Watch City Steampunk Festival

Kaila and me in our Steampunk outfits

For undergrad, I attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where I was a double major in Physics and Mathematics. As I've mentioned before, one of my roommates, Kaila, still lives in Waltham while she goes to graduate school in Boston. For the past few years, Waltham has hosted the International Watch City Steampunk Festival every spring, hosted by the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. The main street of town is converted -  the park plays live music and sets up booths for individual venders, the shops and pubs and restaurants decorate and offer special deals for festival attendants, there is a live parade, and there are all sorts of panels and events all over town.

For those not familiar with steampunk, you can think of it as a particular brand of science fiction, based on 19th century/Victorian age technology: think Jules Verne, Orson Wells, where everything is steam powered and full of gears. An alternate vision of the future that people in the past might have conceived. It's a LOT of fun to dress up and be silly. Waltham used to be a center for industry and manufacturing during that time period, and is particularly known for its watch factory, which inspired the festival's name. So every year, I've enjoyed going back and visiting my old haunts from undergrad while dressed up to the nines. They always host it on Mothers day weekend (to my mom's dismay, but I've been in Baltimore a lot recently and so we celebrated early) so this past weekend I headed up for the festival.

And also, trebuchet demonstrations,
hurling ice into the river!

This festival had a myriad of activities. Panels (like Victorian Technology and the Steampunk Vision, and Waltham and the American Industrial Age), workshops (like Electronics for Minions, and Thrifty Steampunk), lots of ongoing music and shows (like the Dark Follies Circus, a pirate show, belly dancers, a fiddle circle, a one-man band who makes his own very odd musical instruments, and the improv show "To Whom Does That Line Pertain To, Perchance?"), the yearly pub-crawl (woo!), a steampunk themed LARP (live action role playing - lots of running after people with nerf guns and foam swords!), lots of venders (selling corsets and spices and games and trinkets and much more),  and just in general lots of wandering around having fun and looking at other people's costumes. And naturally, for a steampunk festival, I have to have an awesome costume of my own!  A few detail pictures:

Homemade cincher

My cincher also works as a holster

Key necklace

Pocket watch, or rather,
pocket sundial/compass

What I generally wear has developed over the past couple years, adding various elements as I find them - for example, my first year, I wore a skirt I got from my mom, and a different shirt, and I've added a number of accessories. The major pieces of my current outfit have come from various thrift stores - boots, skirt, and shirt. I bought the hat and the necklace at the first festival that I attended a couple years back. My gun (a painted water pistol) is also from my first festival -- I got it for participating in the pub crawl that year (We had to go from bar to bar, fulfilling quests and performing tasks for various characters in order to recover the secret plans. And drinking.) The bag I carry around all day is actually what I usually use as my computer case, which I got as a graduation present for high school and have been using for years, and is a great leather bag with brass fasteners and hooks. And the cincher I made myself, in preparation for the first first festival I attended: I found a pattern online, used buttons from my mother's button jar, and got the fabric from some old curtains I found at a thrift store -- a regular Scarlett O'Hara move, that! Anyway, it all comes together very nicely, I think, and was done relatively inexpensively. Honestly, making up your own outfit is a lot of fun, I highly recommend it if you want to attend this kind of festival, and there is a lot of room for interpretation and personal creativity within the genre. Examples:

A local group set up a working blacksmithery

Behold the mechanical arm!

All in all, it was a pretty awesome weekend, and a great excuse to go up and see Kaila and wander around Waltham again. It's always nice to visit my old favorite spots (like Lizzy's Ice Cream, or the More Than Words bookstore). I'll be going up to Waltham again in about a month, for my fifth(!) year reunion, but I won't get to wander around in a costume then, alas. But there is always next year for that - I'm thinking this summer I may try and mod my own nerf gun... we shall see!