Five acres, two little ones, one awesome husband, 12 ducks (give or take), and a bunch of fruit trees and garden beds. In her spare time, Nicole likes to knit, paint, draw, teach kids, make fairies & dragons, philosophize, and read fantasy. She doesn't HAVE spare time, but does like to fantasize about it!
And now, for our final princess (unless Disney makes more or I decide to do Mirabelle or Raya): TIANA!
In many ways, Tiana was easier to research than other princesses. We have pictures, fashion plates, and even videos from the 1920s. But, that also means it's there's less room for error. I'm not sure I did a perfect job. After I'd drawn one coloring page, I'd find things off with the others--like the necklace probably should have been longer and there's probably supposed to be straps on the shoes. I'm still confused about wearing gloves in evening wear. There's a video by Glamour about what Tiana would have worn, and it mentions there should be evening gloves.
Here's that video by Glamour:
But, none of the fashion plates or found showed women wearing evening gloves. So, I drew Tiana without them. (EDIT: Looking at actual photos, I do see gloves on some--but not all--of the evening gown photos).
There's two main styles of evening gowns, from what I understand. The "flapper" style dress that most of us have seen, and the Robe de Style, which is trying to look like the gowns of the 1770s. This image compares them nicely:
What both dresses have in common is the dropped waist and the flattened chest. The style of the 1920s was to look as youthful/flat/rectangular as possible.
Here you can see the more well-known "flapper" silhouette. Notice how long the dresses were. We think about 1920s dresses as being short. They were short for their time, but were rarely above the knee. They were also above ankle length (I had to draw both of Tiana's fancy dresses as shorter, as they were originally depicted as being floor length).
What the movie did get right was the dropped waist and large flowers and bows on the hips. Both were very common design elements. I could not find any examples of strapless dresses--all of them had either sleeves or--more commonly wide necklines with 1-2 inch straps. Here's some more examples:
For Tiana's iconic green dress, I went for a Robe de Style gown. These kept the square upper body, dropped waist, wide-set straps, and large bows/flowers, but they added in a 1770s style. They were inspired for the same sorts of dresses Belle would have worn, like the "robe à l'anglaise" and "Robe à la Française" (note the similarity in naming). Petals and flowers were common with these gowns--perfect for Tiana's lily-themed gown. I even found one that's green and floral!
Now onto Tiana's workwear! Now we're back to dressing like rectangles. Day dresses could have long or short sleeves, and could be anywhere in length from knee to above ankle. There were a bunch of different collars, which The Frog Princess actually depicts when Tiana changes from her blue work dress to her yellow one. Vintage Dancer has a wonderful collection of 1920's dress examples! They don't allow copying of images, so you can check them out on their site. Here's a great example, though, that looks like the yellow dress Tiana wore:
I also looked into what waitresses wore during this time period. I love how they actually reflected the different attire in the movie. Her outfit when working for Cal's has a ruffled apron that goes over the shoulders, and she has one of those little maid hat-things. This seems to have been a more upscale restaurant where they want the waitresses to look like maids. This was common. Her outfit for Duke's has a waist apron and no headware. Both can be seen in pictures and drawings of the era.
All in all, there was a lot to research and a lot to learn. I love this way of exploring history. Every time I go to draw something, I have to ask, "What exactly did that look like?" That spurs more research and I end up learning a lot more than I expected to!
You know how, sometimes, you go to find something on the internet, and it's nowhere to be found? That was me today!
I needed a small activity for my Ancient History students to do if they were done with making their Roman leather pouches. So, I went looking in my copy of "Classical Kids: An Activity Guide to Live in Ancient Greece and Rome" by Laurie Carlson. There was a page in there about making a hodometer, like the ancient Romans might have used to measure houses and roads. This seemed like a great idea...but I didn't want to deal with the innacuracy of using string and pencils to make a circle. And, I wanted it to have handy little inch divisions.
I thought, for sure, there must already be a printable for making a hodometer. Little did I know, I wouldn't find one, and that these things are called by many names: Odometer, measuring wheel, surveyor's wheel, trundle wheel, perambulator, waywiser, and more! In the end, I found a circle divided into 12 sections and scaled it in photoshop to have a diameter of 3.82 (to give it a circumference of 24 inches), then I added in numbers. I printed it out, cut it out, and rolled it along a ruler, and it sure seems to work pretty well. I wouldn't consider it perfectly accurate--especially over long distances-- but it should work great for kids!
I figured I'm probably not the only one in the world wanting one of these and not wanting to have to draw it out and do all the measurements, so I posted it here for anyone else who wants/needs to use it!
Anne Miller wrote:I am not sure what paints are food safe other than milk paint.
It shouldn't be too hard to make your own food safe black paint. Paint is made of two elements: pigment and binder.
Thankfully, black is one of the easy pigments to find or make, as you can get a very nice black from ground charcoal. For thousands of years, charcoal was what artists used to make black, and it's non-toxic. You can grind up some charcoal from any fire in a mortar and pestal (my history students love grinding up charcoal I got from my woodstove.)
The next step is finding a binder, and there's quite a few non-toxic binders--some of which might be at home. Casein (from curds) works well, and it's what's in milk paint. But, you could also buy gum arabic to make a watercolor or ink (that's what watercolors are made of). Another binder is a drying oil, like linseed--this makes an oil paint--, but it'll take a long time to "dry"/polymerize. Chinese black ink is made with gelatin, so you might be able to make a black paint with gelatin (I haven't tried it yet).
The main questions is, which paint will stick to a smooth surface. I think casein (milk) paint will likely flake off the stone if it doesn't have lime to help it bind to the stone, and the lime would make the paint lighter. It'd be a fun experiment to try the various paints and see which one sticks!
I decided this was as good of time as any to weed the area. While weeding, I noticed many of the alliums needed to be divided. Seemed like a good chance to see how they divided, and to actually take pictures of them.
It's doing great! I planted them in two different places (maybe more, but I know these two places have it and not my mother's elephant garlic). My son loves munching on one patch of these alliums, and the thimbleberries keep trying to overtake the area. But, that hasn't stopped them from surviving.
The other patch is under a pear tree, and that gets mulched and weeded more (and it gets snacked on less), and that one is doing even better. I've dug up and divided/replanted them a few times, and they just keep doing better.
These are a favorite snack for my son. He loves eating the leaves. They're a little less spicy than the elephant garlic (which is a type of leek), but look very similar.
Youtube decided to show me this video, and it makes a lot of great points:
Basically, face blindness is like being shown a bunch of carrots (or red apples, or garlic cloves) and being told their names. They all have distinguishing characteristics if you try really hard to find them. But, you have to find them, memorize them, and attach them to a name.
But, apparently some people see a face and their brain just....remembers it. They don't have to put in effort to try to memorize it. They don't need to use features like hair color, style, etc, to remember a person.
Some people are so good at cataloging see a face once and remember it forever. And, some people are so bad at it that it so bad that they can't tell their mother's face apart from another person of the same age, hair, and build. And some are somewhere in the middle.
I've always struggled with names and faces, especially when people are outside of their normal context. But, I figured I was just bad at it and not working hard enough at remembering people. I had a lot of guilt! I hadn't realized that I probably have some form of face blindness until Covid happened. I was talking to another person, and they were complaining about how much they didn't like the masks because it made it harder for them to tell people apart. And, I thought in my head, "What? It's exactly the same with masks and without them!" I used other cues, like hair and eye color and style of dress and mannerisms to tell people apart.
Some people have really unique faces, and I'll remember those with their names, especially if I see them in circumstances where they're distinct from everyone else. Sometimes, a name and face sticks. But, woe betide me if I enter a classroom and there's three thin boys with short, light hair, or four girls with long brown hair who act in similar ways. Sometimes, I do manage to sort them out...but not always. And, it's even worse if I haven't seen them in a while.
But, the book that really made everything "click" for me was The Farmer's Handbooks series. They're FREE and full of great how-to information.
A lot of books seemed to focus on the "why" and philosophy, and I got kind of lost in that. The Farmers Handbook grounded the philosophy is skills that I needed.
Five acres, two little ones, one awesome husband, 12 ducks (give or take), and a bunch of fruit trees and garden beds. In her spare time, Nicole likes to knit, paint, draw, teach kids, make fairies & dragons, philosophize, and read fantasy. She doesn't HAVE spare time, but does like to fantasize about it! 
