Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

I haven't posted any fic in months - just a couple of podfics - because I was writing a lot of meaty stuff for JanuAUry. And now it's JanuAUry! My first one, Fantabulosa, went up today - set in Edwardian London, Ed is the most renowned female impersonator and Stede also kind of wants to go on the stage. Next up is the Ladyhawke AU!! I rewatched Ladyhawke today to try to find a piece of dialogue to use as a title and unfortunately there are literally no memorable lines in the entire thing? I'm making graphics for each fic - you can see the Fantabulosa one here on BlueSky.

I have very slowly got most of a pocket done in my wool skirt, but then I realized that I actually left spaces for TWO pockets! I have to do another pocket!! 😩 And the seamstress who relined my coat said very definitively that she won't do finishing for my sewing projects because she also hates doing buttonholes.

Felt very weird this afternoon. Not sick, but ... on Tumblr I described it as a slow-rolled panic attack, because that's the closest I can get to describing it. It just sort of hit me, how sad it's going to be to leave Oneonta and my house, I love them both, and all because of a Skinny Bitch who views herself as downtrodden because she sometimes can't make everyone do everything she wants, and takes it out on me.

Edit: Huh, had an interesting thought in the shower. Our most recent conflict is about (I think) me not handling a recent donation by the official procedure, but for the past ... year, maybe two? we have not been handling any donations and purchases by the rules. And I say "we" but I mean the curators. But I'm the only safe target, so she rips me to shreds with the curators instead of making the point that we need to get back on track as a group.

I've been making muslin sleeves to sew to quilts for an exhibition I curated, which will be on the walls for about two weeks. Ironically it has already taken me more than two weeks to do these sleeves and they're not even done, let alone sewn to the quilts. Though they're at least to the point where I just need to sew the long seams (I cut them across the grain and then pieced them when needed, so I could take advantage of selvages, so there was a lot of other sewing. And of course the ironing) and then of course attach them to the quilts.

Have been going through a bit of a whatever-fraction-life-crisis lately, worried that I'm wasting my life, never finish any impressive projects, oh my god my job is so pathetic (this was the major spur to the crisis, a collections colleague is leaving, which I was going to take as an opportunity to ask to be director of collections since their successor would probably need more direction, but she told me that the president is planning to give the recently-promoted, 30(?)yo associate curator another promotion to be THE curator and also be in charge of collections) and I started contemplating going off as a freelancer. But then I also started wondering about trying to get the 18thc pattern book published again, because now Regency Women's Dress has earned out its advance, and in looking into my inbox to see who said what about it, I found that the fashion editor at Bloomsbury Academic had actually discussed some major revisions to my proposal with me to make it a more substantial and scholarly book, and was awaiting a revised version AGES AGO but then I got sidetracked with musicals and fucking covid and COMPLETELY FORGOT ABOUT IT. So uh ... I'm going to try to work on that. Deeply embarrassing, though.

(It is helpful, at least, when I go through these crises now, to be able to say "this is emotional dysregulation" and such. Rather than thinking either that the world is ending or being able to correctly attribute it to my perception but then just going "oh I'm broken and messed up and stupid I guess.")

(Emotional dysregulation gets the self-mocking Tamaki Suoh icon.)

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Turning the heel of the second sock. Taking a break right now to write this.

JanuAUry fic statuses: 1900s female impersonators - DONE; Ladyhawke AU - basically done but I need to go back and fill in a few holes; advice columns based on AITA post - DONE (short and silly); Regency f/f AU version of the dinner with Mary and Anne - in progress; f/f 1930s burlesque AU - outlined but not started; diary fic based on AITA post - still not sure if I'm even going to write it tbh; AU where Ed came to find Stede in the forest - DONE

I've been using the new DW update page, and tbh I like it. Not much different but just a bit more modern.

Twitter is absolutely shambolic! Apparently they're not paying their rent on certain services and are trying to shift off of them but since they laid off so many people it's going poorly, which is why everyone is rate limited ... and Elon decided to spin it as deliberate by saying blue checks get 6000 tweets/day to look at and everyone else 600, which is apparently about fifteen minutes of browsing. Really feeling more and more like the death of the site every day.

Posted my Reverse Bang fic yesterday, Momentum, and I'm very pleased with it. Felt SO anxious afterward, though, a combo of the usual "will people like it?" feeling with a second layer of "does the artist actually like it and think it's worthy of their work??" (Esp as the summary is frankly not very expressive - I found it a very hard fic to sum up.) The art is excellent.

Changed my regular Big Bang fic outline (the totally unhinged one) to a new non-reuniony one, then scrapped that because I built it mechanically and with no heart and I just didn't really want it, and came up with a new one that is unhinged in a different way. Already written about 8k words, so I know it was the right choice. Am desperate to see it illustrated.

I should really be studying woodworking tools ... We're cataloguing this carpenter's tool chest that we bought at auction ummm months ago (we were waiting on getting a) a laptop for collections use b) with access to the database c) and a way to plug it into the network), and I just do not have the words to explain different types of saws and planes and chisels!

I finished A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske the other night. It was so good! The basic premise is that magic exists but is secret, and a non-magician in Edwardian England (probably sometime between 1908 and 1914) accidentally gets appointed to the government office that's meant for someone part of that world; he's immediately plunged into a deadly conflict he knows nothing about, with only his prickly magical liaison for help.

( here be spoilers )

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Emboldened by my success at getting permission from other museums, I'm considering opening up the question at home. Basically, I was asked for my thoughts on points for the next strategic plan, and most of what I sent over were points about photographing the collections and getting them online. This seems like a good opening to discuss putting patterns online as well, scale ones, I mean. But I feel like then I have to go all the way to talking about doing the full thing otherwise it could seem like I'm trying to inch us closer to what's beneficial for me without being upfront about why/how - issues of conflict of interest in museums can be kind of arcane and extensive, and doing basically anything pattern-wise could theoretically benefit my pattern business by raising my profile, which could potentially be a problem. Everything I tried to write today came out really twisty and elaborate, and I'm thinking of just saying tomorrow, "I have a pattern company, what if I do my thing and we put the resulting graded and scaled patterns on the website for free?" Without my branding on them or anything of course.

Some of today's dresses were boring, but I did find some good ones! I shared two bad pictures on Facebook. The blue doesn't photograph well because it's that early 1850s iridescent kind of shot silk - blue and yellow. The top of the flared sleeve is pleated to fit the armscye and the pleats are stitched down. I have absolutely no use for an outfit from that period, but I really want to pattern and copy it. Maybe we'll do something a bit Dickensian around Christmas and I can justify it ... The other is from 1912, worn by the donor's mother on her honeymoon to New York. (It didn't really photograph well either ...) I love the one-sided lapel, because why? And it has a kind of apron overskirt in the front, because why not?

Edit: forgot to say, that sailor suit from a few days ago? The owner was elected secretary of the local or regional Red Cross in 1917, and I like to think she had that made for the occasion, because it's so military.

I was really hoping to get that grant for dress forms, but it was not to be. :( I got an email today saying they'd given out all the money in round 1 and can't have a round 2 (again), and since I never got a notification about the grant before that, I assume that means no. Very sad. I have another source to try but I think people in general are just heartless Philistines who don't understand the importance of historical clothing in building the public's appreciation for the past, ANYWAY.

To take pictures for the HSM, I've pretty much decided that I'm going to clean away my recycling from the one area in the apartment where there's space and clear wall enough for a backdrop, get fully dressed, and try to use the timer on my phone or tablet camera. Hopefully it works because the only other options are a mirror pic (and my mirror's better than the old one, but it's still very much not ideal since only one pose is possible) or putting it on the skinny dress form (boobs aren't in the right place, it will look stupid).

Edit: Reading the Pragmatic Costumer's recent corset review, and ... we are basically the same size, except I have more hips/butt. So why do I think she looks svelte in all of her pictures and I look fat in mine??

Things I like about PastPerfect V: Not opening fields as windows that have to be x'd out to save the record. It's a lot easier to navigate between, say, the People fields of different records this way.

Things I hate about PastPerfect V: THE LAG IS SO MUCH WORSE. I click on a field, type, realize I'm not in edit mode, click edit, oops the first field on the page is now full of irrelevant letters. I swear it's worse in V than IV. Or maybe it's just the networking slowing it down? Maybe I'm unfair.

I have to rant, which I normally don't do while at work, but it's so frustrating. ( Read more... )

I already know not to let this get under my skin, but it does, it just does.

I've been trying to really get into accessioning this week, and I've made great headway. There's a card table piled high with objects, mostly paper, a bunch of stuff in my "office" (upstairs; I think it's a holdover from when they could afford a full-time admin person and the collections manager didn't have to sit near the front door), and a bunch of stuff in the collections. The card table's been my object: I've been taking a batch of stuff back to my desk, then sorting through it to decide if it's a) crap we don't want, b) things we obviously want, or c) material the archivist ought to look at to determine whether or not it would benefit the archives, because I don't know if we already have it or something like it. So -

- 1840s letters to a family in the county (from England!) -> yes, definitely
- early 20th century books on local topics -> I can't make that call
- all the records from the local retired teachers' association up to the 1990s -> PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME ACCESSION ALL OF THEM

Really, I only created 11 accession groups over the past couple of days, but I got through almost every single thing on the table - there are piles everywhere, neatly arranged, and I made a typed list for the archivist so she doesn't have to touch it all. Hopefully she'll be able to rule on it quickly so I can move all of it out of the way and start bringing stuff down from the upper floors. Part of me can't understand how they got to the point where they were hardly accessioning everything and just letting it all build up - this is for years, the earliest non-accessioned things came in in 2007 - but then I guess once you've put the paperwork off for a year or two it starts to seem like an insurmountable project. Sue told me yesterday that she was impressed with the way I dove in.

Not impressive yesterday: I struggled mightily with balancing the deposit, reconciling the membership renewal list and the actual checks. It turned out that the computer printed one guy's listing twice in a row for NO REASON (I didn't put it in twice, and when I printed the list out a different way it didn't happen), and one person who was previously paying the Individual rate downgraded to Senior and I didn't change the automatic dues from $30 to $25. It was hours, we were all doing the math over and over again and getting different answers each time, I was laughing hysterically at intervals because it was so ridiculous.

Brookside is interested! I hope this goes through. But I can't meet them until the week after next, plus I haven't set up my appts with the other museums for patterning yet, so there's a good excuse reason for not getting with Manpower again yet.

I'm going to have to figure out where to go next, though. That's the trouble with this sort of career path. I'm thinking about Peebles Island, because my guess from the records I've seen there is that they could use me - and they don't have an internet presence as far as I know. That's a big place, too, so it could take longer.

But of course the more of this that I try to do, the more I box myself in. Really, though, the choice isn't "box myself in" or "branch myself out", it's "box myself in" or "be a mail clerk". But ... IDK.

Bought a wrist brace and I love it! Maybe this will solve all my problems.

Met says no. :( Met also says they're sending out rejection letters, which I have a hard time believing, but whatevs.

Patterned today the 1872 wedding dress, a late '20s day dress I almost want to make (it's a sack, though), and an early 1860s dress with a double-pointed bodice. And now I think I'm done, because I need to redraw all of them to be more organized and in pen and to write directions. I want to keep going, there are dresses I'd like a pattern of, but I'd like to finish this while I'm still being paid for it and can make sure the embed code gets into the files.

Mom accidentally killed a bird in the wood stove today. :( I'm glad I wasn't there, it sounds like it was pretty awful.

Last night I preordered my Renoirs. In a way, it was empowering? I feel like I could buy a pair of the Regency boots sometime.

I realized after I bought the most recent Humble Indie eBook Bundle that I never downloaded the last one, so I took them all and put them on my Kindle. So that's nice. It's amazing how much more big-time the books get with each successive charity drive, and it's great to see how the average price has been rising. I remember it being something like $2 with the original game bundle.

Washed some linen. I'd like to make a linen gown for Fort Ti, but I've been meaning to make a shift for months and months and even though the one I made for my thesis is functional, I do have a gown that works and it's more important to get this fixed. Actually, I might try altering my blue linen gown so it fits in the shoulders and has applied robings before I go ahead and make a whole new thing.

Gosh it is cold.

Did a few different things today, but mainly I finished uploading Wing letters to Scribd. Against all odds, they have 300 views despite my not putting them in any category or letting Scribd put them on the front page. But I am most proud of going through and annotating Stephen Hopkins's handful of loose diary pages (he has years of tiny diary books, hopefully one day the carefully handwritten transcriptions of those will be digitized, but not by me) and reuploading that, because it is vitally important that people know Sate Johnson is Sarah Johnson, b. 1836, and that the hotel where Stephen goes with Fred is either the Union or Glens Falls Hotel, etc.

WHY DID THEY NAME THE SITE THAT. I'm sure it's pronounced like "scribed" but I always read it as "scrib id".