by Roseanna White | Sep 4, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
In preparation for my “Spies in Early America” class I’m teaching my home school group, I decided to get some quills. After all, if one is pretending to be a Revolutionary-era spy and will be writing secret messages in homemade invisible ink, obviously one ought to use a quill pen to do it! Right? Right. =)
The only problem is that, well, finished quill pens are a bit pricey. And since I listed my classes as “free,” I wanted to keep costs to a minimum. As I perused the quill options online, something soon became clear–if I was going to provide quills to 12 students, I needed to buy them uncut, hence cheaply.
Sure. No problem. I could learn to cut quills. I mean, every person who knew how to write for centuries trimmed their own quills. This isn’t a big deal. I’m a smart girl. I can figure it out. Right? Right?? LOL
So I ordered my nice set of a dozen black quills. And as I waited for them to arrive, I read up on the process online, visiting several sites to get the full scope of my project. And the more I read…the more I realized that 12 quills ordered for 12 students gave me absolutely no margin of error. Insert Roseanna taking a trip to Jo-Ann Fabrics.
I ended up with 6 colored quills for $2, the 12 black ones for $7, and a precision knife made by Fiskars. (Colonial folks would have used a pen knife. I, however, have not a pen knife. So I went with a sharp blade that still allowed for control.)
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| My Fiskars Precision Knife |
Then I set up my area. I was working on my old wooden desk, which I didn’t want to score with my blade, so I put a cutting board down. Then I got to work preparing the quills. The first step is to shave off excess feathers, as you can see from the mound of colored fluff in the above picture. The idea is to make sure it sits comfortably in your hand without the barbs annoying you. I have tiny hands, so I didn’t have much to worry about. But men would have to shave off more, for sure. And most people from days bygone would have stripped the quill entirely. For ascetics, I didn’t do that here.
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| See how the feathers hit my hand at first? |
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| After trimming, the feathers don’t start until after my hand. |
You’ll also want to shave the feathers from the middle section of the quill, where they’re really fluffy. I actually found that with the feathers I was using, if I took off all the fluffy looking ones from middle and sides, that was a good rule for how far to shave.
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| Shaving fluffy feathers from inside the rib |
I then cut off all the tips of the feathers. This has to be done at some point, and one of the articles I read said to do it before tempering. Others said after. I see no big difference when you do it, so…whenever, LOL.
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| Quill with tip removed |
Then comes the tempering–this is when you harden your quill. The quill wears away with use, so if you start with a harder shaft, it’ll last longer. You can soak them overnight in water to really help the process, but since these are for recreational use, I went straight to the heat tempering.
For this part of the process, you fill a can with sand and pop it in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes. Since I was doing so many quills at once, I used a cake pan. Once the sand is heated, pull it out of the oven and bury your quills in as far as they’ll go.
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| Quills getting their heat treatment in 350-degree sand |
Leave them in there until the sand has cooled. I did this part in the evening and left them until morning when I was ready to start working on them again.
Next comes the part I feared messing up royally–cutting. Getting out my handy-dandy precision knife again, I studied the diagrams and descriptions on the various websites and distilled it down to a few main steps.
1. Make a slice at an angle to take away about half the diameter of the quill.
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| The first slice. |
2. Once you’ve opened the shaft, you can see that inside is a series of circular membranes. Get those out with the tip of your blade and, in the section beyond your cut, some little pokey thing. I used a cuticle shaper from a pedicure set, LOL.
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| Removing the membrane |
3. Then you do the slices to form your nib. Start by making a slit parallel to the shaft and centered, from the tip up about 1/4 inch. This helps the ink flow to the point
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| Making the slit |
4. Then you start shaping the point into a nib. Here are some pictures from various angles.
5. The final step is to work the point. I just pressed my blade to the tip, perpendicular to the shaft, to square it off. Then took it at an angle from both top and bottom to get the best edge.
As I practiced using them, I trimmed a bit here and there until I found the shape that made the ink flow best. And of course…
by Roseanna White | Sep 2, 2013 | Word of the Week
Leave it to Roseanna to browse through the dictionary for fun on the weekend. 😉 Sunday as I was beginning to think about the Word of the Week, I popped over to
www.etymonline.com and accidentally bumped the O section. Then thought, “Sure, go with it” and browsed through a few pages. Randomly clicked on page 11 and soon was learning something. =)
Operative as an adjective is from the 15th century, meaning “producing the intended effect.” The weakened sense of “important” (i.e., “challenge being the operative word in the speech”) is very new, from 1955. But it’s the noun version that intrigued me. =)
Since 1809 operative has meant “worker; one who operates.” Sure. No problem. But obviously the more interesting is its meaning of “spy.” I’d never looked up this one before, but it’s so right up my alley that I’m kinda surprised I hadn’t, LOL. This meaning came about around 1930, directly from the Pinkerton Agency. They would refer to their detectives as “operatives,” and since much of their work was undercover–spying–it was soon applied to any secret agent. Fun, eh?
by Roseanna White | Aug 29, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
A while back on another blog, I read a post about how, if we’re honest, we all have the reader-we-wish-we-were and the reader-we-really-are. Like, we might want to think we’re going to read some scholarly, high-falutin’ piece of literature for pure fun one summer…but when it comes down to it, we opt for the romance novel with the pretty gown on the front instead. I really appreciated the thoughts the blogger put forth, because I have totally done that.
It’s a thought that stuck with me, and which translates to a lot more than my reading pile. Because it’s tough sometimes. We should own who we are…yet be improving. We should be happy in our skin…but want to be healthier, in better shape. We should take pride in our work…but not be too proud to take advice.
The more I think on these things, the more I think that finding a balance for each of those circumstances is what helps me discover who I really am. Years ago, I posted about how, when I spend time with some of my best friends, I sometimes come away thinking, “Why am I not like them?” I don’t make food from scratch much anymore. I don’t sew my own clothes. I don’t debate the morality of one brand over another. Should I? Well, hearing their philosophies, I often think I should. But if I give my attention to that…
And one of those friends replied to that blog saying how she leaves those same visits wishing she could develop stories that others want to read, wishing she could be confident in her clothing choices without getting hung up on the why of things, wishing she could be the kind of person to express those very doubts with eloquence.
We all have those I wish I were… moments. We all look at the way our friends parent, dress, exercise, cook, write, read, worship, or [fill in the blank] and think, “I need to be more like them.” But how often are they looking right back at us and thinking the same?
Sometimes this makes me laugh. Sometimes it makes me shake my head. And always it makes me pause and think. Because I can’t be Kimberly or Karlene or Stephanie or Jennifer or Paige or Erin. I can’t be Francine Rivers or Ted Dekker or Laurie Alice Eakes or MaryLu Tyndall or Julie Lessman. I can’t be the college professors who sat around thinking about Aristotle for fun.
There are things I wish I could improve about myself, especially when I reflect on these people I so love. I wish I were more proactive about my homeschooling choices. I wish I were more educated on the medical choices available to us. I wish I knew (and cared) what was in my food. I wish I studied the changing tides of the industry to which I belong. I wish I kept my house clean. I wish I always answered my kids with patience. I wish I could organize my time.
And it’s so incredibly weird to me to be talking to a friend and here her say, “I just keep telling myself, ‘You need to be more like Roseanna. Keep your cool.’ You’re the most laid-back person I know, and I need that.”
I wha…?
LOL.
What I take from that is that we need to learn from each other, yes. We need to grow. We need to stretch ourselves out toward knowledge, as Aristotle would say, and come to a better understanding of our worlds.
But we also need to recognize that we can only do what we can do. We can only be who we can be. We only have so much attention, so many hours, so many days. How do we really want to spend them?
For me, it comes down to this. If I have to decide between working out and writing, I’m going to choose writing. But if I can combine working out with brainstorming…well, that’s awesome! So rather than doing videos that demand my full attention, I’ve been walking. It gives me much-needed time to think in peace, and that makes my writing time for fruitful.
If I have to decide between keeping my house clean and spending extra time on fun lessons with my kids, I’m going to choose my kids. Because sometimes it seems like if I spend my whole day teaching the must-dos, then the following hours cleaning up, I never get to hug them. Never get to cuddle. Never get to put puzzles together and build Lego tractors. So I prioritize. The kitchen must be cleaned, the toys have to be put away. But I’m not going to fret over every stray piece of paper.
The list goes on. Will I ever reach a place where I’m not frustrated day-to-day with some little thing? Where I don’t look at the awesome people God has put around me and aspire to be like them in some way? I seriously doubt it. Because I’m aware of my own faults, and it’s good that I want to improve them.
But I’m also aware of who I am and what’s important to me. And I have to be careful that I don’t get so hung up in bettering one aspect of myself that I neglect another. I have to be, above all, who I am.
by Roseanna White | Aug 28, 2013 | Remember When Wednesdays, Uncategorized
One of the most challenging–and amazing–aspects of writing is digging deep into issues that the author knows nothing about firsthand. That’s what research is for, and when it comes to facts, it’s pretty simple. You look things up. Read. Watch documentaries, maybe. Voila. Knowledge.
But some parts of books aren’t about knowledge so much as wisdom–how our characters would react to things, how faith grows and fades. There are ways to research that too. More books, interviews… But I’ll be honest. I don’t do that. When it comes to internal aspects of my characters, I go from the gut. Which can be a challenge, because I’ve led a beautifully boring life, LOL. I’ve never suffered even the slightest abuse, never gone without.
I love, though. And I’ve lost. I’ve fought. I’ve prayed, I’ve cried, I’ve laughed. And though losing a grandfather to cancer is far different from, say, losing a child in a lot of ways, in other ways, grief is grief. I take what I know and put a magnifying glass on it when it comes to these things–prayerfully. And thus far, the feedback I’ve gotten from people who have suffered the things my characters have suffered is that my methods work. =)
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| Holy Spirit depicted as the dove above Child Jesus in two Trinities by Bartolomé Esteban Perez Murillo |
But in
A Soft Breath of Wind, I’m dealing with aspects of the faith that go beyond imagination. And while I have some experience to go on, and have spoken with some people (not when researching, I’m just blessed to have met folks with an amazing awareness of the spiritual world), I’m keenly aware that the Holy Spirit’s movement can feel different to us all.
So today, as I’m five chapters into this new biblical, I wanted to take the time to talk to you. Would you be willing to share with me your experiences with the moving of the Spirit? How and when you’ve most strongly felt Him? What other senses came alive? Have you ever seen-with-your-eyes into the spirit world? Heard His whisper? Felt His touch? Dreamed His dream? Have you ever followed a nudge and seen so clearly why He did the nudging? Felt a call to pray at a time you thought random, but which was anything but?
You’re welcome to share in the comments if you don’t mind it being public. Or if you want to share but not publicly, you can email me at Roseanna at RoseannaWhite dot com — because this is me, I sincerely doubt I would use anything you share exactly. But I’m quite likely to take bits and pieces and aspects and weave the understanding of them into my character’s world.
On an unrelated note, it’s my day at Colonial Quills–and the blog has a new look! It’s a revision of my post about espionage in early America that I posted in July, but if you missed that one,
check it out here.
by Roseanna White | Aug 26, 2013 | Word of the Week
I looked this up the other day just for the fun of it … and because I had never paused to think why PIs used to be called gumshoes. But according to etymology.com:
“plainclothes detective,” 1906, from the rubber-soled shoes they wore (which were so called from 1863); from gum (n.1) + shoe (n.).
Obvious, yes. But still fun. =) And a nice start to the week I plan on preparing my “History of Spies in Early America” home school group class. 😉 Got the Creative Writing one mostly done yesterday. Yay!
Hope everyone has a great week!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 