brain work

[anotheranon]

Surprise travel this past weekend gave me the chance to do some reading.

I was able to read all of When the Girls Came Out to Play during my round trip flight, not just because I had time because it was good. I'd told a Costume Society acquaintance about my embryonic fencing gear research and she recommended it as a "dry academic" background read, so I was expecting a slog. But no, it's quality non-fiction and turned out to be exactly the book I needed that I didn't know existed.

Very generally, the popularity of sports helped loosen up (sometimes literally) women's clothing so that they had greater mobility and autonomy, and therefore allowed women to be more active in the public sphere. A strong argument can also be made that women's colleges made the change that years of dress reform could not, namely, putting women in trousers because bifurcated garments were allowed in sex segregated college phys ed, and later crept into non-gym wear.

Illuminating reading, and timely as well as the problem of clothing limiting women's activity is still with us today (got home to find several of my friends linking to this rant about the need for pockets in women's clothing).

So I realize rather stunningly that this research may lead to something other than noodling on my desktop and in my LJ :P

It is cutting into sewing time though. I doubt I'll have anything new for Dress U, and guess who is taking forever and a day to put the sleeves on D.'s scholar's robe?

Time management, I can not haz.

Comments

[skill-grl.livejournal.com]

Why do you denegrate your time management skills? You do huge amounts of things!!!!

If anything, you need to pick priorities (which you seem to have done well) and learn to accept human limits (and, this is where I'd bet the real problem is).

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I know, right? I DO do a lot of things. Imagine how much more if I could stop browsing leather messenger bags or following every link on Pinterest!

And yes, I have a huge problem with accepting human limits because I'm fairly sure I've not come up to mine yet...

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

That book sounds fascinating ... integrated histories of causes and effects are far more interesting than those that focus on one thing to the exclusion of all the other things it's connected to. Downloaded for reading. :-)

When someone has the broad range of interests and I-want-to-dos that you have, all the time management skills in the universe ain't gonna squeeze 72 hours out of 24. (Heck, if that were possible I'd be wearing all my sweaters, socks and shawls instead of many of them still being in the "some assembly required" stage). I figure wanting to do more than I can possibly do is a good indicator that my brain is still active and learning ... and a reassurance that I'll never be bored on my own time. ;-)

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

The social history of fashion is almost always more interesting for me than biographies of designers (even Fortuny!) because I'm always surprised at how a simple thing such as making trousers acceptable for women pulls from a dozen different threads and lines of thought. The pictures may not be as pretty (early 20th c. gym slips are fugly as hell) but the story is almost always better.

And yes - I think my main aim here is to never be bored. And as far that goes it's working...

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

I hear ya ... social histories are so fascinatingly varied and wide-ranging. Am back into Petroski's "The Pencil" right now and it's about far more than the writing implement ... it's about what was used previously and how, the evolution of the shape and design based on use, the various materials and their sources and acquisition, the manufacturing and marketing, research and technology, guilds and families and patents and trademarks and taxes. All of which varied from country to country and were affected by who was at war or had treaties with who, not to mention family generations, squabbles and divisions. All that for what seems a simple tube of wood with a hard marking substance within. :-)