I dug into the family genealogy a few months ago, and I’ve been trying to do research since. Unfortunately I’m having a hard time finding information, so I’m throwing this out there in case someone comes across this post and can help. My father’s side of the family is Romany. Read more…
The Cotton Club Museum invited the Gainesville Handweavers Guild back for this year’s Florida Emancipation Day (May 20th) celebration. It was held on May 18th this year, because that was the closest Saturday. Originally I thought I’d be giving a short lecture, like I did last year. That one was Read more…
As I think I’ve mentioned before, I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books as a child. I first read them when I was five, and reread them frequently until I was around nine. My paternal grandmother even made me a rag doll like Charlotte, Laura’s doll. I Read more…
I’m doing a talk today for my Historical Textiles group, and I wanted to assemble some pictures and info about spinning wheels from different time periods…. The first European spinning wheel was the walking wheel. It was hand-operated, and the yarn went onto a pointy spindle. When the Sleeping Beauty 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…
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…
I never had good luck with audiobooks. As someone who mostly reads nonfiction, I find that audiobook readers often have no idea how to handle it. It often sounds like the high school P.E. teacher trying to teach algebra — like they don’t know the material, and don’t really care Read more…