My Two Hide Dress Comparison With Museum Dresses

I changed my mind about fringe and such after seeing the two hide dresses at the Chicago Field History Museum.

Most of these dresses were post-contact and were made from mountain sheep hides. This you can tell by the tail in the front and back at the yoke.

This means the hides were thinner and much smaller.

My hunch has always been that Women began to use Mountain Sheep Hides because they were easily available post contact and had no value for trade with the Europeans.

Also, the great Elk herds had dwindled due to over-hunting and the introduction of European stock, which brought a form of Tuberculosis to the Elk and Buffalo. This caused Women to use what was more readily available to them, yet acceptable, for their clothing.

Since my hides were prepared sans tail and haired hide edge on the belly and legs, I had to improvise. I used deer hide for the tails and the leg and dew claws for the neck edge, sleeve ends and the gusset edge on the hem. This is cheating, I must concede, but after looking over more than a dozen dresses, under close scrutiny, I found that there was much improvising going on all the time.

I saw mountain sheep yokes on elk dress bodies, deer dew claws on the sleeve edges, entire beaded yokes cut off original dresses and re-sewn onto new hide bottoms. Every dress had some type of patching along the hem as well as other areas. Most had the fringe sewn on and then cut. Entire areas of sleeve were patched and or replaced.

In fact, the more dresses I examine, the less I buy into the notion that all dresses looked more or less the same. In basic shape, yes. In design I couldn't even find two that were similar. In most cases a silhouette was sought, but to get that shape, just about any kind of patching, gusseting and improvising was allowed.

Certain ideas followed tribal custom, but for every rule I have found an exception. This was a true yesterday as it is today. Some women are followers, some are leaders. Otherwise fashion would have never evolved at all.

A case in point would be the Crow dress on the right. No one would say it followed any rules other than it was made of 3 hides. This Woman followed her own heart. There are tribal hints in the cut of the garment and the wool patches, and some of the bead work could only be Crow.

But from there it takes its own journey into a garment that was never seen before, and perhaps, since. This Lady marched to a different drummer and had the courage to wear what she had created.

It reminds me of a Powwow I attended at Nett Lake, Minnesota several years ago. The Jingle Dress Dancers came out in the dresses that have remained relatively unchanged in design since the 1940's, namely a sort of pocketed shirt dress, for lack of a better description. But one Girl stood out. She had fashioned a modern A Line dress that more or less followed the curve of her body, in a modest, yet fashionable way.

I can still remember the snorts of disgust I heard from all the Elders around me, the whispers and the general attitude of disapproval. Yet, that young Lady danced. I hope she is still dancing in that dress today, or has passed it along to her daughter. I haven't seen one like it since, but I have noticed the loosening of the "dress code" that has shaped Jingle dresses now for two generations. I'm sure she played a large part in that change.

This is what fashion is all about. As times changed, so did the ideas about what would be worn. There was always the first one who was brave enough to try and change things.

My struggle is that I can't make a Pre Contact garment no matter how hard I try. The only way for me to truly create one is to go back into the past and make it. Since time travel is impossible, I have to do the next best thing.

Create a garment that is similar in shape and design using the old methods, and even here I have to cheat, I used a sewing needle, scissors and a cutting wheel since I have no training in using an awl or stone cutting tools, my project would have been a travesty if I had tried to make the garment in ways that I had no training in. So this was my first compromise.

My second was in using Brain Tan Elk hides I had not created myself, nor could I get them made with the hair on the edges, legs and tail intact. Perhaps someone will make these hides for me someday, but for now I must work with the materials I have, or forgo the project altogether.

So I had to use deer tail on my Elk Hide, but I have seen post contact dresses improvised this way in museum, so I can assume when the proper tail or edge was not available, a proper substitute was found even Pre Contact.

My third compromise is yet to come, having no Pre Contact Two Hide dress available to study, other than the one Arikara dress, (on the right), which was simply painted, I have to make some assumptions as to how the yoke was decorated using pre contact materials.

One Nez Perce Dress comes close. It features rows of Dentalium shell, which I have already acquired. It also has bead work. This is my dilemma.

I have no pre contact dresses that feature beads of any kind, but there are resource materials that list pre contact Women having stone beads of many types, Jasper, Obsidian, Jade, soap stone and pipe stone. There is no description of how they were arranged or even if they were attached to the dress or strung as necklaces.

I have to borrow courage from a new Artist friend I met lately, who had the daunting task of recreating a completely feathered Palanquin for an exhibit in a museum in Moundville, Alabama. He had sketches and descriptions, but no detail as to how feathers were arranged. He found resource material on the proper attachment method, but he still had to arrange the feathers in a probable pattern. For this he had to use his imagination or give up the project entirely. He spent many sleepless nights, but finally, in a dream, it came to him what he should do and he did it.

According to him, better he did something than he abandon the project and not allow a reasonable representation to be built for people to admire and learn from.

This is where I find myself, looking at thousands of pictures and examining hundreds of dresses and trying to figure out what was done before trade beads. I think the Nez Perce dress comes as close as anyone will to a pre contact pattern, but the question still remains as to what the bead work would be composed of.

I have stone, bone and wood beads to chose from, (but can find no real documentation as to massive numbers of them being sewn to dresses), as well as copper cones and tube beads, (common pre contact), quill work and pearls.

Note Pearls on legs, arms and just about everywhere else, and this is just one modest example

Since pearls are present pre contact in huge quantities, I am leaning in that direction. No other bead shaped item is as prevalent in all tribes as the common freshwater pearl. Thousands upon thousands have been found in graves. They are shown on garments as well as wrapped around arms and legs.

If copper made it all the way from Northern Michigan and Minnesota to Florida in great abundance, I'm sure trade went the other way and pearls were traded to the Northern Plains.The problem being that the Northern Plains Peoples did not build mounds to bury their dead, preferring platform disposition.

This leaves us with few clues as to their dress, other what has been handed down orally from the peoples themselves and the few post contact garments that follow the custom of the past but the materials changed with the introduction of trade beads.

The Woodland Mississippian Mounds as far as Wisconsin have abundant pearls in them, but few remain intact as they were worn because of inherent damp soil burials. The few that do remain do so because of their closeness to copper plates found in graves, which chemically helped to preserve them. This means that there were probably even more than we could imagine, as they are easily degraded to nothing when deposited in the soil for any length of time.

The Plains People were a wealthy People who traded far for their adornment. They had dentalium shells in great abundance, even though they originated off the Western coast of what is now Canada. The idea they beaded with pearls before trade beads is a logical conclusion. I can't imagine them going without such a beautiful item when their next door neighbors, (the Ojibway and Mandan, as well as many others), were literally dripping in them.

At the same time, I hesitate to create a dress with no solid foundation in evidence. It is obvious that pre contact Plains Women used dentalium shells to decorate their dresses. But what did they use for the bead work?

ReCutting and ReSewing The Yoke on My Two Hide Dress

I came to the realization the other day that the yoke on the top of my dress was not only slopping around constantly when I moved, it just felt...odd and out of balance.

The was no getting around it, by cutting the yoke on my dress form without proper arm padding, the yoke sloped terribly, causing the dress to feel weird when it hung on me.

The only solution was to wack it off straight and start again.

Thankfully, the stitching I had across the top was temporary anyway and I knew I would have to resew it with the welt in place, I still worried about the fit after I did my irreversible slashing.

But I knew it should be straight across to be traditional, so I trusted in Tradition and cut away....

Even the sleeves had a strange sort of swoop upwards from using a curved bow as my dress form arms, these I slashed off too.

 I was then left with a nice straight line, as it should have been in the first place.

The picture doesn't show it, but I further trimmed until the cut neckline was flush also, I wanted to start completely fresh.

If I had cut too much I could always add a 1' or 2" gusset with welts on either side evenly across the shoulder to the sleeve, I saw this on one dress at the museum, but my dress was also too long so trimming was in order.

 I then added my welts between the layers..and whip stitched all together, then turned, flattened the seam and trimmed the welt to be flush.

The leather across the top is very thick and spongy, very hard to sew easily. This also creates a stiff yoke that adds structure to the dress line itself, but is a total pain to sew and forces you to sew a thicker seam to penetrate to the stable leather.

This will be important once beads and dentalium shell is added, the shoulders must support a great deal of weight without shifting or pulling, but makes the shoulder seam heavy and bulky. Trimming the welt close helps to ease this bulk as well as using an equally thick and spongy welt.

I always match my welt thickness to the leather on the seams, this creates a uniformity of tension and weight that is noticeable. You must always be certain to have your seams very straight, or pucker and sway will translate into a ghastly bulge or swoop when done.

Here is the result. The yoke is noticeably shorter. This is caused by the cutting off one inch overall on each side of the yoke, (front and back), but the added seam welt and tight whip stitching have gathered up the garment at least another half inch and made the yoke more rigid and therefore less floppy and stretchable.

New wrinkles have appeared at the armpits, which will ease themselves out as the dress rests on the form and me, as all leather garments do with time.

It now fits like a dress. It is truly more comfortable, and is at least one inch shorter at the hem, allowing for the future fringe that will reside there.

The waistline also moved up and inch, but it looks more traditional that way, the long waist was a bit too long in retrospect.

 It was the scariest part of making this dress so far, it looked great, but it didn't feel right, most of the time I felt like I was wearing a heavy sheet or potato sack, every time I bent over I had to re adjust the yoke as it would slip from one side to another.

Now it stays put. I had to fold the neck in front under and inside about and inch and will tack it into place with a few stitches, most people could tolerate the flap but I have a surgery scar on my neck right where it touched and it bothered me. I can't wear turtle necks either because of it.

Here is the dress now as it stands, I am so grateful to my husband for being patient with me as we were taking pictures, I'm sure I drove him crazy with all my jumping up and interrupting his reading to snap a few more pics.... 

The fringe welts at the side add a real bulky look to the garment yet, but once they are cut into very thin fringe and are tortured, (my word for the distressed, kinky look on most Old World dresses fringe), I'm sure it will have a slimmer line, or off it will come!

I will be sharing my distressed fringe technique when I get to this part soon. The sleeves will also be fringed heavily to get rid of the bell look.

The side silhouette is looking great, I want to be able to wear this dress without a belt or with one, and the hang looks very nice.

It still has a bulge in the front caused by pinning the dress front up to the shoulders when I colapsed the dress form for travel, I won't be doing that any more, she now rides laying down on our bed as we go down the road, so the bump should ease out with time.

I am leaving the train long in the back, and will also be adding side "feet" as an extension to the gussets I sewed in in the previous post, this will be an exciting addition and will pull the sides of the dress down for a slimmer look.

The dresses I studied had these "feet" covered with hundreds of brass cones, I will be using copper cones as is proper for pre contact.

Also, as a side note, I had to switch out dress forms, my size C is now too big for me, I am officially a size B now, and had to move to my smaller form. I have lost 45 or more pounds since I started this project.

I was gluten intolerant and since giving up all wheat products and MSG, the weight has just fallen off of me. Women of Native Descent take note of this! Most diabetes and other illnesses including arthritis would improve if we just laid off the wheat.

If your heritage does not include several generations of wheat consumption, you too could be gluten intolerant!

My Husband thinks I look lovelier the closer I comes to honoring ancient traditions and living out my lifetime dream of recreating a precontact Two Hide Elk Dress! He may have something there, I have never been happier, although my fingers are so sore I can barely type!

Good Medicine!