No sewing news to report, but let me tell you, I haven't really been idle. (It only feels that way because the progress is less visible.) (Besides, if there was sewing progress, I'd go post about it on the other blog!)

I took two boxes worth of books down to a used bookshop. $78 in store credit later, they handed me back a whole freakin' box. I'll sort through most of them and pick over any that might have some sort of textile interest, but the rest are going to Goodwill.

Honestly Mr. Stephenson, if you would just write portable length books, I think more people would read them. The Kindle is a godsend in that regard - I tore through Quicksilver without thinking about it, and now I'm on to The Confusion.

The Big Three-Oh

And here I sit, still trying to figure out how to bid my twenties farewell in style.

A friend of mine is a chef, who does sort of a bespoke dining experience - but that would limit it to 12 people, and while I know I have at least six who'd appreciate that level of cuisine, I wouldn't want to limit my BIG GIANT BIRTHDAY to 6, or even 12 people.  Great idea - but for some other time I think.

I have a bunch of friends who're Makers. But they all make different stuff.

I also have a bunch of friends who are students, poor, underemployed, unemployed, or just plain ol' cheapskates. So that takes a lot of the "admission required" items off the table: go-karting, mini golf, theme parks, etc.  It also also means that a lot of folks won't come if it's not within a certain distance of their houses.

I love museums. Only a relatively small subset of my friends do.  Dancing?

Well, yes, but everyone's into rather varied things when they're not doing their stints at Fezziwigs.

Hiking? I've done it a bit. It works out alright. You have the issue of people being at different fitness levels, of people coming under or completely un-prepared,

And then I also realized - I haven't had much in the way of birthdays lately. Why am I trying so hard when I know most of the people won't show?

I really just need to make this about me. For once.

Notes on Books for Reenactors: Victorian

I started writing this for a friend, and it got to the point where I was writing at such length I figured I might as well share it all.  Here's a peek into my collection of books for reenactment - these are only books that I might bring along, not my favorite research tomes. (Though as primary sources, they're pretty good!)  This set is for Victorian/Dickens Fair - meaning sometime after 1855 or so.

Enquire Within Upon Everything (the good, period-looking facsimile): 1978 reprint of a British 1856 original 0-214-20575-4 (Comes in this hilariously 1970s-Williamsburg-nostalgic hard sleeve, which is kinda handy actually.)

Contains recipes, hints on speech and grammar, first aid and medicine, household cleaning, card games, gardening, descriptions of the latest technologies on display at the Crystal Palace.

Including the Tempest Prognosticator (AKA Leech Barometer)!

 Makes a great bathroom book as the sections are interesting, short, and generally randomly distributed throughout the book (though the index is very very good).

Beeton's Every-Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book: 1984 reprint of the British 1865 edition ISBN 0-8317-6176-8 (Gallery Press)

A nice, enlarged edition (meaning readable without a magnifying glass) in a nice red binding suitable for display at reenactment sites. (Only two pages that give away its status as a reprint!)  Contains housekeeping instructions in the front, and alphabetized list of recipes in the middle, color plates at the end. (Also has period advertisements in the end papers!)

Desserts... oooo.

Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management: 1982/1985 reprint of the British 1861 edition (end papers unclear on which edition is reproduced here) ISBN 0-907486-18-5 (Chancellor Press)

A really big, readable version of the book, grouped by subject matter instead of alphabetized. Bound in a sadly modern plasticized cover. (This was the one I wrapped in brown paper.) Beautiful color endpapers including a picture of Mrs. Beeton.

A portrait of the lady herself!

 Housekeeping instructions in the front, recipes in the middle, Bills of Fare, followed by instructions on the hiring of servants, their duties, some misc receipts for cleaning aids (blacking, grate-cleaner, &c.), home medicine, and then home lawyering.

The following three books are from the Cookbook Collector's Library: all really quite nice reprints of American books, but none of them have ISBNs that I can find. It looks like CCL may have either become "Favorite Recipes Press" or been a side project of theirs in the late 1950s through 1970s. FRP appears to be a vanity publisher now. Huh. Perhaps I'll enquire.

Housekeeping in Old Virgina: 1965 reprint (my copy is marked "Cookbook Collector's Library" on the spine, but Favorite Recipes Press on the inside) of the American 1879 edition

 

Red boards with gold-ish stamped decoration. Completely re-typeset in reasonably period but much more legible serif font.  If you search Google Books for this, you get to see the scanned magazine adverts for this collector's library as a subscription service. It seems like a lot of people bought, and then decided they didn't like this book, because there are TONS of them on the market on Bookfinder. The recipes were apparently collected from a bunch of housewives, making this the original Ladies' Club Cookbook. Recipes are divided into sections, and there's a section on cooking for sick folks, housekeeping and cleaning, and paints and dyes.


Dr. Chase's Recipes or Information for Everybody: 1970 reprint of the American 1866 edition, (if you look on Bookfinder.com there are a HUGE number of variants of this book out there).

 Period size (small), period style binding (green with gold embossing), period end paper advertisements (beautiful), but it is so painstakingly faithful a copy that the pages appear dingy from discoloration of the original, and you can see where something rubbed up against and stained the edge of the book, and thus this mark appears on the edge of the repro. Kinda amazing.
Contains a section on home beverage production (both alcoholic and non-) in a section called "The Saloon", medical advice, then information on various crafts: leatherworking (tanning, shoemaking, harnessmaking), painting (which seems to be all manner of decorative stains, etchings, and various house-furnishing operations), blacksmithing, tinning, gunsmithing, a short "jeweler's section", a farrier's section (various veterinary advice), cabinetmaking, barber's department, baker/cooking department, a long miscellany, a section on coloring, and two interest calculating tables and a glossary.
Not sure how much faith I'd put in the food recipes, since this guy was clearly not a cook in the main, and one of his recipes is for "Apple Pie Which Is Digestible".

Ladies' Indispensable Assistant: 1971 reprint of the American 1852 original.

Contains home medicine information including a section on medicinal plants and herbs, then some cooking recipes, a section on cooking for sick people, a section on various fun handicrafts (Berlin work, making slippers, beading, wire baskets, etc), a section on dyes and dying, etiquette for ladies and gentlemen, a section on beauty (mostly fashion, some cosmetics), then, of all things, a short chapter on keeping Canary-birds. Looks rather like something you'd send your daughter off with into the frontier.





So, speaking of books for the frontier, an extra one that I didn't have on hand at Dickens:
The Prairie Traveler: 1993 reprint of the original 1859 edition by Applewood Books. ISBN 978-0-918222-89-3

Brown paper wrapper, which might be period? The back cover unfortunately is undeniably modern, but I suppose you could glue another piece of brown paper over it.
I actually picked this one up at the Smithsonian Museum of American History at the end of a whirlwind business trip. If you ever played Oregon Trail as a kid, especially if you played the weirdly expanded version 2 in the early 1990's, you'll recognize a lot of the content in this book. While it's different from other books I mention in that is has no recipes, it does have a bunch of camp medicine info, plus valuable suggestions for outfitting wagon trains, the best time of year to leave, camp furniture, quicksand, stampedes, Indians, tents, and hunting.

Holidays are over

I'm not going to lie, it's a little distressing to dump out all that angst and know for a fact that people aren't reading.

Ahwell. It's 12:05am, my RSA token is dead, and the holiday break is over.

We made the trek out to visit the folks, gifts were given, RGB LEDs were geeked out over, steak was eaten, and then we drove home. Less than 6 hours spent all in all and it worked out pretty well, I think. Everyone seemed pretty happy with their presents, and I got to regift the atomic hotsauce that I got at the New Year's Eve party to someone who will truly appreciate it (my little brother).
My loot? Another Zoid Camelbak to replace the one I got in like 2003. (The new versions are pretty sweet, really.) A yoga mat, an industrial strength soldering gun, both of which I asked for, and a pile of candy.  I think my dad was really confused by my request for a "vintage vanity set" so I ended up with some insanely expensive... manicure cream and nail file set.  That's fine, just means I get to pick a nice celluloid one out for myself.

And now to bed!

On Praise

I started writing this while sitting in the Denver airport, because we got there three hours early to board our flight. Whoops.

I actually started writing (Blogger has drafts, nifty!) and then stopped, because without a screen protector, I actually felt somewhat exposed, blogging from a seat in the middle of a room. Hilarious, right? Because you could argue that posting on this completely-open-free-for-all of a blog means I don't really care what people think about me, right? Well, no. I've been quiet for three years, and it's taking time to get back in the habit of sharing, particularly when I feel like doing so exposes me to low-flying snarkbombs. I am taking tentative steps outside the garden gate, walking where it's no longer "safe".

I had an inspiration post that I want to write, but I need to digest some other things here first; it would be avoidant to allow this to keep going unsaid and unrecorded, and once you procrastinate from saying something once, it's really easy to continue to do so. It ain't healthy.

I can't accept praise. (Ooof.)  I'm not sure why.

I consider myself a pretty reasonable person, pretty self aware and always working on things. But lately there's been this theme of always feeling awful about my output, be it at work, or when sewing, or in whatever other activities. And at some point I became conscious that it's because I feel like I never receive real praise - and my own standards are stupidly high and unattainable. For example, this winter when we went through our review cycle and subsequent bonus/raise period, I fully expected to be put on a performance improvement plan. Instead, I got an eye-wateringly large bonus (seriously, I thought I'd misheard), and was told I was essential to the team. And then I realized too, that it's not that I don't receive praise - it's that I can't take any of it seriously.

At work, I'm always looking for intention behind praise. But at least at work the things we do are so uncritically good that I can tell myself that no matter what, the intention is useful; worse was when someone walked up to me at Dickens, and thanked me for "all that you do". My immediate thought was too uncharitable to print here, so I'll generalize: my immediate thought was that they were praising me not because I earned it or did anything particularly good, useful, or worthwhile, but because they wanted attention from me. And now I feel incredibly self-absorbed admitting that, but it's so easy to write off so much of the Faire community as being histrionic, self-congratulating, borderline-personality-disorder, actorbating, narcissists. (I am SO sorry. It's almost physically painful to write this, but not-writing it doesn't do me any good here. I need to admit this to process it.) To some extent, I realize that I am hungry for approval from people who I respect. And there are piteously few of those people around, and they tend to have standards just as high (or higher, perhaps?) than mine.

Thither the admission, thus the resolution.

(Oh, okay, I know, I know, resolutions are hard, and maybe passe, and set one up for failure, which is something that Impostors staunchly avoid. So doubly a resolution, to resolve to do anything?)

I will attempt, this year, to give meaningful praise whenever I can. Maybe I'll need to start slow here, but I think the start of being easier on myself will be to recognize the good (no matter how small, flawed, imperfect, or strained it may be) that other people do. And then maybe I can give myself a little credit for the things I do.

Dickens Fair Violets

Every person I've ever met in my profession has a folder in their desk where they print out physical copies of compliments they've gotten. I have one labelled "Kudos" and another coworker has one called "Violets". These make for good readings later, particularly if you're having a bad day.

So let me jot some bits for myself, so I can squirrel them away against possible future need:

Being totally unable to keep from laughing as I was trapped in the window at Dark Garden and serenaded by some of the street folk with my own song.

"There's a girl in the Dark Garden window with a pickaxe. Only Laura could pull that off. Ha, it's totally Laura! I win!"

A few returns to Fezziwigs, in which I was warmly greeted, prodigal though I might be. And the random swingathon that turned into an accidental Irish set, in between the rows of Cavalry Galopede.

Geeking out over primary source reprints with like-minded folks.

I spent a lot of time doing something I don't enjoy, but it had its high points.
A lady who came by and spent literally half an hour talking to me about Victorian cooking, because she was really really interested in what I was doing. She was astonished to find that there were reprints of Mrs. Beetons available cheaply, and more excited to find that (as I hinted without actually breaking accent, character, or language) there are scans for free on Google Books.

Talking to a nice gent who stopped to watch me slicing apples. He complimented me greatly on my knife technique, which I said wasn't really all that great because my knife was dull. He looked at it, looked at another sitting on the cutting board near me, and asked if he could sharpen them for me. I handed them over hesitantly, not sure about the wisdom of handing very sharp chef knives to a random member of the public, but! He swiped them against each other quickly, mentioning that he recognized the brand as having "good hard steel", then handed them back to me, incredibly sharp and now slicing through the apple skin like never before. Turns out, he's a chef at a fancy Mexican restaurant. I was doubly complimented.

"Where are you from?"
"London of course!"
"Really, which neighborhood? Me mum lives..."
"Oh, um, well, this neighborhood!"
"You're Californian aren't you?"
"Er, well..."
"Your accent it so good I wouldn't ever have known except that you tripped up there. I'm from Brighton!"

Showing kids that you can whip cream with a whisk never, ever, ever gets old.

The random drunk guy in a bad Halloween priest's cassock, who was absolutely fascinated by me rubbing citrus zest on lump sugar.

Traumatizing everyone with the unicorn jelly!

Hello World;

Apparently, I couldn't completely ditch my old ways. But I'm at least moving to a new platform, albeit one without privacy controls, or community, or... well... It's a brave, new, publicish world.

Hi there. My name is Laura. I will try not to post any sewing related content here (that's what the other blog is for). Can't promise much else.