Another cop-out in a way but I thought people might find this interesting. See, I didn’t really like history in school. Even in college I was a slackass despite my art history minor - visual memory is a completely different thing for me. It wasn’t until I didn’t really have the pressure to memorize dates and names and had access to A&E and its spinoff channels that I really became interested in history. Probably the visual thing again.

Even though I was fascinated by women in history, art history in particular, it wasn’t until the late nineties that I started taking it fairly seriously. That’s when I started gathering information for a book about the women in American Art - African American Women Artists in particular. There is a ginormous pile of stuff I’ve gathered over the years. And essays I pick up and write on every once in a while. Scans and reproductions. And, as I’ve said before, a respectable private collection of books on the subject. Who knows if my little history book will ever be published but even if it never is I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time.

So far the only time I’ve ever been paid for my interest in history was when I worked for a website that recreated historical houses in (ready for this?) The Sims. Yeah. How nerdy can someone be to take such a popular video game and make it not just into building digital dollhouses, but digital historic dollhouses. Hehe. How punk rock am I? Ok, so not really.

For the most part I created more modern houses in a particular style and mid-century re-creations. And some of you are already familiar with the eerily accurate re-creation I made of our house. My main job was usually to identify and document all the little downloaded doohickeys my buddy Gigi used when building her houses. This was no small feat, she had thousands upon thousands of object, wallpaper, and floor files. Several gigabytes worth. And I would have to remember who made each one and where to download it. The good news is that a person with visual memory was particularly useful for that job.

Yes, people paid to download these houses and I would provide links to all the stuff they would need to go download somewhere else to have it work properly. That might seem strange to non-gamers out there but people spend money on their hobbies and this was just another weirdo hobby. For my knitting friends: think of it as paying for a really good pattern but still needing to get the yarn and needles.

You might be asking “Noelle, what the hell does this have to do with Catherine the Great?” or maybe “Will you stfu about this history stuff and post more knitting and spinning?” For those of you with the second thought I have a great knitting post today I just have to take photos.

There was a bio about Catherine the Great on the Biography channel last night and I remembered the huge reproduction Gigi made of Alexander Palace, which Catherine built for her grandson, and Catherine Palace, which was restored and heavily redecorated during Catherine the Great’s reign but had originally been built for Catherine I.

So I thought you all might find that odd architectural view of Catherine the Great’s life interesting. You don’t have to pay to look at the screenshots but you still have to pay to download it. So just go peek at the screenshots and check out how a couple of gals took a nerdy hobby and made it even nerdier.

We’d all wandered off to other interests by late-2003 or so. After receiving a cease and desist from the Jekyll Island historical society and then the director of the Ivy Green museum (even though the floorplans in both cases were likely in public domain) our hearts just weren’t in it anymore. There was a brief migration to a free server with a more modern slant but it didn’t hold our interests like the historic reproductions did. Kind of sad but we enjoyed it for a while.

In the unlikely event that you’re interested in some of the houses I made that remain free to download you can still join my extremely old Yahoo Group. I actually won a few awards for those houses. I guess I should add that these are all for the original Sims games with all the expansion packs that were available up to the point the houses were created. I never installed the last expansion though.

I am in a seriously cranky mood today. So I think it would be best if you went and read about this really cool midwife in Ethiopia over here. I’m going to go take a pill and possibly a nap.

I’m pretty used to the random webcomment spam. And I’m even immune to the gravity-free sex apparatus spam. But I really HATE the stuff that’s generated to look like a continuing office conversation saying stuff like “Lance, I’ve confirmed the plans with Biff I hope these are ok for you.” What good is this serving?

I’ve been a bit lazy about the personal posts. I don’t seem to get a lot of them done in March. The Women in History stuff wipes me out. And I haven’t actually gotten a lot of knitting done. But I’ve been spinning! I’ve spun this crazy merino mohair stuff similar to the hell’s angel hair but in varying shades of blue. It’s big and thick and thin - totally taking advantage of having this ginormous bobbin while I can.

This morning I mailed the fulted marble beret to my cousin (finally) and the Bombay Dreams yarn to Pamela. We ran a few other errands (this being the only night Cody has off until next Monday boooo) I just had a nice bath and read one of the short stories he’s been wanting me to read. It’s funny how we have reading lists for each other - so we can talk about them later.

After I finish this post? I’m going to drink limeade and ply that crazy fuzzy blue yarn with beaded thread. CRAZY stuff. I might even name it Grover in Drag or There’s a Monster Wearing Pearls in this Skein. There will be companion yarns for it too because I have a bunch more of that blue merino and fluffy soft mohair. Having a ball in spinland. Wish you were here.

Gouyen, meaning Wise Woman, was born in Arizona into Chief Victorio’s (Lozen’s brother) Warm Springs Apache band in the 1850’s. She was famous among her allies for never getting injured or harmed in any way during battle, even when overwhelmed by the numbers of soldiers and their bullets.

On October 15, 1880, while the group was resting near Tres Castillos, New Mexico, they were attacked by Mexicans. When the offensive was over, seventy-eight Apaches had been murdered and only seventeen had escaped, including Gouyen and her young son, Kaywaykla , later known as James, whose interviews later in life would provide a great deal of information about running with Victorio and the region. Her small daughter, however, was murdered and shortly afterwards her husband was killed in a Comanche raid while visiting the Mescalero Apaches.

A legendary tale is told about the revenge of Gouyen. One night following her husband’s death, she put on her buckskin ceremony dress and left the camp carrying a water jug, dried meat, and a bone awl with sinew for repairing her moccasins. She found the Commance chief who had killed her husband engaged in a Victory Dance around a bonfire with her husband’s scalp hanging from his belt. Gouyen slipped into the circle of dancers, seduced the Chief an led him off into the high grass. At first she had hoped to get the Chiefs knife, but ended up attacking his throat with her teeth. They grappled and fought but eventually she won. Gouyen scalped the Commanche, cut his beaded breechcloth from his body, tore off his moccasins, then stole his horse. When she returned to her camp she was exhausted but managed to present her in-laws with the Comanche leader’s scalp, along with his clothing and footwear.

Gouyen remarried an Apache warrior named Ka-ya-ten-nae. Later, she and her family were taken prisoner by the U.S. Army and held at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where she died.

Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in Ancona, Italy, to an educated but poor lower middle class family. When she was twelve, her parents moved to Rome to enable their only daughter to receive a better education. They encouraged her to become a teacher, which was the only career open to women at that time. Maria excelled at mathematics and had originally chosen a career in engineering but she became interested in biology while attending a technical school for boys and enrolled in medical school.

n 1896, Maria Montessori became the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome Medical School, and joined the staff of the University’s Psychiatric Clinic. Through the university’s free clinics and her private practice, she came into frequent contact with children and families of the working class. When she was invited to represent her country in two international women’s conventions and other speaking engagements in Europe she spoke vehemently supporting peace efforts, the women’s movement, and child labor law reform.

In 1901, Montessori became the Director of the University of Rome’s new orthophrenic school where she began to work with the reform wave for mentally handicapped children. She was was among the first to take a scientific approach to the education of these children, following the clinical studies by Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin., two French physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After research and trials with a boy “raised in the wild” Itard postulated the existence of developmental periods in normal human growth. This idea later became the cornerstone of Dr. Montessori’s philosophy. From Edouard Seguin, she drew further confirmation of Itard’s work, along with a more organized and specific system for applying it to the everyday education of challenged students. Through Dr. Montessori’s study of Seguin, she came to attune herself more actively to the “normal” child, applying all that she had previously learned.

Montessori combined these studies and developed educational studies based on observation and experimentation. This approach was referred to as the Child Study School of Thought. The next few years were devoted to work based upon the careful training and objectivity she had learned as a biologist.

In 1906, Dr. Montessori was invited to head the organization and orientation of preschools in one of the model tenements in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. The first Casa dei Bambini or “Children’s House” was opened on January 6, 1907. From her experience here, Dr. Montessori developed her philosophy and observations/experimentation methods for the education of young children.

The busy schools turned out to be very hectic, however, she had the older children help out and provided some puzzles that she had invented for the handicapped children. The results were that the children began to settle themselves, played with the puzzles, and learned daily living skills. Through observational studies Montessori discovered that children teach themselves when given the proper tools and environment. They have an almost effortless ability to absorb knowledge from their surroundings, as well as a tireless interest in manipulating materials. This self-creating process of the child is the cornerstone of what has been known as the Montessori Method. Eventually she was teaching these young students to read and write - four and five year olds were working on problems originally intended for third grade students. She would continue to develop equipment, exercises, toys, and methods based on what she observed children to do “naturally,” by themselves, unassisted by adults. She also built tables and chairs instead of desks so the students could interact and learn more with each other.

As Montessori schools were set up throughout Europe and in America, Dr. Montessori ended her medical career in order to devote all of her energy to advocating the intellectual potential and rights of children. A good portion of modern traditional education is based on Dr. Montessori’s philosophy and resources, including the development of personalized instruction, manipulative learning materials, educational games, programmed instruction and the developmental classroom concept.

She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times—in 1949, 1950, and 1951. Maria Montessori died in Holland in 1952, but her work lives on in teachings based on her methods and through the Association Montessori Internationale, the Amsterdam-based organization she founded in 1929 in order to continue developing and teaching the methods most conducive to children teaching themselves.

Katherine Dexter McCormick was the second woman in history to earn a degree in science from MIT. In 1904 she received her BS in biology and married an heir to the International Harvester fortune, Stanley McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick who invented the mechanical harvester. Two years after their marriage, Stanley was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Katharine built a fantastic castle, Riven Rock, in Santa Barabra, Ca, so she could live with Stanley surrounded by a peaceful atmosphere. Despite the tranquil surroundings her husband’s episodes would wax and wane throughout his lifetime. Katherine earnestly believed that his illness was genetically-related so she resolved never to bear children. By 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and the lawyers for the Cyrus McCormick estate battled to restrain Katharine’s power to spend the money in Stanley’s trust fund without court approval.

Katharine made small contributions to numerous causes, including the woman’s suffrage movement and, later, Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood Federation. Most of her charitable spending went into neuroendocrine research. As long as her husband remained alive, her spending would be monitored by the probate court in Chicago and as long as she spent money on research into causes of and treatments for her husband’s disease, her spending was easily approved. Only after his death in 1947 would she inherit the funds and be able to spend the funds at her own discretion.

By age seventy-one McCormick was wealthy in her own right and determined to develop a cheap, easy to use, safe, effective, artificial contraceptive pill. In 1951 McCormick met with Gregory Goodwin Pincus who had been working on developing a hormonal birth control method since the 1930s. McCormick agreed to fund Pincus’ research into oral contraception and in 1954 she and Pincus got Dr. John Rock to conduct human trials. The FDA approved the sale of the Pill in 1960. During her lifetime and in her will, she contributed $2 million to develop the birth control pill, not a single cent of the government’s money went into developing the most revolutionary pharmaceutical invention of the century. Nor did any corporation finance the development of a birth control pill: corporate executives refused to believe there was a market for a drug that prevents women from becoming pregnant. Without Katharine McCormick’s funding, the birth control pill would probably not have been invented, tested, or marketed for a very long time.

She strongly believed in using her fortune only to aid unpopular causes which, in addition to controversial political movements, included the visual arts and music. She also donated money to MIT to build women’s dormitories in her husband’s name which are still used today. Following her death in 1967, her will provided $5 million to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which funded the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library in New York City.
According to Planned Parenthood, The Library serves the research and information needs of planned parentood, affiliate staff and volunteers nationwide, as well as researchers, other sexual health professionals, writers, and journalists. Last year the libaray drew from its collection of more than 6100 books, 23,000 articles, pamphlets, journals, and historic photographs and videotapes to respond to nearly 5000 requests for information and to create and publish fact sheets, white papers, bibliographics, and resource listings.

Sushi for dinner last night. A big breakfast at Cracker Barrel this morning. Cody and I are nothing if not diverse eaters. I love the weird country store (or as Cody and I call it, Cracker Mart) at the cracker barrel. We got some candy for a friend’s little boy and a cat-shaped peanut butter biscuit for Winter. Oh ok I got a teddy bear too shut up.

There was snow this morning. Not enough to really affect anything other than produce some sparkly wonder in our minds. It didn’t really stick to the roads either. It’s still very windy and the snow blowing around on the fields by the bosque looks like there’s a white misty fog. But it’s just fine bits of snow in the wind.

Yarn store yesterday. Scout completely surprised me with a freakin sweater in my size. Some crazy person knit the Simply Marilyn sweater and decided it was too big so they were going to give it away. Scouty said “I’ll take it! I have a friend that would love it!” And it was mailed to Albuquerque. How sweet is that? Scout is too good to my slow webpage fixin slackass. Remind me to give them both handspun yarn. Now I have a pretty sweater to wear. And it’s sort of pink so it even fits into Project Spectrum!

I’m still doing well with the yarn diet. I did get to do some vicarious yarn shopping by helping Adam pick out some yarn for fuzzyfeet. He went with the donnegal tweed which I think felted the best out of all the yarns I’ve used. And somehow I managed to still spend too much on patterns and books at the store yesterday. Bought a set of bamboo crochet hooks to go with my new copy of The Happy Hooker that came in the mail on Friday. I am hellbent on figuring out this crochet thing. People say it’s easier than knitting but I’m just not getting it. I can’t wait for the Big Girl Knits book. I’m hoping there will be a good pattern for my neapolitan handspun.

I’m afraid that I will have to delay Stash Sunday photos. The outside table I usually use is wet and sludgy and the winds are strong enough to blow my precious Noro all over the place. And the lighting inside the house is just awful I won’t do that kind of injustice to the yarn. Yes. I plan to take photos of the Noro stash. It’s a shameful amount of yarn.

Cody is taking a nap. It goes without saying that all the animals are too. We’ve already been to the grocery store, stopped by the coffee shop, and even picked up a refill of some of my meds at the drug store. I’m going to watch tv and see if I can use this weirdo icord maker I picked up at the yarn store yesterday.

I hope you all are enjoying the women in history posts. I don’t usually get a lot of feedback on them until months later when someone does a search and finds my page. But I’m happy to get the stories out there. I like to think it helps preserve their memory in a way. I really enjoyed writing about Vera Hall today. Some of her songs can be bought on itunes. She never really expressed an opinion of all the recordings the Lomax’s did of her voice. Can you imagine what she’d think of being able to buy digital music in an instant like that?

Vera Hall was an African-American woman born around the turn of the twentieth century in a small house just outside Livingston, Alabama. She grew up with a supportive family and community, but in an extremely poor area around the central Alabama-Mississippi state line. This area, also known as the Black Belt because of its rich, dark soil, was particularly impoverished even for the notably poor South and severely incongruous financial times. Her grandfather was an emancipated slave who had taken up work as a tenant farmer. His son, Hall’s father, worked on his father’s farm then rented his own plot after the original landowner died. Hall’s mother was a stern, practical woman who had a great appreciation of song. Hall and her family took great solace and strength from their community church, Shiloh Baptist Church of Livingston.

At a young age, Vera Hall (sometimes known as Vera Hall Ward, Adel Hall, Vera Ward Hall, Vera Ward, and Adel Ward) became a respected and devout member of the church, and remained so for the rest of her life. But in her late teens, she also fell in with more worldly crowd, for whom blues, craps, and alcohol were the primary entertainment. The dichotomy of these two worlds– that of spirituals and the church and that of blues and the juke-joint– was a recurring theme throughout her life (as it has been for many blues singers) and a notable influence in her music. She drew upon both perspectives to cope with and overcome her life’s perennial difficulties. She experienced many personal tragedies, including the death of a young brother, both parents, a daughter, a sister, and her husband by 1930. To support herself and her remaining children she was forced to take up cooking and washing for a local household. But she continued to sing.

Ruby Pickens Tartt, a local woman working for the WPA, had taken an interest in local folk music and art. She was particularly passionate about black culture and the storytelling, singing, preaching, and handicrafts that it produced. She was integral in introducing Vera Hall to John and Ruby Lomax. They would conduct extensive interviews and recordings with Hall, among other southern folk artists, throughout the late thirties and forties. There are 29 songs by her in The Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center (some of which can be heard here and here).

The only time she left Alabama was in 1948 when she performed in New York in a concert organized by Alan Lomax. She died in Tuscaloosa in 1964, right before the resurgence of folk music appreciation had rediscovered her music.

Vera Hall was known in particular for the passionate moans in her songs. Her rendition of Wild Ox Moan was probably her most well known, which was later recorded by Taj Mahal. More recently her accapella Trouble So Hard was sampled by Moby for his song , Natural Blues, on the album Play. Her songs are still available, usually on Southern folk music compilations.

She was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in March 2005 and celebrated by the Alabama Blues Project last October, where they launched a fundraising campaign to buy a marker for the cemetary where she’s buried in an unmarked grave. There is an amazing website with a lot more information about her life called The Vera Hall Project.

You can read about more women in history in my archives and at Pesky Apostrophe.

continuing with Women in History..

Midwife, teacher, and author, Trotula di Ruggerio’s treatise on gynecology, Passionibus Mulierum Curandorum (The Diseases of Women), in which she identified herself as a woman, was used in medical schools for centuries. Long regarded as one of the preeminent medieval scientists, Trotula lost her place in the history of medicine only in the beginning of the 20th century when historians became unable to accept that such a woman could exist in eleventh-century Italy.

Trotula wrote with disarming frankness about gynecology, obstetrics, cosmetics, and skin disease in a sensible and humane manner. Passionibus Mulierum was far ahead of her contemporaries’ practices when discussing surgery, analgesics, and the care of the mother and child during the post-partum period. Her topics included the need for cleanliness, a balanced diet, and regular exercise, warned of the effects of emotional stress, and discussed birth control, problems of infertility, male infertility (a scandalous subject in itself), sewing (and avoiding) tears suffered in childbirth, repositioning a baby during a breech birth, and the problems of sex and celibacy.

She pioneered the use of hormonal treatments (derived from animal testicles) to cure infertility and to regulate menstruation. She also recommended the use of opiates to relieve pain during childbirth. The Catholic Church strongly opposed this, saying that women should suffer while giving birth. Trotula is perhaps most famous for finding several methods to simulate the loss of the hymen on the wedding night. One method was to apply a leech the day before the wedding and to remove it shortly before consummation.

Unlike many other works of the period, her cures rarely include prayers, incantations, astrology, or other forms of blatant superstition. She was married to a doctor named John Platearius. They had two sons, Matteo and John, who also became doctors. During her life, Trotula was referred to as Magistra Mulier Sapiens - “The wise woman teacher.” Trotula’s other book, De Aegritudinum Curatione, or De Ornatu Mulierum was commonly known as Trotula Minor. Despite a first hand account by Constantine of Africa describing her performance of a caesarian delivery of his son some scholars dispute that Trotula was a woman, or that she even existed.

Source: Hypatia’s Heritage, A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Alic

for more Women in History check out Peskymac’s site.

I have to admit that right now I’m using notes and articles I compiled and wrote last year and just never published. So I’m not working nearly as hard as it seems on this. Also, I’m not doing much editing so sorry if the writing’s choppy.

Hmm well I was hoping to post some lovely photos of Cody’s frankenstein fuzzyfeet all fulled and shaped. But, er, it didn’t work out. I overfelted them and now neither of us can get the tighter manos heel around our ankles. So if anyone with tiny feet, like a women’s size 6 or so, wants some very unique wool slippers let me know. Or I’m just going to cut them into strips and do something else with them.

The good part is I have something else to post about. And it even falls into the Project Spectrum category! It’s yarn! Yay! I’m getting back into the spinning! And let me say, I’m really glad. Spinning is so calming and I’m always really proud of what I come up with. This time it was some great 50% merino 50% tencel that I’d picked up from Winderwood farms last fall. I spun it thin enough to feel comfortable plying it.

So I borrowed Beverly’s giganto plying head from her lendrum wheel while she’s out of town and made a pretty big batch of two ply. 294.12 yards to be exact. Although I have some more on one bobbin that I’m going to try Andean plying or maybe just wind half of it into a ball and ply it that way. So there’ll probably be about 315 - 325 yards altogether. Not bad.

edited (again) -

I ended up winding the remaining single ply into a center pull ball and plied from the center and outer edge of the ball. That’s a nifty little process I’d heard about from the people at sheep to shawl last year. I learned so much that day. Much more than just how to spin with a wheel.

Anyway, there was more than I estimated for that second skein - 39.56 yards! So the total yardage is 333.68.

I wound the plied yarn into a skein using my trusty Goko swift this morning.

What I love about my Goko is it’s so unique. It makes just winding or unwinding a skein a pretty little sculpture. Those Japanese really know from the aethetic don’t they?

The tencel really made the shades of pink and orange shine. They’re like silk. But softer. And shinier. And silkworm friendly. The colors and the shine made me think of fabrics from India. So I’m calling it Bombay Dreams.

The bad news is Beverly has first dibs on this yarn. The good news is if she doesn’t want it I’ll be happy to sell it to you.

edit: Now if Miss Beverly doesn’t want it Miss Pamela will buy it. Yay!

Send me an email or leave a comment if you’re interested. I’ll let you know when she decides and we can work out a bill on paypal or a special listing on etsy or something. I’ll be selling it for 60 US dollars. That will include the yarn I’m going to be plying today so that will be 333.68 yards for 60 dollars - that’s less than 20 cents (17 cents to be exact) per yard. It winds out at about 10 wraps per inch - worsted to heavy worsted weight.

This stuff is so pretty. And shiny. Did I say how happy I am to be spinning again?

Also, I’ve been knitting the little ugg baby booties for a pregnant cousin-in-law. Ramona gave me the yarn that was leftover from knitting hers. And I did go ahead and buy some more so I could be sure I had enough for the hat too. I finished one bootie last night and these things are huge. If I do it again I’m going down a needle size or two.

I’m glad Chloe won. Not only because she was “anyone but Santino” but because I really like her model. She has such a unique look I’ve been rooting for her all season. I think it’s fun to see untraditional looking people model. Makes me think that even normal people might be able to wear those clothes too. Which is why I really like the models from the Interweave magazines. Some are pear-shaped or have big shoulders. Some even have *gasp* bellies! Models with bellies not modelling fat girl clothes! Whoda thunk it?