Spring Edwardian Wardrobe

Z here (yes, I am the spoiled one these days).  It's almost spring around here, and we're showing off the Edwardian wardrobe the human made last summer from JenWrenne's summer sew-a-long patterns.  She ended up resizing the original patterns for AGAT dolls for us instead.

First is Nellie's garden party dress, with embroidered inserts in the bodice and skirt.  The human happened to have a yard of embroidered eyelet scallop edging and a matching yard of embroidered eyelet insert that went perfectly with a piece of mint broadcloth.

Next is Lily in the rainy day dress made from a light blue calico with tiny white flowers.  The contrast is from white cotton, and the belt is from a piece of white bias tape.  This dress also ended up a little loose, but that means the blousing over the belt looks good.  (We think the human forgot to account for the extra fabric in pleats on the bodice in some way...)

Samantha is wearing a sailor dress made from this light blue linen with white stripes (please ignore the furry interloper).  It looks nice and summery, doesn't it?  The collar and cuffs are from white cotton.  Because it's linen, the pleats stay in well.  Sadly, so do any creases.  So this dress is usually hung up in the closet and not worn...

Finally, I'm wearing the pleated walking dress, which has a jacket and a skirt.  The outfit is made from a black cambric, with white contrast cuffs on the jacket.  The collar of the jacket didn't lie quite flat enough, so the human had to tack it down with an extra tuck.  The jacket yoke should probably be re-drafted if the human decides to make this dress again.

Upcycling for doll clothes

Z here.  Spring is right around the corner, and that means the dolls of Jinjia Mixed Goods need a new wardrobe for the season.  We're trying to get away from the quilting fabrics and old-fashioned styles and try out something more modern this year.  Which means it's a perfect time for the human to go through her massive stash of old children's clothing and cut them down to size for us.

The stash of children's clothes...

The challenge, as always, is seeing just how many outfits we can get out of the stack.  The stash  of clothing to be upcycled contains 2 mock-layered sleeve tshirts (one red/black, one turquoise/white), a pink/purple print mock-layered tunic over white sleeves, a pair of knit pants (purple with pink and lavender butterflies), 4 tshirts (one pink w/ hearts, one purple with hearts, one white with music notes, and one with a blue floral body and striped sleeves), a pair of white leggings, a pair of black jeggings, and a pair of light denim jeggings. 

Guess which of our new clothes was made from what!

And here we go...

Outfit 1 (Luciana)

White tank top

Turquoise graphic off-the-shoulder tee

Black denim mini-skirt

white graphic leggings

Outfit 2 (Z)

Turquoise and white mock-layer-sleeved tee

Black jeans

Outfits 3 and 4 (Sam and Nellie)

Black and red graphic raglan shirt

Black and red graphic mock-layer-sleeved tee

Black jeggings

Black denim miniskirt (seen in outfit 1)

Outfits 5 and 6 (Z and Luciana)

Short sleeve scrappy floral knit tunic

3/4 sleeve scrappy floral knit tunic 

Light blue denim mini-skirt

Light blue denim jeggings

Outfits 7 and 8 (Sam and Nellie again)

Knit dresses in 2 styles, with white bodices and purple skirts

White leggings

Outfits 9 and 10 (still Sam and Nellie)

Pink and purple print maxi dress over a white tshirt

Pink and purple peasant dress with a belt accented with a gold button

Outfit 11 (Luciana):

Pink graphic tshirt

Light blue jean shorts

Outfit 12 (Z):

White graphic v-neck tee

Purple floral knit pants

And finally, outfit 13 (Lily)

Blue floral knit dress with striped sleeves

Matching striped leggings

I think we got everything we could out of that stash, don't you?

Library Showcase: Alice and Jerry Readers

We are back on our mission to have the best time-traveling classroom dolls can have.  At some point in the past, someone asked the human to make a set of mid-century readers, the Alice and Jerry readers.  These generally date from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.  We think they were eventually replaced by the more popular Dick and Jane New Basic Readers.

The series had:

2 pre-readers ("Day In and Day Out", "The Wishing Well")

2 1st grade readers ("Round About", "Anything Can Happen")

3 2nd grade readers ("Friendly Village", "Down the River Road", "Neighbors on the Hill")

3 3rd grade readers ("Through the Green Gate", "If I Were Going", "The Five and a half Club")

1 4th grade reader ("Engine Whistle")

1 5th grade reader ("Wagon Wheels")

1 6th grade reader ("Runaway Home")

These are our versions of the pre-readers and the 1st grade readers.

And here's the second and third grade readers.  All 6 of them.

The stories are all of idealized life in mid-century America, in a small town surrounded by farms.

Where a trip 'into the city' was a big event.

Finally, the last 3 'grown up' readers.  These covered more historical fiction, biographies of famous people (almost all men, and the only women included were the very feminine ones.  Which makes sense given the era these were published.)

The best thing about historical textbooks is how they represent the general views and moral system of the time.  If you're interested in a series on the history of schoolbooks for children in the US, please leave a comment.  We've got everything from the first New England Primer (1774) to the Dick and Jane New Basic Readers.

If you would like these readers, the printable is on sale now on Etsy.

Have a geeky Valentine's Day

 

Z here.  Welcome to another lovely day at ...well, we never did name our house.  Once upon a time, the human was going to name it 'Ivy Cottage', but that doesn't quite fit our living style.  'Ivy Cottage' suggests old fashioned girls in long skirts and poofy sleeves have tea on the porch, and while we do that sometimes, our general habits are not quite Edwardian (even though some of us would prefer otherwise.  Not me.  I like being modern). 

The other thought was calling our home 'Schoolhouse #5', which is the name of the human's Vermont vacation house.  Yes, it really was the district #5 little red one-roomed schoolhouse.  Eventually, we will have a one-room schoolhouse of our own.  Right now the human is balking at the cost (and size) of the desks she'd need for us...

And what are we doing in our still unnamed home?

Well, I'm helping the human write up her new gaming run that she promised to have done by early March.  It's a Warhammer 40K RPG campaign with the new Wrath and Glory ruleset.  I have my own book of the core rules and some WH40K fiction for research.

Luciana is...doing something to that drone of hers.  I think she named it Spot the Wonder Drone, after the one the human had.  There's been some muttering of attaching solar panels or LEDs or whatnot to Spot, but I think reality might win out.  Also, the human has forbidden us from flying it indoors and taunting the cats with it.

And Lily is writing Valentine's Day cards that double as invitations to our yet-unplanned-but-definitely-going-to-happen gaming run.  Apparently Wizards of the Coast (those people that publish Dungeons and Dragons these days) decided that they needed a set of DnD themed Valentine's Cards.  The puns on them are HORRIBLE.  In the wonderful punny sort of way.

They, in fact, too horrible to keep to just ourselves, so we're sharing them with you.

DnD Valentine's Day Cards

And here are the 2 main reasons Luciana is modding her drone...

Merry Christmas from Apollo 8

We are so going into space today

50 years ago, we sent Apollo 8 to the moon.  It wasn't originally planned as a moon mission, but rumor had it, the Soviets were going to send someone to the moon by the end of the year, and we had to beat them.  The Saturn V rocket had only been used once before in Apollo 7.  The newly redesigned crew capsule had never been tested in flight before.  Nor had the guidance computer.

(Full disclosure:  the human works for the company that designed the original Apollo guidance system.)  

And they made it to the moon.  It's not a mission you hear about a lot, but it's the mission that paved the way for Apollo 11.  Apollo 8 showed that we could get someone to the moon and back.

The place the human works had a wonderful tribute night to the engineers and scientists behind Apollo 8 at a special event to preview the new PBS NOVA episode on Apollo 8 (broadcast at 12/26 9pm EST, on PBS.  You should go watch it, because it is has all the fun stories behind the scenes on what the scientists and engineers were up to.)  The human also got to meet people like John Aaron (the original steely-eyed missile man), Jerry Boswick (CAPCOM for Apollo 8), Poppy Northcutt (Return to Earth specialist for Apollo 8.  Whoever thinks there weren't women in mission control is LYING), and Margaret Hamilton (who designed the Apollo Guidance Computer.  Now (in)famous because she has been immortalized by LEGO as a minifig.  So of course the human had the minifig on hand when she met Margaret Hamilton and showed her the minifig...)

There was a panel discussion at the event, and someone from the audience asked John Aaron, Jerry Boswick, and Poppy Northcutt what the most terrifying thing about Apollo 8 was for them.

John Aaron:  We had 55 days between Apollo 7 splashdown and Apollo 8 countdown.

Jerry Boswick:  I was told on a Friday afternoon to give an answer by Monday if Apollo 8 could go to the moon or not.

Poppy Northcutt:  The return to earth system didn't work.  I heard rumors that Apollo 8 was going to the moon, but that I thought that was *&^%$^ because we couldn't be sending anyone up when we couldn't get them back.  We were doing bug fixes a few days before launch.

(Keep in mind 'bugfix' in those days involved wrapping wires around magnets to change values in computer memory...)

Our favorite story involves the Apollo Guidance Computer.
The lead engineer of the Apollo Guidance Computer, Margaret Hamilton, let her daughter play with the simulator for the guidance computer.  And one day, her daughter managed to crash the guidance computer by giving it a command of 'change to program 01' when it was in flight mode.  Program 01 is a test program for use before launch, so the guidance computer thought it was back on the launchpad when it was supposed to be in space.  

And Margaret Hamilton, being a good engineer, brought this fact up to her bosses, and said 'We should make it so someone can't accidentally change the computer to Program 01 during flight.'

And her bosses, being men in the 1960s, said 'This can't possibly happen.  Our astronauts are some of the most highly trained men we have.  They can't possibly make a silly mistake like this.'

And on the way back from the moon, astronaut Bill Anders was making a star sighting (to give the guidance computer a stable reference point to work with).  He was supposed to type VERB 37 NOUN 23, VERB 5 NOUN 01 (in English, that means 'Change program to star sighting, use star 01 as a reference').  What he actually typed was VERB 37 NOUN 01 ('Change program to program 01'), the exact thing that triggered a crash in the simulation...
So the capsule started going crazy, because the guidance computer thought it was back on the launchpad...

A frantic call to Houston, and a computer reset later...they were back on course and Bill Anders was no longer allowed to touch the computer...

The crew of Apollo 8 orbited the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, and, in a live TV broadcast, read from the Book of Genesis.  Here's the transcript, directly from the mission control log files:

We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.

In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.  And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and God said "let there be light." And there was. And God saw the light and that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said "let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters." And God made the firmament and divided-the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said "let the waters under the Heavens be gathered together into one place. And let the dry land appear." And it was so.  And God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering together of the waters called the seas. And God saw that it was good. 

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth.

(https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/apollo-8-earthrise)

We'll go back to the moon some day...

Christmas Eve Coloring Books

It's Christmas Eve, and we're enjoying the vacation with cookies, milk, and a stash of new coloring books for the winter.  

These would make great absolute last minute stocking stuffers.  Each book has 6 pages to color.

Get the coloring books here!