Below is a ferrotype of me and my lady Maria from last summer at Gibson’s in Gettysburg. Rob enjoyed making the image as he usually doesn’t deal with 1870s types who bring in their own clothes for pictures - he's usually dealing with CW images. It was a great period experience and a lot of fun having the image made together, and as it was a bright day only took a seven second exposure on the wet-plate camera. Hard to see in the picture but Maria’s reticule and one of her original fans in on the table, my Family Heirloom Weavers repro carpet bag is underneath it by my feet.
My outfit is just a run of the mill brown with woven window pane wool sack suit, proper Robert Land lace-up shoes and a Clearwater Hats low crown bowler. However, Maria’s outfit turned out really nice and was a great sewing project that captures the mid-1870s fashion of walking dress pretty well – short overskirt, long underskirt, representative collared bodice and a decent underskirt train though that can’t be seen in the image. Since the picture was made I added throg closures to the bodice and a series of bows to the sides of the over skirt so now it's officially complete. We made the dress and petticoat from Ageless Patterns patterns. the dress is made from quite heavy brown cotton with very thin woven window panes of violet, lighter brown and indigo (almost a sort of plaid but not quite). The sleeves needed some re-work as the pattern was a bit off (or I was off when I cut the fabric – likely more my error than the pattern’s…!).
Maria’s boots are Robert Land lady's lace-ups, though button-up would be even better. Her hat is a black 100% wool felt that I reshaped for the right period pronounced fore/aft curvature with a knife-pleated hat band made from the same fabric as her dress. She has one of her favorite period hat pins, with a decorative silver head, holding on her hat. Next projects are a house dress, an 1878-82 era walking dress (no bustle on these), a couple of common dresses and an apron or two for camp. We’re having fun making her stuff and are currently embarking on a wool coat – takes a lot of wool for the pattern we have and think it will come out nice.
Here is the ferrotype from Gibson’s studio showing Maria’s outfit to good effect:

Here is a sample of her dress fabric which matches up as close as we could get it to several fabrics we’ve seen in period images. As her dress is not available right now for me to photograph in color here’s a swatch of it. I used to as a background for one of Maria’s cameos and my cameo tie stick-pin for display in the library. Hope it comes out well enough to see to fabric colors.

YMH&OS,
Brass