Another branch of the family.

I have eighteen million cousins. Seventeen million of them are in Canada. That may or may not be an exaggeration, but that's how it seems sometimes. It's difficult to figure out exactly how we're related; sometimes I have to go back into the 1800s to find the ancestor we have in common.

Violet Pulver was my first cousin three times removed; she was born around 1915 and died relatively recently (that is, during my lifetime, because I remember it). Frances Collier was her grandmother. Frances and her husband, James, had two children: Myron and Marion. Myron is my great-great grandfather, and Marion was Violet's mother.

Marion, who was born Marion Hamblin, married Charles Herbert Pulver ... I believe. This is all off the top of my head. They got married when Marion became pregnant. Later they fudged the birthdate of their son, Fred (Violet's older brother), so that it wouldn't be obvious he was conceived out of wedlock. My grandfather's parents did the same thing; both of them found out later that they were actually a year older than they were told.

In any case, this is just a long way of saying that I now own Violet's old photo album, which shows her and her brother as children and includes some pictures of their parents and other relatives. I was struck by how many pictures of Fred and Violet included cats. They seemed to have liked them very much. Is it genetic?


People think that my family's nuts about cats, but we've never taken ours boating with us.


Then again my family doesn't really go boating. The woman in the picture above is not Violet, by the way; I'm not sure who she is. But that is a cat, and I like the picture very much.

Here's another picture I like - the house where Violet was born:


My favorite in the whole album, though, has to be the picture below. I fell in love with it the second I saw it. I didn't know why at first, and I still don't know exactly why, but I'd guess that it has something to do with the fact that the father appears to be in his working clothes, which is somewhat unusual for a picture of this time.


I'm guessing that this family is only related to me by marriage; the mother is Elbertine Pulver, perhaps a sister or other relative to Charles Herbert Pulver. The father is Henry B. Strever and the daughter is Ethel Marguerite Strever.

The Dress.

Yesterday my mom said to me, "I think I may have an old dress of my grandmother's somewhere."

I asked how old she thought it was, and she said, "I don't know, maybe 1940s."

Of course I wanted to see it, so she said she'd look for it. Today I did 250983 chores as a bribe to get her to hunt around in her closet. We found a lot of old stuff, and we also found the dress.


It was a favorite of my great-grandmother's (Ruth), and I can see why. It's really light and comfortable. It's quite obvious she wore it often; there are holes in it, and the back is nearly worn through.

I don't know what it is with me and old clothes. I mean, I know a lot of people like vintage clothes, because they like the look of a certain decade. For me it's something more, though - I like the idea of temporarily inhabiting another person's life, particularly someone from long ago - and of getting a feel of what it was like to live when they did. I can't actually step back into another decade, but I can wear the clothes. It's a scrap of an experience, a glimpse.

Of course, as soon as I stepped into my great-grandmother's dress, it became very evident that I am not my great-grandmother. She was quite a bit larger than I am. The Hamblins were tall and robust; Ruth was 5'8", and her parents were 5'11". She and my grandmother both married small men, and downsized the family significantly. I know "downsized" isn't really the right word, but I can't think of any other way to describe it.

In any case, the dress is large on me. It was knee-length on my great-grandmother. When I wear it, I am aware of who I really am: someone playing dress-up.


Still, I might adopt the dress as my own and wear it, if it weren't in such poor condition. It was made out of thin fabric to begin with; a few more years of use might cause it to fall apart. So back in the closet it goes.

As for the exact age of the dress, I can't say. My mother originally said it was from the forties, but when she saw it and remembered it she thought maybe it was from the fifties or sixties. She remembers my great-grandmother wearing it when she (my mom) was little (during the sixties). I can't guess because I'm not an expert in vintage clothing. I can recognize it's old from the fact that the hems are so generous; that's about it. There are no tags on it.

With that, here's a glimpse into the chaos that is my bedroom right now. Granted, it's only really chaotic on top of the dresser. The rest is not so bad.

I still can't figure out ...

... where the best place is to photograph myself in my room. A highly important issue, I know. Here I am yesterday in my room that is quickly turning into a real room, with decorations and such. There's still a lot of things to be sorted out, though.


This is just the type of person I am: I spent hours putting up all the silhouettes and pictures and such, but I don't particularly feel like cleaning out the dresser and putting all of my things in it. So boring. Plus, it already looks like my room - so what if half of my stuff is still downstairs?

But I will do it, of course ... bring up all the stuff. It needs me.

In other news, I've been looking at eBay daily for the last week or so, trying to find a good approximation of what my grandmother wore to the beach in the late forties/early fifties. I've actually found a couple of excellent matches, for a good price, so what do you think the problem is? That's right, they don't fit me. Apparently there were a lot of women walking around in bathing suits in the forties with 40 inch chests - and more power to them and all, but what about me? Why wasn't anyone thinking of a bathing suit for me fifty years before I was born? I mean, yes, it was fifty years before I was born ... but that's fifty years they could have spent making a bathing suit.

But yeah, whatever. Such is the dilemma faced by anyone who wants to buy vintage clothes: manufacturers never think of future-people. Maybe we should start thinking about future-people? I see a potentially huge market in manufacturing and marketing today's clothes as the vintage clothes for tomorrow's future-people. Anyone want to invest?

Old Stuff Quest #3: The Victrola

What on Earth is this strange box hanging out in my living room, typically covered by a tower of pillows?


It's shiny. Oh, and also, it has a turny-thing on the side. It must be ...

#3. The Victrola
Date of origin: 1915
Condition: Good

Check this thing out:



It's dusty, but otherwise I think it probably looks pretty much like it did on the day my great-great grandparents bought it. It's one of the items they brought with them from the farm. I know this because my mother always cautioned me about playing with it when I was little: "Be careful with that! It's old! It's from the farm!" In our family that's not a euphemism for anything; my great-great grandparents were farmers (as were all of their ancestors, pretty much). Their daughter, Ruth, was the first in the family to move off of the farm, and made her parents angry by marrying a Canadian immigrant with an eighth grade education who was seventeen years older than she was. They must have warmed up to him eventually, though, because they ended up moving off the farm in 1928 to move in with Ruth and her Canadian, and they brought the old Victrola and a bunch of other old crap with them.

Later, Ruth and the Canadian would have two children, one of whom was my grandmother and made her parents angry by marrying a Catholic Canadian. Because the women in my family enjoy going against their parents' wishes, and Canadians.

Anyway, that's the story of the Victrola, which has survived two world wars and my childhood. Seriously, though, I played with it a lot. One of Katie and my favorite things to do at my house was to play the Victrola for a while, then pretend that we were on the Titanic, and that we were blind orphans, and then we died in a fire. On the Titanic.

For more information about this particular type of Victrola, including the reason why it's not worth particularly much, go here. It's a really cool site that allowed me to date this Victrola to within a year of its manufacture using the model type (IX) and serial number.

My Room.

I like my new bedroom because ...

-It's bigger and has more windows than my old bedroom.
-It's decorated exactly the way I like, as opposed to exactly the way I like circa 2003 (yes they are vastly different).
-It has two little nooks, which I am using for knitting and for projects.
-It comes with its own bathroom. I have never had my own bathroom before. It's ... even less exciting than it sounds.
-It has all of my things in it.
-Miss Teto likes it.
-It's on the second floor of the house.
-It has a BIG bed! I've found that I'm like that kind of fish, you know, that kind of fish I can't remember the name of that will get as big as its habitat allows, but with beds, and instead of getting bigger in a bigger bed, I stretch out to fill up all the space. So, basically, I fit in a small bed, but in a big bed I take up just as much room. Is it a kind of fish or is it a snake? I always forget important things like that.
-It's miiiine.

Here are some details of my room that I haven't showed you yet (I think) -


Above the bookcase, which I have decorated with the intaglio print I made as my final project for the year, and the two bowls I made in high school for my parents (the big brown one on the left was for my dad for father's day; the white one on the right was for my mom for mother's day), a bowl that my ceramics teacher made and gave to me, and kittehs, of course. The kittehs are "vintage." By vintage I really mean that they have been lying around my house for 40+ years. I really should come up with a word to describe such "vintage" items. Maybe "shmintage" - a la Kathy Griffin's nickname for the non-televised Emmies ("Shmemmies?") I don't know. What do you think?

Anyway, here is my project nook:


It was my intention to keep it very plain, to allow for lots of clear space to mess up with everything I use while making projects. The table is another shmintage item, from my grandmother. It's a sewing table with collapsable legs and measurements imprinted on the surface so you can measure your sewing without a ruler.


And above is my knitting nook, currently populated by knitting supplies, the plants that survived sophomore year of college, my rabbit bookends, and a print by one of my favorite artists, Ashley G. of Kitty Genius. I believe it's called "Knitty, Knitty" and it is very, very appropriate (as you can tell).

Lastly, here is a picture of a sunset as seen through my bedroom window. This is the first room I've had that's allowed me to appreciate a good sunset. My original bedroom and my first dorm room faced East, and my second dorm room had a view that was blocked by shrubbery and other buildings.

Shaping up.

Today I drove, kind of for real. In case you hadn't heard, I am the only twenty-year-old in history not to have a driver's license. That may or may not be an exaggeration. Last Thursday I acquired my learner's permit, and now I can drive in circles. I can only do so when my mother takes me to a very remote place where my chances of destroying property and/or lives is slim. She was still on edge the whole time, though, because even in the middle of the wilderness with no other people around my powers of destruction are alive and terrible.

I estimate that I will be ready for driving on an actual road in about 2492409823 years. By then there will be no human beings, thus greatly reducing the number of people that I could possibly crash into. And yes, I will still be around, because I recently sold my soul to the Devil in exchange for the time it will take to allow me to learn how to drive, and no, I didn't think to ask for driving skills instead. That would be too easy.

This is the wilderness where we went. I drove around in a parking lot far, far away from where the trees are. But the trees were pretty, so on the way I out I took pictures of them:



Have you noticed that the New Frances Collier has New BIG Pictures? Do you like them?

Janet.

If my grandmother were my age today, she might have had a blog herself - maybe a fashion blog. I love looking through old photos to see her wonderful clothes. She was born in 1930, so she was able to enjoy some of the (arguably) best fashions of the twentieth century. And she was gorgeous. She still is, really.

Here's a photograph of my grandmother - Janet Waldie (later Bourque) - that I used in an intaglio print last semester. It's one of my favorites. She's on the right; on the left is a friend who I believe lived down the street [Update - my mother said she was their next-door neighbor and her name was Ruthie]. I think she was thirteen at the time.


Here she is a few years later, in 1949 (age 19). I love her coat and gloves in the picture on the left, and her pose in the picture on the right.




I love everything about that last picture: the bathing suit, the fish, the background, the sneakers ... I want the bathing suit so bad. [My mother says she remembers the bathing suit, and that it was green.]

This next picture is another one of my favorites. I adore the bandanas my grandmother and her friends are wearing. I'm pretty sure they are in someone's dorm, although I don't know whether this was at Parsons or the Business School at Albany - my grandmother attended both. Parson's only for a year, though, before she decided she didn't want to be a fashion designer.


One last one, outside in her coat. One trait of my grandmother's that I'm glad I didn't inherit: although she was slim, she always had cankles. They got worse and worse as she got older until she could no longer wear normal-sized shoes and socks.


I did inherit her fair skin and acne, small build, and tendency to worry too much. I can't really blame her, though - those problems are common to most of my family.

In case you're wondering - Janet is still alive, although she has Alzheimer's and is in a nursing home. She married my grandfather, Alan Bourque, shortly after the last of these pictures were taken (I believe the year was 1952). They had four children, of whom my mother is the second oldest. They built the house I live in now in 1960. In 1990, my family moved in and my grandmother lived on the second level of the house, and her bedroom was the one that I'm living in now. She lived with us for thirteen years before being moved to assisted living in 2003.

P.S. To see more of my old family pictures, visit my Flickr page.

New Look.

Frances Collier has a new look today! I don't know if any of you remembered (I sure didn't) but Frances Collier The Blog turned 1 year old on June 19. In honor of its birthday, I've created a fancy new header and tinkered with the layout a bit. The result is meant to be prettier than before. How do you like it?

The new header is made up entirely of authentic vintage materials from my family's enormous Warehouse O' Old Stuff. The "June 1883" illustration is from that year's Farmer's Almanac. The two little pictures beneath are pieces from Frances Collier's scrapbook, compiled in 1875. I felt the one on the right was particularly relevant given that Frances and her husband, James Hamblin, were farmers.

Just over the text in the header is a tintype of Frances with her son, Myron, around 1870 or so. I like it because of the way Myron's chubby baby leg fat bulges out of his booties. Also, because of Frances's hair. That hair is not kidding around.

I'm thinking of changing the header with every month. I'll replace the "June" picture with a "July" one, of course, and so on for every month, and when the seasons change, I'll switch the pictures around to fit the weather.

Anyway, that's up with the changes around here. If you have any suggestions about the layout and such, please tell me. As always, your comments are veddy welcome.

The quest begins.

Today I have decided to create a new regular feature for this blog: my Quest for the Oldest Things in My House - Old Stuff Quest for short. My family has a lot of antiques. I'd say about 99.999% of them are artifacts that have been passed down from previous generations in our family. The remaining percent are a few old things that I have bought, like my Hawk-Eye camera. As far as I know, none of the things we have are particularly valuable, money-wise. In sentimental terms, of course, they are priceless.

At this point, my best guess is that the oldest thing in our house is from about 1800; it's a tea set given to my great-great-great grandmother, Mary Jane Moore, as a wedding present in 1830. I'm not so interested in pinpointing exactly what the oldest thing is, though, as I am in exploring all the many old things we have, and their history. I'm going to number them to keep track of everything, and do my best to date them accurately.

Today I have two items from my mother's fireproof box. The first is very relevant to this blog.

#1. Frances Collier's Scrapbook
Date of origin: 1875
Condition: Good



This scrapbook was made by Frances Collier (my great-great-great grandmother) for my great-great grandfather, Myron Hamblin, in 1875. It was then passed down to Myron's daughter, my great-grandmother Ruth, who wrote the note that's tucked into the first page of the book.

The scrapbook consists of many, many pages of cut-outs from magazines - mostly comics and entertaining pictures, in color. Someday I'll get around to scanning all of them.

My mother says she has a feeling that Frances Collier spoiled Myron, her first-born child. Other fun facts about my great-great grandfather:

-He was a dairy farmer.
-He planted a tree in our backyard that still stands.
-In his older years, he worked as a bookkeeper for my great-grandfather Ernest (his son-in-law) but apparently he was lousy at it. Upon firing him, Ernest notoriously told Myron to "go and tend to your garden, old man." Rather awkward, considering that the two of them lived in the same house at the time.


#2. Daguerreotype of Myron Hamblin
Date of origin: c. 1840-1855
Condition: Excellent



If you are ever fortunate enough to come across a daguerreotype in this good of a condition, for a reasonable price, you must snatch it up. I command you. It's not that daguerreotypes are that valuable (although some can be, if the subject matter is unusual enough). It's just that they are exquisite. You will never find two daguerreotypes that are exactly the same. The craftsmanship that went into these things is unlike any other. If you are into photography, especially if you are into vintage photography, you really should get your hands on a daguerreotype, if only to look at it for a few minutes. They are amazing.

This daguerreotype is of my great-great-great-great grandfather Myron James Hamblin - the grandfather of the Myron Hamblin mentioned above. He lived from 1807 to 1897 and was a farmer in upstate New York.

His daguerreotype really is incredible. It looks like new. There are no scratches on it, and it's completely intact and in working order (it has a clasp that snaps shut). It's perhaps my favorite of my family's old things.

Here's a close-up (please excuse the reflection of my camera on the glass!):


If you're interested in finding out more about daguerreotypes, check out this site. To get your own, try eBay; you can get pretty nice ones there for a good price.

Love.

I love my new room that has all of my favorite pictures in it, and my knit chickens, and my yarn. I can't wait to show it to you; right now it's too dark to take good pictures. What you should know for now is that it has a knitting corner and a project corner complete with a sewing table (it has measurements imprinted into it - I'll show you a picture later).

Having a new room makes me want to look on eBay and Etsy for fun stuff to decorate it with, even though I rarely ever buy any of the things I look at and end up looking at clothes eventually. It's been a long time since I've done a "best of Etsy" post so I suppose I should do one now.


Vintage brown tapestry boots, Santoki Vintage, $55

These boots are INCREDIBLE. They're made out of tapestry!! I've never seen anything quite like them. I'd buy them if they were a bit less expensive - say, $30 or less. They're my size too.


1884 Antique anatomy ephemera, Stories Divinations, $32.50

Quite interesting - it's a fold-out so you can see all the different layers of the body. You may note that there are no reproductive organs, being that it's from 1884 (they were yet to be invented). Also, the liver looks a little ... strange. What the hell is it doing to the small intestine? I feel dirty just looking at it.


1930s/40s canning jar, Surrender Dorothy, $10.89

I love old jars! I wouldn't put any foodstuffs in them, though ... it's a known fact that everything made before 1975 had to have at least a 50% arsenic content, by law. Also, I wouldn't go about buying any of these things on Etsy. You can pick up 3509834 of these at a thrift store for $1 or so.


Apple a day dress, Thirteen Eighty-Five, price withheld because it's none of my mother's business how much I paid for it with my birthday money!!

Yeah, I bought it a couple of minutes ago, because it's the best thing ever. Just look at the print!

10.

I was tagged by my friend Alex to do this 10 things thing:

The terms of this award are as follows: A) first list 10 honest things about yourself - and make it interesting, even if you have to dig deep! B) pass the award on to 4 bloggers that you feel embody the spirit of the Honest Scrap.

Hokey dokey.


1. Flannery O'Connor considered her worst vice to be laziness. I could say the same thing. I am sometimes terrifyingly lazy. Yet I accomplish a lot for a lazy person.

2. When I was twelve, I wrote a novel called The Venus Pentacle and it was both terrible and glorious.

3. Last night I dreamt that I downloaded Ewan McGregor off of the internet and he materialized in my shower. That was great, but then things got complicated because Kiefer was in trouble in another universe and dammit if I don't help him out who will?

4. In middle school I had this thing in my backyard I called the Culture, which I invented with my friend Cedilla and maintained with both Cedilla and my friend Katie. It was basically the living space of an imaginary tribe of people, whose society was something like a cross between those of Stone Age Europe and Native American tribes in the Northeast in the pre-Columbian era. We constructed walls and a "kitchen" and "living room" that had tables made out of slabs of rocks and stuff, and we gathered a "harvest" of weeds and berries that we kept in a hole in the ground. We also made a pretty nice bow and arrow and a hammer. The best part, though, was what we did with the imaginary people - we kept killing them off, then allowing their populations to swell before killing them off again, usually by famine or the like. Sometimes they divided themselves into separate tribes, and sometimes certain tribes migrated away. It must have spanned hundreds of years in their time.

5. Yesterday, at the age of 20, I finally got a learner's permit. Hooray for the "better late than never" principle.

6. I wish I could cook. I also wish I was the least bit interested in learning how to cook.

7. I've always wanted to live in some other era or at least visit. I appreciate the modern medicine and computers and all of that, but I want to have a daguerreotype of myself so bad. I also like the clothes, the hairstyles, the furnishings, and the lovely open spaces of times past. I wish that the lot across the street from our house was still a tiny forest and not an ugly McMansion.

8. I am an anxious person and so is everyone else in my family, almost.

9. I'm a Universalist Quaker, and an agnostic.

10. I like you.


The end! Oh, wait, now I have to tag four people. I tag: Katie, Jordan, Alexis, and Ramona.

Frida.

Remember Flannery the chicken? This is her sister, Frida. She is quite a bit fatter than Flannery, due to the fact that I had more stuffing at my disposal this time. I got the stuffing - Polyfil to be precise - at Michael's, where I had never been before and is currently my vision of heaven.




I really should get pictures of the two chickens together. Right now they're sitting on the rocking chair in my new room and look very cute.

They were both made using the Knit Chickens pattern by Susan B. Anderson, available from Blue Sky Alpacas.

[UPDATE] So happy togetheeerrr ...

Hair Today.

[UPDATE] Thanks to the magic of Photobooth, I was able to get slightly better pictures of my hair. These were taken after a long day's work, and as you can see, the braids are still intact and actually on my head. Success.



Thanks to Strawberry Koi's tutorial, I was able to make my Heidi braids so much better today! They actually looked good at the top, and they didn't fall out halfway through the day! I was ecstatic.

Unfortunately, my ecstasy overwhelmed my sense of reason, causing me to take pictures of my braids in a dark room rather than one with light. I don't know why I did it. I guess I just like my parents' wallpaper. But whatever, here are the pictures.




You'll just have to take my word for it that they looked really, really good from the top, because I couldn't get a single good picture of it to show you.

Do you like Miss Teto in my parents' messy bed in that last picture? She always chooses the time right before I go to work to settle down somewhere and purr at me invitingly. I am tempted to crawl into bed with her and snuggle all day. But no, I have to work. Tetocats really do live the good life.

Picture wall.

I've always dreamed of having a lovely picture wall like those featured in the Sneak Peaks of Design Sponge. Well, look what I did yesterday!



It's a combination of old family photographs, old thrifted stuff, and new stuff. Here, let me show you some of my favorites:


[My grandparents on their wedding day]


[My mother, age 2 - she hates this one because she thinks she looks "fat"]


[Mother and baby portraits from the 1940s, which I got from a thrift store]

Also included, and which you can see if you enlarge the second picture, are (from left to right): a tiny painting done by one of my relatives, a greeting card of a sheep knitting its own wool, a small sand painting from Arizona, an embroidered picture made by one of my relatives, a little "love" picture my mom bought for me, and a photograph of my great-great-grandparents' farm, circa 1910.

Oh, and also, I hung up one of my favorite posters in my new bathroom!


I love decorating so very much.

Heidi braids.

I wore Heidi braids on my birthday yesterday. I first wore them a few weeks ago after being inspired by Wazz of Needled. Now I've found this great tutorial on how to create Heidi braids, via Fieldguided. The tutorial is from Strawberry Koi.

Here it is:



And here's my very awkward attempt to photograph the back of my head with the braids in it yesterday:


My neck looks weird, like there's an alien about to burst out of it or something, but you get the idea.