While most associate Rosie the Riveter with the women who worked in the factories during World War II, there was a less well known group of women who also volunteered to help the war effort during that same period of time.

The Women’s Land Army was a band of approximately 3 million women who were recruited to work on farms, dairies, and in canneries, to help continue to provide food for the nation while the men were at war. The Women’s Land Army (WLA) placed women where help was most needed, in the Midwest, South, and South-West states. They were paid competitive wages, and proved to be just as productive workers as men. When asked by a reporter if the women would quit after they were exposed to the hard work, one farmerette responded “Would we quit? No, soldiers don’t.” Many of the women in the WLA found the work and the income satisfying and continued their employment after the war ended.

The Women’s Land Army was inspired by Rosie the Riveter, and formed after several women’s groups and the YWCA convinced congress to allow women to help with the farm labor, since food was already being rationed and it was becoming more scarce. Where ever the WLA worked they helped to stabilize local economies and they had a significant impact on workforce policies and stereotypes for future generations.

Take a few minutes to learn more about this fascinating piece of our history:

This is a 10 minute video, with really interesting information and great pictures! Watch for lots of overalls!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXcjQhtpsg

Or if you only have 3 minutes, watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1N45JGayU&sns=em

recruiting poster

An EXCELLENT free on-line book “On The Farm Front”, that is filled with letters from one farmerette’s experience in the Women’s Land Army in Ohio

http://lettersfromlandarmycamp.org/?page_id=1585

A link to one of the letters: http://lettersfromlandarmycamp.org/?page_id=1439

A picture included with a letter home. "Me thinning peaches & my boss"

Women's Land Army ID card

From my years of experience working as an elementary school teacher, I have found several books that have been helpful to inspire children to think more positively about vegetables and growing their own gardens.

Please share some of your favorite children’s gardening books, as well! In the meantime, I hope the following titles will provide some reading fun and good conversation for you and your family!

The Summer My Father Was Ten by Pat Brisson. A Father tells his son a story about how he damaged a neighbor’s tomato garden when he was ten, and how the neighbor taught him to garden to make amends. Has a great moral about the value of community and cooking from your garden. Ages 8+

 Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. When Miss Rumphius was a child she told her grandfather she wanted to be like him and travel the world, he told her that she also needed to find something to make the world a more beautiful place. After her travels, Miss Rumphius walks all over her town planting wild flowers, to bring beauty into her world. Every year the flowers come out and it makes everyone smile. An inspiring story for young girls. Ages 8+

Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert. The alphabet book features a wide variety of unusual fruits and vegetables, to help expose children to new foods. Beautiful pictures keep children highly engaged. Ages 3+

Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert. This popular book describes the steps involved in growing vegetables and making vegetable soup. This book fills a niche; it is a good book for getting very young kids excited about growing vegetables. It even has a recipe for making your own soup at the back! Ages 2+

Garbage Helps Our Garden Grow: A Compost Story by Linda Glaser and Shelley Rotner. A non-fiction book that introduces children to composting. Fun pictures of real children engaged in composting, encourages children to try it out at home. Ages 4+

How Groundhog’s Garden Grew by Lynne Cherry. Squirrel teaches Groundhog how to grow his own garden after he was caught nibbling on the neighbors crops. It includes a ridiculous amount of information about how to garden into this story. If you are looking for one book to read to your kids before planting your own vegetable garden, this is an excellent choice. Ages 5+

Flower Garden by Eve Bunting and Kathryn Hewitt. A rhyme about a young girl who surprises her mother by planting flowers in a flower box. A great book for young children and urban gardeners. Ages 2+

Weslandia by Paul Fleishman. An imaginative young boy plants some magical seeds that transform his yard one summer and he uses the plant to create his own civilization. Stunning colorful pictures draw children in to this wild tale. Ages 8+

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Kraus. Classic little picture book with illustrations by Crockett Johnson, well-known for Harold and the Purple Crayon. A little boy plants a carrot seed. Despite being told by his entire family that the seed won’t grow, the boy perseveres. Every day, he carefully weeds and waters the area where he planted the seed. A plant grows, and one day, the boy is rewarded with a big orange carrot. Children love this story. Ages 2+

City Green by Dyanne DiSalvo-Ryan. What happens when a diverse group of city neighbors works together to rid their street of a litter-filled vacant lot? How young Mary, Miss Rosa, and their neighbors transform the vacant lot into a community garden of flowers and vegetables makes an interesting and realistic story. Ages 6+

Speed Cleaning tutorials- from The Clean Team

http://www.thecleanteam.com/productdetail.cfm?id=books

Rule 1: Make Every Move Count- clean in a circular pattern, don’t make lots of annoying trips back and forth across the room

Rule 2: Use the Right Tools (keep them at hand by wearing them on an apron!)

Rule 3: Work from Top to Bottom (so you won’t have to re-clean anything)

Rule 4: If it Isn’t Dirty Don’t Clean It (mainly just clean horizontal surfaces)

Rule 5: Don’t Rinse or Wipe a Surface Until It’s Clean

Rule 6: Don’t Keep Working After It’s Clean

Rule 7: Put Your Tools Back in the Same Place or Apron Pocket Each Time

Rule 8: Keep Track of Your Time (try to keep improving your speed)

Rule 9: Use Both Hands to Clean

7 Daily Cleaning Tasks you can do to avoid weekend cleaning- from Totally Together

http://totallytogetherjournal.com/the-daily-7-for-a-highly-successful-household/

Number 1: Make Beds Right Away

Number 2: Do One Complete Load of Laundry

Number 3: Empty All Garbage Cans

Number 4: Keep Your Kitchen Sink Empty

Number 5: Clean Up After Yourself and Help Children Do the Same

Number 6: Bathroom Wipe-Down

Number 7: Before Bed 10-Minute Clean Up

The most helpful tips for me were: to always clean in a circular fashion around your house, cleaning from top to bottom, and to wear an apron with all your cleaning supplies at hand so you don’t have to waste time or backtrack. This has significantly reduced my time cleaning, which makes me much more likely to be regular about it!

Here are the supplies that both websites recommend to keep in your cleaning apron:

• 
• Sturdy canvas apron with pockets and loops. Rosies sells one that is perfect for this!
• Scrub sponges or microfiber rags
• Multipurpose cleaner in a small spray bottle, to attach to a loop in the apron
• Window cleaner in a small spray bottle, to attach to a loop in the apron
• A scraper (plastic putty knife, toothpick, or razor blade) for the caked on gunk
• Microfiber rag, for dusting

The best part is that you don’t need any fancy cleaning products, except for a good apron, and the rest can be purchased at the dollar store!

I hope this helps reduce your cleaning time as well and increases your time to work on fun projects and be with family and friends!

Really need some more storage space, but can’t find the right piece? Build it yourself!

While that idea may seem far-fetched at first, there are some amazing resources out there that can help you easily accomplish that task.

One website we love is http://ana-white.com/  First of all Ana really captures the Rosie’s can-do spirit. She lives in Alaska, where she has been tinkering with building projects out of wood since she was a child. Recently, she built her own home with her husband. “It’s not a big house, and the counter tops are granite tiles, not a slab. But it is our house, and we did build it, all by ourselves, board by board, and we couldn’t be more proud. When we built our home, it wasn’t like what time are the contractors coming. Instead, it was like honey, I’ll hold the board, and you nail.” We love that enthusiasm!

However, as much as we are charmed by Ana, the website is really just a great forum for people to post their own DIY furniture projects. All the projects are broken down into exact dimensions and step by step advice with pictures! There are furniture project ideas based on skill level from beginner to advanced.

Here is a pottery barn bed for $3,200  

Here are directions for how to make the bed (posted by Ana) for just the cost of materials!  http://ana-white.com/2010/01/plans-canopy-for-the-farmhouse-bed-pottery-barn.html

Don’t have the tools to be able to make your own wooden furniture?Several warehouse retailers such as Home Depot & Lowes will cut wood for you for free. Just give them the dimensions and let their tools do the work! Some stores will even allow you to rent tools, such as this high power precision saw from Home Depot: http://www.homedepotrents.com/proTools/miter_saw.asp?cm_sp=tool_rental-_-overlayF-_-miter_saw

One of my favorite parts about making furniture, besides the cost difference, is that you can easily match all the wood colors in the room, with stain.

Recently, in my house, we updated our living room with more storage: a large modern shelf, end tables, and stools for extra seating. We looked up design ideas on websites like Ebay, Overstock, and Anawhite, and then just had fun experimenting! It was the first furniture we ever made. A month later, everything is still standing, the stools can support our weight, and we saved ourselves hundreds of dollars! Best of all, unlike sometimes when you bring a store bought piece of furniture into your home, it did not make all our old furniture look shabby! We were able to customize the color and design to accentuate everything we already had. Another financial relief!

Here is one of the shelves that we made:

So, what piece of furniture would you like to add to a room in your home? I double-dog-dare-you to whip out those Rosies, and that Rosie’s attitude, and try to build it yourself!

I found this book recently, and was drawn to it because the title matches our Rosie’s moto. The book was written by a victim of the 9/11 attacks and completed by her sisters after her death. It embodies a gusto for life and a go-getter attitude that’s pretty incredible.

The theme of giving yourself a “merit badge” for trying new and brave things keeps rattling around in my mind this week.

During a talk with a good friend, who is a new mother, she admitted that she gives herself an imaginary badge every time she is able to complete a difficult “mom mission”. She has given herself a badge for things like nursing in public for the first time, nursing while balancing on a stool, changing an explosive diaper, and getting an infant through New York City streets with too much bulky equipment. I love that she turned situations that could that cause most women to complain, into a mental badge of honor for getting through it.

A wise woman once encouraged a group of us ladies to start a “victory journal” to record all the minor and large successes that we accomplish in our lives. I only tried writing in my journal for a year, but I was surprised by how many “victories” I actually have in my everyday life once I took the time to examine them and write them down. I usually just continue to focus on my to-do list, and forget to reflect on how amazing it was to get through what I just did. I know many women will agree with me that they share this characteristic.

One thing all of us at Rosies Workwear for Women love most about our job is that we get to interact with so many inspiring and hard working women across the continent and the world! We hear from women who are doing tasks that we might never have dreamed of! Such as leading a team of dogs across Alaska, and leaving the city to start a successful organic farm. So, it makes me wonder, what amazing things we all doing that we might forget to sit back and give ourselves a merit badge for? What kinds of dreams do we still have that we would like to continue to try and reach for to earn another badge?

So, this week, please write to us about some of your victories and merit badges that you have earned recently. Take time to inspire us, and give us all ideas of things to try!

My mom used to grow the most gorgeous fragrant roses. I could bring anyone one of her cut roses as a gift and they would gush about it for weeks. I wish I could produce those kinds of roses, but my current bushes are a scraggly, moldy, spider mite infested mess! So, I headed off to a fantastic rose pruning workshop by the number one rose retailer in my region. http://www.gazebogardens1922.com/News.html

The most important thing that I learned: is that when you attempt to prune your roses for the winter, you really can’t do much harm. Whew, it took the fear out of the task to for me to hear that from an expert! In fact there was an experiment run by the English Rose Society to see which method would work the best, traditional hand pruning, large hedge clippers, or a chainsaw. Guess which plants produced the most roses in the spring? The ones that were hacked with a chainsaw (even though the quality of the roses & the bush was reduced)! So, as you begin pruning your bushes remember not to obsess over perfection, roses are hard to hurt!

First a little rose “vocabulary”: Typical Hybrid roses are grafted at the base to a rose called Dr. Huey, because of its strong root structure. The graft point is usually a little bulbous like this. Canes are the stems that come out of the plant. The bud is the bloom point that will grow the new leaves, the bloom point near the top of the stem is the one that will grow.

Step 1: Even it up! Trim your rose bush all around, to an even length, cutting off any remaining leaves or blooms. It has been a very mild winter here, so my roses are still blooming, but I learned it is still very important to prune them now because they need time to rest and hibernate before the spring.

Step 2:Cut out the obvious! Take a good look at your plant. Cut off any dead wood, or canes that have a black spot on them. Canes will only grow out of new wood. If you have a lot of dead wood at the graft point, and it looks overgrown, you can even clean some of it up with a saw blade.

Step 3: Design your plant! This step is all about choosing which shape you would like your plant to grow in. Cut out the canes that are growing in or towards the middle of the plant, to allow more sunshine to penetrate the bush once all the leaves grow in. Plan on having canes branch out in 4 different directions so that the bush will have a nice fullness once it grows in. Cut canes about a ¼ above the bud point.

Equipment- it is important to have a nice pair of hand shears, gloves, and long sleeves before starting pruning roses. We recommend the “The Digger” gloves from Woman’s Work , and Rosies full length Coveralls, to help get the job done! Both are on sale right now- so it is perfect timing!!

https://rosiesworkwear.com/shop/product-info.php?pid9.html

https://rosiesworkwear.com/shop/product-info.php?pid75.html

Fertilizer- If you have trouble with spider mites or mildew (that may cause white fuzz or yellow/black spots all over your leaves) right after you prune is the time to recondition the soil with an insecticide and/or mildew & rust treatment. Use regular fertilizer on your plants right before they start to bloom in the spring, when the weather is around a steady 55 degrees. If you want to move the rose bush to another location, right after you prune it is the best time (because the rose bush is dormant). I plan on doing this for two of mine. Apparently it is an easy process I will let you know how the transplant goes! This is a great resource if you would like any more photos to help you with your project http://www.rainforest2548.org/sjvrsjan.html

Have fun and please send any photos of your successful rose pruning attempts! We would love to see it!

We are so proud to have had Elizabeth Layton as part of our team this past year!

Liz graduated in December from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a Communications major in Business Ag. She is currently back home in Santa Rosa looking for new opportunities to spread her talents. We loved having her as part of team Rosie and wish her
the best in all her future adventures!
We know that for us she will always take her Rosies spirit with her.  Thanks for all that you did Liz, you will be missed!

Liz  is being replaced by Katie Crawford. Katie has been a part of Rosies for 10 years, she has been a Rosies model, helped create product ideas, worked at road shows selling and now we get to have her use her unique talent for writing by taking over the blog , newsletter and face book posting. Rosies has a lot planned for 2012 and we welcome Katie’s voice to keep the Rosies community connected.

-Sharon Moore (Rosie’s founder)

Here is how you play:

1. Have someone take a picture of you in your favorite Rosies gear in front of a fun location (ex. a popular landmark)

HINT: we are looking for backgrounds that provide good clues without giving the location away! So, don’t stand in front of a sign telling what the location is! Also, the location should be something other Rosies can figure out, so a picture in front of your personal farm would not be as good of a choice as a picture in front of a hometown landmark.

2. Email the photo to us at info@rosiesworkwear.com Each month we will select one picture to post on our webpage. If your photo is selected you will WIN A PRIZE!!

3. Go to our webpage to try and guess the location of the selected photo. The first one to correctly respond will WIN A PRIZE!!

The Holiday Season is officially here!  This is a great time to unleash your creative side and go crazy decorating!  Don’t be like the “ditto” house! We had so much fun finding all of these do-it-yourself projects and hope you enjoy them just as much!

1. Button Cookies

How cute is this?  Shortbread cookies are delicious and turning them in to little buttons adds that extra something that is perfect for the holiday season! All you need is a shortbread butter cookie recipe, two biscuit cutters (one a little smaller than the other), and a drinking straw (to make the holes).  After they’re done, just add the ribbon through the cookie holes and these will make the perfect gift for a neighbor, friend, or family member!

2. Lace Ornaments

We love how simple it is to spice up a plain ornament!  Simply cover your ornament with lace and then spray paint over it (we like silver) and then remove the lace, let the ornament dry, and add it to your tree!

3. Melting Snowman Graham Crackers

These are adorable for the kiddos in your life! The eyes, carrot nose, buttons, and twig hands, and melted part of the snowman are all made with melted white chocolate and a little food dye.  The scarf is a fruit roll up (use a pizza cutter) and then set it all on a graham cracker and Hershey’s bar!

4. Peppermint Centerpiece

A sleek, simple white tray with candles and peppermint puffs makes the perfect centerpiece for your home!

5. Holiday Place-cards

Simply stick your place-cards in a tiny pinecone!  We think this is so simple – and so cute!

6. Candy Cane Photo Holder

Just tie three candy canes together with some green ribbon and place your holiday photo on top!

7. Candy Cane Vase

For this you will need:

• Two sided tape
• A circular vase or empty can
• Rubber band
• Candy canes
• Wide ribbon (must be wider than rubber band)
• Roses (or any flower you choose to use)

How to do it:

- Wrap the two sided tape around the vase once approximately halfway down the vase. (The two sided tape will help keep the candy canes from sliding out from under the rubber band).

- Slide rubber band around the vase.

- Begin inserting the candy canes behind the rubber band.

- Tie the ribbon around the vase taking care to cover the rubber band with the ribbon.

- Fill with water and arrange flowers

8. Snowman Door Decoration

We loved this different take on holiday wreaths!

This past weekend Rosies Workwear headed down to the Rosebowl flea market in Pasadena to be a part of the 2,500 vendors featured every month.  Celebrating over 40 years of business, this was like no other flea market we had ever been to.

After checking in around 6am (flea markets open early!) we set up our booth and patiently waited for the gates to open to buyers at 9am.  We had the opportunity to talk to many different people and promote the Rosies overalls and coveralls – we had such a great time (and even did a little shopping ourselves!)

It was wonderful to hear how many women appreciate workwear designed to specifically fit them.  We were also able to inform women how convenient overalls and coveralls can be for many activities some normally wouldn’t think of.  Workwear doesn’t just have to be “at work”.  Gardening, home repairs, and do-it-yourself projects are all great times to wear your Rosies.

If you find yourself in the Pasadena area on the second Sunday of each month, this is definitely a flea market you should check out.  For more information on the Rosebowl flea market, visit their website at http://rgcshows.com/RoseBowl.aspx.