Always Winter Never Christmas

Serious rennies are a hardy bunch. Short of active tornado or blizzard warnings, we are out there - rain, shine, or in this case, snow! 

We had been keeping an eye on the forecast for the spring faire. We knew it was going to be a cold, damp one. A couple of weekends before the Great Plains Renaissance Festival, the Little Apple Renaissance Festival was scheduled in Manhattan, KS. A perfect dry run for a few cold-weather modifications we'd made to our very first matching renaissance dresses.

The faux-turbans covered our ears well enough, and we found beautifully soft cashmere pashminas to match for our necks. But even with long underwear and the scarfs, we needed more. 

Luckily, I still had a couple yards of the upholstery fabric we'd used for the bodices. And frankly, I'm not sure what else I would have used it on. 

To add a little extra width, and also to have something soft and warm around the face (instead of the stiff, scratchy upholstery fabric), I bought some faux mink fur for a shawl collar and front opening. We trimmed the short capes in tassel fringe to match the dresses.  They fit close and snug around the shoulders, and were really about as warm as a modern wool coat would have been. 

The Little Apple Renaissance Festival ended up being rescheduled due to blizzard conditions, but not before we'd gotten all dressed up with no where to go. So, we took advantage of the wind-blocking and aesthetic properties of a mausoleum in the cemetery in Beloit, KS for a short photo shoot. 

At the Great Plains Renaissance Festival a couple of weeks later, the weather wasn't quite as blizzard-like, but was still cold enough to warrant the use of the capes, and damp enough that our skirts were wet half-way up by the end of the day, and just about "an inch-deep in mud", to quote Jane Austen.