Stereo Photo--Eclipse Totality

 

I'm sure everyone knows there was a total solar eclipse last week. It was harder than I expected to make it into the path of totality--my planned ride had car trouble--but it was totally worth it (pun intended). We did have clouds, but they cleared up enough to give a great view. My phone camera wasn't really up to the task, but I tried to take a 3D photo during totality. We could see Venus and Jupiter. Four minutes feels like a really long time when the sun has just gone dark in the middle of the day! I'm posting the same photo with and without the moon edited darker in Photoshop, since the light shining around the edges confused the camera focus and washed it out. The edited photo looks more like it did in real life. It's as close as I could get to bringing totality home to show my friends and family members who weren't able to travel there. 

Life of Christ Stereo Cards--The Last Supper and the Appearance to Mary Magdalene

 

Happy Easter! Today I thought it would be fun share a few more of the Life of Christ stereograph cards from my collection. I've already shown the full set of twenty-four that were printed in color, but it's interesting to see the difference between those and the hand-colored ones. Those twenty-four pictures can be found in both versions (as well as in black and white), but there are also a number of pictures that don't seem to have been reprinted in color. The hand coloring is a bit garish to the modern eye, but some of the scenes are quite interesting. Among these are cards showing Jesus washing the disciples' feet, the Last Supper, and the post-resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene. It is easier to tell on the hand-colored cards that they were originally photographed from beautifully detailed dioramas. Unfortunately, they also seem to fade more easily. These have been color-corrected to be less yellow, but there's nothing I can do for the fading. They do look better in 3D, though.

Life of Christ Stereo Cards--Between Christmas and Easter

 

Since it's almost Easter, I thought it would be a good time to share the last three of the twenty-four colorful Life of Christ stereograph cards I posted a while ago. These are the ones that didn't fit easily into either an Easter or a Christmas post. I used Photoshop to remove a couple of blotches that I found distracting, but otherwise these didn't need a lot of alteration. One shows Jesus at age twelve, talking to the teachers in the temple, and the other two show the wedding at Cana and the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier posts about this set are related to Christmas, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), and Easter. These cards appear to have been generally sold in a set of twenty-five (the box advertises twenty-five, and many different-themed sets of twenty-five cards were available in identical boxes) but the twenty-fifth card could be any of a fairly wide variety with some relevance to Jesus or the holy land. I think that means that these twenty-four were a proper set, but an additional card was added to give the original purchasers their money's worth; that would be easier than printing separate boxes for a set with one less card. These same views can also be found in black and white, sometimes colored by hand. There are actually several more scenes in the black and white set that I wish had been printed in color!

Three Strange Years: Daily Life During the COVID-19 Pandemic

 

My pandemic diary is now available in paperback! I kept the diary on social media while COVID-19 was upending everything, and it seemed important to preserve it, so it's now available on Amazon here. Obviously I've been working on this one for a while, since I started writing it at the end of March 2020. Originally it was simply meant to fight loneliness while everything was shut down, but it grew into a detailed look at daily life over three historic and really strange years. At heart it's a celebration of family love and simple pleasures--novice gardening and other new hobbies, socializing at a distance, and being there for each other the best way we knew how. The ups and downs of life during the pandemic, captured in real time, are never to be forgotten. 

Christmas Angels

Merry Christmas! My internet hasn't been working at home lately, so I haven't blogged as much as I'd like. But I wanted to share this picture of my story-book angel with her real-life inspiration, plus two more "twin" angels--I guess they are triplets now--that I bought on eBay because my sister has the one that belonged to our grandparents (We spent Christmas together this year, so the angels did, too). They do all have their own names, of course. (Faith, Charity, and Mercy, since the book angel is Hope!) Faith was the original angel who needed a name--a previous post with a picture of her and the book she inspired can be found here.  Paper dolls of Hope are here and here, and a printable Nativity stable to go with them is here. Merry Christmas again!

 

Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Ellen, or the Naughty Girl Reclaimed

 

Here is another of the early paper dolls originally sold by S & J Fuller at the Temple of Fancy art supply store in London. Ellen, or the Naughty Girl Reclaimed was published in 1811 and is said to have been a favorite of Queen Victoria when she was a little girl. Like Little Fanny and Little Henry, which I blogged about here, Ellen's head is separate from her body and can be slotted into a paper pocket in the top of each of her outfits. I have constructed her in the same way as the others, gluing her onto paperboard for sturdiness. Ellen's story is, like Fanny's and Henry's, very much a product of its time. Ellen, the "naughty girl," refuses to do as she is told, eventually going through enough hardship as a result that she learns her lesson and reforms.  I especially enjoy that one of Ellen's outfits is shown in two states, before and after she falls into a muddy ditch. 

The hat from that particular outfit looks strikingly like Little Fanny's fancy hat, so I'm throwing in a picture of Ellen and Fanny wearing their matching hats. The outfits are not as similar; I'm not sure if that's a result of changing fashions or just Fanny wearing her winter coat and muff in the wrong season, as she does in her story. Ellen also has a red cloak and basket of eggs ensemble that looks a lot like two of Fanny's market outfits. It would be easy to confuse some of these pieces.

Ellen also comes with a dunce cap and a beggar's outfit. I'm not sure why the beggar's outfits were so popular for these dolls, but Little Fanny and Little Henry have them too. They can all stand around looking disreputable together while they wait to be changed into nicer clothing. 

Download PDF files of Ellen and her outfits here and here.  

Bartrug's Mother Goose Rhymes--Coloring Books

 

Some time ago I was looking for old nursery rhyme books on the Library of Congress website, and I ran across a quite interesting one by Carey Milton Bartrug. Mother Goose Safety Rhymes was published in 1940, but the Library of Congress lists it as being in the public domain because the copyright was never renewed. I looked up the author's obituary, and it seems that the copyright was not renewed because Carey Milton Bartrug died in 1952, before the time came to renew it. The Library of Congress people checked for copyright renewal in 2019, but since the beginning of 2023 the author's 1952 death date also qualifies his writing as public domain (though the pictures by Marjorie Peters may still be dependent on the lack of copyright renewal, since there are many women with that name and I have not been able to identify the correct one). His obituary and a picture of his headstone can be found here on the Find a Grave website. He sounds like exactly the sort of person to write nursery rhymes about safety; he was superintendent of schools in Iowa Falls from 1928 until 1945, and then he ran an insurance agency. Besides the nursery rhyme book, he wrote an entire series of workbooks about a character called Safety Sam. 

I've chosen a relatively innocuous page from Mother Goose Safety Rhymes to show here; Old Mother Hubbard falls off a chair while getting a bone for her dog, and the helpful moral is given to "Always beware when standing on a chair." Besides standing on chairs, children who read the book are warned against swimming alone, playing with matches, touching loose wires, riding on bicycle handlebars, etc. Some of the pages are scarier than others. Anyway, it tickled my fancy because it's so very... blunt. Me being me, I jumped down a research rabbit hole and discovered that Bartrug and Peters made two more nursery rhyme books, one about health and the other about etiquette. Since the illustrations were done in black and white, I thought it would be fun to turn them into coloring books for my kids. 

My Mother Goose Safety Rhymes Coloring Book, My Mother Goose Health Rhymes Coloring Book, and My Mother Goose Etiquette Rhymes Coloring Book (which are all available on Amazon if you click on the links) are formatted with a blank back to each picture. Not only does that prevent the pages from showing through each other, it allows the pictures to be creatively extended by those who are coloring with crayon or colored pencil. Here is an example page from My Mother Goose Safety Rhymes Coloring Book that has been colored by my son. Little Tee Wee has carelessly put himself in danger by going out alone in a small boat and tipping it over, and my four-year-old decided to increase the danger by asking me to draw a shark on the facing blank page. This was a fun, relaxing little project.