Regency Fashions for Ladies by Victoria Chatham

CLICK TO PURCHASE FROM AMAZON

Fans of the Regency era will, no doubt, be quite familiar with terms like muslin and superfine, half boots and spencers. It doesn’t matter in what era we set our novels, our characters need clothes, at least for some of the time depending on how hot the romance is. The Regency fashions were looser and less form fitting than in earlier eras emulating as they did the flowing neoclassical styles of Greek and Roman statuary.

So what, exactly, did a Regency lady wear under her gown? The fact is – not much! Short-legged drawers with a drawstring waist were only just coming into fashion in the early 1800s but were more popular by 1811. Our Regency belle would also have worn a chemise designed to protect the outer clothes from perspiration or prevent a silk or muslin dress from being too revealing. A chemise rarely had any trimming as the coarse soap and boiling water in which it was frequently washed would have reduced trimmings to rags in no time.

The chemise was worn next to the skin and the corset, either short or long stays over it. The short stay fitted just below the bust and the long stays reached the hipbone and created a smooth vertical line. Both styles of stays were kept in place by shoulder straps. A petticoat, usually with a scooped neckline, short sleeves and fastened at the back with hooks and eyelets, was worn over the chemise and stays. Usually trimmed at the hem, it was meant to be seen when a lady lifted her outer dress to avoid mud or to otherwise prevent it being soiled. Stockings were made of silk, knitted cotton or wool and held up by garters.

Dresses were often made of soft, clinging muslins but the oft mentioned morning dress was high necked, long sleeved and made from plain, serviceable fabrics such as wool and linen. The thin twilled fabric sarsnet, or sarcenet, was woven with different colors in the warp and weft so that when the fabric moved there was a subtle shift in color. Evening dresses, or ball gowns, were satin and silk creations, fitted under the bust, short sleeved and with low necklines. An apparent contradiction in terms was that being fully dressed referred to evening wear which showed quite a bit of skin and décolletage, and being underdressed meant wearing a high neckline as in morning clothes. Colors indicated status as young ladies wore bright colors such as pinks, pale blues and lilacs, while mature ladies dressed in purple, deep blue, yellow, strong reds or black.

Outerwear included capes, wraps, shawls, spencers (a short waisted fitted jacket) and pelisses. Rather than a pocket, which was worn under a dress with a slit in the side for access, ladies carried a reticule, or a bag closed with a drawstring and often decorated with beads. This in essence was the lady’s handbag in which she could keep her vinaigrette and handkerchief. No respectable lady would dream of leaving the house without her hat or bonnet and, at home, married women usually wore caps. Short gloves were worn at all times during the day and long gloves reaching the elbow or higher during the evening. The latter would be removed for dining.

Flimsy flat soled slippers of silk, satin, kid or velvet would be worn indoors. Often embroidered or otherwise decorated, they were usually tied with ribbons and sometimes had a short heel. For walking, a lady had her half boots made of kidskin or nankeen, a canvas type fabric. She might even resort to slipping a pair of pattens over her shoes, which lifted her up out of the dirt and mud and prevented both shoes and hem from getting dirty.

No lady would dream of leaving the house without wearing a hat, usually some style of bonnet trimmed in numerous ways. Chip straw was not actually straw, but thin slivers of wood woven into shape. Grosgrain, a ribbon most often used for trimming hats and bonnets, is still in use today and is a coarse weave, tightly woven fabric. It resembles a fine cord that lies perpendicular to the long edges with the warp (the threads which run lengthwise on the loom) being lighter than the weft (the threads that run across the loom). Grosgrain has to be sewn carefully as it frays easily and holds pin or needle marks. It was usually made of silk or wool and occasionally a combination of the two. It was most often used for trimming hats and bonnets.

Sources:

https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/

http://candicehern.com/regency-world/

Tom Tierney’s Fashions of the Regency Period Paper Dolls

Wikipedia

Victoria Chatham is proud to be a Books We Love author.

Find her at:

http://bookswelove.net/authors/chatham-victoria/

www.victoriachatham.webs.com
www.facebook.com/AuthorVictoriaChatham

Just A Few Blocks Of Stone

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00UC407R0

Click here to Purchase from Amazon

Just a Few Blocks of Stone

I've had a very busy month with some personal setbacks. So this month I'm not in the mood for writing something funny. Someone in last months wrote about some interesting facts regarding Stonehenge. For those of you who think I'm just a crazy funny guy, well I am, but those that know me more, know that I have a far deeper spiritual side and I've done a lot of research into native beliefs and other cultures. I've written a lot of science fiction and love learning about ancient places. One of the most interesting for myself has always been the Pyramids of Giza. Some old blocks of stone, a friend once said to me. Yup, on that he was correct. But once I begun to look closer at these blocks I begun to realize there is so much more here than some Egyptian scribes working with copper tools could have put together.

So some facts on what is known. The main pyramid contains two and a half million blocks of rock cut from an Aswan quarry six hundred miles away. It weighs an estimated six to seven million tons, which probably doesn’t mean a lot until you consider it’s heavier than all the cathedrals, churches and chapels built in England since the beginning of Christianity, and the tallest structure erected until the Eiffel Tower was built it 1889. The main pyramid was supposedly built by the pharaoh Khufu in twenty years. We now know his name is a forgery put there by an English archeologist which wrongly spelled it as Rhufu, and to this day here's been no true evidence of any pharaoh has ever been found inside the main pyramid, or any inscriptions of any kind. Pretty humble scribes in those days, I'd say.

This is quite a remarkable feat, considering the Egyptians lacked astronomical, geological and mathematical expertise. Although no records recorded anywhere by the Egyptians have shown any details on building, moving or assembling the blocks. Which you'd think some egotistical hotshot would have put into permanent inscriptions. I Know I would.

To build this grand edifice in twenty years would require placing one block every five minutes, day and night, nonstop for twenty years (read this as no unions, no holidays). This doesn’t even include cutting the stone, moving it and building the ramps needed to place them. Setting a mere twenty blocks a day would need 340 years just for the main pyramid to be finished. The easiest way would be floating them up the Nile, man what a traffic jam with all those barges.

Historians claimed that they were erected using an earthen ramp circling the pyramid. Engineering experts have said it is not possible to construct them to such precise dimensions in this manner. Also, that ramp would not be shallow enough to allow the huge blocks to be dragged up it. A ramp of a shallow enough gradient to allow this would have to have been 4,800 feet long - that’s more than three times the length of the pyramid itself - and would have to be built out of stone in order to handle the 5-20 ton blocks. And if it were made of stone, where are the remains? Nothing has ever been found to even suggest how all this was done.

If I've got your attention, here’s where the fun and real mind-blowing stuff starts. The precise nature of the main pyramid is amazing. The difference in length of any of its sides is eight inches. The twenty-two inch thick plain it sits on is within one inch of level on an area of 756 X 756 feet. Which doesn't sound big, but is about ten NFL fields side by side. Gaps between the casing stones measure just a fiftieth of an inch and the apex of the pyramid is located directly over the center, not bad considering this building is forty stories high. Some really good string there and a great plomb bob I'd say.

The lower passageway is 350 feet long. It’s straight to one fiftieth of an inch through the blocks they’ve laid, and straight within a quarter of an inch through 200 feet of solid bedrock. Darn sharp copper chisels and a mighty good eye. Oh, did I forget to mention no evidence of any torches used?

The Meridian Building of the Greenwich Observatory in London was built to align with true north and even it is out by nine-sixtieths of a degree. The main pyramid is aligned to true north within one-twelfth of a degree. It sits exactly on thirty north parallel, that’s an imaginary line one third the distance between the equator and the North Pole. Also, if a line is drawn along the longest land parallel on Earth and the longest land meridian the exact center is the apex of the main pyramid.

Calculations of the length of the King’s Chamber and of the length of the pyramid divided by its height both equal pi. If a line is drawn through the apex of all three pyramids and another through the left shoulder and headdress of the sphinx then the entire Giza complex becomes a Golden Mean Spiral based on the Fibonacci spiral of numbers, which is a sacred set of numbers that govern all patterns and growth in nature. Seashells and watermarks have been found about halfway up the pyramids, carbon dated to around 10,000 BC. These shells, along with a fourteen foot layer of silt around the base of the pyramid, seem to indicate that there was flooding here at one time, a fact which could be further confirmed by the inch-thick sea salt crystals discovered inside the pyramids when they were first opened around 1200 AD. You’re probably thinking ‘how did that happen in the middle of the bleeding desert.

According to the Bible, and fossil records, the Giza area had a lush environment around 10,000 BC. This was also the time of the great flood. Erosion marks on the Sphinx, which, by the way, is the largest limestone structure in the world, shows that it was subjected to rain storms for thousands of years and is perhaps far older than the pyramids. Seashell growth on the Sphinx also indicates that it too was underwater at some time. Lastly, the alignment of the pyramids is the same as the three stars of Orion’s belt as they appeared from Earth in 10,500 BC. The two larger pyramids were originally encased in white limestone and the smaller in red to resemble the color of the three stars as seen in the night sky. The Egyptians weren’t the only ones to build pyramids dedicated to Orion. In Xian, China.

You'll find what look like the same configuration of seven pyramids. Also built in Teotihuacan in Mexico is again the same configuration of pyramids. If you draw a straight line across the globe, oddly enough they all link up.  Which makes my scratch my head and say, "Very Interesting. Weird, but very interesting." I like to think facts are stronger than fiction. So if I've got your curiosity piqued, go grab a tape measure and give your local travel agent a call and check out those old blocks of stone.

Note: Photos courtesy of the New York Public Library