 Hi, I'm Rebecca Olds. Some of you may know me as Time Smith Dressmaking on other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Today I'm launching my YouTube channel. So who am I? I'm an independent maker, researcher, and teacher of 18th century historical dress. And by independent I mean I'm currently not affiliated with any university, although I will probably find myself back in academia by the end of this year to pursue my passion for dress history. I'm a huge advocate of learning through reconstruction. Some of you will already be familiar with the Isabella McTavish-Frasier wedding gown project that I led last year as a classic example of researching an antique original garment, working out its cut and its construction. And those are two words you're going to hear a lot of on this channel. And then doing my best to share that with you. So to sum it up, what I do, I research, make, and teach. My background, I learned to sew at my mother's knee and learned it more formally in school. Then I took quite a break pursuing a legal career, but I never stopped reading about history, historical fiction, how people lived back then, and being interested in their day-to-day lives, and that included clothing. I was one of those little kids always asking why it was only as an adult that I realized what was really driving me was to find out how. So I came to historical dressmaking a little late in life after a legal career, and if anything that's proof it's never too late to make big changes and delve into something brand new that you will find satisfying. But the biggest challenge that I found when I started was in the glut of information that we have available to us these days via the internet. How do you know what information is well founded, well researched? It's true. It's not opinion. It's not fed too many filters about what we think about the past. Who do you trust? Who do you believe? Who do you look to to teach you? There are all sorts of blogs and video tutorials, special intrascripts on social media, but that makes the task of sifting through oceans of information even harder. How do you determine what is fact and what is opinion? Figuring out what was done in the period and calmly determines with what compromises we might need to make as modern makers, and then there's learning the new skills, the hands-on actual doing stuff. Books and blogs and videos can only go so far. You're constantly asking yourself, but am I even doing this right? It took me a while to figure out what books were good ones and amongst all the voices on social media, which ones were worth listening to. I've gone down many wrong paths and I'm sure I will again. The challenge is to learn and practice progressively so that you don't spend more time getting good at doing it the wrong way. Until about 18 months ago, I was self-taught and feeling pretty alone on this journey. There's been no one, and I mean literally no one, in the UK teaching period method in historical dress. For other periods, yes, but for the 18th century it seems to have been broadly overlooked without an appreciation of how different and how specialized that period was. And unfortunately, this hasn't been examined very closely in UK communities, whether it's museums or reenactment groups, living history or heritage sites, but for me the last 18 months have been transformative. It started with meeting Lauren Stoll and Abby Cox, American Duchess, and they recommended to me that I seek out the historic tailors, manchill makers and milliners who have had structured training in these techniques. So I took the decision to reset my priorities and my resources to commit to doing what I needed to do to learn these skills. Doing it with hands-on tuition and supervision from people who really know has been a game changer. I am now aiming to see what can be done to bring some of these skills and teaching to the UK. It'll take time and I'm still figuring out how to go about doing that. I think YouTube has a role to play. So here we are. I've been honored to partner with a number of museums on exciting projects and there are more coming in the pipeline. I hope this will provide an opportunity to explore that full lifecycle of research, making, learning and teaching that is only available when you study extant garments and look at their cut and construction. We'll see how methods of instruction might change in coming months in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic that places limitations on our on our traveling and gathering together in groups. But it is my hope that I will be teaching workshops both here in my studio in Bokno Regis, West Sussex, UK, but also wherever reenactment or living history groups might like to host me in a venue close to you. In the meantime, this YouTube channel will aim to share information and teach skills directly relevant to 18th century dressmaking in a variety of formats from project V-LOGs, as I believe they're called, to tutorials on aspects of making various types of garments, to interviews and presentations sharing primary source documentation, to coverage of historical events and markets, history fairs, we have a lot of those in the UK, to helping you source specialty items that you may not be able or willing to make yourself, from head, hat, to toe, shoes. The only real boundary on what this channel will cover is time period. My special interest is 18th century and specifically that actually means approximately 1675 to about 1790. Why that precise period? Watch my video in a few days and I'll explain why.