Book Review: The Dressmaker's Guide

The Dressmaker's Guide, 1840-1865, Second Edition, by Elizabeth Stewart Clark, has not received many online reviews, so I thought I'd describe it a bit. I have not been asked to do this by the author.

This is a ladies-only post: any gentlemen are invited to excuse themselves.

The book is self-published, intended for the Civil War reenacting (“living history”) crowd. It doesn’t feel self-published: it is well laid-out and the font is appropriate. The drawings are clear.

A publisher would have given the text one more edit, to clear up minor annoyances like typos, then/than, and superfluous adverbs.

The book is not fluff: it is 300 pages of solid information. The first 70 are relevant only to reenactors, addressing matters like textile accuracy and class-specificity. The next 20 pages cover basic hand-sewing techniques in detail, with some suggestions of materials that sound intriguing (so that's what twist is!). And then comes the fun stuff: how to make 19th-century piping, how to make period-correct gathers and half a dozen different kinds of pleats, and finally how to draft (or rather drape) 19th-century garments, including nine kinds of sleeves and about as many bodices. I believe the selection of shapes is, with a few exceptions listed below, comprehensive.

The book does not elaborate on the many styles into which these shapes can be developed without further instruction (e.g., where you might put trim): it assumes that you have at your disposal a large collection of period images from which to derive inspiration.* It concerns only women’s clothing, though I assume the techniques for children’s clothes are similar.

What I love about the book is the level of detail: e.g., the author not only tells you how to make box pleats, she explains how to position them so that they look nice, and which parts of the pleat need to be precise and where you can fudge; and how to size and space the stitches that hold them together; and how many pleats “look well” per skirt.

Missing from the book (or at least I couldn't find them) are:

-pagoda sleeves

-ruched (etc.) trim

-blouses, as opposed to bodices: how to finish the bottoms, put in tucks, and make the high, ruffled collars of c. 1850

-where to insert the supports in – the gentlemen did clear out, right?

-maternity

-internal cross-references

-a list of resources, and

-an index.

The book is costly, probably because it is a combination (and expansion) of two books that the author had previously published separately. But I do not know of another book that explains clearly how to draft, say, a 19th-century armscye or a fiddleback; and the technique for narrow hems made me very, very happy.

The author’s website is http://www.thesewingacademy.com/

*such as a public library, or the Internet; or, there are whole books of nothing but daguerreotypes, published expressly for this purpose.

Brainwashing

Babyloops saw a man eating soup, and asked for some.
"No, Babyloops," I said, "It's not kosher."
She kept admiring the soup.
"Should we go find you something kosher?" I suggested.
"Find you something kosher!" she agreed, and off we went.
"Do you want a banana?"
"No! I want kosher!"
"Do you want chips?"
"No! I want kosher!"
"A banana is kosher. So are chips."
"No, I want kosher!"
So I gave her a carton of Haagen-Dazs and a spoon.
"I like kosher," she said.


[**the word "please" has since entered her vocabulary.]

Funny mistranslation

‎"But for a burst of pizzas, throw little somethings all over."


- advice on how to host a party, from the Jerusalem phone book

Occupy Entropy II

There is no such thing as the present. (This is reflected in the way the present tense works in Hebrew.) Time swishes from the past to the future; you can reference the past, and you can reference the future, but you cannot point to any part of Time and say, "This is the present," because by the time you do, it is already in the past.

However, we have the ability to stop time from swishing by us. To make a free-will choice to do something good, is to do something eternal, as the Source of all good is eternal: to remove those moments from the passage of time.

Occupy entropy!

In the Wee Hours of the Morning in a Kitchen Full of Spray Bottles This Seemed Extremely Funny

For the full effect, you have to stop singing abruptly the moment you run out of syllables.

On the evening before Pesach, my husband kashered for me
Five steel pots,
Four electric burners,
Three countertops,
Two kitchen sinks,
And a blech!

What We Wore in Egypt

This is not based on serious research, only the Internet; but from what I can make out, it seems that...

The Egyptians went round chiefly in white linen. The more wealthy you were, the finer your linen -- which is why garments in Egyptian art are sometimes depicted as transparent.

The Jews wore wool -- shelo shinu es malbusham, we did not switch over to traditional Egyptian dress. And, at least when we had time, we dyed it. Woolen garments, like shepherding, were anathema to the sheep-worshipping Egyptians.

Wool in summer is not as crazy as it sounds -- a light wool is more comfortable than, say, a light cotton.
But I did find this amusing, because even today certain Jews are the ones wearing black wool suits in the summer...

On Being a Giving Person

My neighbor, Mrs. Monsoon:

"If someone tells me that her son is sick, and I don't say, 'Can I take the rest of your children? Can I cook you a meal?' that makes me a small-minded person, doesn't it?"

Food for thought.

VIDEO: Appointment with Infinity

Search Terms Leading to This Blog

Some of them tickle my fancy.

orthodox jewish teddy bear
I, too, would like to meet a teddy bear that expresses an interest in mitzvah observance.

why do orthodox jews not like green
For the same reasons anyone else does or doesn't, I'm afraid.

name of jewish spoons
??

freezer sounds like bagpipes
Anyone who types a simile into a search engine is someone I wish I knew better.

Thanks, folks, for the entertainment. I hope you all found what you wanted.

The Push-Button Umbrella

Here's one I hadn't heard before, reprinted with the kind permission of Project Genesis -- torah.org.
Retold by one R' Becker, who elaborates on it here.

A well-known story is told wherein Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, (of blessed memory, known affectionately by the Torah world as the "Alter [Lit. elder]" of Slabodka) was diagnosed as having a condition requiring medical treatment at one of the larger medical centers in the area. After listening carefully to the pros and cons of each medical facility, the Alter elected to go to St. Petersburg for treatment. A student escorted the Alter throughout the extended period of his recovery. Upon his return to Slabodka the Alter was approached by a community member who inquired regarding the Alter's absence. The Alter indicated that he had been in St. Petersburg. When asked what occasioned his visit there, the Alter responded that he had gone there to see the push-button umbrella. The astonished student, who had accompanied the Alter throughout the difficult medical ordeal, asked the Alter for an explanation.  

The Alter explained that he had, indeed, chosen St. Petersburg after carefully weighing the pros and cons of each facility. However, a short while earlier, the Alter had been traveling on behalf of his yeshiva and had passed through the train depot at St. Petersburg and was intrigued by the sight of the new invention, the push-button umbrella, being opened by a resident of that cosmopolitan city. The Alter, ever vigilant for traces of bias within himself, wondered whether, on some level, his decision to have the procedure done in St. Petersburg was not adulterated by a trace of interest in seeing the novel inventions which premiered there. At the moment that the gentleman asked him why he had traveled to St. Petersburg, the Alter took the opportunity to reflect on his motives rather than to glibly respond with an answer which was too obvious to be useful.

Life upon the Wicked Stage

We're famous! We're famous!
A modified version of the post Back to the Wilderness! was published in Oregon Humanities Magazine, here:
On Not Moving from Israel

Their editor made two changes to the draft I sent: altered the line breaks, and de-capitalized the word "Boss," thereby removing all reference to the Divine. Probably thought it was a typo.

On Not Moving House

The main reason that there have been so few posts lately is because the Chief Nudge of the blog has been moving house.

House?

The logistics of moving are such that we've been staying in our friends' basement while they are out of town, waiting for our belongings to arrive. Thoreau would have a field day with this, I am sure.

It is a very unsettling thing to cook in someone else's kitchen, serve on someone else's ceramic dishes, and work in someone else's living room, and I have repeated once too often that I rawther hope we can move soon.

And then we were told that the truck would arrive the next day -- joy! rapture! and then this thought:

I lived in a certain country until I had learnt to shed the hesitation of being an alien there; and then I moved to another another stage of life and another neighborhood and stayed until I had learnt to live responsibly there; so, based on precedent, it is pretty clear that the moving truck is not going to arrive until I have learnt to deal with living in someone else's house -- that is, to stop treating it as a temporary fix, mentally living out of a suitcase, putting off all important and complicated plans until I have a house to make them in... yes, it will be easier to take down notes when I have notebooks and a table not covered with someone else's papers to take them down on; and yes, it will be easier to feed my daughter pomegranates when I do not have to hover over her to keep the juice off someone else's white satin tablecloth; and so on; but to live in a perpetual state of "we shall do nothing of complexity until we have our own house to do it in" is illogical.

I have not yet learned to live properly in someone else's house -- thought I -- so it is quite impossible that the truck should come tomorrow, assurances of the moving company notwithstanding.

And then the moving company called. "Sorry, there's been a snag. The truck will not arrive until next week."

Wet

Multnomah Falls

Silver Falls

Chanukah

by Mendel Hirsch.

Looking across the street as we light our Chanukah candles in our window, I always feel outdone by the glow of colored seasonal lights illuminating the house directly across our road. 

But that is the great significance of the Chanukah Light.  Let me explain.

The common custom is that we light an additional candle every night of Chanukah.  However, Halacha (Jewish law and custom) has three levels for the candle lighting.  The minimum is one candle each night.  The second level is to light a candle for each member of the household.  Our custom is the highest level.  The same goes for where to light.  The preferred place is at the door (the common custom in Israel).  Second best is in the window facing the public (our common custom).  If neither can be done then it suffices to light on the table in middle of the room.

This tiered level mitzvah is unique to Chanukah.  Why was it established this way? 

If we look back at the story of Chanukah, we find Matityahu, a single individual, who was inspired to remain faithful to Jewish values.  He imparted this to his children, who took it to battle and inspired the nation to follow them.  All seemed lost; the majorities had already assimilated.  Matityahu could have given up, and accepted the facts of the times, but he knew, as long as one person would stand for our Truth, all is not lost.  It is upon this concept that the lighting was established.  The first and foremost level must be the single candle.  Like Matitiyahu, even if you are the only candle burning, you must let that light go forth.  The next level would be to inspire each member of your household, like Matityahu did, and light a candle for each one.  Our custom follows an even greater aspiration.  The hope that not only can we light for ourselves and our households, but also assure that our light continue to increase. 

Sometimes, this inspiration is something contained in a household, but cannot permeate the outside world.  In such a case, all we do is light on our table.  At least we can inspire ourselves.  In better times, we can let this light shine into the world, but from the inside, insulated by our home’s boundaries. So we light at our window to the outside world.  In times of spiritual strength and courage, we can open our door allowing our light to directly interact with the world.   At such times, we light at the door.

As I light the menorah, I realize that our Chanukah lights may not be the brightest lights on the block, but it doesn’t have to be.  The Chanukah lesson is well learned.  Like Matityahu, as long as this single light shines, our light will shine on.

R' Baruch Ber

Found this today:

I am embarrassed to admit that I found the following, not through word of mouth, but on Wikipedia:

A witty anecdote serves to illustrate how the three of them differed in their approaches and relation to their teacher: it is said that had Reb Chaim [Soloveitchok] said, "This table is a cow," Rabbi Yitzchak Zev Soloveitchik would say that the table had the same Talmudic laws as a cow, Rabbi Shimon Shkop would say the molecules in a table could be rearranged into a cow, but Rabbi Boruch Ber Leibowitz would attempt to milk the table.

Steampunk, Mori Girl, and Judaism

There are a couple of identifiable alternative fashions in America -- goth, punk, ethnic -- but I just heard that in Japan, there are several street fashions each associated with a lifestyle, a philosophy, an entire approach to the world.

I am not sure the same can be said for their American counterparts... I suspect that it is only the rare person on this side of the Pacific who says, "I think I will dress, and live, and look at life, as if I were a Poe character (or a clockwork Victorian, or a Tibetan herdsman), as much as possible." But in Japan the fashion of let's pretend we live in the woods has got its own name (mori-kei) and publications and corresponding philosophy and values and, if I understood correctly, not a small number of adherents.

Fascinating.

It's very Jewish, that your style of dress should be an organic expression of your philosophy and values -- though in the case of mori-kei, and I could be wrong about this, I am not so sure the interest in the weltanschauung gave birth to the fashion instead of the other way round.

Jewish dress is defined by Torah principles, which makes it fairly difficult to pin down, as fashions go: it's not defined by a particular shape (like steampunk) or color (like goth) or texture (like mori-kei) or place (like goncha) or era (like vintage) or being different from what everyone else is wearing.
One of these days I should write about what does define it... does someone more learned who writes for this blog want to tackle that one?

As it comes out, Rav Bulman zt"l once observed that traditional Jewish dress is the dress of the nobility of the past generation. But that's incidental.

Astoria

Lewis and Clark headed up the Missouri, looked West, and saw some mountains they expected to reach any day.

The days kept passing and the mountains kept getting bigger, until they reached the foot of the Rockies.

Well, they got over those. And then they looked West, and saw the Cascades.

By the time they got through the Coast Range, they were stuck spending the winter at Fort Clatsop, in what is now Astoria, in the corner of the Ourigan Columbia and the Coast. The journals from that winter are repetitive.

Wet.

Wet and disagreeable.

Cold and wet.

Cold. Disagreeable. Wet.

They wound up eating their tallow candles for lack of meat.

In the Spring they bade Oregon weather good riddance and returned to Missouri.

Today Astoria is a small shipping town on the Oregon coast. We walked through the repair yards.

My father identified the boat on the left as homemade.

I believe the owner told us that his Metta Marie, which is now being taken apart, is some 80 years old.

Poor things want to be out sailing, and here they are propped up on land for repairs, looking out to sea.

Ocean-going ships

Monument to the Unknown Whatsit

It really is that green.

Seagull tracks

Nice colors

Astoria is a very old town, and looks it.

It is still wet. But not disagreeable.

The Difference between Elul and Rosh Hashana

The difference between Elul and Rosh Hashana, said Rabbi Geometry, is that in Elul the King is coming, and on Rosh Hashana the King arrives.

Cathlamet

Cathlamet crops up in the journals of Lewis and Clark as a Chinook town on the Columbia.

Today there is still a Cathlamet - whether in the same place, I couldn't tell ya - on the Washington side.

It looks like Oregon: small wooden houses with leaded windows, from the '30s. This despite the lack of zoning laws, which says a lot about the people of Cathlamet. There are no stoplights in the entire county. There are a lot of lawn ornaments, cast deer predominating.

There is an old hotel, with the lobby on the second floor, whose proprietors took time to shmooze with us. All the people we met are down-to-earth folks who work for the county and fish.

"Would you ever live outside this county?" one of them once asked a young lady of his acquaintance.

"No," she said.

"Will you marry me?" he asked, then. (She said yes.)

Out in the river lies the island half of Cathlamet, Puget Island; and that looks like Washington: massive houses on large lawns, alternating with fields of Holsteins.

The fields are very green, the hills very blue, the sky very grey: the entire county is executed in watercolor.

As always, clicking on pictures will enlarge them.

Raise your hand if you transposed two letters in the name of the boat in the foreground.

I forgot about this local variation on the police car.

This house is pretty typical of the entire mainland Cathlamet.

See, Chazal know what they're talking about

Doesn't this look like a saloon? --The upper floors are abandoned.

The siding is asbestos.

Avast

There is something just wrong about International Talk Like a Pirate Day falling out on Tzom Gedalia.

Have an easy and meaningful fast, and we can all get together in Cheshvan and go arrr together if we need to.