completed last night: The “Shelley” warp with “Storm” (mostly blues) “Water” (mostly greens), and “Wave” (mostly peacock) shawls. Each woven with dozens of Canadian hand-painted merino wool and handspun dyed-in-the-wool yarns, and about 25″ wide by 65″ to 75″ long plus fringes. This is the first warp of the year and two of them will be in the sale this coming December.

People often look at life expectancy statistics and assume that people died at the age of 46 in 1900 because medical care was poor and that people seldom lived past age 46. In fact, anyone reaching the age of 46 in 1900 was probably as likely to reach age 75 or 80 or even 95 as someone is today. Life expectancy is an average, and children more often died of diseases and then-untreatable infections and pneumonia. Families died from eating tainted food or because their water system was poisoning them. People also died at work more often, but that has changed in the last hundred years.

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