Some of us are now looking at the speed and frankly larger amounts of effort and money being put in that we were told was impossible, unfair, at a small scale.

Many of us are grieving all over again for what we missed out on due to being denied reasonable requests. For many it was advanced degrees, for others it was a career. We are talking about the exact same requests and, for many in the community, from the exact institutions that denied them in the first place.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/AccessibilityForAbleds?src=hashtag_click&f=live

Please read, but don’t add more pressure on those sharing, it’s a really hard time for us. Read, and remember and remember to keep normalising these accommodations. Once this is over they may be locked off again to those who need these all the time.

So for those who only hear from the disability and chronic illness communities at a distance, we are currently sharing tips and hacks for how to cope with self isolation.

Right now I’m not doing more self isolation than I normally do, which is close to what is being asked, but I am focusing on what I can do right now, and for another year, even though I have had two particularly bad years already where I couldn’t go out and do things.

So that means not just distracting myself but reminding myself that what I am doing right now has meaning. It is both my own personal meaning, as well as has meaning to people around the world who I would never get to meet anyway.

I am also pacing myself.

This one is more difficult as we tend to want to make as much use of “down” time as possible. But right now being healthy and protecting everyone else as well as ourselves means taking time to build physical, mental, and emotional resources.

I know that projects put on hold are so tempting to finish now, right now, but pacing means perhaps leaving a bit for later in case you don’t have 20 projects on the go. Ehem.

But yes conversely sometimes that passion will help carry you to a point where you can settle for a bit after and you can relax, basking in the glow of success.

It really does depend on you, but also this mix can change over time and so it is absolutely correct to figure out what works for you as an individual.

But this next part is something a bit tough to remember. Isolation is isolation. It brings stresses that even the most introverted of us deal with. Over time if the bulk of your in person contact is purely from professional health providers it can start to impact health, or perception of self.

So absolute kindness to yourself, and in thinking about those who have to self isolate either because they are sick, or to prevent others from being sick is going to go a long way.

For me my self isolation is probably going to ratchet up a bit over the next few weeks. We have very few cases in NZ but one patient was in the hospital I will have to go to and about 50 staff have had to self isolate already. I cannot risk getting sick because I won’t be able to wait it out at home.

My Anne of Cleves inspired hat is getting her final make over.

I made it in 2006, added more pearls later, then the gold braid and more pearls and now I’m using a different technique to be able to avoid the issues I had the last time.

But I took them off and stabilised the velveteen a year ago. I had not worked on it as I simply had so much in the way of blog posts here and else where that I want to get into an easy to read and see format.

I also had resources totally out of array (thus my domain name) so it was always a case of having to hunt for a reference to share it again.

So I’m looking at putting up my most useful costume projects for each section of my new site and make pages for each element that is iconic to the time and place.

That includes and my hat, but I think I need to get my other hats up and I need detail images as well.

I am sooo excited to share, because as of right now I have every single portrait of an ensemble from the North Rhine. I did exclude relious dress but there is so much that is depicted and I have some written texts that I think that will be a very nice side project.

Also when I move pages/posts from here I can correct some information I got wrong or had to use due to information being not quite ideal 🙂

OMG! Done! This is a huge deal, and while not perfect it’s at the point where this is now a truly valuable resource. And it means I can start adding in detail images. I have so much to say that I have not been able to due to these images being all over the place. In books, in digitized books, in image galleries, all kinds of formats.

https://www.thefrockchick.com/northrhine/nrw-images/

Next step is to generate some galleries or cats based on decade.

I am trying veeery hard to get my North Rhine research properly webbed. It’s taking some time to cite as I want to credit both my course and the institution and it gets a bit complex. But right now there are 511 individual images on my site! This has not been done before. I’ve not only put these in chronological order but from multiple sources online and digitised, and it’s a massive gift to the art history and costuming history communities because well you can’t get to 14 years of dedicated research and not owe a big debt to those who came before.

But these are my Nordrhein images. The Westfalen is a bit more complicated but does then lead into a nice set of sumptuary laws 🙂

These will be fully cited this week so that I can start to put images into pages of editorial stuff 🙂

https://www.thefrockchick.com/northrhine/nrw-images/

I am trying to sort out a way to contact me. This is much tougher with a self hosted site than on social media so it might take a while!

Yesterday I decided I’d try to start backtracking some images of my NRW files that have been listed as unknown. Where they have arms there is a chance that I can work backwards from approximate date of artwork. If the sitter is a woman her arms are that of her father and mother and not that of her husband. So I can sometimes find the sitter through her parents and if she has a daughter I can have a bit more luck as usually portraits of all kinds at this time separate by gender.

One of my query images might have been flipped, but also I think there is a panel missing. I think I know who the central figure is as he did not marry nor had children and is depicted in eccelesiastic dress, the remaining panel shows two women each wearing gowns entirely made of gold. That marks them as being very high in the ranks of nobility, I had thought princesses but they seem to be of a countess and her daughter.

It was sold at auction, the family name understood but I think I may have identified the sitters- it’s a matter of asking why it looks a bit different. But it may mean being able to hunt down the other panel at another auction.

The other two images are from stained glass windows and one of them has been restored just in Dec last year! One of the windows included the names of the sitters, but the other look a bit of searching to find a list of the paintings from the cathedral and tiny images of the full size so that I could just compare general shapes.

So that is three more figures I can add to show the difference between the very wealthy citizens of Cologne vs the nobility in the North Rhine.

Westphalia gets very interesting and very complicated very quickly. I have really just myself around the whole K-J-B duchies and how they came together. It means I can go back through each Duchy and maybe find siblings and spouses and children not in the direct line. And find depictions.

So.

A bit of work still but I’m enjoying this folder again.

I’ve been making my way through several documents across several things I need to do and am very excited that I had correct instincts.

It took a bit of backtracking and creative spelling.

But I am exhausted and am going to need to rest.

So fun that ome of what I found was through an art auction, then looking at heraldry, the other required some searches for restorers of the works being looked at.

I have now a high quality colour photo of one and the other might be around and still being worked on.

Fibro is weird. Like really weird. Today I have a bit of upper back tension and fibro is sort of… doing weird things with the signals. I am getting what would normally be goose bumps but feels more like tiny little stinging hooks pulling the tiniest pinch of skin. Waves of it mostly on the top side of my arms. It’s been fairly constant with typing and now when prepping meals.

I don’t remember having this when I’m in bed so I think it’s a crossed signal thing. And my hair can brush my neck and feel like it’s a burn. And my CTR scar hurts a lot. Papery cut feeling and a bit of ache.

I think that’s all that it is in my scar, it mostly acts up when I have other fibro or RA symptoms, and my RA symptoms tend to set of fibro, so it’s kind of most likely to be that 🙂

But I got to go to my first local SCA event in a long time and it was lovely 🙂 Been doing a few practices but not going out as such. I think it may be the year though to get my cutting book just done. It is going to be hand drawn and scanned. I just can’t keep struggling with digital files. It’s enough to need to edit and format it all. I can still make it work as a colouring book and a dress up doll book and it will be much easier for me to also make a second set of patterns to help it be useful to people who appear to have different fitting concerns to me- we don’t really, but due to both fashion and cutting modern history it’s been less clear.

My system does work, but when you only have tidied up shapes from my end patterns then yes, that’s going to be unintuitive.

So I have found patterns of fitting solutions more by region and era than I have in size. And that is amazing! And wonderful. Especially when it can come across as extra work to consider plus size patterns in a line. It’s not really, but you soon learn what assumptions you have made in your system/line.

But it is so very much to sort. I have it all as hand written notes, digitised notes, line art by hand, and by at least two programs..

And my visual spatial brain gets overwhelmed trying to find a start and finish. It’s more like, but how do I not take about traded items from 200 years before when it lead to this? And I have managed to totally fail to organise my not-NRW images for the same reason. How do I sort them? Not all artists worked in one place, and portraits of women can use their father’s surname, or mother’s or birthplace, or home after marriage and it can be very confusing. I did go by city for a while. But that’s where many double ups happened as I added to them years later.

So, this is where I have been for the last while. Trying to find a linear or set of linear paths to get to where my memory library is (not quite a mind palace, but it’s very much a time and space kind of sorting system.)

The majority of my North Rhine files are in a state I can work with. It is a bit tough scrolling through hundreds of pages at a time to see if there was a single reference to a garment but I think I have it all properly sorted.

At least enough to properly piece it back together.

I was meant to just look for the images of the nobility of NRW but I got a bit lost in the Brunswick stuff that I was very detoured. So those are now collected as well.

The Westphalia gear gets more complicated but also tends towards the Saxon style and so it really need to be collected separately.

So happy!