I've mostly been working outside on my raised beds because it will soon be time to plant. I found asparagus roots for sale for the first time in two years and that means a larger asparagus bed. I love asparagus.

On the sewing front here's my finished 1940s blouse (left) and another blouse from a 1960s pattern (right).



I think they turned out ok. I left out the organdy sleeve stiffening called for in the 40s pattern because I didn't require the square shouldered look. I also left off the pockets because they were placed too close to the gathers and bulged out rather than lying flat. Slight drafting error there. When I first tried the blouse on before putting in the sleeves it was slightly large. I consulted the pattern and noticed there were 3/4" seam allowances on some seams. Not that variable seam allowances are unusual in a pattern this old; I must have been sewing on autopilot. I'm not finished with the second blouse because I don't have any buttons for it yet. The pattern envelope showed shorter sleeves. When they turned out elbow length I decided to use an 18th century type trimming.

The flea market last weekend was... empty. It was also very cold. There may have been a connection.

I did find and bring back some vintage patterns in my size. Not all of them are my sort of thing but bargaining for the whole lot was cheaper than buying only the ones I wanted at regular price. I think the seller may have been tired of packing and unpacking them or he was getting hungry and needed some lunch money. Now I have no shortage of minidress patterns, for good or ill. The late 60s and early 70s are my favorite for wearable vintage fashion. Possibly I watched too much early 70's Doctor Who at an impressionable age.



I bought patterns because I went through my warm weather wardrobe a few weeks ago. Most everything was in a state to be thrown out except for a few things I bought this fall at thrift shops or from end-of-season clearances. I need more shirts so I think I'll be making some short-sleeved blouses and tops first.



I adore this 1940's pattern with the neat puffed sleeves. I'm making it first. Somebody brought it to a Costumers' Guild meeting along with a lot of other patterns and I had to take it home with me. I have some aqua green and white striped 100% cotton shirting which I think will be suitable. I haven't a clue where it came from or why it's in my fabric stash, but fabric I already own is free fabric.

Like I needed one. Anyhow, he's a Cardigan Welsh Corgi mix, age ten and a half. He was brought into the shelter where I work after his owner died. We're not a no-kill shelter and nobody wants to adopt a ten and a half year old dog. Not anybody. :(

But he's a tiny little guy and being so old, well, there's no long-term commitment. So I took him home with me. I hope he'll like it here. He seems delighted with his new backyard. He also seems fond of dog food. Other than that I don't know what his personality is like yet. We'll see!

I've been given leave to skip off work Saturday and I will be heading up to Dallas for Candlelight. If the traffic isn't bad I'll be there in time to meet up with the guild. If the traffic is bad I suppose I'll just be walking around by myself.

To anyone heading up to Ft. Washita: have fun!

Try not to get the flu that's going around. It's a doozy. I realized I had it last Tuesday and I'm still getting over it. I've stopped coughing, though, so I can use the computer now without making everybody else sick. I am so getting internet put in at my house. Being stuck in the house for four days without even a newspaper as a window to the outside world was too dull even for me.

In Costumer's Guild news, I've had our articles all typed up for a while but I'm still waiting on my momma to look them over and approve them. She's been pretty busy over the past few months.

I have to run back now to check on how my trees are going and that the tree cutters haven't taken out my brand-new roof. When I come back I expect to be able to find pictures of the 18th century picnic somewhere. I was so sad to miss that-- ya'll had better have had a good time without me!

Based on how old he was when I got him, I've worked out that Fred was probably born sometime in November 2006. That makes him three years old this month. I can hardly believe it's been so long. I'm glad I found him. He's such a darling.

I've been busy. And my laptop cord died. I went down to the library one day and discovered the library now has LJ and many blog sites blocked because they are "social networking". Boo. I finally found the adapter cord for my old laptop and have the internet back.

I've been very busy with work because they've given me extra days! I started off at this job working ten hours a week and now they have me on for almost full time.

I've also had to deal with the tree that fell on the roof during a bad rainstorm. The damage was pretty extensive and there will have to be a new roof. Part of the tree fell through the dining room ceiling so drywall repairs are also in order. At least it's not raining as much anymore. The first few days were bad because it rained constantly and I was too afraid of sliding off the wet roof to get a tarp up there.

I have been looking forward all year to the Ft. Washita living history event but I don't think I'm going to make it. I'm terrified to ask for more time off so soon, especially as I've already had to arrange for two days off to get one of my painfully bad teeth fixed. I'm really disappointed.

I don't know when or if I'll be able to go to any future events, so I've packed away all my in-progress projects. I'm planning to make myself some dresses for next spring instead, just to have something to sew. I feel bored without any swing to work on!

Early this morning one of the cats, Spot, was whisked away to a new life as an apartment cat with my dad and my sister. I'm sure she's going to be happier as an only cat. I'm going to miss her, though. She's my favorite. More importantly she's also my dad's favorite and she adores him. She'll even wake up and come over to visit him when she hears his voice. Her usual routine is to sleep on the front room windowsill in the morning, sleep on the kitchen windowsill in the afternoon and sleep on my nightstand at night. Her other hobbies are sleeping on the cardboard scratcher, sleeping next to the cat food dish, sleeping on people's laps and enjoying some tasty catnip and sleeping it off. I think she will adapt well to apartment life.

Wooster (the orange polydactyl cat) will be staying on in her place. I've had to quarter him on the back patio temporarily because of the mutual hatred between him and Spot. I tried corralling them in separate areas of the house only to have one or the other escape and lie in wait to attack. Wooster weighs twice as much as Spot and has extra claws so you can guess how the battle usually went. As it is Spot has been sitting on the kitchen windowsill all the time where she can hiss and smack at him through the glass at her convenience.

I forgot to mention....my new job is at the animal shelter. As jobs go it's surprisingly fun. Also there are kittens. I think it will do for now.

I've been painting away at the new sewing room all week and I'm almost finished. I should be done with the trim this morning.

Here's my new sewing machine alcove (formerly the closet). On the right is "before".



The before picture fails totally to convey the impression produced by the nasty, grimy, moldy beige paint found on every surface before cleaning and the undercoat. This particular room had severe mold problems in the past though no new mold has appeared between when I put on the undercoat last year and now. There were some drainage issues and unfixed plumbing problems which formed an inland lake under the house. Fixing those removed the lake along with the indoor humidity and mold problem.

The inspiration for the paint color was the entryway of a c.1805 historical house I visited in Charleston, S.C. I loved the bright stark green they used. My green is much less bright because I mixed it up myself from random paint I found in the storage closet and shed. My house came with about 30 gallons of perfectly good paint, as if somebody was planning to paint but never got around to it. Fancy that.

This week I made one 18th C. mitt, an 1860s nightcap and finished my calico 1860s dress except for hemming and putting the skirt on the waistband. I also painted part of the back bathroom, mowed part of the lawn and canned some tomato and apple sauce. I found three jobs to apply for (a record) and found and signed on at a local temp agency. Next week I am signed up for substitute teacher training, probably. My momma arranged that for me and she didn't ask them if you need college for it. I can't find out until I call them on Monday. Presumably one can decline to substitute for the high school. There is no level of hazard pay that would convince me to go inside a high school ever again.

That's some things done at least.

Now for some pictures from my unscheduled vacation. When I went to visit my relatives this time we drove across on I-20 instead of the way I usually go. At the Mississippi crossing there is a rest stop and right above is Battery Benton, which played an interesting but tiny little part in the War of '61. These pictures were taken from the top of the steep hill on which the battery sat. I think it is a natural landform. It's certainly an ideal place for a battery, almost built to measure. From the first picture it seems that the bank slopes down at a gentle angle but in reality it seems like a sheer drop down to the river. The road in the picture is about 30 feet down from the grass hill where I was standing while taking the picture.



Now for the dear little house in the woods. My aunt and grandmama have had this cabin up in the north Georgia Mountains. It's a wonderful place if you can talk someone into turning the water heater on. They've fixed it up over the years, though the only times I had ever been there before this year was to help them clean and fix plumbing broken over the winter. I didn't get to see it at its best, only at times when there was no heat, no water except for the toilets and no hot food or hot water because the gas was turned off. Interestingly, those conditions were exactly why my family got hold of the place; the former owner was an artist whose wife divorced him rather than spend a second winter there in squalor. You could probably live in it all winter nowadays because it's been improved with a new roof, insulation, appliances and a wood stove. As long as you don't mind getting snowed in on the top of a mountain. That could be annoying.

I discovered a few days ago while surfing the internet at random that there is going to be a Civil War reenactment in McKinney November 6-8, along with the usual one in Tyler which is October 23-25. I'd never heard of the McKinney one before. It might have been going on for years for all I know. Anybody planning to make either of these?

The only thing I'm missing to go camping at one of these things are tent poles. And it's not like those would be difficult to obtain as the lumber for them is one of the many items piled up in my back bedroom. It's been there for quite a while.

On that living history note I sat down this morning to read the cookbook my aunt loaned me. "Housekeeping in Old Virginia" is a compilation cookbook from the cookbooks of many old Virginian families and was published in 1879. It has some interesting overlap with the (Robert E.) Lee family cookbook; a number of receipts found in the Lee cookbook are also in this one but they have been submitted by other people.

The editor goes to some effort to explain that the book is intended as a guide for the lady reader to direct her (incompetent) cook and servants with her superior housekeeping knowledge. Just in case the reader might go yard and try to cook something herself. That's a bit odd, since most other cookbooks direct themselves at a reader who wants to know how to cook. I often get a weird sense of entitlement to their former lifestyle from the writing of wealthy Southern women in the post-war era. Of course, my Southern relatives were poor white trash barely scratching out a living under these people's thumbs, so I may be biased. ;)

It's the earliest cookbook I have that has receipts for sandwiches. This interests me. Both of them are for ham salad with a mustard-like dressing. It seems odd that people who had potato chips, donuts with holes in them and jello from a box hadn't discovered the ham and cheese sandwich. The 1900s cookbooks I have give many more sandwiches, mostly of the chopped-up salad type and my 1903 cookbook does have the BLT and cucumber sandwiches ("A Brand New Sandwich") as novelties. By 1900 receipts call for mayonnaise-type dressings pretty much exclusively. Maybe mustard had gone out of style as a flavoring, or improved food storage methods had made mayonnaise more practical, I wonder about why that was.

This book also contains a ridiculous amount of pickling, preserving and alcoholic beverage receipts as compared to later cookbooks. It's not an odd number for a cookbook of the time, though, as far as I can tell from those I have. Logically there would have to be more ways to preserve food in the pre-refrigeration era. Refrigerators (ice boxes) are mentioned, but usually there are alternate instructions if your kitchen doesn't have one or if you live out of range of daily ice delivery.

I'm babysitting my sister's dog this week, if you can babysit anything so large. The poor thing has been moping around the whole time she's been here. I think she misses her people. She doesn't even want to play with her beloved stuffed monkey.



On the sewing front, I made a bodice lining muslin for a "regular" 18th century dress with the help of Patterns of Fashion. My stays are so stiff, all I had to do was put them on the dress form and drape the muslin. It's great. The result fit very well when I tried it on. I had big trouble with the sleeves because the sleeve shaped made no sense at all to me. Eventually tried draping them on the form too and it worked like a charm. I'm not sure what material the dress itself it will be made of yet because I don't have the fabric yet, but when I do I'll be ready to go.

Then I started work on the 1860s togs because I've decided my wool dress will be too warm to wear in September. I have several dresses sitting around that want making up. I started on the calico dress first as the most generally useful. I have the skirt mostly sewn together and the bodice entirely made except for the sleeves. I hate making bodices so I consider all the hard work to be done now.

When last I visted my aunt she sent back with me two old family quilts that needed repairs. I've started work on the first one which was missing two entire blocks. They had fallen apart and been discarded. I made the new blocks out of some vintage material about the same age as the quilt. I've never pieced a quilt block before or made a pattern for one and it took two attempts to make a new block to fit exactly into the missing space. My first try was 1/4" too small on all sides.



Once I got a proper pattern it took me about ten minutes to put the blocks together on the machine. I am not a quilting purist and believe that quilts should not be pieced by hand. Unless the work is done in backstitch, of course. This is because I loathe repairing quilt tops. Especially when they become totally unraveled after somebody sewed them with running stitch using a single thread and the thread broke in a few tiny spots and you have to repair the entire thing with slip-stitches and it's a nightmare. (Argh!!!!)

After that I replaced all the missing ties in the quilt. The cat helped by grabbing the thread for me. All of the quilts that came down from that side of the family are tied rather than quilted. I've tied a few quilts before, so that was easy to figure out.

As partial advance payment for the repairs I received a set of Victorian-era quilt blocks, probably made by the same artist who produced my crazy quilt. The main colors are pink, brown and turkey red and some of the dress prints used are amazing. These blocks make a twin-sized quilt. Having no use for a twin-sized quilt I plan to space them out into a double with borders between the blocks.

I've convinced the laptop to connect to the internet for a few minutes at a time. This is progress.

This weekend was the Canton flea market, always my favorite weekend diversion. Last month there were two held because of a quirk of the calendar. I don't know what it is about flea markets, they're such fun. I don't even buy things most of the time. I just walk around and look.

This month I did buy myself some fabric and costuming supplies. On the left we have a 60's or early 70s dress kit; it has all the notions, trim, instructions and a dress all cut out in the package. Clever. I thought it was a paper dress at first because paper dresses came in similar packages, but no, it was a real one. On the right we have two 4-yard pieces of cotton material, probably of the same age. They had fun fabric back then. On top is a roll of brown antique hem binding and two cards of lace. Canton is usually a good place to pick up dirt cheap vintage or antique lace, though the vendor with the largest reliable selection hasn't shown up lately.



Not shown is my 50 cent crape mourning veil. It didn't photograph as anything but a black blob. I haven't decided if I should sell it (it's probably worth slightly more than I paid for it, right?) or keep it for costume use. It's not like I'm going to run into another one any time soon.

I looked through my 1860s things to figure out what I will need to make for Fort Washita in December. I already have a wool dress but it is too long to be worn outdoors. I need a shorter plain dress for walking around, either wool or calico. If there isn't a large enough piece of wool in the stash I'll buy some calico for it. I don't have a single piece of calico large enough to make anything out of.

Other than that I need to put my flannel petticoat on a new waistband and reassemble the light blue silk dress. I've brought the silk out to work on. It's easy enough since it's already cut out and basted to lining, it just needs sewing together. I am going to make the skirt separate so that later I can make a sheer dress like this one:



For the fall I'll need something 18th century. The 1795 dress is cut out and is waiting to be put together. I have not had any interest whatsoever in working on it and am discouraged by a lack of suitable shoes. I think it may be better to set it aside for now and make a shortgown to go with a petticoat that is already finished. I have vaguely appropriate shoes if I wanted to dress for an earlier decade. The shortgown pattern I have is so simple I could whip it up in a couple of hours. Not the pinnacle of elegance by any means but it would be something to wear. Either that or I could make a printed cotton dress; that would take more time yet be interesting enough I might want to make it.

I'm working on an 18th century cap right now from the Kannick's Korner pattern. I cut it out of an old piece of sheer cotton organdy, in hopes it would be stiff enough to keep the shape of the cap rather than droop. The pieces are so small and so few that the work goes quickly even though it is all by hand, though my whipped gathers are not one of the great masterpieces of sewing.

I recently read the archaeological report on the homestead occupied by my relatives, the Edges, between 1905 and 1920. They were subsistence farmers who cleared the land themselves
in order to claim it. Mrs. Edge (the mother) and Mr. Edge's
mother both died during the time the homestead was occupied leaving only Mr. Edge, his little daughter and some hired farm
laborers. After 1920 it passed out of my family's ownership and into the hands of the US government. Eventually it became
part of Eglin AFB.

Portions of the site were dug up by the University of Florida
a few years ago. There has been no new development on the site
and when the archeologists came everything was just how it was
when the Edges cleared off.

Just how it was considering, of course, that according to family history they burned the house and farm outbuildings
down rather than let Uncle Sam have them. Most everything they
found in the 2nd house area was charred, burnt and/or melted,
not surprisingly. About the only thing left was a blackened
brick foundation. Their first house also had burned by
accident around 1910.

The refuse dumps yielded lots of interesting unburnt items,
including a broken china doll head and a large amount and
variety of patent medicine bottles. The doll is interesting
since it is probably the exact doll that my granny remembered
having as a little girl. She only ever had one china doll,
purchased by her father as a special gift from a traveling
salesman.

The further history of the occupants that I know of is that
the only child of the house (my great-grandmother) married in
1919 or 1920 at 15 years old to a Mr. Cutts, mostly to get
away from home. They didn't have their own homestead but were
share-croppers. They had a son in 1921 and a daughter in '22,
who later became my grandma. The son died of blood poisoning
as a toddler after a fall from his high chair. Certainly it
must have been a very hard life back then. I don't envy them.

I have a visiting cat now. He's named Wooster, as in Bertie. My parents have sold their farm to some (apparently desperate) people who had to move in Right Now, and the barn cats need temporary housing. This cat has eaten way too many cheeseburgers, let me tell you. He can't even jump. That's why he came here and not one of the other cats. I promised to put him on a diet. I tried to get a picture showing his weird feet. It looks like he has thumbs. I've always wondered what was up with that.



I also was able to get the stupid tree limb taken down this morning. I noticed that my magnolia has been blooming on the lower branches, so here's one of my pretty blooms.



I stll haven't finished all my to-do list yet. Mail this, mail that, there's no end. Meh.

And this is nothing like a nice walk in the countryside.

As mentioned before, I've been working for the Census out here in the middle of nowhere. This involves walking around in the heat a lot. I usually work Monday through Saturday and then mow the lawn and work on the house on Sunday. This does not leave me with a lot of free time or energy for amusement. At least it pays the bills. :)

I also have internet again now. I used to use the internet at my mother's office but it's been shut off for a long while while she moved everything over to a new place. The new set-up is much more convenient for my house as well, so I rather like it.

Anyhow, I've been working on the garden mostly in my free time. Two sides of the house now have proper landscaping instead of random weedy lawn growing straight up to the side of the house. I put in a small raised flower garden over the winter and now it looks pretty enough in a makeshift hippie garden sort of way.

The fig tree has just started to show the first crop of baby figs. I have peach trees too, but they've never been cared for and they hardly produce any fruit at all and that which they do make, well, I wouldn't eat it.

I have a phonograph now. This amuses me more than it should. I should really say I have "the" phonograph since it's been in my family for about ten years, it's not exactly a new acquisition. Someone left it at my house a few months ago after cleaning out a storage locker and having no clue what to do with it. That's ok. I'm happy to look after it. It's a portable model that folds up into what looks like a suitcase, very handy for parties I suppose.

I spent all day washing records and listening to swing music and ragtime music and jazz and music from WWI and I hardly even made a dent in the boxes and boxes of records.



The dish towel on the left? That's the volume control. I thought we were the only people who did such a silly thing until I went to buy new needles from the phonograph dealer at Canton this weekend. They had a dish towel rolled up in the trumpet of the one they had for sale!