Altered Calendar Project: March

With creative input from my sister Anna who is visiting New England this week, I have completed the altered calendar piece for March: it is inspired by the popular Victorian Era pass-time of goat stacking. Wealthy gentlemen vacationing in the Alps would hold contests to see who could create the highest and longest-standing stack of goats. Mostly it was men who participated, but one woman-- Elizabeth "Bitsy" Gladstone was undefeated in goat stacking for several years running. Turns out goats are highly stackable!

Anna documented the collage process:

Collage detail: 

Historic Alpine Goat Stacking:

I hope y'all are having a goat-stackingly good month of March!

Cool Chick from History

There is a pretty great blog out there in the internet universe called Cool Chicks from History. The writer of this blog posts a different female historical figure every day and highlights that woman's badass accomplishments. It is a wealth of historical information and images that tend to get left out of your average history class. There was recently a call for illustrations of different cool chicks from history and I volunteered!

I thought I would get to choose someone from history who has inspired me (I was thinking of doing Nampeyo, who I did research on in college) but as it turned out, I was assigned someone, which ultimately I think was a great way of going about it because I got the chance to learn about someone who I was not already familiar with. The woman I was given was Jane Colden, a Botanist who lived in Upstate New York in the 1700's. I was pretty excited because I also am from Upstate NY (though not exactly the same part, she was in the Hudson Valley and I am from the Finger Lakes).

I learned pretty quickly that there are no known images of Jane Colden which made it an interesting creative challenge. I looked at portraits and picture frames from the eighteenth century for reference as well as some paintings of her family members that I was able to find.

I learned that Jane Colden was known for studying gardenias, among other plants, and using ink to transfer images of plants, so I also worked in ink and showed her making notes and sketches of a gardenia. I imagined her at a desk in her house in Upstate New York. Surrounding her portrait are more gardenias and other plants that she studied.

She faced the same sexism that was unfortunately standard at the time and was not really acknowledged for her accomplishments during her life. She discovered some previously unclassified plants whose scientific name "Coldenia" is actually referring to her father who was also a botanist, even though it was she who discovered the plants. 

I'm totally glad I know about her!

I'm Adorable

Goodness Gracious, I was just awarded The Adorable Blog Award by Emily of the blog Because it's Way Past Blog Time, & Because I can!! Thank you so much Emily!!! Go check out her blog!

Here are ten things about me:

1- I am crazy good at pogo sticking.

2- I took the train from San Jose, California to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania last summer.

3- When I read a book, I make all of the same facial expressions that the author describes the characters making. It helps me get into the story.

4- I am one of the few people on earth who doesn't like pad thai or bacon.

5- I own a truly ridiculous number of scarves and I love all of them.

6- When I was 15 I dressed up as a giant vagina in the Ithaca Festival Parade. I just scrounged up some photographic proof (since I know you were wondering...!) I look so young!

7- I know all the words to the Ludacris rap in Justin Bieber's "Baby."

8- I am madly in love with Peter Doig's paintings.

9- ... and I am also madly in love with Nampeyo's pottery ever since I did a research paper about her in college.

10- I have appeared in 3 home made music videos, including a Justin Bieber parody, thus #7.

And now I would like to nominate the following blogs for this prestigious award!

Dropping Bob-ombs

Gary's Third Pottery Blog

Reverend Awesome

Things I like

If you choose to accept this award, rules are as follows:

-Thank the person who gave you this award, and link back to them in your post.
-Tell us 10 things about yourself.
-Nominate your bloggers.
-Contact these bloggers, and let them know they received this award.