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Monday…errr…Tuesday Amusements 7

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I had so much original content planned for last week and this week, but then I got a cold. Colds, like all other illness, zap my creativity and make me kind of stupid. I have regaling my friends and family almost daily with stories about how I couldn’t find things I’d put down or confused words. It’s been taking me an especially long time to notice puns, in particular.

Whilst eating as much garlic as possible and drinking loads of hot water I have been spending a lot of time catching up on reading blogs. I got through quite a lot of my 1000+ post backlog in Google Reader. I also revisited the folder in which I bookmark links that I want to share, and selected some of the best for you today. Now let’s see if I’m well enough to make this more than just readable.

Getting Crafty

My hands have been too full with tissues for me to actually make anything; the Citron shawl I started in January has been on pause for a while. I’m going to be done with it soon, though it’s going to be a lot smaller than the pattern because I don’t have enough of the yarn I decided to use. I’ve enjoyed the pattern so I might make another when I get some more yarn.

I have been in the mood for crafting though. I don’t make enough. I have a few skeins of embroidery thread, boxes of beads, masses of ideas and tons of tutorials bookmarked but like everything else my hobbies have fallen by the wayside as I try to finish my novel. I’ve been longing for spring, I really want a proper summer this year, and this butterfly headband would get me in the mood. Personally I’d tone it down a little for everyday wear. I’m thinking one or two purple-and-black butterflies on a thin headband.

We get a large number of lampshades donated to the charity shop I volunteer at, but unfortunately very few of them are small enough to use like Gwen does to make this “dainty Victorian-ish hat“. Otherwise I’d be breaking out the purple paints and ribbon ASAP.

I can never find a safety pin when I want one, and I think the only ones we’ve got in my house are tiny and gold, so I’d have to make a special tip out to stock up before I made this Tom Binns-inspired safety pin necklace. I think you could apply the general idea to all sorts of other accessories, a big safety pin brooch would be especially cool. Plus you could thread beads on the safety pins! Oooh! I am definitely going to do this. If you want something a bit softer, this t-shirt necklace requires only the ability to use scissors and follow instructions.

Cute Creatures

Let’s take a break from all that hard work considering the crafty possibilities and enjoy Dee’s selection of 13 Unbelievably Adorable Animal Photos.

Useful Things Entertaining Things Etcetera

Oh, what’s that I hear? It’s the sign of my imagination yawning. Too tired to come up with a better title for this section.

If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you might remember my review of the exhibition Between the Covers: Women’s Magazines and their Readers at the Women’s Library. Their current main exhibition is called Ms Understood: Women’s Liberation in 1970’s Britain, and I haven’t had an opportunity to visit it yet, but after reading Katie’s review at Fat Quarter, I’ll make sure to go along before it closes on the 17th April.

Recently I have realised that my upper body strength has been vanishing steadily. I can’t lift food shopping bags high anymore. When I tried to do the initial test for the one hundred push ups training programme I couldn’t manage two. I used to be able to do ten or more! I think I’m going to have to do the whole thing, with “bench” push ups to try to get myself back to normal and hopefully better.

Finally, I suggest that in the spirit of Spring Cleaning and all that, you choose yourself a new desktop wallpaper for March from Smashing Magazine’s fabulous selection. There are so many I liked that I’ll probably end up changing them every few days.

Between the Covers: Women’s Magazines and their Readers, at The Women’s Library

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Did you know the first women’s magazine was published in 1693? It was called The Ladies’ Mercury and was a spinoff from another periodical called The Athenian Mercury, which published the first advice columns. The Ladies’ Mercury was only published for four weeks, however, and every other women’s magazine was just as short lived until the Industrial Revolution.

As more and more factories opened in British cities, increasing numbers of working-class women chose not to enter domestic service, and work in factories instead, where the conditions were better. Middle-class women, whose families could not afford to pay their servants better, suddenly found themselves having to run households and do cleaning, cooking, and other domestic work themselves, things which they would have never been taught by their mothers. This is where women’s magazines took off – they were filled with advice and instructional articles aimed at these women to help them manage their new roles.

As increasing numbers of women became literate, the numbers of women’s magazines widened and the topics featured became more diverse. At The Women’s Library, a couple of weeks ago, I visited the current exhibition Between the Covers: Women’s Magazines and their Readers, and I saw examples of these early magazines: one for Christian women, with articles and columns mixed in with hymn lyrics and passages from the Bible; a couple of magazines for burgeoning feminists; magazines which featured recipes and maths problems within the same covers; magazines the size of large books; and flimsy pamphlets originally costing a fraction of a penny. There are also plenty of examples from the 20th and 21st centuries on display, including a wall featuring covers from every edition of Cosmopolitan published one month in 2008. This was really interesting – most of the front-cover models were white, some of their poses were eerily similar, and only three of the women were smiling. The only grin that looked genuine belonged to the woman on Cosmo Taiwan. Most of the headlines mentioned sex, and the more modestly the model was dressed, the more she stood out – there were a lot of dresses cut in a V to the navel that month!

I found this exhibition fascinating. It isn’t arranged chronologically; instead it is laid out in several sections, so you can compare magazines through the ages and their attitudes towards the lives of women, how they dealt with the need to feature advertisements, and how developments in technology have changed the way they are produced and read. It’s clear that in recent times adult women’s magazines have become a lot less political, although magazines for teenage girls have definitely improved – the first were entirely devoted to idolising pop stars and silly romantic stories such as ‘Love in the Launderette’.

As well as the magazines on display, there are several interactive features of this exhibition. You can listen to interviews with various women involved in publishing magazines today, play a game to see if you can guess the magazine from its headlines (I only got one right!), answer a ‘How Liberated Are You?’ quiz from a 1978 edition of Cosmopolitan, and watch Talking Magazines, a film featuring a range women from Tower Hamlets (a borough of London) talk about the magazines they read and how they feel about them. There is also a reading area stocked with magazines from the past and present, including a few handmade zines and foreign titles. The Women’s Library has an enormous collection of magazines, so although most of the items in the exhibition are behind glass, there are many more available in the reading room upstairs (free to join and use) that you can actually touch and properly read.

I really enjoyed visiting Between the Covers, I totally geeked out and spent hours going around and looking at everything. I would recommend it to everyone who has ever loved or hated a women’s magazine, and most especially to bloggers – lots of the questions this exhibition raises are relevant to us.

Readers who live in London, or who will be visiting before 29th August 2009, should definitely pop in and check this exhibition out. Entry is free, and The Women’s Library is a really lovely building. 14-18 year old women can also join a short course in MagaZine Making from 10th – 14th August.

I liked the review of Between the Covers at Uplift Magazine, check it out if you would like to read more opinion on this exhibition.