HISTORY: Preserved

I am so excited to share with you some of the fabrics from this fabulous 1931 signature quilt owned by my long-time best friend Katherine. The quilt originally belonged to her grandmother, Ruby, who was from Kansas, where the quilt was made. The quilt was made for Ruby's 16th birthday, possibly her graduation, and includes embroidered signatures of brothers, sisters, parents, school teachers, and friends of Ruby. It's a wonderful piece of family history for Katherine's family.

What I love about this quilt, besides all the cool, embroidered signatures, are the fabric prints - which are what I wanted to showcase. What a great snapshot of fabric from the time! When I want to learn about the fashions of a particular time period, I think the hardest part is wrapping your head around what was in style for the types of fabric and prints, and understanding the ebb and flow of fashion through the decades. It's hard keeping it all straight! I am so happy Katherine agreed to let…

I finally finished my son's 18th century work shirt! We are both really excited. I actually can't believe I finished it - and it was all hand-sewn! As soon as it was done I told myself that I won't be doing that again for some time. I do love my sewing machine! I know it's not accurate, but all of my own 18th century clothes will be done on my sewing machine. Kids' clothing aren't as bad as they're a lot smaller, but I don't think my fingers could take hand-sewing adult-sized clothing.

Anyway, this was a great learning experience! I used a pattern company I'd never used before. Their patterns are very well-researched, but I think this particular shirt pattern is more complicated than some. It's a very nice one, though, and the shirt is very sturdy.

Here's all the info:

The Challenge: January - Procrastination

Material: 100% checked linen

Pattern: Kannik's Korner 2nd half 18th century boy's work shirt

Year: late 18th century

Notions:…

After posting the latest Author Highlight on Temple Bailey, I discovered a short autobiography she wrote of herself in the back of her book Peacock Feathers. We didn't want to leave out the nuggets of information gold in there, so my friend Mairi and I updated the post a bit. Check it out here!

Today I was excited to finally delve more into my ration cookbook Cooking on a Ration. A while ago, I posted about all the recipes I wanted to try from this neat little book, but haven't tried any of them until today!

Peach Surprise Dumplings is the one that caught my eye. The recipe is very basic, and to me, is such a classic example of ration cooking cleverness. It uses pie crust, canned peaches, and a spoonful of orange marmalade for the surprise! Then for the sauce, it uses the syrup from the peaches, a bit of sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice, and butter. Simple, frugal, and time-savvy. Oh. And they taste divine!


The only change I made was to cook the dumplings in glass dishes because I didn't have English muffin rings like the recipe called for. (Who does??) The glass dishes worked great, though. Oh, and I used sliced peaches since I didn't have peach halves.

The recipe used nearly all the peaches in a large can (24 or 32 oz.?) and used all of the peach juice I got fro…

I'm starting off this new year on my blog with two exciting bits of news.

The first one is: I just hit 20,000 views to my blog! That's pretty amazing! Thank you to all those who have come and who continue to visit here to read and learn a little bit about History.

The second bit of news is: a while back, I mentioned how sad I was that I lost some of my museum pictures I took when we went to my home state Indiana. Well, my awesome husband did some file recovery magic on my camera's SD card and he recovered them all! So thrilling! I will be posting about the most awesome museum we went to in Indiana in two parts coming soon.

Here's wishing you all a Happy 2016!