A British pen pal of mine is heavily into cryptography (and even studied it in uni). There was a big event at Bletchley Park, the place where the German Enigma machine’s code was broken during WWII. There’s a museum there now, and a couple of weeks ago they had a […]
On Saturday, Nov. 1st, I went to the Northeast Handspinners Association‘s yearly event. (They do an Open House on odd years, and a weekend-long event on even years.) The group changes venue every year, as they comprise spinners from New England and New York state. This year it was in Read more
On October 29th, 2025, I’ll be giving a talk over Zoom about the history of fiber arts in the occult. I had researched the subject for a friend’s podcast a few years ago that never got recorded, and I’m going to dig deeper for my talk. My audience is the Read more
I dug into the family genealogy a few months ago, and I’ve been trying to do research since. Unfortunately I’m having a hard time finding information, so I’m throwing this out there in case someone comes across this post and can help. My father’s side of the family is Romany. Read more
The Cotton Club Museum invited the Gainesville Handweavers Guild back for this year’s Florida Emancipation Day (May 20th) celebration. It was held on May 18th this year, because that was the closest Saturday. Originally I thought I’d be giving a short lecture, like I did last year. That one was Read more
As I think I’ve mentioned before, I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books as a child. I first read them when I was five, and reread them frequently until I was around nine. My paternal grandmother even made me a rag doll like Charlotte, Laura’s doll. I Read more
I’m doing a talk today for my Historical Textiles group, and I wanted to assemble some pictures and info about spinning wheels from different time periods…. The first European spinning wheel was the walking wheel. It was hand-operated, and the yarn went onto a pointy spindle. When the Sleeping Beauty Read more
I’m tangentially involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), which does medieval stuff (through 1600AD). I want to get into Arts & Sciences (ArtSci) competitions, where people make things the way they would have been made back in Ye Olden Times. You document each step of the process, saying Read more
I was asked a couple of weeks ago to give a short talk at the Cotton Club Museum as part of a demo the Gainesville Handweavers Guild did on Florida Emancipation Day (May 20th). I donated a copy of the Mary Madison book Plantation Weavers Remember: An Oral History, which Read more
The medical history podcast Sawbones, which I’ve been listening to for like a decade now, recently had an episode about when tomatoes were the trendy superfood (back in the mid-1800s). Before then, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous. The man who popularized them was a guy named John Cook Bennett, Read more