Day dress of roller-printed cotton, 1810-1815. Susan Greene Collection, GCVM 90.25
Lately, I have developed an obsession with this roller-print day dress from the Greene Collection At Genessee Country Village Museum. I first encountered it on the 19th US Infantry’s website, a haven for those of us consumed with the early Federal everyday.
The 19th US site provides more photos and a drawing of the dress, so that if one were to become impossibly obsessed with the dress, one could recreate it. And if one were up late nights, one might consider how to create a copper-engraved roller for printing cotton.
Johann Klein dress, 1810
A more productive line of thought might be to consider this fashion plate, found during an early-morning Pinterest session. I think it gives us a sense of how rapidly fashion crossed the Atlantic (just as quick as engravings could be printed and bound into magazines, and boats could make the trip), and how avidly women copied the latest fashion.
That avidity would have been tempered by access to fabrics, but the resemblance between the dress at Genessee and the fashion illustration is striking, indeed.
And by TBT I mean Titano-Boa Thursday. Putting on the clot-preventing stockings is a lesson in patience, creative language use, and wriggling. Thankfully I can bend more this time around and can thus pull these suckers up– not that they really pull, it’s more that they suck and adhere to your leg and you coax them off your flesh–and get dressed in under an hour. I don’t fully understand the principle by which extremely constricting legwear prevents clots, and at this point, I don’t think I could. My best grasping right now is lunch time and a bottle of Tylenol.
Stockings, 1788-1793. French. MMA 26.56.124
In lovelier legwear, I do have some of American Duchess’s silk stockings, and look forward to wearing those again in the nearish future. Still, you’d think the TED people could have a little fun, perhaps with replicas of these astonishing stockings? They’re toe-less, just like my TEDs.
Today I’m procedure plus seven, and glad to be on this side of the OR. Surgery is never a fun or pretty thing, and even the most rational action (take care of this now, before it gets worse) seems crazy to your self-protective mind (but it’ll hurt!).
I am very fortunate that my surgeon has a sense of humor and a skillful hand, though when the visiting nurse saw the incision and said, “Wow, he’s good. That’s no Rhode Island incision,” I will confess I was of two minds. One, sad that I was not typical of the Ocean State in the way of a mahogany chair, and two, scornful and proud because of course I went to Boston where they can tell left from right, thank you.
Your foot goes in the sling, and you have to move your leg about.
I’m still not quite ready to read (I work my way through the Times, but I don’t know that it sticks), and I am definitely not ready to sew.
There’s a lot of time spent on physical therapy, reminding muscles that they’re just fine, and can wake up now. In the hospital, you are provided with a trapeze to lift your leg and encouraged to move it about. While oddly old-fashioned, and seemingly borrowed from Foyle’s War, it does work. I can’t slide my leg back-and-forth on the bed, but I can move if someone holds it up just a little bit. (The socks they give you are color coded: yellow is fall risk. I called them duckling feet, and the nurses were entertained.)
Lemon Ice. Delicious.
The other big focus is meals. In the hospital, you call and order your meal, and it is the only place I know where you can order Lemon Ice for breakfast with fruit and coffee, and where the kitchen will call and wake you up to make sure you place a dinner request before it’s too late.
Time becomes a strange thing: often, it’s measured in the blocks between doses of painkillers, and I find my sense of “early” and “late” are altered. The world gets small, focused as it is on basic needs, and small is how it will stay for a while. Every day is better, and this time around so much better than the last, but it will still be a while before I can really read and write and sew and think.
Thanks to everyone for all of your comments last week! They were very nice to read when I got my phone back on Tuesday, but replying was beyond my ken last week.
No, he didn’t eat them
The next week or two are going to be cat-like for me: meals, naps, exercise, and today, perhaps a trip to the porch. Fortunately, I have experts here to provide advice. Mr Whiskers understands the importance of meals, and fully appreciated the fragrant salad placed before him on Mother’s Day.
Fortunately, he left the flowers unmolested, and moved on to staring out the window at the birds who sounded like they were saying very rude things about him.
A nurse on the ward at the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth Hospital, St. John’s Wood. Photograph by Henry Grant, 1954. Museum of London Image Number 008798
Gentle Readers, you may recall this post. In February, it seemed May would never come, but it has, which means a temporary halt to writing, posting, traveling, and sewing.
Thank you for reading, commenting, and sharing till now: there should be more fun come this summer, sooner if all goes well.
Kirsten Hammerstrom 
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