If you missed the first post about the antique JOS spinning wheel, please check it out. Today I met with a man I’ll call Dr. Wood, because he’s a retired professor who’s become a professional woodworker. He’s making me very happy. He’s fixing the broken footman for free, and I’ll Read more
Updated 10/18/23 to add trip details (at the bottom of the post) My mother, my oldest nephew, my nephew’s boyfriend, and I went to New Orleans for a long weekend. We left Florida on Friday, October 13th, and came back on Monday the 16th. I went on a tour of Read more
I was gifted an antique spinning wheel today. It was a family heirloom from the 1800s, and the giver was a woman in her seventies who wanted the wheel to go to someone who would use it. Thanks to some antique wheel enthusiasts, I was able to discover some information Read more
The other day I asked the Handweavers Guild of America on Facebook about queer/trans weavers they’ve had on their weekly Textiles and Tea program (broadcast live on Facebook every Tuesday at 4pm ET, then uploaded to their YouTube channel the week after). They were kind enough to reply with a Read more
I’m tangentially involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which does medieval stuff (through 1600AD). I want to get into Arts & Sciences (ArtSci) competitions, where people make things the way they would have been made back in Ye Olden Times. You document each step of the process, saying Read more
UPDATE: You can now buy my modified version on Etsy HERE. A few months ago I decided I wanted a warp-weighted loom (abbreviated WWL for the rest of this piece). I have no carpentry skills, though, so I wanted to buy one. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of options out Read more
I was asked a couple of weeks ago to give a short talk at the Cotton Club Museum as part of a demo the Gainesville Handweavers Guild did on Florida Emancipation Day (May 20th). I donated a copy of the Mary Madison book Plantation Weavers Remember: An Oral History, which Read more
The medical history podcast Sawbones, which I’ve been listening to for like a decade now, recently had an episode about when tomatoes were the trendy superfood (back in the mid-1800s). Before then, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous. The man who popularized them was a guy named John Cook Bennett, Read more
I gave a talk to my local handweavers’ guild a couple of days ago. Some people couldn’t attend, and some online friends wanted to see it. There’s no video, but I’ll share my notes and slides here. The History of Weaving Technology in Europe: A Ridiculously Brief Overview It took Read more
A friend of mine recommended a book to me by an author I’d never heard of: Florence King. My friend said King’s memoir, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, was one of the funniest things she’d ever read, and every time she loaned out a copy she replaced it so Read more