Slumberland

Photo by steve.wilde.
(Creative Commons)

While looking for an image for someone tonight, I stumbled on one of the most beautiful photosets I’ve ever seen on Flickr: Gordon Plumb’s Stained Glass. 183 beautiful photos of stained glass, including some lovely photos of William Morris-designed windows.

After viewing Plumb’s set I wanted to look at some more glass, and found the English Stained Glass — Pre Victorian pool. More great photos. Something I found interesting in this one was the large amount of windows that are made up of fragments of older windows, put together in a sort of collage. It makes me quite sad that so many windows were destroyed, though the new versions are nice, too.

And finally, there is the general Stained Glass pool, with more than 11,000 pictures to enjoy.

Recently I was looking through the book For The Love of Knitting, which includes many pictures of vintage knitting patterns and books, and I noticed that one of the illustrations was of a Fleisher yarn company ad from 1921. The ad included a complete pattern for a very cute drop-stitch sweater, which it claims takes “less than two days’ time”! Now, here’s the neat thing — anything published pre-1923 is in the public domain in the United States. So this ad and the knitting pattern it contains are in the public domain (probably why the book included it). So I’m reprinting the 1921 pattern here for anyone who is interested.

More photos and the pattern text after the jump!

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The Gentleman’s Page is subtitled “A Practical Guide for the 19th Century American Man.” And it is, indeed. Browsing this site, you’ll learn how the men of that period dressed (frock suits, sack suits, and so on), how they acted (the correct bowing technique), and even the strict etiquette on how they should use their visiting cards when calling on acquaintances. Photographs and illustrations from the period are included. It’s quite fascinating.

While browsing Shorpy, I saw a link to Box of Apples — a site devoted to fruit crate label art. They sell giclée prints of them, but even if you’re not in the market, the gallery is a fun browse. They mention in their blog that “…one reason these labels are so pretty is that instead of the usual four-color printing (where cyan, magenta, yellow and black are combined to produce the desired hue), they used eight- and twelve- color printing.” Close-up examples are provided to illustrate this. They are all great, but I think I like this one the best.

Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog is one of those blogs that just makes you say “Wow!” on a regular basis. The photos aren’t all a century old, though some of them are. (Lately a lot of them have been Depression-era.) But they are all quite old, and quite amazing to look at. Many are just plain beautiful. Others are more thought-provoking.

I especially like the 4×5 Kodachrome transparencies like this and this — it’s so strange to see these times so long ago in color that seems so real. We are used to seeing most photos of that era in black and white, or sepia-tone, or hand-colored, or faded old colors. But of course, real life was colorful.

While I was going through photo albums looking for photos to upload to Flickr, I found a group of photos that I took on April 10, 1994, at the Seattle Center memorial vigil for Kurt Cobain. These are the photos.

I looked online for articles about that day, and surprisingly, found very little. Here’s something I wrote about it myself on Metafilter, a few years ago.

It’s hard to believe that 13 years have already gone by.

I’m going through old scrapbooks and albums to find photos to put onto Flickr. Lots of my photos are in terrible shape and I don’t want to lose them completely. This one is scanned from a contact sheet that is not in good condition — I don’t have a good full-size print of it any more and I’m not sure if I still have the negative, though it might be in a notebook in one of my boxes o’ junk.

Anyway, I was prowling downtown Olympia on a dark cloudy day in 1985, looking for something I could photograph for Bob Haft’s Experimental Photography class at Evergreen. The due date was the next day and I had procrastinated as usual. I turned a corner into an alley and found this graffiti. When I developed the photo, it didn’t look like Olympia; it seemed like something from a war zone in the 1940s.

I made a hand-colored print (which has since been destroyed), and turned that in for my assignment. This is one of my favorite photographs (though it’s not very cheery, is it?), so I hope I can find the negative and get some real prints made again sometime. Because this is scanned from the contact sheet, it looks even more vintage and unreal than the print did; it’s got a touch of blurriness and noise.

I’ve got some other old photos up at Flickr now and I might post more of them here on the blog soon.

Today I received a book in the mail, the book pictured on the right: Vanishing Seattle by Clark Humphrey. This is a book I’ve had on my wish list for a while; it’s got a ton of great pictures of Seattle landmarks that have sadly disappeared. I’m old enough now to remember a lot of them. Some of them I didn’t realize had gone. So, anyway, I’m thrilled to have this book. But the thing is — I didn’t order it. I was going to order it but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. So it’s a mystery: who sent me the book? Thank you, whomever you are.

And by the way — if you are a Seattleite who has been here for a while, you want this book. Trust me.

Photo by biwook.

“A copyright will protect you from PIRATES. And make you a fortune.” I have lots of copyrighted stuff and no fortune yet. *sigh*

I found this old advertisement on Flickr when looking for images tagged “pirates,” and thought it was cool. Thanks to biwook for posting it.

A professor at WSU has put together Nuke Pop, an exploration of nuclear war themes in popular culture, from comic books to candy wrappers. Very interesting material.

While browsing through his site, I found another fascinating item — Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, a lengthy exploration of fiction about nuclear apocalypse. It includes a massive bibliography, too. I recommend it for any fans of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction.

Not to be all Slate on you today, but this is pretty darned funny — From Falsies to Polyurethane, a slide-show of patented breast augmentation inventions since 1858.

“An earlier beauty book titled The Ugly Girl Papers discouraged Irish maids from trying to develop their charges’ breasts by fondling them.”

Uh, yeah.

The Columbia Law Library Music Plagiarism Project is a collection of information about music plagiarism cases. The site includes legal opinions, commentary, and sound clips and scores from the complaining and defending works — going back as far as 1845. The text can be a little thick to wade through if you’re not a lawyer, but it’s still pretty interesting to listen to the sound clips and decide if you agree with the decisions the judges made. I’d love to see the pages expanded somewhat for the non-lawyers, though. (Found via the Seattle P-I.)

I am young enough that I have never received a telegram. In fact, I’m not sure if my mother has ever received one either. But I always thought they were kind of neat.

You can still get telegrams through Western Union, but they are kind of boring and bland. Much cooler are Retro-Grams — vintage style telegrams, which can be sent via e-mail for free, or also by first-class mail, or even by retro courier! You can choose from different styles of telegrams depending on which era you want to recreate. This is just darned cool. I would love to send these out as Christmas cards, but they are $3.95 each… maybe just a few, then.

(Don’t miss the History of Telegrams page.)

Apparently trolling and flame wars aren’t limited to online communication, or even to modern communication. The proof: Usenet, AD 1540.

In 2543, at an interplanetary conference of costume historians, a paper was presented. This paper discussed an unusual style of dress from late in the 20th century: the Super-wide jean.

“Given the size of these garments, the main question people have nowadays—of particular import to re-enactors of the Industrial Age—is ‘how did they keep them up?’ Several theories have been proposed. Some believe that the items were fastened to the wearer’s undergarments with snaps, hooks and eyes or lacing.”