I enjoy doing smaller local presentations groups & historical societies. This presentation, From the Showroom to the Workroom: Exploring the 19th-Century Millinery Shop, was for the Antiques Club of the Finger Lakes at the Geneva History Museum in 2025. I love getting to meet people at regional and national symposia & conferences. Unveiling Rural Milliners was simultaneously available virtually during GCVM’s 2024 Fall Fashion Symposium.Straw millinery, the process of making a hat from straw and those who did in the nineteenth-century, is the topic I present most frequently. The Little Companions of Women: How Childhood Playthings Became Adulthood Helpmates looked at how porcelain dolls in whole or part were made and remade into sewing and desk accessories.
Workshops
Village/Site Based Presentations
The most elaborate presentation to date was my Women’s Employments presentation through a Millinery interpretation.From 2014 through 2023, I redressed the Insurance Office at GCVM as a millinery shop. This became a platform for discussing not only fashionable headwear but aspects of women’s employment during the mid-nineteenth century. Straw hats and bonnets took shape in the hands of women and children, plaiting and sewing at home in one of several cottage industries of the nineteenth century. Winter, cold weather attire is a topic that astounds me with the crowds it can draw and retain. The layers warn to stay warm can pack a room filled with discussion. Winter events give me an opportunity to share my ongoing research on sewn winter hoods. Guests seem to enjoy learning which hood I’d recommend for milking a cow, keeping an eye on children, or getting stuck in a hail storm. Columns of “Handmade Gifts” became common in the second half of the nineteenth-century.
If I Had My Own Blue Box: 