Rosie

Last month, we visited the FDR house in Hyde Park. In our exit through the gift shop, the girl picked out a Rosie the Riveter t-shirt, and announced that she wanted to be Rosie for Halloween.

Because I know this girl, I know that her choice was about 40% "let's make mom happy with a feminist icon" and 60% "ooh, i get to buy hair product and screaming red lipstick". I totally went along with it because it was a pretty easy costume to pull off, and um, We Can Do It!

She had the jeans, a belt and the boots. We got a blue oxford cloth shirt at the consignment store - it should have been denim, but oxford cloth is what we found, and it's good enough for jazz. I got the red/white polka dot fabric at a quilt shop and fashioned it into a head schmatte, and we found an image of the collar pin on the web, printed it on photo paper, and hot glued it to a pin-back button. Ta da!

[The electric drill is not historically accurate. Also, it did not go to school with her.]

And then, as one does, I posted the pictures on Facebook and a friend of mine from high school left a comment:

I am smiling because I think your mom would have loved it. It is genius. And intelligent. And historical. And NOT a princess or a sleazy outfit. Post this to your blog. Please.

And so, because Anne asked, and because my mother would indeed have loved it, here's my 10 year old Rosie.

Fierce.

Class of '94....1894, that is.

I was perusing the archives of my alma mater, as one does, looking for an image that had been used in a presentation that I'd been to over the weekend. The speaker had said it was from the 1894 yearbook, and happily, all of the yearbooks exist as pdfs on the college library's web page. I love the intertubes.

That 1894 yearbook turned out to be 317 pages long what with covers and endpapers and advertisements, and it is completely wonderful in an unexpectedly whimsical way. Oh sure, there are pages and pages of lists of names, but there was a banjo club! Complete with banjeurines and a factotum! And two members named Florence. The whole yearbook delighted me, actually.

One page was given over to a ditty about bananas:

I found the image I was looking for:

There's a whole riff on the Declaration of Independence, rendering it applicable to a graduating class:

A Declaration of Dependence.

WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a class to dissolve the bonds which have connected them with college life, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and their own opinion of their learning and importance entitle them, a decent respect to their Alma Mater requires that they should declare the grief which moves them at the separation.

Prudence, indeed, would dictate (this have we learned line upon line, precept upon precept, from our foster mother) that conditions long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. But when a long train of courses and matriculations, pursuing invariably the same object, has fulfilled its design of reducing us under an absolute sense of our profound ignorance, there is its beneficent task ended, and it is our right, our duty to throw off such conditions and to provide new fields for our future activity. The history of the present Faculty in its relations with the Class of '94 is a history of continued kindness and of repeated benefits (sometimes, we confess, these blessings were so disguised that we failed to recognize them), having in direct object that knowledge of folly which is wisdom, and that mild and submissive disposition which is the crown of womanly character. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.

They have maintained, often against our will, laws the most wholesome, and the most necessary for the public good.

In every stage of our history we have petitioned in humble terms for that which seemed necessary and convenient for us; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated refusals. Thus has an overruling wisdom preserved us from error.

We, therefore, the representatives of the Class of '94, do, in the name of the class, solemnly publish and declare that this Class of '94 is not, and never can be, unmindful of these benefits; that nothing can absolve them from their allegiance to their Alma Mater; and that the affectionate connection between them and Wellesley College cannot now, or at any other time, be totally dissolved.

And near the beginning was this heart-stopping and ever true statement from Tennyson:

Just that, alone on a page. Wise words. Witty women. I'm so glad I stopped to read that 1894 yearbook.

What's Old Is New Again

In days of old, once upon a time, over the river and through the woods, an eon ago, you know, back when I was a kid, there was an Italian deli. It was on Main Street and it had sawdust on the floor. Its fragrant stock included wheels of Parmesan, tubs of olives and giardiniera, enormous wax covered provolone hanging from the ceiling, sturdy little cacciatorini, seeded semolina breads. Exotic but not, for it was the stuff of childhood. For cocktail party nibbles, my parents would buy cecis and favas - roasted salted chickpeas and fava beans - the cecis crumbly to the tooth, the favas requiring a good snap of your back jaw. The juxtaposition of textures chalky and smooth in that bowl of salted mixed not-nuts was what always kept you going back for more.

Recently, I got a pitch from a PR company touting roasted salted chickpeas as new "very unique" snack:

Health Conscious Friends Launch Perfect Crunchy Snack
Cooking "accident inspires new product, Chic-a-peas

I said, sure, send me a sample. But it wasn't until I tasted them that I realized that they really weren't anything new - they were a repackaging of the cecis of my childhood. That's not to say they aren't good - just not new.

Now what I need to do is find some favas to go with the cecis. And throw an old school cocktail party.

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Disclaimer: I didn't buy the Chic-a-peas, and I wasn't compensated for writing about them.

The Garment

It looks medieval. You look like a hippie. That garment could have been in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I love it! You made that?

My absolute favorite baby present - back almost 11 years ago - was a blanket made out of recycled felted wool sweaters. It's simple - six inch squares zig-zagged together, all shades of off white, dense and soft and subtle. It was made by Crispina, a woman who - back in the day - used to have a flourishing cottage industry making blankets out of sweaters. In recent years, though, she's scaled back the production and sales business, and now does workshops to teach other people how to repurpose clothing into other things. Because it was an itch I had to scratch, last spring I went to one of her all-day workshops, the sweater/sweatshirt chopshop. Crispina supplies everything you need, and by day's end, my garment was largely complete. It probably would have been finished that day had I not decided that it needed to be knee-length, but finally, after some more snipping and stitching, it's actually finished, six months later.

The schtick is that you cut up two sweatshirts so that you keep the neck/shoulders of one, and the shoulders/sleeves of another. Everything else flows from there. I cut the pieces for the "skirt" in a more-or-less trapezoid shape, so that when they were pieced together, they flared out a bit. The trim piece at the bottom is actually the bottom of two sweatshirts flipped upside down. It's all hand sewn, with six strand cotton embroidery thread, except for the hook & eye tape - that's too stiff to do by hand, so I took it to a costume shop and had them run a zigzag. I probably could have done that myself, except that my sewing machine is old and cranky. Besides, standing hip to hip at the worktable in the shop, figuring out the thread color and making sure the tape was pinned right, you get lines of dialogue like Let me just move that codpiece for you.

I'm so pleased with how it came out. And the funny thing is, people comment on it every time I wear it. Yeah, my 10 year old wishes I wouldn't leave the house in it, but everyone else loves it.