All posts tagged: Regency; HSER

Regency costumes, thedreamstress.com

Regency Ladies by the River or, Playing the Plantain Game

I’ve been working on my photography skills over the last year and a bit, getting better at settings, and angles, and playing with new things. I still get 1 decent image for every 25 I take, but hey, practice makes perfect (or at least, a little bit better…). The Wellington historical sewist have been letting me practice on them every time we do a dress up event. There was lots of practicing at our 2019 Sew & Eat Historical Retreat. (Practicing does include me setting all the functions and handing the camera over to someone else). I’m still most comfortable with ‘people stand perfectly still and pose photos’: But once you’ve done those, and the obligatory ‘smell the flowers and look into the river’ photos… And pretend to push each other into the river… Then you have to get more creative! So I taught the ladies how to play the plantain game. It’s a shooting game you play with plantain grass heads. My first memory of playing it is with my family outside one of …

The NZSEHR 2019 in Regency thedreamstress.com

Costumes and Kunekune pigs

I was very excited when the intro guide to our cottage for our Sew & Eat Historical Retreat said that we could put all the food scraps in a bin for the pigs. I’m always a fan of anything that keeps food out of the rubbish (food waste is a huge contributor to climate change – food rotting without air creates carbon). I was even more excited when we arrived, and it turned out that the pigs were pet kunekune pigs, not farm porkers destined for the slaughterhouse. And we could feed them and pet them! Happiness! Kunekune pigs are descended from domestic pigs that were brought to New Zealand from Asia by whalers or traders in the early 19th century. They are now a unique breed of their own, from isolation, or crossbreeding, or because the breeds they descended from have since gone extinct (as has happened with so many breeds of domestic farm animals in the last 200 years). Kune means plump in te reo Māori, and when you double up a word …