Extreme Costuming - Home

"Good enough"?  That's for amateurs!*  Here, we deal in EXTREME, my friend!

Hand-embroidered Elizabethan Jacket

Welcome to the home of Extreme Costuming!  My name is Laura, and I'm a member of Gardiner's Company, Trayn'd Bandes of London (Elizabethan), a volunteer costumed interpreter and occasional researcher for the Jamestown Settlement and Museum (Early Colonial America), and a Laurel and a Pelican in the SCA (which has gotten me absolutely no free cups of coffee, darn the luck).  I've been a member of Gardiner's for 12 years, involved with Jamestown for 15 years or so, and a member of the SCA (under the name Isobel Bedingfield, née Gildingwater) for 18 years.

I've been sewing and making costumes since I was very young, but for the past thirteen years I've really narrowed down my focus to England during the years 1580-1610.  It's a great period for detail and decoration, and they teach the Tudor/Elizabethan period of history multiple times in English schools, so I'm more familiar with it than other periods.  I come from England, and I grew up in London, so that country and city seem like a logical place to research.

Now, what is Extreme Costuming, you ask? 

It's a slightly silly sounding name.  But aside from that, it's a total immersion approach to costume and material culture.  From a costuming standpoint, it's the crazy projects that take hundreds of hours to complete.  It's creating the things that make people say "I could never do that!".  It's the hand-sewn, the deeply researched, the complicated, the time-consuming.  The correct materials, the correct sewing techniques, and an understanding of the complicated tapestry of politics, trades, occupations, and fashion that surround every single garment. 

I love costume, but I want more - I want clothes.  I want to bury myself in the details that slipped past me when I was newer to costuming.  I want the challenge.  And if I do it wrong, I want to know how.  It's costume research as a conscious choice.

I'm not the world's greatest seamstress or embroiderer, but I love what I do - it makes me happy.

And my philosophy is that if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

Hopefully, that includes this site.  Here are some highlights:

Articles - The various classes and articles I've written about Elizabethan life and clothes over the years.  New articles added fairly frequently.

Le Monde - The essays and ramblings of my misspent middle years.  A variety of thoughts and a wide variety of subjects, intended to be mostly humourous.

Mostly.