Melissa DeGuire and Professor Mary Farahnakian, Department of Theatre and Media Arts
My project was to research and recreate a dress worn by Marilla Lucretia Johnson Miller Daniels. She helped her husband, William Miller, who is sometimes referred to as a “Bogus Brigham”1 and her father, Aaron Johnson, to found the city of Springville and get the education system in Provo started. Having been a teacher in Nauvoo and in the LDS Church (Primary for ten years and Sunday School for twenty), she supported the work of her first husband to establish education in Provo, and by 1857 there was a school in every district2. She also was an active member of the Utah chapter of the Woman Suffrage Movement and visited Relief Societies throughout the county to educate women on their rights. The picture below is the source I used to recreate Marilla’s dress. This copy comes from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.
I wanted to show the structural underclothing and the dress at the same time so people could see the structure and layers of clothing. I looked for pattern companies dedicated to historical reproductions. I also got ideas from actual pieces of nineteenth-century clothing from BYU’s historical clothing storage. One item I drafted myself (the drawers–I even hand-stitched them, but that took more than fourteen hours.). I used unbleached muslin so these under layers of clothing will last a long time.
I wanted the dress to be more authentic than the under clothes. Silk taffeta was the most commonly used fabric for these types of dresses. However, 100 percent silk taffeta is stiff and crunchy, and it would have deteriorated quickly. (Modern taffeta is made of mixed fibers.) Marilla was part of the pioneers’ silk-making endeavor, in which the Saints raised their own silk worms and wove their own fabrics from them. Marilla most likely made her dress from scratch, growing the worms, weaving the fabric, and constructing the dress, so I found a business in Thailand that makes hand-woven, 100 percent silk fabric and used that to make this dress.
This was a valuable experience in learning how to do research in my field as well as what it takes to recreate a piece from history. I learned that the planning and research process is the most important thing to get right because it determines how the rest of the project will turn out and how easy it will be to accomplish. I concentrated too early on how the dress would be made before gathering all my research and finding all the possible sources. Planning the construction of the dress also needed to be more thorough and happen sooner. My first picture source was very dark, a copy of a copy. I tried working from it, but couldn’t see the details. It wasn’t until late in my timeline that I found an original in the Provo DUP Museum. I had been looking in Springville. The hem of the skirt, however, was still unseen. I took an educated guess as to what it might look like. Fortunately, I realized I had guessed correctly when I finally saw the copy of the full picture, obtained from the Family History Library. I finished the dress, but only after making some mistakes that cost me valuable time and fabric. That could have been prevented if I had prepared better.
Despite the setbacks, I did whatever it took to meet my deadlines, sometimes sewing all through the night. I first shared my project in October at a small conference of the Southwestern Region of the Costume Society of America. My adviser, Mary Farahnakian is one of the officers and came with me to Houston, Texas to introduce me. There I was able to mingle with experienced persons in my career field and give a short presentation on what I had accomplished with the ORCA grant. It was a great opportunity to make business connections and share the history of the pioneer women with a group of people unfamiliar with the pioneers’ involvement in textiles.
After that, thanks again to my adviser Mary, I was able to work with Heather Seferovich and her team of the Education in Zion Gallery in the Joseph F. Smith Memorial Building on campus to set up my project as an exhibit. I learned about writing labels and what it is like to go through the editing process in a professional capacity. It was difficult to determine what was the most important information that needed to stay in the labels and what could be cut out. The Education in Zion Gallery displayed my project of Marilla’s dress from November 8 until December 15, 2011. The Gallery always records the number of people who come to view the exhibit from open to close. We opened the display right before a couple big events in the gallery, and then the gallery’s team and I took shifts to count observers. In 30 day there were approximately 1,323 observers of just my exhibit.
As the display came down, the dress was taken to the Museum of Art in Springville to be part of the “Art City, Our City: Springville History past and Present” exhibition that will open January 3, 2012. Afterwards it will be donated permanently to the Daughters of the Utah Pioneer (DUP) Museum in Springville which is run by Sandy Allison.
The major chunk of the grant went toward materials. It takes a lot more than just fabric to put together a project like this. There are a lot of smaller pieces like grommets, buttons, thread, and boning. The remaining funds compensated for gas to visit museums and the 80 plus hours of time it took me to construct the project. I am immensely grateful to the Office of Research and Creative Activities for their approval and funding of my project, to Mary Farahnakian for her guidance and finding opportunities to present, to Sandy Allison for helping me get my research started, to Heather Seferovich and the Education in Zion Gallery for displaying my project, and to Marilyn Daniels for her knowledge on Marilla.
References
- Katherine Thatcher Brimhall, The Testifiers of the Prophet Joseph Smith: Biographical Vignettes of Mormon Pioneer Women (n.p.: by the author, 2011), 64.
- Katherine Thatcher Brimhall, The Testifiers of the Prophet Joseph Smith: Biographical Vignettes of Mormon Pioneer Women (n.p.: by the author, 2011), 66.