World Turn'd Upside Down

Dancing the Virginia Reel, 1897

Here's a great person I met via the internet.  She wrote to me about a post, and upon reading her blog and her "all about me", I saw that we have many, many interests in common.

Her name is Stephanie Ann and her blog, World Turn'd Upside Down, is a wonderful collection of all things historic.  She is a re-enacter, and so is interested in absolutely all aspects of historical lifeways.  There are hours of great reading here!  The illustrations in this post can be found, along with many others, on her blog.

Stephanie has kindly put up a guest post by me, an overview of basic quilt repair concepts.  Lots of what I've learned with quilts over all these years is equally useful for any sort of vintage or antique textile item, so I hope will be helpful to her readers.

Here are two of her most popular posts:

Spencerian Lady's Hand

Civil War Men's Shirt Pattern

And here are photos from a few of her posts that I found really fun:

She experiments with vintage recipes, like this one from 1799 for potash cakes.

Peterson's Magazine published instructions for this talma shawl in 1859.  Stephanie is a knitter, and is working on an updated wording.

I love this dinner menu from 1860.  This is quite a meal indeed!

And, here's a selection of photos from the Middletown Peach Festival.  These folks really know their stuff.   

These photos remind me of something I've come to realize from the costuming I've been doing - isn't it interesting that for so much of history, everyone always wore a hat outdoors.

Well, making contacts like this is what makes the "interwebs" such fun!