my own learning, both through historical research and technical experimentation.  I’m incredibly privileged to be able to contribute to the next generation of costumers, and to learn from all my immensely talented colleagues. Teaching at Toi is also almost literally a dream come true.  When I first moved to New Zealand almost 13 years ago I looked at the career options in Wellington, …

I can’t believe 2018 will be halfway over in a month in a half!  It seems like it just started. I’ve been very busy, as evinced by my slightly slower blogging rate.  I’ve kept you (mostly) updated with my sewing (lots of shorts, Georgian accessories, and Regency unders), Scroop Pattern-ing (Otari Hoodie & paper patterns!), historical research (swimming in Edwardian wool swimsuits), and photoshoots (30s blouses, geekiness , Edwardian, and bathing suits). But we’ve been working on a lot of other stuff too. We’ve had the kitchen that was destroyed in the Great Black Bean Pressure Cooker Explosion of June 2017 fully fixed and replaced – ceiling done, walls painted, floor replaced.  That took lots of organising and following up, so ate up huge amounts of my time.  And it turns out they used the wrong kind of paint, so I’m going to have to repaint it.  Grrrrr…. But it does look lovely! We’ve also been doing our own home renovations.  We sanded back the terrible old blue door, and filled all the gaps and …

When you find an old book with a title like ‘My Official Wife‘ for 50 cents at an op shop, how could you possibly pass it up?  Even if it’s terribly battered and slightly falling apart?  With that name, you just have to know what’s inside! Little did I realise when I bought it that My Official Wife was once well known.  It was a bestseller when it was published in 1891, and made Savage a household name. It’s also hilariously, awesomely, terrible. My Official Wife was Richard Henry Savage’s first novel, and it draws heavily on his life.  Like Savage, the ‘hero’ (more on those quote marks later), Colonel Arthur Lenox, is a retired army man.  Both men had experience serving in forces all over the world, from their native US, to Egypt.  Savage & Lenox both had a single child, a daughter, who married a Russian noble & government official. Colonel Lenox’s first visit to Russia to see his now-married daughter, and meet his extended family of highly-placed in-laws, precipitates the book’s action. …