Tag Archives: Rosie

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

Can’t afford that gorgeous wooden table you saw at Pottery Barn? Build it yourself!

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!

Did you know that Rosie the Riveters real name is Mary Doyle Keefe? The original Rosies the Riveter was made famous after a painting of her by Norman Rockwell first appeared in 1943 on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post and, later, on war bond posters. Keefe, who was paid $10 to pose, came to embody the can-do attitude of American women whose work helped win the war. It is arguably among the most recognizable images of World War II and transformed Keefe from a small-town switchboard operator into an American icon.

In a USA Today article, Keefe tells the story of how she was living with her family in Arlington, Vt., at the time, not far from where Rockwell lived with his family and had a studio.”The telephone office was in my mom’s house, and he would come in to pay his bill,” Keefe recalled, in the article. “He knew who I was and asked if I would sit for a picture. Gene Pelham, his photographer who moved from New York, would take a picture and Norman Rockwell would cut out what he wanted. You didn’t sit there while he was painting the whole thing, which was good.”

Keefe described how she had received endless ribbing about the now famous image of a brawny working woman breaking for lunch with a ham sandwich in hand, pneumatic riveter on her lap and copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf underfoot. Her body looked nothing like that in real life, said Keefe, especially the muscular arms.

Rockwell sent her a written apology.”The kidding you took was all my fault, because I really thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” Rockwell wrote in the 1967 letter.

Now 87 and living in an apartment at the McLean Home, Keefe tells her full story in this article from USA Today.