Threshold Girl Comes Along

My Delineator. I have no idea how to use Corel Photoshop.. which drives me crazy. But I cleaned up my Delineator. I haven’t seen this pic on the web. It’s from August 1909.

A beautiful day, and I spent a great deal of time working on Threshold Girl…as I await my new Delineator from 1911, which will have some up to date fashions…Not that the Nicholsons wore the lastest fashions… so I’m pretty safe with the 1909 patterns.

I am changing the story into the present tense, so that when I talk about a flashback, I don’t have to use past anterior, or whatever it is called in English.

Funny, I know the name of tenses for French, but not for English.

And I’m still confused about Sherbrooke Street and the streetcar. I know from a book I have bought by Aline Gubbay, A View of Their Own, that Westmount got electric street cars in 1893 and one of Sherbrooke the year later.

But I read so much about the controversy about putting in a track between Greene and Atwater, and I also found that there were two loops, north and south, and I also found some ‘instructions’ on how to get to NDG in 1910 and they don’t mention going along Sherbrooke. So I don’t know.

Wait a sec. The Gubbay book has a map with a tiny tread marks where the street car went… I guess befoe 1913, because it goes along Sherbrooke only to Greene and then along st. Catherine.. and another goes down Victoria to St. Catherine.

So, logically, the girls would take the street car right at the corner of Greene and Ste Catherine.. the two routes converge there….

I will have Edith take the UPPER Loop because the Upper LOOP is the pretty loop… and she aspires to HIGHER things. So I’ll still have the girls walk to Sherbrooke and Victoria…and then take the tram to the city. I guess I’ll have Edith drop off a library book at the Westmount Library. They’ll walk through the park. But that’s a long walk….Hmm. They did walk a lot in those days, even in their corsets..

Oh, I don’t know.

Delineator Discovery!

I found my Delineator! The the 1910 era women were depicted wearing flowers or sniffing them….

The irony, it is from August 1909, only a month earlier than my new acquisition.

Anyway, I’ve purchased one from August 1911, the month Margaret and Marion sew Flora up for school. So all is well.

And with the cool air, my head has unclogged and I fixed up the middle part of Theshold Girl. Simply, efficiently, by putting it in chronological order.

The day I spent fixing the graphics allowed me to work on the problem without working on the problem…Obliquely.

Hmm.

I got an email form Workopolis: I guess I am on their list. The subject line intrigued me.. “The 10 doomed industries or industries with no future.”

Well, I guess it’s no worse than any other newspaper article, so I read it.

According to this workopolis promo e-mail…. Newspaper journalist is the worse profession, followed by apparel manufacturing and textile mills.

Journalists are a dime a dozen these days, with citizen journalists. And for those who took a degree: Just work for a tabloid then go into consulting for the government or police.. or straight into PR.

Or blog if you are above all that, and make money at some side-job.

My husband’s profession, electronic newsgathering, wasn’t listed in the Workopolis article. Although video post production was.

There are more news outlets than ever, but these often hire models and talking heads. And the way things happen: a story is covered to death and then forgotten. “Nothing in Moderation” has to be the slogan of news media these days.

Of course, that’s what’s wrong with the world, but what can you do.

My 1909 September Delineator Meets "The Girls:

My new Delineator Cover between “The Girls”… Coincidentally, this cover, which I almost ruined by dropping two sided tape on it, goes PERFECTLY with my Thomas Forester Vases, especially since the fake flowers I have in them match the flowers in the model’s hats.

Not only that, but the vases are from around the same time, I imagine.

The cover is signed and dated… Klimx??? Paris 09. Oh, I found it on Magazineart.org. Carl Kleinschmidt

Just One More Magazine and Then I’ll Stop

Norman Nicholson, probably around 1920, a year or so before his death from an embolism.

I just purchased a 1909 Delineator from eBay. Cost a small fortune, but I can’t find my other edition that I bought about 5 years ago, and this one had an article about The Corset: Uses and Abuses. Also a bit about Ellis Island. It seemed promising.

I have written in a mention of this magazine into Flora and the City. I feel I must, it has been written out of history.

And I just found out, Theodore Dreiser was the publisher of this magazine between 1907 and 1910. Big on ‘child rescue’ as in adoption.

He left under a cloud of scandal, but it had nothing to do with his work.

Ahem.

Just took a walk around the old Macdonald Campus, now John Abbott as I was picking up a relation at the bus there.

I walked the dogs near the Stewart Hall, which is the old women’s residence, I guess. A big building, now apartments. “Danger” say some signs around it. I guess the building is losing bits and pieces.

Hags and Whores and Fashion Mores

Footwear 1909, from the Delineator, an article on the technique of the proper walk. Luckily, women had corsets to hold them up in those days, morally and physically, just don’t try running for the streetcar! If you visit YouTube you will find some wonderful era footage of city streets in those days. Pandemonium!

Highly dangerous to walk those crazy streets constricted by clothing. That’s one reason Coco Chanel claimed her clothing became popular: It freed the working woman up. In Flo in the City I describe how Marion had to take three streetcars to work at her school. Imagine this in winter with all the snow! There were heavy snows in February 1909. I think I will add a scene where Marion tumbles in a snowbank…

Hmm. So here’s a picture of stylish footwear from my copy of the Delineator. This style seems ‘witchy’ to me, since movies and such portrayed witches wearing this style. A witch, in movies made in the 30′s and later, was merely an old women, wearing old styles.

A witch today might be an old lady in bell bottom pants! Of course, for a short period in the late 1960′s, early 1970′s the Granny Look came back, with Granny boots and Granny glasses.

Ain’t fashion weird? Of course, nothing is weirder than Madonna bringing back the corset, but wearing it on the outside.

I’ve decided to read this copy of the Delineator, front to back, for research. have not done so, already, because as a modern girl I find it hard to read such wordy magazines.

But almost every article within it strikes a cord with me and seems useful for my novel in progress, Flo in the City, which I am writing on this blog.

My novel is based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ my social studies website.

Remember, the Delineator, unlike the Ladies’ Home Journal, mixed fashion news with social activism…and sometimes to odd effect as reflected in the excerpt I reprinted in the previous installment.

Here’s a rundown of some of the articles in this August 1909 edition:

Styles of the month

Concerning us all (infant mortality)

The Present Unrest Among Women (Gertrude Atherton article printed in my blog a while ago)

The Art of Mary Cassat (Impressionism!)

The White Peril (Bad Milk)

Saving Sunday for America (I’ll write about that next)

The Technique of a Graceful Walk

Good Style in Parasols

Rheumatism: It’s cure

The Delineator Child Rescue Campaign

Dauville Days (Social whirl)

And many fashion and dressmaking pages.

I may only have one copy of the Delineator for the 1910 era, as they are expensive to win on eBay…but I feel I have a representative issue.

THE EYESORE -6th installment

Big hats and boats: 1910. Might be Marion there. This is a classic impressionist scene except for the canoe. Of course, the picture taker knew nothing of the avante-garde art scene in Paris. Canadian Emily Carr did, she was in Paris in 1910
I’ll get right to it.

Except for an hour at luncheon, where Mrs. Montgomery fed them cheddar cheese sandwiches and cucumber aspic, and speculated about Margaret’s trip to Three Rivers, a rather one sided conversation as the girls were sworn to secrecy about it, the afternoon passed uneventfully. There was choir practice at 2 pm to fill some time and afterwards Mae read in the hammock as Flo tossed a ball to Floss on the lawn.

At four the Mae and Flora left to pick Marion up from the train; well, Mae popped into Pope’s, bought that piece of tongue and ran home to put it in a marinade, a few hours late, but how would Marion know?

On the way home, the two sisters ran into Jed C, who said Marion had not changed at all since he last saw her; then they bumped into Ivor D who said she had changed a great deal, so much he hardly knew her.

I saw them both last year, Marion wryly observed, at the St. Andrew’s Day celebrations.

Marion was carrying a small travel case and a magazine as she detrained, and Flo grabbed the magazine from her.

It was the Ladies’ Home Journal. It had been years since the Nicholsons subscribed.

But this is from May 1906, Flora said, disappointed. It’s two years old. The fashions will all be out-dated. Well, I supposed it doesn’t matter much in Sherbrooke, or anywhere in the ET for that matter.

Marion’s attention drifted for a moment and she bit her bottom lip.

Anyway, Marion, teased, coming back to Flora. What’s wrong with 2 year old fashions. This jacket is two years old. Mother sewed it from a picture in the Delineator.

The summer jackets, this year, don’t have leg of mutton sleeves and braided collars.

Am I such an eyesore?

Well, I have to admit, Jim and Ivor didn’t seem to think so.

Well, I will tell you a secret: I am having 2 new shirtwaist suits made for me, for the fall.

Where will you get the money to pay?

I will figure out something, Marion said, surpressing a smile.