Hello, my name's Natalie Ferguson. I've been keeping this blog since 2005. That's getting to be a long time, and for many years it was an anonymous venture, as far as the text goes. However, so much research and effort have gone into the content, and photos of my family and I figure throughout, so really there's no longer any sense in avoiding formally attaching a name to the thing.
So, here are the tags of identity, the vitae, to add to the crush of billions out there: mama and wife, MA American History, MPH Behavioral Science, both from Emory University, worker bee in public health, and everlasting reader of history and examiner of all the detritus of history, but especially of the social-historical sort -- sewing manuals, magazines, letters and journals, bits of old garments and textiles.
Hoping that you find the content intriguing and occasionally useful, and/or a balm for curiosity or ennui. Very best to you!
So, here are the tags of identity, the vitae, to add to the crush of billions out there: mama and wife, MA American History, MPH Behavioral Science, both from Emory University, worker bee in public health, and everlasting reader of history and examiner of all the detritus of history, but especially of the social-historical sort -- sewing manuals, magazines, letters and journals, bits of old garments and textiles.
Hoping that you find the content intriguing and occasionally useful, and/or a balm for curiosity or ennui. Very best to you!
2 comments:
This is coming 12 years late, but I just came across your article as I was Googling about cotton, and wanted to congratulate you on your use of language. Beautiful! like the cotton you describe, a boll of which is tacked to the bulletin board above me.
Here's the URL re. my novel, Hallam's War, which came out about the time you were writing this. www.hallamswar.com I've almost finished its sequel (of sorts) which takes place in NYC two years after the end of the Civil War, and which also has a lot about cotton, from the POV of a southern widow trying to sell her crop to a powerful NY cotton factor. (Oh, and there's lots about clothes; my female protagonist is a dressmaker. In fact the review of Hallam's War in the Washington Post, mostly positive, complained about my talking so much about what people were wearing!) Just recently, re-reading War and Peace, I came across a scene where Tolstoy went on for three pages about just that - obviously, it tells us so much about the person.
EPR
Dear Elizabeth Payne Rosen,
What a delightful note! My ears really are quite pink...it's nice to hear when people appreciate writing.
Twelve years after we grew two pots of cotton, I am learning to spin it. Not from the boll, for preparing cotton for spinning is far harder than, say, preparing wool. I spin from little tufts pulled from a puni, prepared in India, usually. The cotton forms a fine yarn so easily, and at a rate so fast that it's hard to see it happening.
Staple, the length of the cotton fibers, is so important, with long staple making a smoother, finer thread and, by extension, finer cotton cloth. Something that your new protagonist would have been most concerned about when selling her crop in the go-go years following the Civil War. Most probably you are all to familiar with it. When I was testing our home-grown cotton, I had no idea that one day I would be playing with it again, but looking at it with the eyes of a worker in it.
I will have to look up Hallam's War. If it's about a dressmaker, I am likely to be pulled in immediately.
Of course it's important to write about clothes! They telegraph all kinds of things, from social-historical to the character's feelings about themselves, motives expressed, or not, about others, and on and on.
Well, thank you again, and very best indeed,
Natalie Ferguson
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