Eerie Ogden

Have I mentioned that I live in the coolest town!?

I live in THE COOLEST TOWN!! 

Picture via Eerie Ogden Tribune Facebook

A writer friend of mine, Randi, has started a quarterly newspaper for kids called the Eerie Ogden Tribune.

This isn't your ordinary newspaper for kids, Oh No! This is a paper filled with stories about mermaids, ghosts, witches and other supernatural creatures.

The best part is that all the settings are local!! That's right, the stories are set here in Ogden and the surrounding areas of Northern Utah!!

HOW COOL IS THAT!!??!!

Now, this paper is totally grassroots and needs help. Please, please, please go to their Kickstarter and give a little if you can! Any help is appreciated!!

Pictures via Eerie Ogden Facebook

Here is an adorable Word from Barnabas Wolfbeard! (For some reason I couldn't put the video on here. Just go to the link. It's totally cute!)

You can also find out more information on their Facebook page. While you're there be sure to enter one of the many contests going on! I won this awesome mug! They just gave away some werewolf ears! Seriously, this is so cool!!

Respect for the Past, Part 2

Corsets.

They bring to mind medieval torture devices and extra super tiny waists. Pain and female repression. You might have even seen old X-rays of deformed ribs and squashed lungs.

Picture from French doctor Ludovic O’Followell’s Le Corset (1908)

I'm here to tell you that corsets are actually completely awesome.

Completely.

First of all, let's just get the wasp waist look out of your head. That look only came into vogue late in the Victorian Era and it didn't last very long. It was also a more extreme trend that not everyone participated in. Just like not every woman today wears stilletto nails, not every woman went in for the teeny tiny corsets.

For most of the centuries that women wore corsets and stays they were meant to support a woman's natural assets and make her dresses fit better.

Picture from www.MetMuseum.org

There were many variations of corsets over those many centuries, but I'm going to talk about the mid 1800's since that's the time that I have experience in.

Let's begin with children. Yes, children wore corsets. Sort of. 

Mid Victorian babies wore dresses. Even the boys. One thing we know about babies is that they have diapers. Diapers are messy. Victorians didn't have disposable or plastic diapers, so they dressed their babies in a lot of layers. The diaper layer, then a wool "soaker" to keep some of the wet in, then lots and lots of petticoats. You see, if you have lots of petticoats they'll absorb any leakage before it can get to the outer dress, or leak all over Mom.

If you're picturing all these petticoats you can probably imagine that there would be a lot of bulk. A baby or toddler doesn't have a defined waist to hold up all these petticoats. Instead they would wear stays that had buttons at the waist. The petticoats would have button holes in their waist bands and they'd button together. The stays were usually more like little vests than the corset that a grown woman would wear. There were no bones and there would be straps to go over the shoulders.

As a child grew up their stays would change. Boys would be "breeched", that means they'd start wearing pants, and stop wearing petticoats. Girls would keep similar stays until they were nearing puberty. That's when their stays would start to resemble corsets.

As a girl started to develop a figure she would need more supportive stays. The first way to add support would be to add quilting. Wool would be added thinly between the two layers and quilted nicely.

As the girl grew out of the quilting she might add firmer support with straw, this was also a popular support in the 1700s.

Once she was ready for a full corset, she'd upgrade to whale baleen. Not bone, baleen.

Of course there were different styles for corsets over the years, but during the 1850s and 1860s the idea shape was for a girl to have a torso like an inverted triangle and bell like skirts.

That's where the hoops came in! Hoops weren't patented until the late 1850s, before then women wore corded petticoats. These were petticoats with row after row of cording sewn in to help them stand out. Then the beautiful steel hoops came around and women were able to achieve the glorious wide skirts of their dreams.

As you can probably imagine, these corded petticoats and steel hoops were not light weight. Add the yards and yards of fabric required for a proper bell skirt and we're talking pounds of weight.

Trying to wear that much weight only supported by your hip bones would really be a pain. Literally. A pain in your back.

That's what's so great about a corset! All that weight gets distributed up and down the torso, allowing much more comfort. I know this one from first hand experience. I thought I could get away with wearing all those petticoats without a corset... It was not pretty.

A corset also kept the line of a lady's bodice nice. No unsightly bumps or terrible "muffin top"!

As for the comfort of a corset, I was pleasantly surprised. A good fitting corset is kind of like wearing a long sports bra. I bought my corset from Treadle Treasures on Etsy. It's a "working" corset, which means that it has a hook and eye closure on the front instead of a metal busk. This allows for a little more movement at my waist.

The only hindrance about a corset is that I can't drink any soda. Fizzy drinks that make one even slightly bloated lead to a lot of discomfort. It's also hard to eat a large meal. Smaller meals and snacks are all that I could do, I felt full very quickly. I've been told that smaller meals are healthier, so maybe this is a benefit!

My corset is so comfortable that I've actually put it on to do housework. Didn't really work well for bending down, but doing dishes was great! Wearing a corset to do my daily work really gave me more respect for my fore-mothers. They really did know what they were doing. Far from being some kind of torture device, it really was a support. I can see how women would rebel against the late Victorian wasp-waist styles, but the corset itself had a long life and in my opinion it lasted so long because it had a real value.

Respect For the Past, Part 1

I am a History Geek. As George Santayana so famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I love seeing the patterns emerge when I look back at the big picture.

I love trying to put myself in the shoes of those who lived before me. I like to try and see both sides of a story. I love the gossip and the intrigue, who needs modern soap operas when I can read about King Henry VIII and his wives or Marie Antoinette and her jewels?

Curiosity is a constant state of being for me. I always want to learn more. Who did that? Why did they do this? Where did they live? What was that like? How would my life compare?

One of the stops on my journey of History Geekdom was spending some time as a Civil War Civilian and a volunteer at a Living History farm set in 1858.

Now when it came to living history and teaching it, I am very serious. I do a lot of research. Hours and hours of reading about what people during that time wore, what they ate, how they lived, how they played, how they worked. I looked at thousands of pictures and joined many sites to learn from other people.

I researched for three months before I even started sewing my dress. I sewed all my own underclothes, only using appropriate materials and techniques. I did purchase a corset, because sewing one was too far out of my comfort zone. I also bought a hoop skirt because the cost and skill to make one was also out of my league. The hoop wasn't authentic since it was made out of plastic instead of steel, but otherwise my outfit was very, very close to what a working class woman would have worn in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

I learned a lot, not just by doing the research, but by actually wearing the clothes and going about daily tasks.

I'm going to do a series of posts about all the things I learned, this is only the beginning.

First of all, I think there is an attitude that people back then were somehow dumber than we are now. I really disagree with that. We have it easier now, that doesn't make us smarter. We rely so much on our modern conveniences, we don't know how to live without them.

Take the way we dress. So much of what we wear is made from synthetic materials because it's cheaper and that's what they style is. The thing about cheap synthetics is that they will hold in heat and moisture. When it's a hot and muggy day you want air circulation. Natural materials will give you that. Hoop skirts actually kind of give the wearer their own little climate zone. A few shakes of your skirts and you get quite a nice breeze in your nether regions!

We also tend to wear less clothing in the heat, this makes sense to us. The hotter it gets the shorter our shorts get. Well, I learned that covering up your skin with loose, breathable natural materials is actually cooler than wearing less.

Covering up also gave me sun protection. Wearing a hat, gloves, and long sleeves might seem like it would make me roast alive, but in reality the sun wasn't touching a bit of my skin. I felt so much cooler when my natural sweat was wicked away to evaporate instead of puddling. The only part of my body that wasn't covered was my face, and I spent all day in 90+ degree weather feeling warm, but not overheated.

As long as I stayed hydrated and in the shade I was really quite comfortable.

One more note on hoop skirts. They are fun!! It takes a little practice to get the hang of sitting, and split drawers really help when it comes to using the potty, but they are so much fun to wear and walk around in. I can't even properly put it into words! If you ever have the opportunity to wear a hoop, I highly recommend it!


Next time: Corsets

Macaroni, but not the kind with cheese.

I'm kind of a history geek. I know a bunch of random facts about things that happened way too long ago. Ask my friends, I bring up weird facts all the time. Luckily for me they're all kind of geeky in their own ways, so they tolerate this quirk of mine.

Recently I learned something new and it was one of those forehead-slapping, oh-my-goodness-so-THAT-is-what-it-means kind of moments.

If it shocked me, the History Nerd, then maybe it would be eye opening to you guys too!

Now, just about every American kid knows the song Yankee Doodle. How it is a song that the British made up to make fun of the American Colonists during the Revolutionary War, but the Colonists turned it around and made it kind of a theme song.

Yankee Doodle went to town,

A-riding on his pony.

He stuck a feather in his cap,

And called it Macaroni!

Well, I couldn't ever understand how sticking a feather in your cap could ever be mistaken for noodles. I even asked my teacher about it when we were taught the song. I was told that the British were saying that the Colonists were just that stupid. 

I was taught WRONG!!

How does this....

...Mean this?

IT DOESN'T!!

After doing a little research I found out that Macaroni was actually a fashion trend! 

Macaroni (which can also be spelled Maccaroni) was a mid-18th century fashion trend, mostly among men in the upper classes.

If you picture the men in the mid-1700s with the huge powdered wigs, wearing tons of make-up, fake beauty marks, and talking with an effeminate air. That is Macaroni. 

If you've seen Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, the man who does the wigs for Marie Antoinette is a really good example of a Macaroni. 

That is the best picture I could find online. The Macaroni is the guy on the right with the pointy looking hair. If you compare him to the rest of the male cast you can really see how odd he looks. The movie uses it brilliantly for comedic effect. 

Here's a historical caricature. Regular guy on the right, Macaroni on the left. 

The Macaroni was the precursor to the Dandy of the 1800s. Somebody, usually male, who took a great interest in fashion and tended to really go overboard with trends. 

What the British were trying to convey in the song was that the Colonists were so stupid that they thought a simple feather was enough adornment to be the same as the overblown Macaroni. 

In today's society we have lots of different ways of dressing: Skaters, Hipsters, Preppies, Yuppies, Metrosexuals, People of WalMart...

In the middle of the 1700s you didn't have this many choices. Your style of dress was determined by your status or class in society. So these upper class weird Macaroni were really a sight to behold. (Kind of like when really rich ladies get really bad plastic surgery.)

In summation, translating it into todays language, Yankee Doodle might go something like this:

Dumb American went to town,

A-riding in his Mazda.

Sagged his pants below his butt,

And called himself a gangsta'!