Running Fingers

if someone says they don’t drink, they don’t fucking drink

But in all the outrage about Neeleman, I haven't seen anyone compare her to the original tradwife liar, Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I'm not referring to the Little House on the Prairie children's book series, which were actually pretty open about how poor the Ingalls family was and how many times they almost died through illness/extreme weather/starvation on that homestead stolen from Native Americans. Those novels include plenty of nostalgia and manifest destiny and libertarianism, but Ma Ingalls clearly hates being out on the homestead isolated from their neighbors. That's not trad-wife content. Maybe trad-child content.

No, long before Wilder published her first children's in 1932, she had a regular column in papers like the Missouri Ruralist and Farmer's Week in the 1910s/20s, where she would write 500-word pieces such as:

"The March of Progress"

"Classed as Illiterates"

"The Wanton Destruction of Trees"

"Kinfolks or Mere Relations?"

"Let's Not Depend on Experts"

"When Proverbs Quarrel"

"The Hidden Cost of Getting What We Want"

"Don't Call on The Government All of the Time"

"The Armor of a Smile"

Those are all real essay titles -- I've read them; you can too -- and the content is exactly what you'd expect: folksy, gently humorous, self-effacing, lite-Christian inspirational, suspicious of city life, glorifying backbreaking physical labor, full of housekeeping tips. Any single one of them could be easily repurposed into a Ballerina Farm IG caption or a TikTok voiceover with a quick edit: nothing new under the sun.

And just like Neeleman lies by omission about how their farm books are balanced, Wilder lied by omission about her own account books. Her husband Almanzo Wilder was partially paralyzed by diphtheria after their marriage and couldn't physically manage a farm alone. Caroline Fraser notes that Almanzo's parents (themselves wealthy farmers) had to pay off the mortgage on the Missouri farm or Laura and Almanzo would not have kept the property. Even with that financial help, they had a lot of rough years and it was Laura's side hustles -- selling eggs, clerking, writing columns lying about the rewarding joy of farming -- that kept them afloat. Eventually she started publishing full-length novels and their success finally put them in the black.

So far I've only mixed up the main batch of colors, but I'll split them up and create a palatte of tints and shades once I have access to a scale again.

I don't have any fancy tools and have been blending the fiber by hand, so it's probably best I have a forced break for the sake of my fingers. Once I'm done I should have a very useful set of 57 2g swatches to play with! (Plus 5 more for a set of grayscale swatches)

The ratios are presented in the same order as the wool swatches in the photo above it. I didn't simplify any of the ratios so you'll have to deal with 2:2s instead of 1:1s, oops.

Plus some pure black and white mixes to compare to my cyan/magenta/yellow midtone gray tint and shade.

Adams third child, Seth: What is that?

Seth:

+ bonus alt.

https://people.com/jane-yolen-author-of-450-childrens-books-dies-at-87-11996432

If you didn’t become acquainted with the work of Jane Yolen as a student being assigned her famous, award-winning Holocaust time travel novella “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” it’s likely you will once you become a parent, reading one of her many, many, many books for kids. My young boys are especially partial to her “How Do Dinosaurs?” series with its captivating, realistic dinosaur illustrations and snappy, funny text (and yes, there’s a Hanukkah “How Do Dinosaurs” book).

The prolific children’s book author, who was the recipient of multiple children’s book awards and six honorary doctorates, passed away this week at age 87. She was just about to release her 450th book. “Monsters of Fife: Terror Birds” will come out posthumously on July 14.

Yolen wasn’t raised particularly Jewish, and her exposure to religion was mostly at relatives’ homes, she recounted in a piece for the Jewish Book Council. As a teen, she did become fascinated with Jewish texts and traditions, getting confirmed at her local Reform synagogue; she was one of the first girls to read from the Torah on the bimah at that temple. And she minored in religious studies at Smith College.

But it took a while for Judaism to become part of her children’s book-writing career. In fact, she was two decades into her career when she got “noodged” into writing Jewish tales.

It all happened in the 1980s, she wrote in her essay for the Jewish Book Council: “One of my edi­tors, who hap­pened to be a rabbi’s wife, asked me why I had nev­er writ­ten a Jew­ish book. And I had to think long and hard about that. And she noodged. Boy! Was she an expert noodge. The result was ‘The Devil’s Arith­metic.’ And then the Jew­ish sto­ries began to tum­ble out.”

The books that came tumbling out were as gripping and wonderful and magical as the rest of her oeuvre.

There came magical stories about Jews and dragons and golems (co-written with her son, Adam Stemple).

She published illustrated books about Miriam and other biblical women (and even the children’s book adaptation of the famous “Prince of Egypt”).

She came up with her own twist on the tales of the Wise Men of Chelm.

She perhaps became most known for her three young adult tomes that tackle the Holocaust in novel ways. She wrote the “Sleeping Beauty” inspired “Briar Rose” and the “Hansel and Gretel”-esque “Mapping the Bones.” And of course, she penned the Nebula Prize Winning “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” about a Jewish teen who finds herself transported to 1942 Poland, which continues to be taught in schools to this very day, even as one Texas school district pulled it out of the curriculum for AI-detected “DEI content.” The book was famously turned into a 1999 film starring Kirsten Dunst, Brittany Murphy, Paul Freeman and Mimi Rogers.

Yolen also wrote books about Jewish holidays: “Milk and Honey,” and the lovely “Jewish Tale Feasts” (with her daughter, author Heidi Stemple), a book that my Jewish food-loving family adores.

Heidi, Adam and their brother Jason were all by their mother’s side when she “passed gently with no pain or stress,” Heidi shared on Instagram. Adam was playing his music while Heidi read from her mother’s book “Owl Moon.”

“As you all probably know, she had one of the most brilliant creative minds of our time,” Heidi wrote of her mother. “She has mentored, inspired and nurtured so many authors and illustrators through her words both on the page and off. But, beyond that, she was our mother and grandmother.”