Howdy!
The local Guild that I belong to, the Dallas Handweavers and Spinners Guild, has decided to open its semi-annual Juried Show to non-members. If you’re interested in entering, please get in touch! There’s some very decent prize money. The requirements are fairly simple.
You can email me: oakenking@gmail.com
I’ve known for a while that Google was working on a project of making digital facsimiles of books. I have one of them posted in my Silk Library. What I didn’t know, is how MANY books they have now – it’s a HUGE collection. For those of us who are looking at “lost arts” type work, it’s a gold mine. Books from the 1700’s, the 1800’s, and much of the 1900’s, scanned with illustrations, and they’re SEARCHABLE. You can see huge swaths of many books still in print – and if you choose “Full View” in your search options, you can get full, untrimmed scans of books out of copyright. You can switch to a plaintext view, and see the text in Arial font (granted, it DOES occasionally have difficulty with some of the books that have odd type, and you’ll occasionally see “hom” instead of “horn,” and other such OCR type errors) and you can copy and paste passages.
I’ve been searching on various terms related to silk and sericulture, the history of silk, silk industry, etc… and so far I’ve got seventy books corralled into My Library, which has a fixed address that I can go link to, and share with friends. Some of the books are hard-to-find classics about silk, like Dandolo’s “The Art of Rearing Silk Worms” from 1825, or William Kenrick’s “American Silk Grower’s Guide” – some are references in history books, agriculture reports, etc. Need to know how many pounds of silk were raised in 1890 in Missouri? Check the “Report of the Secretary of Agriculture” (page 273). The US cocoon crop for 1890 was over sixteen thousand pounds. Who knew?
I need to go through and put in “reviews” on them, so that I can remember why I chose each book, as well as noting books that have especially interesting bits, which ones are accurate or fanciful, etc.
You can also DOWNLOAD the PDF files, if you want to have the whole thing with you.
It’s just amazing.
Two things… I have been failing to get around to mailing my friend Barbara her bookmark. And, we got a fabulous new scanner at work. So, I took the ribbon in, and did some scanning, and then PUT IT IN THE MAIL.
how good is the scan – behind the cut. Largest image is 972KB
Dream 20080117 Read more
I’m really frustrated with LiveJournal’s Adult Content settings. I had set my journal default to “Adult Concepts” because some of my dreamwork stuff is racy, and even in ordinary entries I occasionally use some blue language.
HOWEVER, it’s been causing the entries to be collapsed on outside news readers, and is in general a Pain In My Arse. The only thing that shows on my Ravelry Page, for instance, is the content warning… instead of a picture of a half-embroidered peony.
The dream material is *always* behind a cut with an explanation, and I’ll tag those entries going forward with the one-entry Adult Content flag… but I hate having people clicking through to see my silk or a picture of a kitten, thinking it’s going to be something naughty. Or, NOT clicking through, because they think it’s something they won’t want to see.
I think this system is dysfunctional, and I hope that LJ will fix it… but that’s where I’m at for now. Please COMMENT if you un-friend me, so I’ll know.
I’ve been working on my Silk Library on WormSpit. I’ve added five books – one a Google book, and the others from the Digital Archives at the University of Arizona. Some of these were scanned from my own collection, others are used by permission.
These are some really neat old books, full of information and in the public domain.