contributed by Emily (and written a few weeks ago!)
School is starting back up for me and that means that I’m
about to lose some of my knitting time in favor of reading history books.
Normally, I’d be quite grumpy about anything that takes me away from my
knitting, but I’m so totally fascinated by the past that the sacrifice isn’t
too painful.
Knowing that my free time is about to become quite limited,
some friends and I took advantage of one of Vermont’s unbelievably gorgeous
summer Sundays to visit the Shelburne
Museum.
We went specifically to see the current temporary exhibit on
Robots,
Rocket Ships, and Steampunk (you can see all of those pictures here), but once inside of the museum
grounds, there are so many other wonderful things to see and do.
One of my favorite things to see are the automata. From the
museum’s website:
Automata are large (sometimes three feet tall), often
comical wind-up toys with accompanying music that were displayed in parlors,
especially in France, in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The Museum
exhibits about 30 automata, including several particularly fine pieces by
Gustave Vichy of Paris, France. These include a drunken chef, a magician, and a
clown walking on his hands.
The one that will most
interest our customers is the knitter in her very traditional, late nineteenth-century
clothes and frilled cap:
The museum shows a video in the automata room featuring the
machines in motion. Unfortunately, they haven’t made the video available
online. She isn’t accurate enough to actually create stitches, but her hand
movements were definitely worked out by an engineer who knew knitting very
well.
In the
general store, I was thrilled to see a beautiful line of 19th-
and early 20th century hand knitted socks and stockings hanging all
in a row:
Who gets excited about a bunch of old, used socks? I do!
Hanging off to the side of the stockings was a stack of
wooden stocking blockers. One of my absolute favorite things about studying
history is when you notice the little things that have remained almost
untouched throughout the years.
1 comment:
VERY interesting!
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