Slow News Summary: Mid-Winter Edition

Pssst: Keep it on the down-low, but I hope to have some exciting news to share soon about a slow design event that I'm planning. Meanwhile, check out all the slow goodness that's been popping up on the intertubes:

Calgarian Laura Cardwardine's brilliant Loom Chair was shown at the Prototype exhibit at IDS13 in Toronto last month. Via her page on Cargo Collective - follow the link to see a slideshow of how she designed & created it. 

On Slow Design, Slow Making, and Slow Home: 

• slowLab's Kickstarter campaign has ended. While they did not reach their ambitious funding goal, they did significantly grow the online conversation about slow design and their network of like-minded designers. They did have enough pledged for the first stage of their project, so we can expect news very soon about a new crowdfunding campaign. If you don't want to miss hearing about it, they suggest you can join their mailing list on their website (bottom left corner) and/or like their Facebook page.
• One of my new favourite blogs is Handful of Salt, whose description of DesignCraft overlaps rather significantly with the ideas of Slow Craft. Their recent profiles of Fibershed, Selvedge magazine, Denimu, and John Whitmarsh will give you a good sense of why I'm now a fan.
• Abigail Doan on makers' and artists' work spaces and collections: "... one thing that I am now convinced of is how place genuinely influences creative outlook and possibly one's attitude towards the harvesting of materials."
• Wabi-sabi, the sublime, and the beauty of imperfection.
• Via Poppytalk, a heartfelt post by Bookhou that all makers and buyers of handmade objects should read, about why handmade costs what it does.
• Erin Loechner, on why design is important, asks, "Do the objects we surround ourselves with tell a story?" (I have such a blog crush on her.)
• Treehugger's Lloyd Alter gently mocks Dezeen's Marcus Fairs about his 'green design is dead' post.
• I'm fascinated by this post from Atlantic Cities on how the internet reinforces inequality by disproportionately representing the interests, ideas, and knowledge of affluent users - and the implications for slow-mapping projects in both gathering and disseminating the maps that they create.
• An awesome device that will allow people to recycle their own plastic for use in their 3D printers, or 3Doodler pens, is a much-needed development. Meanwhile, Make: had a brilliant post explaining why extruders might not exactly herald a home-manufacturing revolution. 
• Do we really need a motion-sensing fork to slow down our meals? Or a special bag that encourages people to reuse items?
• I ran across reports of some now-ended slow craft exhibits here in Canada! In Edmonton last Autumn, the Alberta Craft Council's PASSAGES exhibit explored time and place, with a highlight being the monumental 120 foot knit runner by Margie Davidson representing each minute of a year with a knit stitch. The Manitoba Craft Council's SLOW CRAFT show last summer is described on their website and this wonderful article about slow craft by one of the featured fibre artists, and the works are shown in this a Flikr set (I think the massive hand-bound artist book and the embroidered prairie soil profile are my favourites).

On Slow Fashion:

• Feel Good Style and Fashionista both profiled the slow fashion movement as a whole and upcoming American brands and international events and designers.
• Slow fashionistas rejoice: EcoSalon is back! Since their relaunch they've written about the leather industry, insourcing, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, tech that helps you declutter, digital second-hand shopping, the sharing economy, upcycled and made-in-the-States fashions, a slow art exhibit in Sweden, and a DIY handbag roundup. 
• The Simple Things shared the story of a tailor who specializes in repairing beloved pairs of jeans on their blog. I want one in my city, please.
• The Local Wisdom photo shoots in Vancouver & NYC got some great advance coverage from Ecouterre, and the inspirational teaser photos have now been posted on the Local Wisdom blog - and the Craft of Use site itself has now launched! I love this project's focus on how we use and repair garments in day-to-day life, and its goal of amplifying these practices and changing our relationship with material objects so that design becomes more grass-roots and process becomes more important than consumption.
• London slow fashion stylists ReWardrobe had brilliant coverage of menswear trends, the good stuff from London Fashion Week, art installations of discarded textiles, and Greenpeace's Detox campaign on their blog. 
• Every now and then a great DIY tutorial pops up among the endless stream of selfies on fashion blogs. The Year Of Slow Fashion has had a couple of terrific ones, making boot socks and turning flared jeans into skinnies.

Slow Fashion Forward have posted a wonderful set of simple guidelines to help consumers make more sustainable fashion choices.

On Slow Travel:

• Thank goodness for travel blogs in the depths of winter. They let armchair travellers dream of beachcombing in Wales, visiting a museum about steel drums in Guyana, seeing Maryland's North Central Railroad Trail or the national parks of Italy by bicycle, or exploring secret London.
• Here are some good tips on slow travelling when you're pressed for time, or anytime.
• This guy is going to retrace the path that humans took to migrate around the world - by foot. Epic.

On Slow Food:

• SFUSA have a new president, and a great blog post about 'forgotten foods'.
• Saskatoon's Star-Phoenix interviewed Saskatchewan's Slow Food reps about the lessons they brought home from Terra Madre.
• Grist wrote about how our supermarket choices are limited by food industry mergers and aquisitions.
• Here's a great interview with Dr. Susan Rubin about engaging ways to educate children about food.
• Slow Food International have created a guide to eating less, good, clean, and fair meat called Too Much At Steak (PDF), and Forbes covered SFI's Slow Wine guide.
• The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity explain why biodiversity is crucially important.

On Slow Living, Slow Parenting, and Slow Work:

• You know about the National Day of Unplugging on March 1st, right?
• A few upcoming conferences: Slow Money are holding their 4th annual national gathering (USA) at the end of April. Slow Food Canada's national meeting will be in Oosoyos, BC, also in late April. Slow Art Day is April 27th. Finally, the Slow Living Summit in Vermont will be held in early June, and the list of speakers looks amazing.
• Carl Honore is currently on a speaking tour to promote his new book The Slow Fix, so naturally there's been a spate of articles, extracts, interviews (the link is audio, highly recommended!), an archived livefeed (skip the first 12 minutes of dead air), and book reviews.
• A bold editorial rumbles about the end of big box chain stores, while another reveals the poor quality of the typical warehouse job for an online seller. The challenge and opportunity that both reveal: rebuilding local economies.
• The NYT tells us that spending more time doing less paradoxically increases productivity. 
• I love this story of a public library adding a seed bank to its services.
• There've also been articles on 'slow news', 'slow data', and the debut of a blog devoted to 'slow education'.

On Sustainability and Environment:

Must reads from the past couple of months: The Atlantic on how food and climate are connected; Mother Jones on the enormous challenge of preventing polar bear extinction; and The Guardian on domestic spying at the behest of the conservative Canadian government on citizens who disagree with their environmental policies. 

Slow Pastime: Family History Stories

Remember when I said I'd share a few of the more interesting stories from my family tree?

I love the simplicity of this sunburst-style family tree from Modern Trees, which can go to seven generations. via Eco & Elsie. Maybe for my birthday?

1. The Irish Ancestor Who Wasn't

Sometimes family stories aren't exactly correct. We'd been told that one of my maternal great-great-grandfathers was named Caleb O'Leary, an Irish orphan, who died tragically young under suspicious circumstances when my great-grandmother was a toddler. He was found dead on the railroad tracks, his family believed he'd been murdered, and local police refused to investigate because they assumed he'd been accidentally killed by a train while drunk (prejudice against Irish was commonplace at the time).

The digitized records tell a different story. After years of fruitless searches for him under the name O'Leary, among families who emigrated during the potato famine, I went back to basics and looked at the census records we had for him. Turns out Caleb's surname wasn't recorded as O'Leary, but as Leary - and the Learys were listed as being of German ethnicity. Leary is an anglicization of the German Lerich/Lerch/Lorch (from "The Valley of the Larks"), and the family arrived with the first wave of Foreign Protestants who were brought in from central Europe to settle Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s. Caleb was raised by his aunt, Ellen Leary Weagle, but had he actually been orphaned? His birth parents are listed as George Leary and Alice, of New Germany, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, in his marriage record. However, there is no record of a marriage between George Leary and an Alice, and all the Alices that appear in the census in New Germany and other nearby communities in Lunenburg County were far too young. George's marriages were to Desire (or is it said Desiree?) Peet, then Clara Grace Fiendel after Desire's death. At first I thought Alice must have been a relationship between the marriages, and then I found the date of Desire's death, about 9 months after Caleb was born. Then I went back to the NS Archives' website to take another look at the marriage record, and realized that the whole page of marriages was written in the same hand with the same pen at the same time - it had been transcribed at some point! An illicit relationship with a teenager that was hushed up successfully and appears in none of the other family trees or family stories, seems far less likely than that "Alice" is just a mistranscription of "Desire" from a damaged or difficult-to-read church record, and that baby Caleb was sent to be raised by his dad's eldest sister while his grieving father struggled with the farm and five other children under age nine.

This also provides an explanation for his identification in family stories as Irish: Desire's parents were George Peet, who was born in New Dublin, Lunenburg County to a family who had emigrated from Northern Ireland - and Maria Arenburg, from another South Shore German family. And George Leary's mother was Elsie Dougherty, from another Irish family. So Caleb's family was part-Irish. And his origins were garbled by subsequent generations because he died so young. 

(I'm now stalled out trying to find George Peet's family.)

As for Caleb's accidental or not-so-accidental death, there are no digital records for that, but years ago my sister found a newspaper article about his death at the Nova Scotia Archives that gave a date and confirmed that he'd been found dead on the railroad tracks. She has misplaced her photocopy of it, but the original will still be in the Archives waiting to be read. The "unsolved murder" story is waiting to be solved.

2. The Puritan Mother Who Was Burned As A Witch

Mary Barnes, the first wife of Thomas Barnes of Farmington, Connecticut, was one of the last three people executed in Connecticut for witchcraft. It's thought that she was hung, not burned at the stake, at the site where Trinity College now stands in Hartford. The records of her life and death are fragmentary; it's not clear who her parents were (there isn't a shred of evidence to tie her to the parents given in most family trees online), or who accused her of witchcraft, and although she denied being a witch, nobody defended her during the trial. Mary and Thomas had four children when she was executed, and they were young enough that Thomas brought in Mary Andrews (an elder daughter of a nearby family, who he later married), to take care of the children while their mother was in prison. Some have suggested that her husband wanted Mary out of the way so he could marry the girl next-door, but reputable historians point out that speaking in her defence might have only served to get her husband accused too, with the result that they'd both be hung and their children would become indentured servants - and remarrying the woman who came to care for the children after a wife's death was hardly uncommon during this period.

We are supposedly descended from Thomas' son Thomas, who would have been 10 years old when his mother was hung. He is my eighth great grandfather, from my dad's side of the family tree. Unfortunately the family trees that all this is based on are a complete schmozzle of duplicated individuals and alternative birthdates (as discussed here), and it looks like Thomas' son Thomas might be the son of Mary Andrews, not Mary Barnes - or could be from the family in Middletown instead of the family in Farmington. It will take a fair bit of research to sort the mess out.