Workshop Three

Learning from Making

Methods and Processes

18th March 2023 |Teams &  Trinity House, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Recreative practice can tell us far more than the processes by which a garment of the past was made. It offers insights into bodily labour, cultural priorities, and social practices of the past. But how should researchers go about recovering this information? From chemistry experiments, digital remaking, and citizen science projects to making in the classroom and reflective auto-ethnography, the methods used to approach remaking are diverse. This workshop seeks to explore the methods, skills, training, and access required to approach remaking as a historical method in dress history.

Programme 

9.20 - Welcome , Serena Dyer and Sarah Bendall 

9.30 - Keynote – Alka Raman, Chair: Sarah Bendall 
Charting Chintz: The Journey of Knowledge Transfer from India to Europe 

10.30 - Tea Break 

11.00 - Panel One: Making as Method, Chair: Sarah Bendall 

Helen Wyld
Learning through weaving: Re-creating an 18th-century Swedish coverlet 

Laurie Rees 
Remaking the Lydia Lawrence bonnet: an ‘experimental conservation’ approach to collections care and exploration of melding modern digital techniques with past making processes 

Anni Shepherd 
Reflections in the Waves: a Retrospective on the Petticoat Project 

Anna Sverdlova 
Practice as Research: Reconstruction of Russian Kokoshnik 

Emma Treleaven 
One size fits all: Experiments in 19th century Shoemaking and Slipper Embroidery    

12.30 - Lunch 

13.15 - Keynote –  Abby Cox, Chair: Serena Dyer
Altering the Stitch: Shifting Historic Dressmaking Methodologies for Different Audiences

14.15 - Tea Break

14.30 - Keynote – Rebecca Morrison, Chair: Sarah Bendall
Unpicking Process: experiments in recreating and reimagining the methods of making

16.00 - Panel Two: Pushing Methodological Boundaries , Chair: Serena Dyer  

Dustin Neighbours
In the Absence of Materiality: Digitally Reconstructing the ‘Lost Dress’ of Elizabeth I of England 

Zara Kesterton 
Petals to pixels: Using digital recreation to insert flowers into the picture of eighteenth-century French fashion 

Suzanne Rowland and Veronica Isaac 
Remaking as a pedagogic methodology: case studies from the University of Brighton 

Viktor Heegaard 
The Sincerely Scientific Tailor – Pattern Cutting and Science in the Eighteenth Century 

Bronwyn Clarke
 The Tyranny of Distance: Making and remaking in colonial and contemporary rural Australia

17.00 - Roundtable , Keynotes & Organisers 

17.30 - Close