Love, Jim

I love you always my darling.

Taken while on leave
Jan, 2, 1957
night I left

puffed sleeves

Those are some puffy sleeves. All I know about this photo is that it was taken in San Francisco.

This, of course, makes me think of Anne of Green Gables. When Matthew buys her a dress with puffed sleeves. The thing she has been dreaming of having, but sensible Marrilla is dead against.

Anne: Marrilla, look at the puffs!"
Marilla: They're ridiculous, you'll have to turn sideways to get in the doors

storytime

Last week, I was driving home from buying yet more postcards and ephemera. When I got in the car there was a story already in progress on NPR about a man who found a bunch of old letters by the side of the road and the journey it took him on. I sat in front of a thrift store for 20 minutes listening to the rest of the story. If you missed it, I thought you might like to hear it. A good thing to listen to on a grey spring day. Have a good weekend.

sitting for a picture

About a month ago I watched the PBS show 1900 House. This is one of those shows where people go live in a house that is designed exactly as it would have been in a certain period and they have to eat and dress and live their lives as people did at that time. I love those kinds of shows.

In 1900 House they had one scene where Dad took the family out to the garden to pose for some pictures. He used a large camera with glass plates and developed them at home, I believe. I wish there was a video of that scene because it was very interesting. Seeing him set the camera up and do all the stuff he had to do and then watching them sit still for 5 seconds while he snapped the image was enlightening. It made me view the many black and white images I have from that time period with a little more color. It became a little more real to me.

About a day or two after I saw that show I came across these glass plate negatives. It was a nice moment to have it all come together in a way.

when girls and flowers shared names

The photograph on the left:

Pansy Miley Lawrence, aged 16 years 5 months. To Katie. Pansy Lawrence ----- Galesburg, Ill

The photograph on the right:

from Daisy. J.E.M.

I love the old trend of naming girls after flowers. I am sure many people have taken it up again in the last ten years. I met a woman once named Columbine. Unfortunately, I think less people would associate that with the flower nowadays.

Some other popular flower/plant names form the past: Magnolia, Violet, Fern, Ivy, Olive, Begonia, Blossom, Flora, Gardenia, Forsythia, Hyacinth, Lily, Jasmine, Marigold, Petunia, Poppy, Petula, Rose.

Are there any you have to add?

Although men are seldom named after flowers and plants, I have always liked the name Garland for a man, although it is rather flowery. There was a commercial on TV years and years ago with two old men. Their names were Gilbert and Garland and I have always been so fond of those names.

pretty things

Hello all. I finally got a chance to get some of the new Victorian Die Cut Scrap that I got for the shop listed on Etsy. Here are some new items. Hope you all had a great weekend. (P.S. There are more to come)

Etsy Buy Handmade thecedarchest

scrapbooks

I am currently reading a really interesting book called Scrapbooks: An American History. As, I am sure you can guess, it is a history of scrapbooks in America and it includes so many different kinds of scrapbooks. The photos are great and I really am enjoying learning about the history of scrapbooks.

I don't do scrapbooks like people do them today. I actually am not much of a fan of the style of scrapbooking that is so popular now, but I do like the idea of saving souvenirs and pretty paper things that you like and pasting them in a book with words and memories. I save the stuff. I just don't ever seem to get to the pasting down and arranging part.

But, since my interest in Victorian scrap and ephemera has recently been re-energized, I have been thinking more about the scrapbooks that they kept back then.

I love that the the scraps were collected just because they were pretty. Recently I came across some Victorian Scraps that had been pasted in someones scrapbook. They were images carefully cut out of boxes for products and maybe advertising cards.




I love the idea that someone appreciated the art in advertising and liked it enough to take the time to cut it out and paste it in a book. According to this book I am reading, many of the scrapbooks that had these kinds of items in it were mostly only these kinds of items.

There is a great illustration of a Victorian scrapbook using these kind of scraps in the book, but I cannot get it copy well. But, you get the idea. This is from around the 1880's.


From the book Scrapbooks by Jessica Helfand

Nineteenth-century scrapbooks, like this one made by Virginia native Annie Grace Clarke in the late 1880s or 90s, [see below] were a virtual ode to chromolithography, consisting of pages that basically celebrated the colored scrap. Annie's album contains trade cards, token of affection cards, chromolithographs and embossed prints, and exemplifies the Victorian propensity to create decorative, non-narrative pages. Compared to their predecessors — those staid volumes of black and white clippings, poems and prayers that dominated in the earlier part of the century — books like Annie’s are equally notable for their absence of writing. Many compositions like this one operate from a central image, around which an orbit of smaller images seems to radiate, like a quiet explosion on the page.


Some original die cut Victorian scrap I am getting organizing. Some will be listed in the shop soon:



You can view a lot of the scrapbook pages and read about them online, too, at The Daily Scrapbook.