From Cup to Curl: How to Get Fabulous Historical Hair Using Straws

One of my favorite bloggers, Liz, at The Pragmatic Costumer, has posted another fabulous installment about historic hairstyles. This time, the subject is all manner of curls:

The Pragmatic Costumer

Big Hair was a Big Deal Long Before Dallas and Dolly Parton!

Those of you that browse my rambling frequently are well aware that I am hair illiterate. Indeed, I know next to nothing about taming my crispy, unruly mane. Yet, I am slowly teaching myself a few tricks here and there, and the internet has been a boon for my boring locks.

As a strong adherent to the old cliche that “every curly-haired girl wants straight hair and every straight-haired girl wants curls,” I have dreamed of lovely curls since childhood. When I was very young, my mother had tightly permed 1980s poodle hair (her words, not mine!), and I remember playing with her pink plastic hair pick, pretending I had a perm that needed fluffing, too. I am infinitely envious of those glamorous 1980s superstars like Bernadette Peters and Whitney Houston who had curls so luscious no scrunchie…

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Pioneer Girl is out!

Without further delay…PIONEER GIRL is here! (…and it’s Annotated…) Let the rousing discussions, debates, and reactions of knee-jerk-disbelief begin!

The Pioneer Girl Project

Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography from the South Dakota Historical Society Press. We are glad to say that the books will be arriving on your doorsteps in the next few days.

On Friday, November 14, the long-awaited Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography made it safely to our warehouse. As pallets of boxes were brought off the semitrailer, sod-house-like structures began to form and Press staffers Lisa Nold and Rodger Hartley quickly lost their sense of time and place.

However, they soon gathered themselves in preparation for the big sendoff beginning November 17.  That Monday, as if jolly ol’ Saint Nick himself were looking over our shoulders, box upon box was packed with care to be sent off across North America. The project of packing pallets to be shipped to our national and international distributors and bookstores had also begun. Boxes were hauled from one…

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Slate reviews the long-awaited publication of Pioneer Girl.

In anticipation of the (Finally!) soon-to-be-released Pioneer Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s circa 1928-30 memoir-cum-manuscript which became the basis for her “Little House” children’s series, Slate has offered the following glowing review of the long-awaited publication, edited and annotated by a team from South Dakota State Historical Society Press, spearheaded by recent Wilder biographer Pamela Smith Hill.

In 2010, Hill was a featured speaker at the first academic conference of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association (lovingly known as “LauraPalooza”: go to http://www.beyondlittlehouse.com for information about the upcoming conference in Brookings, South Dakota, July 2015). She is particularly known as the author of 2007’s insightful Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. Hill has spent the last several years combing through archives and artifacts of various Wilder homesite museums, state archives, Wilder’s papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, and compiling some details from the research of a bevy of additional sources, including several independent researchers’ previous publications.

In addition, Hill is currently teaching the first-ever open-access online college course devoted solely to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Offered via Missouri State University and the Canvas Network, and entitled Laura Ingalls Wilder: Exploring her Work and Writing Life, the 8-week course was offered free of charge and attracted thousands of enrollees; it concludes 1 December 2014.

Pioneer Girl is currently available via pre-order from South Dakota State Historical Society Press (www.pioneergirlproject.org) and the various homesite museums devoted to preservation of Wilder’s legacy, including:

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum and Tourist Center, Walnut Grove, Minnesota:
(www.walnutgrove.org/store/
or call 888-528-7298)

and
The Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, De Smet, South Dakota: (www.discoverlaura.org).

I ask that, as fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder, you remember that where you make your purchase matters. Your purchase made directly through these museum and archive outlets will benefit the museums and archives most directly related to the Wilder legacy; purchases from the giant corporate behemoth retailers do not. So, if you want to make certain your purchase will benefit the places which protect the integrity, conservation, and very survival of the vast collections of Wilder papers and artifacts, please purchase directly from one of the Wilder homesites or the SDSHS Press.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/11/little_house_nonfiction_laura_ingalls_wilder_s_memoir_pioneer_girl_reviewed.2.html

Lovely Limbs: Modern Stockings with Historical Style

The Pragmatic Costumer has done it again! This time, Liz explores her love for centuries of embellished stockings…and I have a new favorite place to shop!

The Pragmatic Costumer

Completely Hosed on Hose

Some women are obsessed with shoes. I love them, too, but my love affair with shoes is more practical than fantastical. My love of stockings, however, has grown exponentially over the years. Not only are they fun, they completely alter the way shoes fit. A shoe that is too big or even too small becomes much more comfortable with the right stocking. Keeping you warm as the weather turns chilly is a huge bonus as well.

Kittens and tea also help greatly.

When I talk about stockings, I don’t mean our modern idea of stockings– the sheer, skin tone nylons or the cutesy sock-shapes we hang up at Christmastime. Though they are both rooted in historical stockings, they are like the two seperated halves of the stocking story. Stockings in the past were knit or sewn, and while silk can be made very sheer, our ancestors…

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