Centennial Dress Project -- The Fun Has Arrived!

One would think that graduating from college would give a person more time to do things like update their blog, but it has become apparent to me that real life takes it out of a body more than school life does. And two jobs does not time for dress projects leave. However, I think I can safely say that in three months (goodness me, three months!) I have made some pretty significant progress.

Item One:

I have purchased my patterns. (Huge hurdle to jump through).

From left to right, they are : Saundra Ros Altman's Past Patterns # 403 Simple Edwardian Waist, Reconstructing History's Peplum Skirt, and Sense and Sensibility's 1914 Afternoon Dress.

Item Two: 

I have purchased a large quantity of good muslin, and have made what amounts to one good muslin mock-up of my shirtwaist!

Historically correct garment in historically correct setting -- the Farmhouse.

This also involved setting my first sleeve, which I was VERY proud of, since it turned out lovely.  The second mock-up will be forthcoming in January when I actually have several days off.

Item Three:

My sewing table no longer has a hole in the middle where the original machine used to sit. It now has a lovely little door. Hip-hip-hooray for my father's carpentry skills!

Item Four:

I have met May.

Wait, you're asking yourselves, who on God's green earth is May and why is she so important that she gets bolded, italics, and underlines? Well, as I told you several months ago when I learned of May's existence, she's my new best friend  And I finally got a chance to meet her.

Not in person, unfortunately, although I would have liked that a lot. May died in 1993 at the ripe old age of 96 years old. I got to met her through her letters, now housed at the Saint Benedict's Monastery Archives -- three years of correspondence that she sent to her mother and freinds at home between 1912, when she enrolled in Saint Benedict's Academy for one year of high school, through 1915, when she graduated from Saint Benedict's College as part of its first college graduating class with a degree in Music.

Internet, meet May. May, meet the Internet. They'll love you just as much as I do, I promise.

 I got to read about her fears about being far away from home for the first time, about her despair that she would never be a good student (and then watch her grades climb to straight As by her last semester of college) and listen to her tell her mother about all her hijinks with the other girls in her class.

Saint Ben's in 1913 -- so cool we had our own postcards.

And oh boy, did those original Bennies get into some trouble sometimes. One of May's good friends, a girl named Denver McCloskey (Yes, I know, Denver! In 1912! I couldn't make this up! ) had "a kodak (sic)...and she's been taking pictures of different ones. Somehow the sisters always avoid having their picture taken." May goes into great detail about the various tricks the girls played trying to capture the nuns on film. She relates another hilarious story where, when a visiting dignitary was going to be shown the dormitories and one of her friends had stopped by to visit in her pajamas, the friend was shoved in the closet until the visit was over. She wrote home to tell her mother that she had bought her first piece of 'school swag', "One of the Saint Benedict's pillows. The colors are red and white," and, she adds with pride, "and I'm going to work it." ('Work it' as in, embroider over it even more, not 'work it' as in, show it off and be awesome with it. Although I'm sure she did that sometimes too. It may even be the pillow featured in this picture.)

She wrote about her freshman five (well, four and a half) with pride -- pride! -- when she wrote home to her mother after only a month at school and proudly declaimed that she was now 101 1/2 pounds. (At seventeen years old. Goodness me.)

To be quite brief, her letters were a wellspring of goodness and delight. I wished that I had known May -- I wished that I had gotten a chance to go to school with her. I wrote a poem memorializing my time spent abroad in Ireland to the great delight of the rest of the people on my trip. May did that, too, for all the girls in her graduating class. It was published in her yearbook. That was in her file, too. I might as well have been reading the letters of the 1912 equivalent of...well, of me.

This is part of the memorial poem. She donated this lovely type-written manuscript to the college and it contains a few really wonderful pieces.

But one of the absolute jewels of May's letters (and there are many) is her letter home to her mother in her senior year, in which she details a long list of items her mother will have to supply her money for. New music for the graduation recital, gloves, shoes, new stockings, new corset, photos for the year book, graduation announcements, calling cards -- a list I am sure Bennies graduating today would recognize in some form or another. Today's parents, however, will probably not recognize the price -- May asked her mother for a princely ten dollars to cover her expenses. I include a selection here where May details some of her finances to give you a better picture of the buying power of a dollar in 1915.

Of course, if you could send me a five dollar bill, I'll have enough to defray all my expenses there [in Saint Cloud.] I don't know how much things cost, but I suppose my slippers will come to about three dollars, my gloves to a dollar and a half, and my stockings to about the same as the gloves, and then as to a corset -- I suppose that will be two dollars. My last one cost that much, I think. There, you see, that comes to eight dollars already and I only have four dollars to my name...

And in the midst of all that, she took a solid page to tell her mother how she wanted her graduation dress to look. Riches!

...Yes, I got that dress that you cleaned for me. By the way, don't make my sleeves on my graduation dress too long. Perhaps three-quarter length sleeves would be better. I wanted long sleeves but they won't look good with long gloves. I want the sleeves to lay over the gloves at least three inches -- if you make short sleeves. You see I'll have to wear that dress at my recital and I want the sleeves to come to about 4 inches below my elbow so I won't have to wear sleevelets at my recital. 

So there we have it. Three quarter sleeves to lay over longer gloves and no sleevelets. The historical record has spoken.

I talked everyone's ear off about these letters after I got home from Minnesota. I couldn't quote them enough, reference them enough, rhapsodize about them enough. Now my parents think I should look into seeing what it takes to get letters published along with some sort of supplemental material for use in women's studies classes and the like. I think that would be a tremendously fun project.

But I still have to make a dress first.

Hello, Universe Speaking

I love and hate going back to college. I love seeing everyone and having things to read and discuss with people and sharing everything you did over your summer. I hate remembering what it feels like to be overwhelmed. Two days of class and already I have a whole novel to read, 6 articles to digest and three chapters in a textbook to prepare for discussion.

A note -- that's only for one class. It's my night class and only meets on Thursdays, but still. This is a little excessive.

But there's another thing I like about back to school -- there's a strange way the Universe seems to speak to you in the people it throws across your path. In the library, for instance, this transfer student came into the stacks where I was looking for a book and very nicely asked if I could help her find a book. Your lucky day, I said. You picked the one person out here right now who works here!

The Universe must also be trying to tell me something through my homework -- in three of my classes I've been asked to write what amounts to a short summary of my reading life. Since I've only finished with the one due today (and I rather like it) I'm going to share it here. I was given on the title as a prompt; it is called "Of Books, Reading, and Me: a Personal Essay."



When my family re-painted my room several summers ago, my parents asked me (in between moving out every single piece of furniture I owned and painting my walls Sherwood Green) if there was anything I needed to add to my room before moving back in. My answer was simple -- a bigger bookshelf. Two little shelves would suffice no longer. Already shelved two books deep, my book collection was growing and there was no place for it to go except the floor, an idea my mother wasn't particularly keen on. So in the new, taller bookshelf came, quickly filled and just as quickly crowded.


I might be a child of the digital age, but I still haven't given up on the analog version of my favorite pastime. New books are added to the shelves all the time, and with far more reward than watching space on a hard drive slowly fill with files. A full hard drive is annoying -- a full bookshelf is an accomplishment, a challenge, even. When I open a physical book, I'm opening up the culmination of four thousand years of human story-telling and -sharing technology. When I read, I owe that experience to all the people who made books possible, the men who spent hours cutting type forms and the women who slaved over paper presses and mills and the printer's children, somewhere in time, who had to put away all the size ten font in those tiny type trays, and I owe it to them to respect the house for the story.


Maybe setting a little bit of type myself has made me more aware of the physical presence of the book. After spending six hours filling three by three inch pages with my own words, and another ten hours printing them, I have a great deal more respect for men like Ben Franklin, who spent their days setting tiny pieces of type for ideas that weren't even their own. The physical presence of a book will make or break my experience of it -- Over the past summer I gave up on what was probably a very engaging story because the type was too small and too closely set for me to read it easily.


But not all my books are on my shelf, and not all my reading is done 'the old fashioned way.' Some of the short stories I read will never find themselves inside a codex, or even on the shiny screen of an e-reader. Some of the news stories or observations on life are not on the path to becoming 'blooks', or books from blogs. And I like it that way. Just as there's something magically permanent about holding a book, there's something wonderfully transitive about reading and sharing thoughts online. Unlike a book, which requires resources and much physical space and contact to manufacture and share, the internet has created a space where stories of all kinds can be shared spur-of-the-moment, without the boundaries imposed by printing off the material to be shared. I might enjoy reading analog, but I enjoy writing digital. My blog broadcasts my thoughts on reading to the whole internet-using world twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s immediate, boots-on-the-ground writing; I can be as elegant or as mindless as I chose. Without a publisher to please or a specific public to satisfy, the entire world is open to my critique.

I’m a child of the Twilight generation. Not just because of Stephanie Meyer’s breakout bestseller, but because people my age are at a crossroads, not quite in the light of the vanishing Day of the Printed book nor fully immersed in the e-reader illuminated Night yet. Wherever it is I stand on the debate between whether the print book is dead or still very much living, at the point where books, reading, and my life converge there’s a single objective in mind – sharing a story in whatever way seems best. Sometimes that’s a book and sometimes that’s the internet and sometimes it’s the oldest story-sharing method of all – the human voice. When I sit down to read to my sister, it doesn’t matter to her whether I’m reading from a computer screen or a printed page; her only concern is that the story being told is a good one.