Category Archives: librarians

ALA and More

Posted on by

I left for the American Library Conference on June 21 and was in California until June 28. Although I have attended many many ALA conferences, this was the first time I attended as both a librarian and a writer. And the word of the day is Hectic!

I usually run from class to class. This time I missed a few offerings I would have liked to attend since I was signing books at a book store. On Saturday I signed at Mysteries to Die for in Thousand Oaks. On Sunday we drove to Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. Both of these shops are niche shops, catering to a specific clientele. Mysteries, obviously, but the Mysterious Galaxy also includes Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy.

The Following week I visited Book Carnival in Orange County. No talk this time, but I signed stock. And since I was invited to return next year when my new book comes out, I hope to speak there in the future. This shop specialized in Romantic Suspense as well as Mysteries.

From a librarian’s point of view, a clear indication of how these genres can overlap. From a writer’s perspective, a reminder of how much bookstores like these do to sell one’s books. They all feel under pressure, from the Big Box book stores and from Amazon. I really enjoyed speaking to the faithful who came to hear me and hope to be invited to do more.

On the closing day of the conference, I signed at the Macmillan booth. Since a lot of these people were fellow librarians, I know it took longer than it should have. I talked to everyone! By and large, A Simple Murder has garnered a lot of positive attention. I feel both lucky to have this experience and humbled by it.

 

Natural Dyes – onionskins

Posted on by

Before the invention of the synthetic dyes, people had to use natural dyes. As I’ve indicated in previous posts, that was not always positive. A poor growing season could mean a weak dye (besides the loss of the crop which was always an issue). There was no way to control the dye and achieve the exact same result every time.

Dyes like cochineal were expensive. And Madder, a dye plant a dyer could grow in the garden, can take 4 – 5 years to reach useability.

Another problem was colorfastness. Turmeric, for example, is a wonderful yellow dye. But, without mordanting, it fades to a muted yellow. In the post colonial period, when iron and copper pots were in use, the dyes were mordanted almost without consciousness. (Of course, food was cooked in copper and iron pots too. Yummy!)

Here is a way to use onionskins.

First, make an iron mordant by soaking rusty iron nails (stainless steel won’t work) in white vinegar. In 1 to 2 weeks, the vinegar will turn a rusty orange. Put in a stainless steel pot with enough water to cover and add fiber or fabric (cotton). Simmer gently for ten minutes and wash thoroughly to remove iron particles. Now you are ready to dye.

Wet the fiber and soak for at least an hour. Place onionskins (4 oz) either brown or red, in a pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for about 15 minutes until the skins are clear. Scoop out the onionskins and add fiber. Soak until desired color is reached. Red skins will give a bright yellow or yellowish green, and brown will give a rusty orange/gold.

Rinse thoroughly and hang to dry. Although mostly colorfast, you will notice it fades more rapidly than the synthetic dyes. However, it is not toxic at all.

More natural mordants and dyes to come.

 

A Heavy Drinking Age – Shakers and Spirits

Posted on by

Spirits, or distilled liquor, were consumed so enthusiastically during the 1790’s (and before and after) that tourists and important men alike began to decry the habit. The U. S. was a nation of drunkards. Even George Washington, a whiskey distiller himself, referred to the heavy drinking as the ruin of half the workman.

Where did we get into such a pickle? Well, part of it was cultural. Cotton Mather (he of Puritan fame) declared “Drink itself to be a creature of God.”

Water tended to be dangerous. It could be contaminated or just plain unappetizing. In Natchez water from the Mississippi River had to be set aside so the sediment could settle. (Yum!) Milk was unpasturized and if the cow ate jimson weed it was poisoness. Alcoholic beverages, and I include hard cider, were safe. Also, corn and rye could be transported from the western frontier (like Pittsbugh in 1793) to the east in the form of whiskey and sold for four or more times the price for the grain itself. And without much more cost in transportation.

In times where the food supply could be erratic. alcoholic beverages accounted for a significant proportion of the day’s calories. In the early days of the eighteenth centure, the favorite tipple was rum; sweet and alcoholic. But after the Revolution, it was declared unpatriotic and people switched to whiskey. Rum was made from molasses and while distilled in Maine and Massachusetts at first, began to be distilled in the West Indies. Whiskey, on the other hand, was All-American; the grain grown in the US and distilled here as well.

Everyone drank. Ben Franklin is quoted as saying If God wanted men to drink water He would not have given him an elbow to bend the wine glass. Toddlers were put to sleep with whiskey or given the sugary residue in the bottom of the glass. (This makes my hair stand on end!) But of course there was a double standard. Women were not to been seen intoxicated.

Some primary sources quote men like John Adams complaining about the length it took to get something built. One day’s work earned a man enough to stay drunk all week. So they worked one day out of seven.

As might be expected, early opposition to drink came from the Quakers, most particulary from Anthony Benezet who attacked slavery and rum at the same time. Quakers had already begun to practice restraint before him and by 1777 they were ordered to no longer sell distilled spirits nor to distill them. The Methodists saw drinking as a barrier to purifying the church and society so they joined the Quakers. The Shakers, as a splinter group, also practised retraint and drank mainly water (that they trusted). The Shakers were famous for their cider which went from ‘kind’ to hard’ very rapidly in an age before refrigeration.

The chorus against such heavy drinking began to grown, spurred by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia doctor who concentrated upon the health benefits of abstinence. Another doctor, a Dr. Thomas Calawalder, had identified rum as the cause of an illness called the Dry Gripes. The rum that was aged in lead casks caused lead poisoning. Interestingly enough, the doctors recommended drinking cider (which is still alcoholic) and beer (which is more complicated to make than you might think.

For more information, both depressing and fascinating, read “Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition” by W. J. Rorabaugh.

Dyeing, Batik and Otherwise

Posted on by

The two books I use most to achieve dyed effects or to dye several shades of the same color are Dyeing to Quilt by Joyce Mori and Cynthia Myerberg and Hand-Dyed Fabric Made Easy by Adrienne Buffington. Both of these teach you how to begin the dyeing process with the procion dyes. I especially enjoy dyeing six or eight tints of the same color for a quilt or dyeing white on white fabric. The white pattern doesn’t pick up the dye so you might have a deep orange piece with a white tracery shot through it.

Of course I had to keep moving on. I went into Batik, which is very fun. I use soy wax to make the designs. Traditionally paraffin and/or beeswax are used but I find soy, although it doesn’t easily give that wonderful crackle, is just so much easier to wash out of the fabric. Soy melts easily too. I have had good success painting on designs and using cookie cutters.

Silk scarf, overdyed in blue, pink and green

Cookie cutters are not the traditional tools, however. Tjants (pronounced chants) are long stylus pens with an opening that allow the hot wax to flow onto the fabric in a straight line. I admit I am not very good with these. Some of the people I’ve taught are much better. The traditional tool I love, though,  is the tjaps (pronounced chops). These are copper designs used for stamping the hot wax onto the fabric. Here is my favorite, dragonflies.

 

 

 

 

 

Copper dragonfly tjap.

I obtain all my supplies from Dharma Trading in California. Just a heads up – the tjaps are hard to come by. They do have shipments from time to time but you must order immediately.

Traveling to earn a living

Posted on by

Will Rees, the main character in my mystery “A Simple Murder”, is a traveling weaver, called factors. Like many professions then, weaving required an apprenticeship of about seven years. About nine spinners were required to keep a weaver in business. And looms were big, heavy and expensive.

Larger towns, like Williamsburg, had a resident professional weaver and cloth from overseas did come into the ports. Smaller towns might have a weaver who also farmed. The further away these towns were located, the less imported cloth the women had access to. This imported fabric was expensive too.

On the frontier, in the 1790’s this was on the western side of the Alleghenies, local weavers were necessary. One of the leading lights in the Whiskey Rebellion was William Findlay, a weaver. He became a legislator from the Pittsburgh area.

Besides the traveling weavers, other professions took to the roads. Some men made brooms. This was a craft the Shakers took on as well; they sold their wares which included brooms, whips, boxes and other items, from wagons. Tinkers, who not only sold pots and pans but mended them as well, were also a familiar sight.

In these agrarian times, the goal was to make enough money to buy a farm. Usually, once a man had a good farm, he settled, at least for most of the year.

Some of the accounts from the women married to such men speak poignantly of the loneliness and isolation.

More about dyes in Peru

Posted on by

I got to dyeing in a roundabout way. I am a lifelong quilter and I began dyeing my own fabrics to use in my quilts. From there, I expanded into dyeing: dyeing yards to use in weaving, batik dyeing and finally a curiosity about dyes themselves.

Except for Lima, which sits at sea level, Peru is a high country, sprawling across the Andes. Macchu Picchu, which is probably the most famous place in Peru, is above 8000 feet. But it is nothing compared to Cusco, which is about 11,000 feet. The land is arid and the ancient peoples including the Incans were brilliant at utilizing the scant water to irrigate their crops. Potatoes come from Peru and this country has several thousand varieties, although not all are edible.

Peru is a goldmine for anyone interested in dyeing. In previous blogs, I’ve talked about the cochineal beetle, which is native to Peru. Properly mordanted, the blood of these beetles creates a vivid red.Prickly Pear

 

Darker burgundy comes from another berry, green from the chilka leaf and shades of brown, black and white from the hair of the alpaca and the llama. ( The vicuna also provides wool of an extremely fine quality but this animal has never been domesticated. The Incans spent much time selectively breeding alpacas to obtain an extremely fine fleece but once their Empire ended that breeding program ended. In some of the museums in Peru examples of these old textiles can be viewed. )

Llama wool dyed with natural dyes

The weavers also use indigo for blue. Indigo is not native so it is more expensive.

 

 

 

 

 

Weaving on a backstrap loomIt is truly amazing to watch the weavers using the backstrap loom.

Looms, backstrap and otherwise

Posted on by

The European loom is a complicated and elegant piece of equipment, so perfectly designed that few modifications have been made to the essential design. The job of a loom is to keep the warp threads taut. And the threads must always have a cross.

With that said, there are a few different kinds of looms. A Jack loom has a rising shed, that is, sets of threads are lifted so the shuttle can pass underneath them. The ‘jack’ mechanism lifts the shed. The treadles, or what my husband calls the gas pedals, lift the sheds. Connecting different sheds to different treadles is one piece of making a pattern.

A counterbalance loom is usually limited to four shafts ( a jack loom can have more and of course the more sheds the more complicated a pattern). The sheds are raised and lowered equally to allow the shuttle to pass between them.

The countermarche loom includes features of both a jack and a counterbalance loom. This type of loom allows the shafts to operate independently, as on a jack, and the shed to open easily and symetrically as on a counterbalance. But the countermarche requires more time to tie up.

Other variations include rigid heddle, treadles operated by hand instead of foot, but they all utilize a mechanism for separating the threads for the shuttle.

The backstrap loom, hoever, uses the weaver herself to hold the warp taut. A strap goes around her back and a stick is used to separate the sheds or the threads which are separated into two bundles by the cross. A backstrap weaver memorizes her patterns and uses her hands to lift the individual threads for the bobbin. (The shuttle mentioned above contains the bobbin.) The heddles are not metal but string. Although this is considered a primitive form of loom, it still contains most of the pieces of the floor looms (heddles, bobbin, warp and weft, and of course the all important cross) it is still complicated. Since the patterns are memorized, weaving on one of these looms demands a great deal from the weaver.

Am I the only one who wonders how something like this was invented?

Albany< New York

Posted on by

I’ve lived in New York most of my life. During that time I’ve been to Albany more times than I can count. I did not know so many things about this city, the capital of New York State, until I began the research for my new book (tentatively titled Cradle to Grave).

Did you know:

In 1609 Henry Hudson went up the river (yes, the Hudson River) and paused at the headwaters not far from the current city to barter with the local tribes. That was just two years after the settlement at Jamestown, Va and eleven years before the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. This makes Albany once of the oldest continuously settled towns in the USA.

The Dutch (for this was Dutch territory then) set up a city that primarily relied upon trade, especially trade in Beaver pelts. The Dutch, unlike the English who came after them, were not farmers but merchants. The Dutch influence is still visible in some old building and in many of the names that still exist. (Blauvelt, the Bronx, Van Cortlandt and so on).

Some of the streets in Albany were in place by the 1700’s. The street currently called Broadway, was formerly Market Street and before that Handalaers Street. State Street was Jonkers (or Yonkers)  Street and Pearl Street was Pearl Street then too, although it has undergone several name changes in the intervening years. I was particularly interested in Jonkers Street; I grew up in Yonkers.

Also, Albany shared the position of NY capital with New York City and Kingston. I suppose the legislators got tired of traveling around the state because they made a law that the next location would be the permanent capital. Albany became that capital in 1797.

Also Albany, in its original county form, was huge. But other counties soon were carved from it, beginning with Schoharie County in 1796.  Who knew?

Living without a net; abandoned and orphaned children in the 1790’s

Posted on by

Orphanages are a recent phenomenon. Most children, if they had no parents, or their parents couldn’t care for them, were abandoned to the streets. Although there was high infant mortality, adults died in great numbers as well so there were many orphans. And, in some cases, the orphans had a living parent. Usually a mother who was too poor to care for herself, let alone children. When she went into the poorhouse, the children went with her – or into an orphanage.

The Charleston Orphan House was set up in 1790, one of the first, if not the first, in the United States. This orphanage took only white children but took almost all in Charleston. They seem relatively progressive: the children weren’t apprenticed out until 12 and they were taught to read and write.

Apprenticeship or indenture was a common method of dealing with parentless children. Usually no one would take them younger than 6 or 7 because they were too young to work. After wards, they were expected to work like adults. To a modern sensibility, the possibilities for exploitation seem limitless and frightening.

What happened to the younger children? If they were still nursing, they went to a wet nurse. There was no substitute for breast milk and wet nursing was one of the few ‘careers’ for women. Foundlings were frequently sent to a wet nurse, some of whom kept the child until five or six. One wonders what it felt like for a child to have been nursed by a woman, only to be sent away. These abandonment issues probably never disappeared.

Modern studies have shown how important development is during these early month. A recent study on the Romanian orphanages detail quite vividly the effects of institutionalized living with no parenting or affection. The rates of autism, alcoholism and other damage are extremely high. But, in the late eighteenth century, simply providing enough food to children was a challenge. Disease was prevalent. In an orphange set up by the Royal College of Surgeons, 99.6% of the children died. 45 made it out alive.

I think of statistics like this when I see the safety net in this very wealthy country of ours being shredded and presidential candidates suggesting children be put to work. Certainly I am not opposed to chores, kids need to learn to take care of themselves and their surroundings, but do we really want to return to a time when little children had to work like adults so the wealthy could enjoy their privileged lifestyle. Ultimately, we will all have to decide: what kind of country do we want?

Orphans and the Shakers

Posted on by

Since the Shakers were celibate and did not reproduce themselves, they relied upon converts to increase membership. They also took in orphans or semi-orphans.

In a time when there was no safety net, no foster care, no food stamps, the injury or death of the man of the family was a catastrophe. No unemployment or workman’s comp either. Women had few options for work outside the home (wet nurse was one!) and when they did work they made far less than a man. Add in the prevalence of disease and there was a frightening number of orphans.

Semi-orphans, what was that? Well, if a single father or more often a single mother couldn’t support her children she had a few options. Depositing them on the Shakers’ doorstep was one. Indenturing them out if they were old enough (and children as young as six were indentured) was another. Babies couldn’t be indentured unless a premium was paid to the employer for the extra care. Orphanages? The first and for many years the only was set up in Charleston, SC in 1793. Black orphans were not welcomed. However, they did not apprentice children out before they were twelve which, for those days, was enlightened. Although these were children they were still worked hard and as susceptible to accidents and death as an adult. One account describes a thirteen year old boy apprenticed to a ship maker. A load of lumber fell upon him, killing him. They found a series of strange bruises on his leg, bruises from marbles. He was still a child who tried to play. Sometimes the employers were called up before the town fathers for excessive cruelty to their indentured servants but not often. Many of the children perished.

And where did you go if you couldn’t suppor yourself? The workhouse. The descriptions in Dickens’s novels, although they take place at a later time, are unfortunately all too accurate.  Sometimes, if a woman remarried, she would be able to recover her children.

So the lot of poor children was dire, for orphans and semi-orphans it was almost a death sentence. And babies were especially at risk. They are so vulnerable and if they were nursing especially so. In those days there really was no good alternative to mother’s milk. Many women survived by wet nursing infants. Some managed to nurse both their own and the others. Some wealthy woman put out an infant to nurse if they were ill or if their husband wanted a male heir. Since nursing confers some contraceptive effect they handed off an infant girl to a wet nurse so they could conceive again. What happened to the infants of the wet nurse. Many or the wealthy women did not want to have the child in their household or to share. Some of the wet nurses sneaked off to feed their child. Another option is to hire a cheaper wet nurse. There are many accounts of women who did so and while they were nursing another child their own died.

So the Shakers were by far the best and safest alternative for orphans. The fact that they educated these children, not only in all the skills they would need to live in the agrarian world, but also to read and write is amazing. They truly lived by their altruistic beliefs.