Iowa: Clarinda and Red Oak

This weekend I took a short road trip with the G family over to Clarinda, IA. Clarinda is a small town where their claim to fame is that Glenn Miller was born there back in 1904. It's also where my Grandfather was born in 1917, into a good, Scots-Presbyterian family. Every spring Clarinda has a Glenn Miller Festival where the best Big Bands come and play. There's also a Glenn Miller museum, which costs $6 per person, so we skipped it.

The Nodaway Museum on the edge of Clarinda is really neat. Besides several rather decrepit outbuildings, it's two big museum buildings put together, and a basement besides, just full of Prairie history. There's a quilt room with racks of impressive antique quilts, and a genealogy center. Donations are requested, but there is no set entrance fee. The museum is staffed by elderly volunteers, who were so friendly that we could hardly leave!

It was sunny, 91F and amazingly humid, so our trip largely ended up being us sitting in the air-conditioned car, looking at the various small towns out the window. We spent a fair amount of time in the extremely agricultural and obscure town of Red Oak. Who knew that Red Oak, IA had so many amazing houses? We drove through street block after street block of gorgeous late-Victorian mansions. The Gs, always on the lookout for morbid haunted houses, loved it.

Summer Evenings

I'm house-sitting for one more week. I sew by day and drag myself out of the house at night.

Breeches, going out in the mail tomorrow. Eight hand-done buttonholes and it took me way too long.

This week I got invited to two Biblestudies. Monday was the charismatic Biblestudy, hallelujah, thank you Jesus! It was a small group of ladies, led by my Clothing Shed manager, reading through "The Bait of Satan." It was pretty basic, there was really nothing too shocking, and they all prayed for me that I would get a husband.

My current wholecloth quilt. It's pretty small.

Only once in a blue moon do I have a free Tuesday night, so this week with my free Tuesday night I went to a quilting group here in North Omaha. You know, when you take away the scary ethnically-diverse men with tattoos and chains, NorthO is really a lot of fun. The Golden Threads Quilting group meets at the Library every Tuesday evening, and they make quilts for people struggling with cancer. It was a fun bunch of older ladies(also ethnically diverse, but not scary) and some granddaughters.

Wednesday was the Young Adult Biblestudy. An older gentleman in my church has been telling me I should go for weeks now, so I figured I had to go at least once. I had preconceived notions of a group full of mid-twenties hipsters in skinny jeans and glasses. It turned out to be a more sportsy, tanned, and just out of college group. I hate to say it, but it was a little boring. When did my peers get so boring?

Yes, I'm a Woman

Last night(It was a dark and stormy night) I could hear the mice in the bedroom. Remember, there were no less than seven mouse-traps in that room, which I don't think I will ever be able to sleep in again. After I heard two traps go off I carefully went to look.

And there was a mouse sitting calmly there on the floor next to the trap.

 

Fort Atkinson SHP: This weekend is a Living History weekend, the first one I'll be able to make this year, and I'm looking forward to it.

I suppose the practical, level-headed thing to do would have been to grab something and smack the mouse. I do consider myself, generally, a calm, level-headed person; but one cannot be practical and level-headed ALL the time. I thought, well, they set off two traps; there's five left. Odds are against them. And sure enough, next morning's investigation showed two dead mice. Well, almost dead. One was in a sticky trap(no, I am not humane) and the other was just lying on the floor. Not sure what that's about since I didn't use poison; but as long as it's dead oh well.

It's all just so disgusting. Mice are creepy and dirty and gross and loud and NOCTURNAL and I certainly don't ever want to touch a live or a dead one! Am I being too dramatic? I don't think so. I'm still not sure what will happen to the bodies; I'm only here for another two weeks. How fast do they decompose, I wonder?

Of Mice and Women

I'm currently house-sitting for friends, just for two weeks this time. They've been fighting a resilient mouse population for some time, which battle I naively believed to be confined to the kitchen. Sunday night debunked that myth. The horde decided the bedroom was more interesting. The amount of scrabbling was enough to keep me awake until early morning when I gave up and moved to another room. Yes, I surrendered.

Picking Cherries in the rain last weekend. No, I did not climb the tree.

When the morning came around I(sleep-deprived and exhausted) went with vengeful thoughts and bought a hand-full of mousetraps. I set no less then seven traps in that bedroom, but didn't catch a thing. Now I'm wondering, where are they now?

Closing of the Clothing Shed

The weekend was a whirl with work, guests, grandparents, a wedding, work, guests, church, and more guests. Saturday was my last day at the Clothing Shed, so I'm currently jobless and should be looking for a new job much more seriously than I am. 

For lack of any other pictures to post, here's the coat again. It's coming along.

Speaking of jobs, I've applied at a nearby clothing store, code name "Plato," don't ask me why because it's already too obvious. Plato is very similar to Clothing Shed, and my manager knows that manager, and put in a good word for me. My interview is this week and I'm foolishly pinning my hopes on getting that job, because I'm lazy and don't want to fill out any more applications. Plato is, amazingly, even closer to home than Clothing Shed.

You will all be glad to know that I am feeling much better about my closets this week. I got bags full of pants-hangers from the closing of Clothing Shed, so I categorized all my skirts; which made me realize all my church skirts are black, and linen is a very large part of my wardrobe(no surprise there, linen is the best). And I even sold more costumes last week!

Etsying

The other night I was good and went to bed on time. But somehow my mind got on the topic of my closets, and how they needed to be cleaned out, and what specifically needed to be got rid of where, and on and on. It took me forever to get to sleep. So when I got up the next morning I immediately began cleaning out my closets. Besides normal things that go in closets like clothes, I have a costume closet full of totally random things which I had already decided needed to go. Random vintage kimono? I have that. Korean War greatcoat? I have that. Victorian bustle skirt? I have that. They don't get enough use, so they need to be sold, but it's very time consuming to find buyers for home-made, used costumes. I've sold some to the local historical Fort, and some to the local Costume shop; some on Etsy, and a few to friends.

Bustle skirt. It's for sale.

So in the course of my cleaning out, I posted two used costume items in a Yahoo group. Within a half hour I had sold them both. Within six hours a dozen other people had responded. My blog and Etsy spiked. The internet wasn't working. I panicked. In the end the original buyer purchased four items, and I gained potential future customers.

Romantic dress. It's for sale.

This is my last week working at the Clothing Shed. My manager was giving away some of the display mannikins to a local church, so I asked if I could have one too. Dress forms are great, but expensive, so I've never bought one; mannikins aren't adjustable, but still work for lots of things. Yesterday my manager gave me two mannikins, for free!

 Meet Florence and Petunia. They're shaped like Barbies and they like historical costumes.
And they were freeeeeeeeee!

Treadling Along

I finally got around to using my Great-Grandmother's treadle machine. Which she bought, used, back in 1911.

"I declare," said Ma, "I don't know how we ever got along without that sewing machine. It does the work so easily; tucking is no trouble at all. And such beautiful stitching. The best of seamstresses could not possibly equal it by hand."

-These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder

It probably took me about an hour to finally get to sewing an actual straight seam. One thing that threw me off was that I had to crank the wheel away from me to stitch forwards, which somehow just went against my instincts. To get an even tread I had to put one foot forward and one foot on the back of the treadle plate, and there was a bit of a trick to it. And wow, it is slow compared to motorized sewing machines. But when I was done, I reached over to turn the machine off..... and there was nothing there. And that's cool.