Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Lowell National Historic Park-the Final Part

        Hi everyone. Today's post is a scheduled post since I am now (hopefully)  in Greece.  However, I did want to finish my Lowell National Historic Park posts because I know that when I come home, there will be other things to share. 😏

    For this last post about the National Historic Park we'll be heading to a boarding house museum where, in the early years of Lowell's manufacturing history, the women employed by the mills would live.  The first 2 parts of this visit, if you're interested, can be found here Part 1 and Part 2.

     These boarding houses were very close to the mills themselves, so the mill girls (as they were called) could easily walk back and forth not only at the beginning and end of the day, but also for their meals. 


      That brick building behind this park is one of those boarding houses. A lot of the mill girls  came from farms in the area up to a few hours away from the mills. At that time, New England farms could be pretty tough places to live because most farmers were not wealthy, and farm work was not easy or leisurely work either. The soil here is rocky; there are so many trees to clear and keep clear, and the winters are fairly long (in comparison to other places). Never mind that the small family farms meant there were always animals to care for or crops to deal with. And on top of that, there was the normal day to day living for women which included cooking,cleaning, keeping  fires going, and helping out with child care.

     A lot of the stories the museum shared  talk about girls who felt they had a chance to get out in the world by going to work at a mill. Besides work, there were concerts, parties and often church related events the workers could attend.

    However, keep in mind, the workers were at the mills 6 days a week,  many day for 12 (+)  hours, so even though these girls were out in the world, it's not like they were socialites who slept in and went to glamorous balls. (And the question is, did they really escape to better conditions?)



Here's a boarding house bedroom where several women slept and even shared beds. 


And this is part of the dining room where the women shared communal meals.

And you might not be able to read these next few photos, but the meals the girls were fed were pretty hearty sized meals. This exhibit showed typical breakfasts, lunches and dinners. 





As you can see, it was not a glamorous life. 


Over time, the overall make up of the mill workers changed, especially as other opportunities for women came into being. As immigrants arrived from other parts of the world, they began to fill those mill jobs. 

However, when the mills shut down, it did create a lot of hardship. New England is filled with mill towns, some textiles, some not. Even some farming communities had small mills, including my town where we have under 3,000 people today and  where there were fewer in the past.  Was it an easier life than farming? I don't know the answer to that question, but as the west opened up with better farming land, many New England farms ceased to exist. Mills became a place for people to make their livelihood. The forests grew back.  People left the country and went to the city  where there were more opportunities.  Immigrants arrived from various places in the world.  And the economy in New England over time, as it is in many places (and as many of you probably already know) has changed from manufacturing to white collar and service jobs.

However, I think the history of an area is always interesting to glimpse. The history of the Lowell Mills might have begun as a unique commercial project, but it does reflect one part not just of Lowell's story, but in New England's history as well. 


I'll finish this post with  a view of a mill and the same park (only a different view) as my first photo.

That's all for me today. I'll "see" you back in the blogosphere when I return home at the end of next week. 


















Monday, March 11, 2024

T Stands for Last Week and Signs of Spring

 Hi everyone. And hello to all of the ladies stopping by for T this week also. 👋

     Our weather here has definitely gotten spring-like.  Well, New Hampshire spring-like. I don't have any spring bulbs popping up yet, but the snow is all gone, the mud is slightly drying out, and temperatures have been above 40 degrees F (4.4 degrees C) most days. It's exciting to see spring arrive so early because I'm someone who has had it with winter by March. 

     But since March and April aren't over yet, I'm not holding my breath the snow is over for the year yet either. But I'm hoping. 😏

    Last week I went for a couple of beach walks. One day it was cloudy and cold on the beach, the other day it was sunny and beautiful.


As soon as I let Miss Maddie off leash (the beach was empty as you can probably see in the photo), she went running for the water, and Mr. Pete followed along.


This rock exposed at low tide was covered with  rock-weed. It's not the prettiest of algae, but I thought it made an interesting texture in my photo.




For my birthday last Monday I went out for soup and an ice cream sundae with a couple of girlfriends. 


    My friends told our waitress I needed more than 6 cherries on my sundae. I had to explain to the waitress how the last time (back last summer) when I had a sundae at this restaurant, my husband had moaned how bad his day was going. The waitress had given him 6 cherries and only given me 1. This time we had a good laugh when our waitress returned and announced she had to beat the 6 and that she had given me 9 cherries. The photo shows 8 of them since one had slipped down on the side out of view. I think since she got a bit carried away with the cherries that she skimped a bit on the walnuts, but oh well. 😏

    Another day last week  I was at Target and found these plain wooden eggs in the dollar section. I decided to get some to decorate.


       At first I painted them, and then I decorated them. The tape (in this next photo) is not part of the decoration. I was using it so I could paint part of the egg a different color and have a more or less straight and distinct line between the 2 colors.


     I'm including this photo (above) as it is my ticket for T this week over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog. Some days for lunch I have a  protein shake.  Although I don't drink hot coffee, I love coffee flavoring. That's a coffee protein shake with a bit of ice in my glass. 

I haven't quite finished decorating the eggs, but once they are done, I will share them.

     One spring thing that hasn't happened in my area yet is ice out. There was hardly  any ice this winter.  Ice in was not until February, which is very very late. But as of this past weekend there was still some hanging on in all the lakes. We walked into my mother-in-law's home this past Saturday, and that's where I took this photo. 


    It's unusual for there to be open water at this time in March. Usually ice out is usually sometime in April, so this year it will be early, and probably it will even happen this week  with the wind wind or more warm weather in the forecast.

That's all for me this week.

    I will be missing T next week  since I'm heading out on a 10 day long planned and twice a postponed trip to Greece with a couple of girlfriends. This is our "retirement celebration" trip that took a while to happen between COVID and a few other life events.   I am sure I will have lots of stories  when I get back home.

   "See" you later this month. Have a great T day and the next couple of weeks.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Pretty in Pink

Hi everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend. Mine right now is is wet and dark, but with the clock change, at least I could sleep in that extra hour. 😏

My page today is for Chris' challenge at Art Journal Journey . This month the theme, On All Fours,  is all about 4 legged animals .


    I started by rubbing some ink pads on my page. Then I used a stencil and some pink paint to make the big dots. 

   That cute pig is cut out of an old greeting card that I found recently while doing some cleaning. She was too cute to get rid of, so I chopped her out of the background and glued her down on my page. For some reason I felt she would be sitting in a flower patch, so I die cut some flowers from pink and burgundy textured paper and added them to my page. 

   I couldn't find a quote (that I liked) to stamp, but I did think about how my page has a lot of pink on it, and so I used some letter stickers and made the quote I added to the page. But I think pink is perfect, especially for a page about a piggy. 

   That's all for me today.  I am also linking this page up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles. Have a great rest of your weekend!





Friday, March 8, 2024

Lowell National Historic Park-Part 2

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday. It's almost the weekend too, so for many people, it is almost time for a little down time. 😏

And FYI-today's post is a bit on the long side. 

    This past Wednesday I shared some photos and info from a trip last month to Lowell National Historic Park in Lowell, Massachusetts. My daughter and I  visited this park back in early February when she had some vacation time before starting a new job. Here's my Wednesday post if you're interested in reading it: Lowell National Historic Park-Part 1.

    Since it is time for Nicole's Friday Face Off and also for Gillena's Friday Lunch Break , I have some face photos today, as well as some photos from the museum at the Historic Park.  The museum is on the floor above where the park has a large number of actual still working looms.


   This historic park had me thinking about Fabric/Textiles, and how it is one those "things" that most of us probably take for granted.  Textiles are all over the place; in clothing, linens, towels, curtains, rugs and other items too. I'll use clothes as an example. 

    We go to a store or go online and buy clothes. Or perhaps we get second hand clothes from someone. Or maybe you even sew and just get the fabric to make your clothes.  Obviously we couldn't have clothes without the fabrics that make them. (Unless we shot all the animals and ran around in fur, but that would definitely decimate the animal population. 😒) I don't know about you, but other than the type of fabric something is, I don't usually think about what it takes to make  the fabric. 

  I can see why weaving fabric by hand would take up so much of a household's time before mechanization came into play. Clothes were needed for warmth, privacy and protection. Yes fabrics could be bought, especially specialty materials like silk, but it was often out of the budgets of many people. It also explains why clothes closets were small or weren't even put into many older homes.  People didn't need them because they didn't have all that many outfits. Unless of course they were wealthy.

   Mechanization was good for fabric production, even though there were a lot of negatives too. Not only were the early workers subject to long days, no safety constraints, and relatively poor working conditions, there were also nasty environmental effects like  dyes and other discharges.  I could probably write a whole post about the pros and cons of mechanization, but I think you get the point without me doing that. 

       The mills in Lowell were historically  about making cotton fabric. I liked this glass tube they had in the museum that showed the results of the entire process, starting with  the actual cotton. To keep this short, I'm not writing about each step but you can see in the photos how the original cotton changes to become, eventually, fabric.


The cotton must be cleaned and then spun to be  turned into thread.



The thread is woven into  cloth, which might need to be whitened before it is finished.


 And it might then need to be dyed to create colorful threads, or perhaps the entire sheet of fabric is dyed.


And then you get bolts of fabric.
 (Sorry for the lousy clarity on this next photo. I think I smushed my finger over the lens on my phone before I took this photo.)


After production,  the bolts of fabric have to be shipped to their destinations.


      I really like this (above) photo because of the perspective of the museum display with  my daughter. She loves fabric, as you can see from  all the various types in her outfit. She also is a clothes horse extraordinaire. And she is a pretty decent quilter too.

     Historically, the importance of making textiles was right up there with getting food. The oldest garment found to date (based on my internet search as I am not a fabric expert) was from somewhere between 3482-3012 BCE/BC in Egypt. You can see it and read about it here if you are interested: Tarkhan Dress. Sadly, fabric doesn't often survive the millennia things like pottery, sculpture, tools and buildings do, and a lot of early archaeologists didn't  bring the importance of fabric front and center in the research, mainly because even they found it, it wasn't showy and usually very decayed. 

      I was also reading about natural versus synthetic fabrics. Although natural fabrics (cotton, wool, linen and silk) come from non-man made sources, man manipulated those sources in order to have the fibers to make fabric. One example  is how sheep have been bred for millennia to have more wool, and wool that does not shed. The ancestors to today's sheep shed their woolly "fur" or had people pull it off. (Rather like having a shedding dog and pulling off clumps of hair.) Sheep are most likely the second oldest domesticated animal right behind dogs because wool makes fantastic yarn then used to make fabric.

     There are books written about textile production, types of textiles, uses of textiles, etc. I've read quite a few, but this is a blog post (and it's already pretty long) and not a book about fabric.

OK, this is enough for one post. I'll end this post on the lighter side with a selfie my daughter took of herself and me on our day out.


If you're interested my final Lowell Park post will be scheduled next Wednesday.

I hope my look at fabric wasn't too boring.  I will be missing the next couple of weeks of Friday Face Offs and Friday Lunch Breaks as I'm heading out on a long planned and twice postponed girls trip. 
Have a super weekend.



















Thursday, March 7, 2024

Thursday Art

        Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.  It's a wet early morning at my house, but warmer than usual, so instead of snow, the wet is mostly rain. And all the rain, means we have a lot of mud too. It definitely feels like spring, which is great, although this year we have record setting ice outs so you can tell it's been a warmer than usual/normal winter.

       One thing I want to share today I have a page for Chris' On All Fours challenge over at Art Journal Journey. My 4 legged animals for today are dinosaurs. 


      I die cut the dinos and colored them in with inks. Since we don't really know what color dinosaurs were (Thanks David for linking me up to Jakob Vinther and his work on dinosaur coloration. They can now infer what colors many dinosaurs were) Since many dinosaurs are closely related to birds who come in various and sometimes bright colors, many dinosaurs were also brightly colored. And I didn't include feathers, but many dinos probably had feathers over at least part of their bodies also. 

      I haven't added any postage stamps to my art in a long time, but I love mail art, so I created a set of fake postage stamps for my page.  The actual white stamps are die cuts, and I used some number  and some dinosaur skeleton rubber stamps for the images. I need to correct myself since the pterosaur is an ancient reptile and NOT a fly dinosaur, even though it lived at the time of the dinosaurs.

     The palm trees (the closest I could come to some of the tropical trees found when these quadrupeds lived) are also die cut, and I stamped the postmark and the special delivery with some ancient postage related rubber stamps  I had in my stash.


And you can see the quote better in this above close up photo. It is from an Art by Marlene set. 

Also for today, I have a tag for Pinky's challenge at Tag Tuesday. The challenge is Rabbit or Hare, I Don't Care.


      I had a page I painted with some shiny blue paint, and while it was wet, I laid the tag up against it which made a few blue blobs. I then used some purple ink spray and a paper towel to color the rest of the background, except that  I took some dark blue ink and inked the edges of the tag. 

       I then used that same blue ink and  some bunny word stamps and stamped them several times on the top of the tag. After that I took some flower paper and die cut the big bunny. I drew in the eyes, filled in the ears and gave the tail a bit of sparkle. The tag still needed something, and I remembered I had a die that cut out all these little confetti sized bunnies. I used the die two times, and then took all the bunnies and glued them down on my tag.  I hope if she's the Mommy bunny she didn't give birth to all these babies at one time. 😏

       That's all for me today. 






 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Lowell National Historic Park-Part 1


 Hi everyone. Happy mid-week to you. 

Back at the beginning of February my daughter was on vacation before she started a new job. We met one day in southern New Hampshire and took a little trip  to Lowell National Historic Park in Lowell, Massachusetts.

   In the 1810's, some business men met and decided they would build textile manufacturing mills along part of the Merrimack River in an area of Massachusetts close to the southern  New Hampshire border. They also planned out living places and other needed resources so their  mill workers could have a life close to where they worked.  Their ideas created the first planned industrial city in the United States. 

   This new development was called Lowell,  named after Francis Cabot Lowell, one of those business men. F.C. Lowell had visited England to see how their textiles were produced. He memorized the construction of these British looms so similar automated looms could be built when he returned to the United States. At that time, the design of those British  looms was top secret.  Lowell was able to come back to the US and build a replica. With that replica, the start of American cotton fabric production went into full swing.  Although he did not live long enough to see the  planned mill complexes built (F.C. Lowell died in 1817), the rest of the men decided to name the city after him.

   At one time Lowell, Massachusetts was the largest textile producing area in the United States. The industry was going strong until it became cheaper to produce cloth in the southern US (where the cotton was grown), and then eventually, cloth production was shipped overseas. When the mills went out of business, Lowell went into a deep economic decline.  It was then that some of the old mills  became a National Historic Park to commemorate and be a teaching tool about that part of US history. 


The National Park Service operates some historical museums. In the photo above you can see some boarding houses where the women who worked the mills lived. Part of this building is now a museum. I"ll share that in a future post.

Below are the canals and some of the mill buildings from the mill complexes. The park service operates a museum in the Bootts Cotton mill.







Inside the old Bootts mill, there was one floor still filled with old weaving machines. On the floor above the machines, there was an interesting small museum about the mills.


I can only imagine how loud the entire building was when all the stories were filled with running machines.  When we entered some park rangers started up a section of machines to run, and my ears were ringing when I left.



Plus the cotton fiber dust must have been horrible to breathe in. Factory  worker safety was obviously not like it would be today. You could see the fibers stuck all over the machines.


The roll of the workers (mostly women) was to be sure that the thread spindles were constantly put in and that the machine was actually producing fabric. This is because the machine could weave the fabric automatically, but these older machines weren't robots and needed a person to keep them working. Here are some of those loaded spindles, ready to go onto a loom for fabric production.


Finally for today's post, here's some fabric that was currently being made in the mill. The park service cuts and sells this fabric to help support the park.


I'll share more on Friday. Thanks for visiting. 




















Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Spring!

Hi everyone. It is another Tuesday and another start of a new challenge at  Try It On Tuesday .

First let me thank Silke for hosting our Spotlight Challenge, and also let me thank everyone who joined in. 
Our new challenge is one that speaks to the upcoming season for everyone who lives north of the equator. This time our theme is

SPRING


I made a blossom filled page  that used a lot of stamping and watercolor paints and pencils.

I started by taking some watercolor pencils and making some "spots" on my blank journal page. Then used a wet brush and spread out the colors so I had various colors around my background. I then used an ancient Technique Tuesday cherry blossom stamp and stamped it multiple times around my background. A few spots didn't stamp very dark so I even over-stamped some of those images.

I used watercolor paints, a marker, and a white pen to  color in the background flowers. I also stamped one branch of flowers on some white paper. I used the same supplies to color them in, and then I fussy cut them.  I used a die to die cut the black oval in the center of my page. I stamped the quote on it with white pigment ink. Then I stamped the bunny on white paper and fussy cut that out. I added that and my single branch of cherry blossoms around the base of my die cut. Finally I stamped some tiny butterflies and colored them in.

Our spring challenge runs for the next 2 weeks, and if you don't know, Technique Tuesday accepts all types of art. And don't forget to check out all the fun spring ideas from the design team members also.

I am also linking my page up to Chris' challenge at Art Journal Journey. This month Chris' challenge is  On All Fours, and she asks for 4 legged animals.   Just a reminder that at Art Journal Journey only journaling is accepted. Please no cards, tags, or other art forms.

I look forward to seeing everyone's spring inspired art. 




 

Monday, March 4, 2024

T Stands for Celebrating All Weekend

Hi everyone. It's the first T day of March. I hope everyone had a great start to the new month. I can't believe we're in the third month of 2024 already.

My post is a bit long today-warning you and apologizing in advance.

Last week there was  spring, a lot of mud and wintery cold in New Hampshire.  

It's not very pretty outside right now at all. 😒 

I did buy some daffodils at Trader Joe's the other day so at least they brightened up inside.


I never managed to get to the ocean to walk last week, but I did a bit of baking. This next photo is also my first ticket to T over at  Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog this week. You can see my Diet Coke. It takes me 2-3 days to get through a bottle this size.


I was making myself a birthday cake because my daughter and her husband came last Friday evening for an early  celebration. This cake was a new recipe for me, and I tried 2 new things in cake baking with this recipe. First of all I have never made a cake with self-rising flour. Self-rising flour is something that for years you could barely find here in the parts of New England where I've lived. Now that I can easily find it, I was ready to try it.

The other thing I tried was using freeze-dried  powdered strawberries.  When I opened the package they smelled great, and they did make the cake taste like strawberries.  I think when I use them again I will add a bit of red food coloring just because I think some people (like my husband) expect strawberries to be red. I know smell affects taste, but I think color can and does also.

Before we had birthday cake, we went out for Mexican food. I haven't had Mexican food for a long time, and it was yummy (but I forgot to take a photo). With dinner I had a margarita too. That's drink number 2.


The photo in this angle makes my margarita look gigantic. It was the same size as my daughter's which you can also see in the photo. And you can see the water I drank after my margarita was finished.

We were too tired Friday night to have my birthday cake  so the next best thing was to have it for breakfast on Saturday. 😮

The layers go (from top of the cake to bottom) strawberry, vanilla and then chocolate. There was homemade whipped cream and red berry jam in between each layer.  Some of it squeezed out when the cake got carried upstairs from the garage. I had it in a cooler out there because  the whipped cream it needed to be kept cold, and since I didn't have room in the fridge, a cooler in the garage was the next best thing.

Here's me with  morning hair ready to blow out the candles.


I actually celebrated all weekend.  😏

 This past weekend my husband and I also went out tractor shopping. The hubby has been stashing money away for many years (we all are sick of hearing him tell us he wants a tractor), and finally he found a used one that worked for his budget and what he wanted.


Yes that's me on the tractor at the dealer. It's the first time I've ever driven one. I'm actually excited he finally found one because I have a few projects I want to work on. A little more practice with the bucket, and I'll be ready to use it myself. ❤

Since he bought the tractor in Maine, we headed a little further east to go visit his Mom. She was not having a great day, but her assisted living is near one of our favorite pizza places. After our visit we went and had pizza for a late lunch. This diet Pepsi is another drink ticket for T day, even though I forgot to take a photo with most of the pizza.


Since this post is getting long, I'll end it here. 

I'm hoping everyone has a great T day and first full week of March.