![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Niche Demographic
May. 16th, 2019 01:13 pmSo I have fallen into a frenzy of research, trying to get my hands on more Sollius the Slave Detective stories. I have very strong feelings about them!
People I have contacted:
1) a local special collection in my county (tragically, outside their scope)
2) my county's interlibrary loan department (they're trying, but it's hard to find partner libraries willing to share stuff for free and $15 fee x 40 requests = bad)
3) a PDF seller on eBay (no response yet and it has been DAYS)
4) a private collector running a fan site (I just sent the email off, and we shall see)
5) a library near one of my friends (YES THEY WILL SHARE WHAT THEY HAVE)
I am typing polite emails to people and using my actual human voice to make phone calls, and I will not give up until I have read all forty remaining stories. Damn you, Mike Ashley, for setting me on this path. I have a google doc with a running list of my requests. I have downloaded many PDFs. I think maybe my end goal is gonna be to transcribe the scattered PDFs into a proper word document, and then maybe format it as an ebook for my kindle. I have practice doing that, and most of the stories are like six pages long, it will be a snap.
Anyway, outside my latest burning obsession, I went to the quilt guild. I showed em the potholder my mom quilted, and the tea cozy my dad quilted. The guild got a kick out of it - usually it's them trying to get the younger generations into quilting, not the other way around.
There was a cool guest speaker there who brought a ton of antique quilts, and needed volunteers to hold em up. Needless to say, I leaped at the chance to get my paws on some old quilts. My favorite was the Nile green and pink one with the hexagons and diamonds. I'm not generally a seafoam palette person, but Nile green is SUCH a signature 30s color, it really defines the whole quilt. Oddly, despite the roaring market for feedback prints, there isn't a lot of plain Nile green out there! I guess it's a product of its time. Anyway, I valiantly held up heavy quilts at full extension until I thoroughly destroyed my deltoids. I'm on the mend now, but for a couple days it felt like I was beaten with a stick.
By a stroke of luck, I won some templates and a quilt pattern from the guest speaker! Hexagons and diamonds, of course. I have never pieced a Y seam in my life, but it might be time to try. Let's just toss it on the to-do list. (I'm thinking dark blue with the occasional flash of gold.)
After the guild meeting, I got invited out to lunch with the guest speaker and a few other guild members. It was a nice restaurant, and my hamburger was excellent. We talked about quilts, of course, and found common interests like horses and not being on the West Coast, but an odd amount of the lunch was devoted to discussions about flooring. I don't know why some people care so much about flooring. Perhaps it's a homeowner thing? I went to the conveniently-nearby fabric shop afterwards and spent my coupon on a yard of Kona black cotton. When you need a thick, solid, high contrast black, get Kona. I have been betrayed so many times by flimsy, rusty, see-through blacks, and it's nice to have Kona back in my palette.
In other news, I have attended a lecture on Shakespeare at the local library. It was pleasant! The guest speaker was a rickety old guy with a sense of humor and a good grasp of history and politics, and he went over the plot of Anthony & Cleopatra with a bit of analysis of motives. I was the youngest person in the room by about fifty years, which is pretty familiar from the quilt guild. You know, when I was a kid I got along well with grownups and thought I was just a bit ahead of my classmates and would get along with others normally once we were all adults, but honestly, I think I just turned out weird with weird interests, and it's always gonna be like this. Mine is, apparently, a niche demographic. God only knows what I'm gonna be like once I'm actually old - at this rate, I'm gonna have to hang out with vampires.
People I have contacted:
1) a local special collection in my county (tragically, outside their scope)
2) my county's interlibrary loan department (they're trying, but it's hard to find partner libraries willing to share stuff for free and $15 fee x 40 requests = bad)
3) a PDF seller on eBay (no response yet and it has been DAYS)
4) a private collector running a fan site (I just sent the email off, and we shall see)
5) a library near one of my friends (YES THEY WILL SHARE WHAT THEY HAVE)
I am typing polite emails to people and using my actual human voice to make phone calls, and I will not give up until I have read all forty remaining stories. Damn you, Mike Ashley, for setting me on this path. I have a google doc with a running list of my requests. I have downloaded many PDFs. I think maybe my end goal is gonna be to transcribe the scattered PDFs into a proper word document, and then maybe format it as an ebook for my kindle. I have practice doing that, and most of the stories are like six pages long, it will be a snap.
Anyway, outside my latest burning obsession, I went to the quilt guild. I showed em the potholder my mom quilted, and the tea cozy my dad quilted. The guild got a kick out of it - usually it's them trying to get the younger generations into quilting, not the other way around.
There was a cool guest speaker there who brought a ton of antique quilts, and needed volunteers to hold em up. Needless to say, I leaped at the chance to get my paws on some old quilts. My favorite was the Nile green and pink one with the hexagons and diamonds. I'm not generally a seafoam palette person, but Nile green is SUCH a signature 30s color, it really defines the whole quilt. Oddly, despite the roaring market for feedback prints, there isn't a lot of plain Nile green out there! I guess it's a product of its time. Anyway, I valiantly held up heavy quilts at full extension until I thoroughly destroyed my deltoids. I'm on the mend now, but for a couple days it felt like I was beaten with a stick.
By a stroke of luck, I won some templates and a quilt pattern from the guest speaker! Hexagons and diamonds, of course. I have never pieced a Y seam in my life, but it might be time to try. Let's just toss it on the to-do list. (I'm thinking dark blue with the occasional flash of gold.)
After the guild meeting, I got invited out to lunch with the guest speaker and a few other guild members. It was a nice restaurant, and my hamburger was excellent. We talked about quilts, of course, and found common interests like horses and not being on the West Coast, but an odd amount of the lunch was devoted to discussions about flooring. I don't know why some people care so much about flooring. Perhaps it's a homeowner thing? I went to the conveniently-nearby fabric shop afterwards and spent my coupon on a yard of Kona black cotton. When you need a thick, solid, high contrast black, get Kona. I have been betrayed so many times by flimsy, rusty, see-through blacks, and it's nice to have Kona back in my palette.
In other news, I have attended a lecture on Shakespeare at the local library. It was pleasant! The guest speaker was a rickety old guy with a sense of humor and a good grasp of history and politics, and he went over the plot of Anthony & Cleopatra with a bit of analysis of motives. I was the youngest person in the room by about fifty years, which is pretty familiar from the quilt guild. You know, when I was a kid I got along well with grownups and thought I was just a bit ahead of my classmates and would get along with others normally once we were all adults, but honestly, I think I just turned out weird with weird interests, and it's always gonna be like this. Mine is, apparently, a niche demographic. God only knows what I'm gonna be like once I'm actually old - at this rate, I'm gonna have to hang out with vampires.
