Yes, I watched it.

A classmate hosted a wedding-viewing brunch this morning, so I baked my most British scones, rustled up some clotted cream, pulled out a silly hat and sat down to watch The Event.

But amidst all the Sarah-Burton-for-Alexander-McQueen dress excitement (and in my secret, shameful romantic-dream-princess-Barbie heart, I have to admit to liking the gown) not enough people registered the coolest part of the dress: the Royal School of Needlework did the lace stitching!

The RSN is an incredibly awesome organization founded in 1872 by Princess Helena, Queen Victoria's third daughter, to provide lower and middle class women with marketable needlework skills. They are known for producing amazing stitchers and incredibly creative needlework designers. Much of the famous needlework done for the Arts and Crafts movement was done either at the school or by graduates, and they also did the needlework on Queen Elizabeth's coronation robes. They have one of the largest collections of needlework in the west and use their thousands of collection pieces as teaching examples to their students who still train in this highly traditional handicraft.

I got a chance to visit the RSN when I was in London with my graduate cohort this winter — besides being incrediby talented artisans, craftswomen and teachers, I can also say that the women of the RSN are almost absurdly welcoming. They took in 12 tired, hungry and cold graduate students and fed us tea and cookies while they told us the history of the school and the role of needlework in English dec arts history. And just think: while I was eating biscuits and gulping down hot tea, just a few rooms over the finest hands in English stitching were working overtime to make Princess Shinyhair's magical wedding dress. If only I'd known... I could have spilled some tea on it and made history.

Boxes for everyone!

No, actually, I just made one. So a box for me, I guess.


His name is Walter. He is big enough to hold maybe five pens and a mini-stapler, but he's mine, all mine!

I ended up using linseed oil as a coating instead of shellac - it lets the grain of walnut shine through more. And if I keep using words like "grain," "dovetail," and "chisel," I might be able to fool you into believing that I know what I'm talking about. Which, clearly, I don't.

Still, I made a box! I guess if this museum curator thing fails, I can always fall back on a career in cabinetmaking. (The furniture conservators who supervised our box-making just got pounding headaches and they don't even know why.)

Wood as far as the eye can see

Grad school is hard. We've got tons of reading, papers due every week, and then, of course, there's shop class.

Yes, internet, I am building a wooden candle box in graduate school. Yesterday I used a handsaw and a chisel to make the dovetail joints and then I assembled it using hide glue (which smells, by the way, exactly how you'd expect: gross, and a little like warm melted cow.) Today we're going to be shellacking our boxes to bring out the "shine" of the walnut wood.

Apparently this craft project is supposed to help us understand the experience of the 18th century cabinetmaker and appreciate the material goods they produced in a more hands-on fashion. I'm so busy being inordinately proud of my kind of sloppy dovetails, though, that I don't think I'm going to be able to focus on anything else.

Shoshana, Master Cabinetmaker! Just rolls of the tongue, right?

P.S. I'm in graduate school. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this earlier, but if not - yeah. Graduate school! Can't believe they were crazy enough to let me in, but they can't take it back now.