One of the best things about living in the future, as I refer to the 21st Century, is access to information that has come before. And I in my feminist way, of course, am referring to the bits and pieces of daily life that get lost along the way to posterity, notoriety, and history… the daily stuff of the lives of families, women and children.
I love being able to flip through the pages of a catalog or a Ladies Publication from 100 to 150 years ago. These acts give me a sense of connectedness to the culture of my foremothers. My maternal grandmother was born in 1883. She began having children in 1910 with the birth of my Uncle Carl. The last of those children, my Aunt Alice, passed away early in September of the year at the age of 92.
How on Earth can I convey the sense of connectedness and continuity of family to my 4-year-old grand daughters when the generations in my part of the family tend toward the long side?
I can read to them from children’s literature of the time when my mother was being read to by her mother, 100 years ago. My mother was born in 1914.
This morning I surfed on over to archive.org and found A Book of Cheerful Cats. I downloaded a PDF of this delightfully illustrated tome to read to the twins when they visit. I will also print out copies to color, cut, glue, glitter and with which to generally have fun.
Somehow I find the search for images from other times and childhoods to be relaxing and rewarding. When I was little I would look through my mother’s tattered memorabilia from her childhood. I was the fifth kid of my mom’s who pawed through her stuff, and it was worse for the wear. While the tactile experience is gone, the rich content of books from those times, minus the allergy inducing dust and mildew, is out there waiting for new generations of family and rainy or snowy afternoons.
10 Early 20th Century Advertising Images
It is Wordless Wednesday, so today I’m reproducing some advertising images from 1910.
Source
Poster advertising : being a talk on the subject of posting as an advertising medium, with helpful hints and sensible suggestions to poster advertisers, and with thirty-two pages of full color reproductions of posters used by national advertisers (1910)
Author: Hawkins, George Henry Edward
Subject: Advertising; Posters
Year: 1910
The digitized/scanned book is available on the Internet Archive.
Images
It is really difficult to believe that lead paint or cottonseed-based foodstuffs celebrated these features of their products. But some of these ads show early versions of what became and still are household brands.
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I just noticed that the Capitol is featured on this last Quaker poster. Maybe the Congress needs to go back to simple food like this and they wouldn’t want to shut down government. 2nd day of U.S. Government Shutdown.
Nearly Wordless Weds, My Girls via GIMP
I felt like playing with graphics and making a digital photo frame for some images for our girls. First I found an image I wanted to use as a frame in The Strand Magazine from 1894:
ORIGINAL
ALTER IMAGE INTO FRAME
I used a white brush in GIMP to white out the text. Then I added alpha (transparency) to the layer. Then I use the select and cut functions to remove the images and followed up with the erase brush to extend the cut around the curved areas. 
ADD IMAGES
Then I added images and text as layers and cropped and stacked them so the images lined up the way I wanted. I transformed all images here into gray scale.
ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES
Here is another one I did, from different sources.
Adorable, no? I will print on photo paper add a small layer of matting and frame.
Japanese Designs from 1860, Animals
While looking for some Victorian line drawings and patterns I stumbled over a book from 1860 that is filled with dozens of prints of mid-19th Century Japanese printed and patterned fabrics. Copyrights have expired for both United States and Japanese copyrights according to the research I did.
I have attached titles to the works that are entirely my own. While some traditional Japanese styles of representation just do not grab me, the sense of pattern and whimsy that is so often found in the detail of the images or on painted fabrics and household decorations delight me to no end.
The titles given to these images in the included captions below are mine.
I have always loved turtles, and I hope the great Turtle Goddess forgives me for once eating soup from what may have been an endangered turtle. It was a Christmas Feast generously and graciously put together and hosted by a restaurant owner in Playa de Humacao for the group of monkey watchers who lived near their restaurant. The group included a professor whom they considered an adopted daughter. One does not ask about ingredients, even if you are, as I was at the time, a vegetarian. I did manage to skip roast goat served at a wedding party a few weeks later.
Anyway, I love the simple pattern that capture the essence of “turtle” for me.
Similarly the whimsy of the birds incorporating themselves into the pattern of the flowers is clever and something that has a very contemporary feel to it. As I look at more and more images from the 19th Century I realize there is nothing new under the sun, only variations on a theme.
Japanese themes capture iconic images in ways at which I can only marvel. The 2008 economic turmoil for me, for example, was perfectly illustrated by The Great Wave which I chose to illustrate an article I wrote for a client. The client felt the image was too negative. I thought it showed the fierce determination of the persons in the boats who were navigating the wave. The best images are open to interpretation and allow us to put our own understanding into them.
I was fortunate to be able to see an exhibition of Hokusai entitled, “Beyond the Great Wave, Hoskusai’s Images of Mount Fuji” at the Art Instititute of Chicago this summer. The Great Wave is probably the best known image from Japanese Art in the west. I recommend checking out the online information about the exhibit to learn more about Hokusai, his famous imagery and a bit more about Japanese art.