Keeping up Appearances

Frequent visitors to this blog will notice that we have gotten a bit of a facelift -- a few items in the sidebar have moved around, and we've gotten a new header. I liked the old one, but the Internet, in its infinite wisdom, seems to have misplaced it, so I spent a bit of time this morning making a new one. I have to say, I think it's an improvement on the old.

This sudden disappearance of my banner (and the rather un-sudden way in which I discovered it was missing) has reminded me that I need to devote a little more time to this blog. The last post was nearly two months ago, and it was, very helpfully, a cry for help.

Let me update you all -- I am fine now. After the kind words of many friends, I was reminded that I do have a place in this world and that it is a fine and noble one, and that it is perfectly acceptable to be unsure about one's path in life.

I still don't know what I want to do for grad school -- it still seems like an awful lot of money with very scant promise of a better job at the end of the road. So I have devoted myself to other projects.  Yesterday, for instance, being one of my first days off in a long while, I began a sewing project that I purchased the materials for in November -- a walking skirt for one of my living history museums. Five hours later, my pile of fabric now resembles a small tent-like skirt. I've begun following a lot of historical costuming blogs, which you can see on the sidebar towards the bottom.

I have also started planning my staycation. In August, two of my good friends from college are coming into town and I, as the only 'local' of the group, have been asked to give a walking tour of the downtown on one of the days they will be staying here. Since I love my city and its history, my next trip to the library will be for books so I can continue researching into giving a brief but interesting view of Chicago's history and architecture, two things I love. It will be a much needed break and an opportunity to catch up with some folks that I haven't had a decent conversation with in over a year.

Since starting my sewing project yesterday (and finding it a little less difficult that originally imagined) I have also been thinking a lot about a project that's been on my mind for a little while now. Next year, my college is  celebrating it's 100th anniversary. Since 1913, they have been educating young women like myself and training them for all kinds of professions, and let me tell you, the life of college women has changed a great deal since then. (For instance, women now outnumber men at colleges across the country, which would have been hard for the class of 1913 to believe.)

So many of the costuming blogs I've been following talk about different reasons for making these clothes -- attending new events, coming up with new stories, or sometimes simply just for the fun of it. As a living historian (or at least someone interested in living history) I think it would be enlightening to attend the centennial next year in the same type of clothes that a girl coming to college in central Minnesota would have worn in 1913, and talk -- to goodness knows who -- about the student experience  in those very early years. I know that one of our history professors will be publishing a history of the school that I am very anxious to read, but so often the material experience of the past is what really gets people hooked in. How would my school experience have changed if I had to go to class in the sweltering heat of Minnesota late summer if I had to be dressed like these young ladies?

Curse the college website for not having more pictures from the early 1910s. Well, I have to email the archivist anyway. So it is onward and upward for me, and hopefully, for all of you as well!