All posts tagged: A Fortnight in 1916

A fortnight in 1916: guidelines for the project

Published by The Dreamstress

In creating  the ‘Fortnight in 1916’ project, I’ve developed a set of general guidelines and rules for how historically accurate it should be. First, the two most important rules: #1 – I’m not allowed to do anything that will endanger my health. This one is pretty obvious.  I’ve run the project by my doctor, I’ll have a checkup before I do it, and if anything seems to be going wrong, I have to modify or pull the plug on it. I don’t handle winter very well.  I get really terrible chillblains, so my clothing and our house heating has to do as much as possible to alleviate them, 1916 or otherwise.  I also had a really serious lung infection this autumn, and while 4 weeks in Hawaii seems to have effected a complete recovery, I can’t afford another bout of it. I’ve chosen to live circa 1916 in the middle of winter because winter is already miserable, so it can’t be any worse in wool stockings and a corset, and I already spend 6 months …

Introducing the 1916 project

Published by The Dreamstress

In April of 2015 I made a full mid-1910s outfit. I found it so comfortable to wear for the Anzac Day photoshoot that I left it on for the rest of the day, and quite spontaneously, did a bit of living history research by cleaning my house while wearing it. The mid-1910s outfit was just as comfortable for housecleaning as it was for the photoshoot, and I gained some really interesting insights into what it’s like to live in a longline corset and stockings and a full skirt and blouse, plus heels. Based on that day, I began thinking about the idea of doing a longer, more involved mid-1910s living history research project. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that there is a huge gap in non-combat focused WWI living history, especially from a female perspective. There are WWI reenactment groups, mainly based around men as soldiers, but some of which include women as nurses etc., but almost no-one has done WWI home-front living history. There are people living in the …