Thy Word: American Girl class-Felicity- week 1

Thursday, March 3, 2011

American Girl class-Felicity- week 1

So this week for our American Girl class, we talked about Felicity for the first time! I had decided that I wanted to dress in a relatively authentic colonial costume to show the girls. A woman from our church happened to have some old Colonial type dresses that weren't being worn by her daughters, and she gave them to me! One of them fit perfectly! I wore that one this week, and improvised some of the undergarments/ petticoat/ etc., I got SO many comments on my dress this past Tuesday, but it was worth it! The girls' faces when they came in were priceless!

Making history more real for my students!
I wished I had gloves...
Some of the girls laughed at me!
Others told me that I looked like Felicity!

Here is a page which talks more about how they dressed in Colonial times.

We had Queen Cakes for snack. They were delicious! Here is the recipe:

Queen Cakes

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 Tablespoons rose water (Optional)

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup flour

1 Tablespoon flour

1/4 currants

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Use paper towels to grease muffin pan with butter. Coat each muffin cup with flour.

2. Cream butter and sugar together. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Add the rose water and salt. Beat well.

3. Add the cup of flour a little at a time, and beat the mixture well between additions. When all the flour has been added, the batter should be smooth.

4. Put one tablespoon of flour into a small bowl. Add the currants, and mix until they are coated with flour. Stir into the batter.

5. Spoon one tablespoon of batter into each muffin cup. Divide any remaining batter among the cups.

6. Bake the queen cakes for 40 minutes, or until they are golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool 15 minutes before serving.

For our first craft today, we made mob caps. Mob caps are similar to bonnets, but they did not have a brim to cover the face. Mob caps were worn to cover their hair and keep it clean, since they didn't wash their hair every day. The mob cap kept their hair clean from dirt, flour, soot and anything else that may have gotten in their hair while cleaning, sewing, cooking and managing a home. Servants wore dark fabric to cover their hair, usually a strip of cloth woven around their heads.

A mom tying on a mob cap...

Girls working on sewing the ribbon into their mob caps...

This is the page with instructions on how to make mob caps: http://www.history.org/history/teaching/tchmhins.cfm

More girls working on their mob caps...

The second craft that we worked on was decorating straw hats with ribbons and flowers. A straw hat was worn to protect a woman's face from the sun, since sunburns were very unattractive in colonial days.
It would have had a wide brim, and they tied a ribbon under their chin so it wouldn't blow off in the wind. We used artificial flowers for our hats, I'm not sure that they had these back then. We also used hot glue... :-D Much easier and faster than sewing them on by hand...