Quilt Lecture, Sat., 11/17/07

Just wanted to post something on my blog about my upcoming lecture for Mesa State's Adult Education center. It is a 3 hour lecture on "A brief history of American Quilting, 1776-1950" You can check out all the details on how to register on my website:

www.laurashome.biz

I will present a pictorial history as well as feature several quilts from 1790 to 1950 and many vintage textile samples from about 1850 to 1930.

I am really excited about this lecture and looking forward to a great class. Check out this creepy "Graveyard Quilt" made in 1835, notice the coffins in the center....I'll talk about the history of this quilt and many others in my lecture.

Leaving MCPLD,...

Since I did not get a chance to say "good-bye" to very many fellow staff members at the Library last Wednesday, I guess I'll have to do it on my blog. I just wanted to say how much I loved working at the Library. There are so many great people there and I am honored to have worked so closely with many of you and developed friendships I know will last a lifetime.

Thanks to everyone for all of the warm wishes and heartfelt thoughts as my life takes an unexpected turn. I wish everyone there well, and will always cherish the fond memories I have of working with so many great people these past 3 years.

Take Care!

Final Task # 23, YEAH !!!!

Once I got started with this whole program, I really enjoyed it. I really started to look forward to doing the next tasks. I know that I will continue to keep my blog going, and will continue to use a lot of the tools I learned about in the Webolution. I know my husband has been so impressed with my desire to even want to try to figure out some of these things, so he has been a big help and highly encouraging me to continue to explore.

I just have to give Nancy Trimm a GIGANTIC round of applause for such a great program, and for coordinating the whole thing and for encouraging us to keep going. She gave countless hours of help and assistance to all of us who got "stuck" from time to time.

I loved the RSS feeds, and will continue to utilize my My Yahoo page to customize it with the special things I need to look for on the internet. I love Podcasting and I frequently use Wikipedia. There are so many great things that I have learned from this exercise, that I am actually sorry that it is ending. :(

I'm gonna keep bloggin' though!

Re: task # 22

I LOVE podcasting! THis is one of the greatest things ever! I added an RSS feed for the Daily Day to my My Yahoo page so that I could see these clips more often. I really miss watching the Daily Show, since Cable doesn't come out as far as our house on I road, I can't ever see it anymore. (We don't have Satellite either)

This is really cool! Enjoy the funny clip below about Hillary, with a funny OJ interjection.

The Daily Show

Task # 22 - Podcast

I am hoping I can paste in a link to see this short "Minisode" of the Dick Van Dyke show, featuring Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie, dancing the Calypso to "True Man True." The reason I picked this short clip is because my parents named me after Laura Petrie, as I was born in 1966 right around the time this show was so popular!

Look for Bob Crane of Hogan's Heroes fame playing the Bongo drum in the background, Nice eye Carol!

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=2849985

Task # 20 & 21 - Downloadable Audio Books

I am sorry to say that this was really a saga for me. I actually spent quite a good deal of time working with this earlier this year. My husband purchased an MP3 player for me last Oct. for our anniversary, so one of the first things I wanted to do was to download an audio book to it.

I signed up for both NetLibrary and Overdrive and was successful in downloading to my computer, both at home and at work. Downloading to my new MP3 player was another story all together. That NEVER worked. Even after my computer-guru husband who knows everything there is to know about computers, etc., spent a few hours to figure out that it was just impossible. He thought that I had already checked to see that my MP3 player was compatible, and as it turned out, it wasn't. He wasted a few hours trying to get it to work and when he finally doubled checked my info, he discovered that my player was not compatible and had a "digital Rights Management" issue. So much for that,....I still love the MP3 player, because it has video capabilities and has cool things loaded on it from my husband. Downloadable books, not something I would ever use on my computer anyway. :-(

Do you all know about this video?

Task # 19 - YouTube Video

Task # 17 & 18 - Wikis

This was an easy task. I viewed the "A Beginner's Look" and discovered that "wiki" meant "quick" in Hawaiian!

After that I went to some of the suggested links and checked out the Princeton Book Lovers Wiki and that was interesting. I read the one Western review, from someone who said that at least they were brave enough to review a Western book! I also went to the Teen Lib Wiki and that was boring. Couldn't get anywhere interesting on that one at all. If I can't find something interesting in less than 2 minutes, it's pretty much out for me.

As far as editing a wiki, we do this all the time with the Manager's wiki for our schedules, and I just think Nancy has done a great job with this! I'm so glad she set it up and that we all actually use it to post out schedules! I'm really looking forward to a staff wiki, that is if I am allowed to participate!

I also love wikipedia. I use that regularly when needing to look up information quick. I used it recently to look up Sodium Perborate,....

Compliments of my husband,...

Mr. P sent me this interesting link about bees,...


http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/stephencfleming/BellJarBees02

Task # 16 - Plateau Voice

With this exercise, I went looking through the Collbran's Plateau Voice looking for "quilting" references and found only a very few boring things. As I was doing this, I happened upon a report from around 1912 I think, about a poor fella who came down to Grand Junction to pick up provisions and on his return to Collbran, his "team" got spooked, he fell from his wagon, and was run over by his own horses. He ended up being fine, but I actually thought it was sort of amusing and I got a laugh out of it. Just that "twisted" sense of humor I have I guess! Here's the link if you are interested:


http://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=UExWLzE5MTcvMDQvMjcjQXIwMDEwMQ==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-custom

Updated Info on the "Seed" below

Thanks to my friend Carol and her very savvy research skills on the internet, she discovered that the picture I posted below of the largest seed in the plant kingdom is really the seed of the "Double Cocnut Palm Tree" seen here in this link:

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/7951/dblcoc.html

Thanks Carol!

Task 14 & 15 Research Tools

Just this afternoon, I was having a conversation with Carol & Shana and I was telling them about when I had Pneumonia as a teenager. Then I came back to my office and started to work on this exercise for the Library's Webolution, so I thought I better look up Pneumonia on the Consumer Health database the library has, so that I could remember what kind of Pneumonia I had. After reading the sytems and how I was treated for this illness from the database info, I discovered that I probably had "Atypical Pneumonia (Mycoplasma and Viral) (Walking Pneumonia)"

Definition:
Atypical pneumonia is a lung infection. “Typical pneumonia” is a severe illness. It is usually caused by bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, or Klebsiellae pneumoniae . Typical pneumonia tends to strike older individuals, especially those with heart or lung conditions. In contrast, Atypical pneumonia tends to be a milder illness. It is caused by a different assortment of bacteria or viruses, and it usually strikes healthy young people.

Here's a link to the information and all the details I got from our awesome database at the Library:

http://web.ebscohost.com/chc/detail?vid=3&hid=107&sid=dad88046-c38e-4e5e-b9cd-3d499580d3d2%40sessionmgr3

It is very thorough and really helped me to figure out what kind of Pneumonia I probably had at 17 yrs. old!

Task # 13 - Comic Strip Generator

"Science says",....this is the largest seed in the Plant Kingdom!

Task # 11 & # 12 -Resource Sites

This task was a bit disapointing for me. Since I am in Administration, I looked for helpful information about Finance, Budgeting, Safety & Facilities issues on these sites. The only one that had anything helpful was ALA. PLA, CAL, CliC and the Colorado State Library all had nothin'!

I did find a picture of our very own ex-employee, Penny Shiel on CAL's site, under the Budget & Finance committee; she's a Chari-Elect!

ALA offered helpful resources to learn more in their Professional Tools, Admin. & Management sections. They gave resources to find out more information about Facilities Management, Budgeting & Finance and Disaster Response, which I thought would be very helpful.

The one I was most hopeful would provide me some information was the Library support staff.com, but as it turned out, was one of the most disapointing sites. Apparently the person who runs it is way behind in trying to keep up with it. If you go the the "What's New" page, her last blog entry was 12/23/06 where she starts off by saying another year has ended and that she is sorry for not keeping this more up to date. Sort of funny now that I am reading this on 8/22/07! She ends it with a statement about not knowing what the future holds for her site, but she still owns the domain name until 2009. She complains that many of her links don't link to anything anymore, but hopes that the ones that still work help someone with something. Ho hum,...this site was really a bunch of nothin' useful.

Sort of frustrating that the amount of information on these sites was so limited or had nothing at all to help Library Administrators. Maybe I should start a new association for all of us lonely Library Admin. folks.

Oh yeah, web Junction. They did have some helpful trainings that would apply to me such as "A Risk management Philosophy", and "Elements of a Disaster Response Plan." They had a Library Management section for specific trainings relating to facilities and things of that sort.

Task # 9 & 10 - Tagging

This task took me some time to really investigate this 'tagging" and understand how I might use it. After viewing the tutorial, I had a little help from my friend, the Lie-berry Police!

What I discovered so far, is that I use all of these different tasks to somehow further my career and interests in antique quilts, reproduction & vintage textiles and things of that nature. So, of course, I went and set up a Del.icio.us account and promptly tagged 3 antique quilt sites that I routinely use for obtaining comps in the market when I am doing quilt appraisals for my clients.

My favorite one of course, is Rocky Mountain Quilts. http://www.rockymountainquilts.com
This company was started by Betsey Telford who is from the Grand Valley and lived and started her shop and restoration business in Palisade approx. 20 years ago. When I started working for RMQ in 2004, Betsey had already relocated to Maine and moved her retail shop there (everything "important" in the antique quilt world really happens back east, you know!). The restoration part of her business was still in Palisade until it closed in the spring of 2006 and was relocated to Maine as well. This is when I went out on my own and strated doing quilt restoration for clients and searching the web for vintage textiles to begin building up my inventory. Incidentally, Betsey has the largest collection of vintage textiles in the entire United States outside of any museum! WOW! It was truely a gift to work for her business and learn so much about 18th & 19th century textiles.

Now that I understand tagging, I think that I will use this more in the future when I need to organize and keep track of all the historical quilting sites I frequent.

Task # 7 & 8 - RSS Feeds

I had already done this task before I knew it was a task for the Webolution. There is a website I visit frequently called http://www.reproductionfabrics.com/ and they have RSS feeds from their site. When I was telling my husband about this, he's like "What kind of breaking news can there be from the world of vintage fabric reproductions?" Plenty of things,....like, what kinds of period fabrics are being reproduced lately, and,...I don't know, lots of things! Well, I signed up for 2 RSS feeds, that come into my Yahoo page, and they are the "Best of the New" and their regular Newsletter which has lots of historical dating information on fabrics. For someone like me who does Antique Quilt Restoration and Appraisals, this could be very important stuff you know!

I also do lectures for local quilt guilds and sometimes do craft shows. Here's a couple of pictures of my "products and quilts" from the last show I did was at Two Rivers Convention Center last Christmas.

My next engagement is at the Chautauqua Festival later this September, sponsored by the Museum of the West and will be held at Cross Orchards Living History Farm on North Ave. The Theme is "1776" so I will have a short talk about quilting from that time period, with several antique quilt samples, and an actual French Toile quilt, c. 1790. My part will be on Sat. September 29th from 1-3 p.m. in the "Women's Crafts" tent.

Not sure when I'll do another craft show, but probably not until 2008. My husband designed a fantastic brochure for my quilt restoration work and is currently working on my website and getting all of my products online. If you can stop by my office at the Library, I rotate antique quilts on my walls. Come check 'em out, and stop for a piece of candy too!

Task # 5 & 6

I went to tht Flickr site and just happened upon someone's pictures from a recent "road trip." They had published some cool pictures of a van they just happened to run across that was totally painted like the Scooby Do Mystery Machine. They were really cool photos. I wrote down where these came from, but now I've lost the link. I thought these were great photos because my husband and I always call our dog "scoob", or "scooby" or "Scoobus." Here's our cute dog when he was just a pup!

Joining late, but,...

I really wanted to join the Library's webolution a lot sooner, but so many other things got in the way. This is a great opportunity for me to learn more about web technology, and try to keep up with the times!

Better late than never,...

Getting a late start to the Library's Webolution. Hope I can catch up, especially with all those "over-achievers" leadin' the pack, and they know who they are!!!