Happy Holidays! I have such an interest in learning new things about Victorian culture. Last year I discovered that clovers and pigs were popular symbols to represent the start of a new year and were featured on greeting cards for decades. I wondered if there was a similar thing to learn about 19th-century Christmas cards [...]
Happy Holidays, dear customers! It has been a great year at Recollections and we are so thankful for all of you and your support. It has also been a great year for the blog and we are hard at work planning another great year of content. In the meantime, I thought it may be fun [...]
‘Tis the season to be cozy! To many of us, that means wool socks, space heaters, and when we finally leave the house, cardigans. A salute to the origins of the cardigan I love a good fashion history origin story! Especially those that involve accidental trends started by literal fires. Remember the story of the [...]
Victorians were innovators with a deep curiosity about the natural world. They also had a real knack for creating beautiful visuals, especially to our modern sensibilities. As we saw in my look at the life of Marianne North a couple of weeks ago, their scientific explorations often ended with beautiful aesthetics that we still enjoy [...]
The holidays are upon us and that means once-a-year decor, food, and music. I have really enjoyed exploring Christmas traditions on the blog over the last few years. The holiday season is a fun topic to explore as one is unlikely to run out of ideas. Don’t believe me? Check out the multitude of podcasts [...]
What is your favorite Thanksgiving dish? Mine is such a toss-up between mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. For the last three years, I have enjoyed picking up a very special gluten-free version from a lovely vegan bakery here in Denver. I put in my order this week and look forward to leaving plenty of room [...]
I love looking at vintage botanical illustrations and have wanted to cover the history of the art form for a long time. I started to dig in over the last month and was pleased to discover that an Englishwoman was one of the more influential leaders of the Victorian movement to explore and document natural [...]
There is something so satisfying about depictions of 19th-century letter exchanges. The paper appears thick and high quality, the letting is in cursive writing which is so rare these days, and of course, the wax seals they are often closed with. Communicating this way must have made each correspondence somewhat significant, more so than the [...]
I really enjoy vintage etiquette and household manuals. The latest in my collection is a 1962 edition of Heloise’s Housekeeping Hints. I have been enjoying poking through it over the last couple of weeks, being both educated on some helpful tips and humored at some of the outdated inclusions. For instance, have you ever tried [...]