Random Saturday - It's a small world ...

We all have our stories, I'm sure.
Meeting someone in a foreign country and they are from your hometown.
Meeting someone and learning you are somehow related.
Meeting someone away from home and finding out you have the same friends.
Stories like that.

Just recently, my sister and I added a new one to our repertoire.

Of course, our town has changed quite a bit since we were kids and keeps changing. Old houses get torn down, new ones built, there's construction, shops close down, new ones open up, a shop building gets transformed into flats, etc.
Sometimes I will walk somewhere and try to remember what a shop was called that used to be here or what the building looked like that used to be where there's a big hole all of a sudden.
Even as a child I have been a fan of old photos, and in these moments I think it's a pity we don't have more photos from around town.
There have always been people taking pictures, though, and there have been postcards, and some of these turn up on social media, on websites selling postcards for collectors, and on eBay.

Every, now and then we go through them and in very rare cases, we even get one - like the one I'm going to tell you about now.

My sister called to say I should have a look at that one postcard of our "Stadthalle" (which literally translates to "town hall", but your "town hall/city hall" is called "Rathaus" here, it's a place for plays, concerts, talks, antique fairs, balls, which can also be rented for big weddings) and its park.
As kids we were in the park a lot because we lived almost next to it, playing, reading, looking for tadpoles.
It was interesting to see how small the trees to the right still were back then, how different the paths looked, the flowers around the little springs were missing, the building still had the clock and the old logo ...

The seller also had a picture of the back. I edited private information out even though the card is from 1976.

In translation, the text reads:
"Dear Mrs. ...!
Thank you very much for your kind Christmas and New Year wishes which I warmly return. I live right next to the Stadthalle ^xx now. It's really nice! How are you? Are you all well? Kind regards! ..."

I read out the signature to my sister and still wondered why that name sounded so familiar to me when she said "What??".
The name had been familiar because she had had a neighbor with the same name ... living next to the Stadthalle ... in the same house as her ...
That's when I noticed. The card had been written in red, but there were those two black x next to the word Stadthalle, and there was a black x on the vertical line with the postcard printer's name and what we both had missed before, there was ... no kidding ... my sister's address!
Her neighbor had sent this card!

That means the postcard went to Austria in January 1976 and almost 50 years later it came back to Göppingen via a postcard dealer in Berlin, back to the same house where it was probably written ... in the flat where another family member of mine is living now!
I have to admit I got goosebumps a little and yes, of course we bought it.
Seriously now, what are the odds?

Do you have a story about the "small world"?
If so, I'd love to hear it!

P.S. See the number I circled in? Our zip code, you would think ... wrong, it's a typo, our zip code was 732 then!

Tackle that stash - A handful of hearts

This is just a short post.
Hearts are probably boring you by now, but I offered to make a bunch of simple ones as gift for children.
The bonus for me is that I can use some leftovers and try out patterns.
Mostly I'm showing you these, though, as an addition to the Tuesday post because that is just what I meant when I said I needed to make it work for me.

I hope these tiny hearts will make children smile a bit when they get them as a surprise, and while making a small piece  which can be finished rather quickly every, now and then - although there have been moments when I seriously doubted my counting skills (up to 8 beads in some rows! 😂) - may not be super creative, it's something. Sometimes a little something just has to be enough.

No worries, though, it will not be all hearts from now on. Even if I plan to move along the color wheel some more, I'm not going to make look at all of them, promise.

Silent movies - Modern Times

It's obvious we had to get to this point eventually.
A silent movie project without Charlie Chaplin wouldn't be complete and "Modern Times" practically jumped at me when I was checking what was new in the ARTE Mediathek (the TV channels keep a video library of their content for a certain time) and found they had a Charlie Chaplin event.
Again, I knew parts of it, such as the Tramp getting caught in the cogs of the factory, but wasn't sure if I had ever seen the whole movie.
Also, ARTE didn't just have the movie itself, but also a documentary on it.

After "City Lights", which had been a huge success in 1931 even as a silent film among talkies, Chaplin had been burnt out and went into depression. His PR tour turned into a trip around the world to help him find himself again. After 17 months, he came back to Hollywood ready to do another movie. At his side was Paulette Goddard.

Public domain

"Modern Times" is a little special in this project of mine as it's not a completely silent film.
Actually, Chaplin had already written a complete dialog for it until September 1934, rehearsals started in October. In December, however, after three days of shooting, Chaplin stopped. He just couldn't make himself to have his famous character talk, he didn't know what voice to give him and what to make him say.
As mentioned, however, "Modern Times" isn't completely silent. People may not speak to one another, but they speak through the machines, the intercom through which the factory boss gives his orders even during break time, the radio, the "mechanical salesman". There's only one scene in which you hear the Tramp's voice, not speaking, but singing, not in understandable words either, but in gibberish because he has forgotten the lyrics to the song. What could be better to show Chaplin's position towards talkies?
Shooting ended in August 1935 and the movie came out in 1936 - "A story of industry, of individual enterprise - humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness."

Ready for some plot (with spoilers)?
The Tramp works on an assembly line. Due to the stress - the scene with the feeding machine designed to feed workers to make breaks obsolete and thus increase profits really stressed me out - he suffers a nervous breakdown which ends in chaos and ends him up in hospital.
After his release he stumbles into a demonstration and gets arrested being mistaken for the leader because he happens to pick up a lost red flag.
In jail he prevents a jailbreak by knocking down the convicts which gets him special treatment. Being told that he will be released soon, he says he'd rather stay in jail.

Back in a world of unemployment, uproar, and poverty, the Tramp is determined to go to jail again after messing up at another job.
He meets Ellen, "The Gamin", who just lost her father and whose sisters were taken away by juvenile services (never to be mentioned again in the movie) from which she could escape. She has stolen a bread from a van, and both to help her and to get arrested himself, he claims he did it, but a witness tells the police it was Ellen, so she gets taken away.
He meets her again in a police wagon after he gets arrested for eating a huge amount of food at a restaurant without paying. The wagon breaks down and they escape together.

Next he gets a job as a night watchman in a department store and brings Ellen with him imagining how it would be to live in a nice house with her.
During the night, three burglars come in one of whom he knows from work. They say they are just hungry, so they eat and drink, and the Tramp wakes up when the department store has already opened.
When he gets out of jail this time, Ellen surprises him by showing him a very rundown shack where they can live. He gets a new job, but the workers go on strike and during that he inadvertently hits a policeman with a brick.

While he's in jail, Ellen has found a job as a café dancer and secures a job for him as well, as a waiter and entertainer.
Unfortunately the police arrives and wants to arrest Ellen for running away from juvenile services. They both escape, but Ellen has lost all hope and wonders why you should even bother trying.
The Tramp tells her never to lose hope and together they go down the road into an uncertain life.

"Modern Lights" was the last appearance of the Tramp on screen, and despite coming out almost ten years after the first talkie (The Jazz Singer), it was a very successful send-off.
While the movie has very funny scenes, there is a lot more to it, though.

Its opening scene is a flock of sheep pushing along - one black one among them - and next a crowd of workers coming out of a subway station. You see a few crowds in the film and often the Tramp is getting caught up in them without wanting it and without being able to escape - for example in the demonstration, during the strike, and a scene in the café where people dance while he's trying to get an order to a guest.
Chaplin had been to Ford's factory, he had seen how hard and exhausting work on an assembly line was for the young men working there, so it's not surprising that his Tramp can't take the stress he's exposed to by the ever increasing speed of the line. If one worker falls behind, it has a direct effect on all the others, too.

After the Tramp is released from hospital, the movie is one attempt after the other to find a place for himself and Ellen in this merciless system, and just when they think they have found it, the dream gets destroyed by that system once again.
It's what makes the Tramp so universal, a lot of people could identify with that feeling, especially during the Great Depression. And yet he never gives up and keeps that childlike hope that there will be something good in the future.
Originally, a different ending had been filmed with the Tramp finding out that Ellen has joined a convent, but then Chaplin found that the film had to end on a hopeful note.

Given Chaplin's own history of a hard childhood in the slums of London and bouts of depression throughout his life, the Tramp's relentless pursuit of his little happiness - because he isn't asking for much - is quite amazing (also for me, a terrible pessimist).

In Germany, "Modern Times" was prohibited, just as Chaplin's other movies were not shown anymore. That doesn't mean it wasn't criticized in the USA for showing "communist tendencies". Not everyone was happy with Chaplin getting political, even more so with his later films. Eventually he even had to leave the USA because of that.

I enjoyed the movie much more than I had expected although I can't really tell you what exactly I had expected. I laughed, I was touched, and I suffered with those two just doing their best to survive in difficult times.
Again, there would be so much more to say about the movie, but as always I'm going to list some sources for you if you are interested (quite randomly picked, as you can imagine, there is a lot available!).
"Modern Times" has been called one of the greatest films not just of Chaplin, but ever. I would definitely recommend watching it and I'm quite sure I will be watching it again myself, too.


Sources:
1. R.K.: Chaplin : Modern Times. Originally in: The Manchester Guardian, July 14, 1936
2. Chaplins "Moderne Zeiten" - Der Abschied vom Stummfilm (France 2024, German dubbing/subtitles). On: ARTE TV (currently available until November 30, 2025)
3. Matt ?: Modern Times (1936). On: I Draw On My Wall, September 4, 2017
4. David A. Punch: Modern Times: Aversion to Innovation. On: The Twin Geeks, February 4, 2019
5. Josh Matthews: Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times - - What Makes This Movie Great (Episode 7). On the YouTube channel "Learning about Movies"

What's happening here?

Today I want to talk about something that's kind of personal.
If you have been following me for a longer period of time, you know I don't share much from my personal life.
You do get a glimpse into my brain weirdly jumping between randomly selected topics which also says something about me, but you don't really know what I'm doing between those brain jumps.

Do I like cooking (no), what books am I reading (mostly vintage crime at the moment), what am I watching (okay, you do know about the silent movies, but there is more), do I have hobbies beside crafting (movies and TV shows), how do I feel (all over the place), what do I play (this and that), what do I look like (very long hair and glasses)?
Of course there's much more.

This blog has been mostly about crafty things for many years. I showed you what I made, I showed you what others made, I told one or the other story and for a while I shared movie quotes, but all in all this has been a blog showing my creative side and that's what it has always been supposed to be.

When I got back into blogging more again, however, this changed, and if you have been around before you may wonder why that is.
There are several reasons and not wanting to be creative is definitely not one of them.
My brain is still coming up with more ideas than I can realize in general and especially at the moment, and that has to do with both ability and motivation.

There are more days now when my hands just won't play nicely. If I don't think of taking a break at the right moment, I start messing things up because of that, then I start ripping up, but instead of stopping there, I get stubborn and try again which usually doesn't work out well. It's amazing how angry you can get over tiny beads (and yourself).
My problem is that it seems my head doesn't want to acknowledge those new limitations and adapt to them ... or maybe my muse doesn't.
I used to fiddle for hours without a break, but as much as I tell others it's okay to take breaks, I have a hard time accepting it for myself.
Having to rip up a WIP, however small it may be, because of a stupid mistake - oh, so stupid sometimes! - can get very frustrating which isn't good for motivation. Having no motivation means I sometimes don't even start.

Another hit for my motivation was that my sales have dried up. I'm not talking trickling, but dried up.
Don't get me wrong now, I'm not begging for sales here. I get it, times are getting harder and harder, postage is high (my customer base was overseas), jewelry is not a necessity, but the web still abounds with it and I'm just a tiny fish in that sea.

It has changed my view on my personal crafting, though.
I'm hardly ever wearing my own jewelry for lack of occasion. I don't get out often enough to and that's not going to change. I know there are people who say you should wear jewelry and clothes for yourself, but I never felt like dressing up at home and wear much jewelry.
So why make more just to stack it in a drawer? Or rather, where is the line between making something to feed my creative urges and making something just to - well, having made it?
For me, there really is a difference which is one reason why I could never have done this full time.

The same goes for embroidery. How many embroidery hoops can you put on a wall, especially if the walls are full already? 😆 My favorite pieces - Nadine on her island, Foxy, the cat inspired by dem Dekan, and the Guardian of the Woods - are set up between my Steiffs now.

I'm definitely not saying that I'm going to stop making things, not even jewelry. I have to find a way, however, to make it work for me, my muse, and especially my body (and my available space).
For years, I had been filling a lot of my time with making stuff, though, and now I needed to find something for the times when I won't be able to do that.
And that's the reason for my blog having changed. Something I can always do and actually love to do is diving into rabbit holes. I've always done that more or less, but haven't shared it as much before and I try to stick with certain topics now.

Valerie Hinojosa from Washington DC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0,
via Wikimedia Commons
"Down the Rabbit Hole"

So this might not be as much of a crafty blog as it used to be, but it will definitely be more of a trip into my weird brain. Often I don't know myself why a certain rabbit hole looks tempting to me.
Anyhow, you are most welcome to visit and I hope you will be finding something interesting and maybe surprising 😉

Random Saturday - I don't recognize you ...

... but I recognize your bag! You were here the other day!"
That happened to me in a store some years ago. I'm practically an invisible ninja if you didn't know that yet, but my shopper keeps giving me away.

There are usually two reactions.

1. "Do you have cats?" or "You have cats, don't you?"
If you think of the variety of purses and shoppers and totes around, it's rather amazing how many people react to a bag. I've heard it in shops, at the train station, on trains and even when I was just sitting on a park bench, and I never felt as if people were making fun of me.
Well, except for that one time on the bench at a train station when someone asked me where I got the bag while their pal stole my cell phone (not a smartphone) from it within seconds which was pretty crafty. I bet they both laughed their thieving little butts off afterwards. I only noticed on the train.
Of course, I was really mad, but it could have been worse, though, it could have been my wallet with all my cards or my keys.

2. "Mom, look! The woman has kittens on her bag!"
This one comes either very loud or whispered with a shy look in my direction. Little kids always loved my kittens.

Indeed, I have kittens on my shopper.
This post was inspired by the post "What's in my bag?" on "Within a world of my own". Thanks, Sally!

My last substitute shopper

Let me tell you something about my shopper.
I have had it for more than 35 years - the design, that is, not the shopper itself.
I got the first one as a gift from my ex-mother in law. It was a set of shopper and an umbrella I still own. Not that I have used it often, I don't like holding umbrellas and also tend to forget them on trains or elsewhere. I lost my first umbrella at five years old, it was red and had ruching all around, and the loss was devastating because it had been a birthday gift (and because I could be a drama queen even as a child).

When I opened the umbrella to take a picture, the color completely surprised me. I have no idea if it changed over the years or if it has always been like this and never really matched the shopper.
The shopper hanging from the door handle is the one currently in use, by the way.

Wait, I have one in use and one substitute?
That's right. It's what I meant by saying I've had the design (and the umbrella) for more than 35 years.
When my very first shopper gave up after a few years - my shoppers have to work hard and it's usually the handles and bottom corners going first -, I happened to see the exact same one in a shop and that's how it started.
I hardly go anywhere without it, full or not, it has become my signature piece. I usually say that if something doesn't fit in there, I don't need it. It carries heavy books, groceries, meds, gifts, and more. I can still see my ex at fleamarkets slipping finds into my bag with a wink, so I got a surprise when I opened it, especially if it was something for me.
He found stuff, I had to carry it because he never had a bag with him. Sometimes I had extra bags in the shopper.

One time, I couldn't find a substitute right away, so when I found it, I bought two and after that always got a new one when I retired one, so I would always have a substitute.
I should be on the fifth, maybe the sixth one now plus the extra.
Nowadays I would probably try to repair the old one first, sew up the straps and corners, or I would try to think of something to do with the fabric.
Actually that might be my only option eventually because von Lilienfeld - that's the brand - has not only retired the kitten design, they have also changed the design of their shoppers (you can get anything from famous paintings to penguins or merkats, also cats, but not my kittens), they are smaller. I'm not amused.
I have already looked around if I can find one elsewhere, used maybe, but only found two in the USA, one of them a knock-off, both of them no option.

I also have a small version of the shopper, by the way, which I obviously haven't used since 2007 as it still has the Maientag badge from that year (see here to learn about the local Maientag badges)! The badges are usually available around the beginning of May and as soon as I have mine - I always pick yellow and red with rare exceptions - I put the yellow on my shopper and I used to put the red on my small handbag. Oops. Guess I haven't been "out" in that long.

You may want to ask if these are really the only bags I own and the answer is no.
I have several more hand/book/tote bags in different sizes with cats on them. Most of them were gifts, well meant, some of them are really extra cute, but none of them has been used more than a few times.
I use small totes (with cats on them, surprise!) as extras sometimes if I think I'm going to need them, but mostly these bags hang around the place and look cute.
I'm just an extreme creature of habit sometimes and in this case I have embraced it full-heartedly. Without my trusted shopper, I feel lost.

Maybe I'll gather all the other cat bags for a group session sometime and introduce them to you in another random Saturday post.

Happy Gotcha Day, Gundel!

It's hard to believe that it has been eight years since a beautiful little panther barged into my life.
Oh dear, you should see her face. Actually Gundel did nothing of the sort. She harmlessly walked into my sister's yard and got a friendly welcome from her later catnapper even she didn't know it then.
I don't think I ever told Gundel's story here before, so it's about time.

As I said, one day Gundel just walked into the yard. She was so terribly thin, her fur looked really dull and overall she just looked sick.
After my sister had given her something to eat which she wolfed down, she left again.
I had seen her from my other sister's window, and as I do love me a black cat, I yelled down that I would take her.
Gundel had disappeared, though, which made us feel bad because she really seemed to need help. Luckily she turned up again a few days later and my sister scooped her right up - no resistance at all - and took her to her flat.
It was probably the first time in a while that she could just lie down and relax, but of course she didn't know that it was off to the vet's the next day.
She didn't have a chip, she weighed only 2.9 kg (not even 6 1/2 lb.), she had one cloudy eye from herpes, and the things she did in the litter box could have wiped out a small country (not the first cat to try that in my house).
I tried to find out if she belonged to someone while she was staying in quarantine - we had to wait for her blood results and have the litter box issues cleared up before letting her get together with Greebo and Ponder - in the library.

The first day she stayed on the window sill, looked, slept, and ate. I can't imagine what her life in the streets had been like because she just looked utterly exhausted and happy not having to move. She didn't even seem to have the strength to show that strange human if she still had some fighting spirit in her.

If she had run away, got lost or if someone had thrown her out, I never found out, but I knew I wanted to help her forget about her experiences in the street.
I don't know if I succeeded in that because until today she sometimes wakes up yelling and looks around confused and scared - at least that what it looks like to me - and then goes back to sleep when I pet and cuddle and whisper to her. It's heart breaking to watch, but luckily it doesn't happen often.

When we got green light rom the vet, I opened the door to her prison (with two very comfy armchairs with nice blankets which was really all she had wanted at the point apart from food) and hoped for the best with the boys.
Greebo was not very interested in her. He was more like "Yeah, new kid, not the first one, it's fine with me, do you think she'll still want to eat that?". He was such a sweet baby.
Ponder, on the other hand, was interested. He wasn't sure what this small thing was and he was confused that the small thing wasn't interested in him.
The lady went straight to the bedroom and hid underneath the bed for about two days, only a little paw or the tip of her tail peeked out. She came out for food, though, which she still needed so badly that she ate half of a huge antibiotics pill I had put down next to her while wondering how to make her take it.

Then she spent a few days on the bed.
Can you tell how different her fur already looks here? She was still very skinny, though, more than you can see here.

Eventually, she started exploring the place and she didn't take any nonsense from the boys.
Greebo didn't mind her at all and Ponder was happy to play with her. They liked slapping the other's butt and then the offender ran until he or she was caught and slapped back. It was so fun to watch. They never slept next to one another, though. There always had to be a little gap which makes it even more amazing how close der Dekan is sometimes allowed to sleep near Gundel now.

This is one of my favorite pictures. I remember showing it and some other angles on Facebook and asking jokingly how on Earth I was supposed to tell them apart!
Believe it or not, a few people informed me - not as joke - that Gundel was smaller than Ponder. Seriously now? I'm so glad they pointed it out to me!
Not that she was a kitten. My vet guessed her age at about 3 or 4 which means she'd be 11 or 12 now. I think she must still be 3 or 4. 6 tops. (Remember I said I'm not good at math?)
And Ponder was just a really big boy. Not fat - he really wasn't - but big and wonderful.

Ever since Gundel has been the Lady of the House. Meffi was my Queen and Esme was my Princess, and Gundel doesn't look like a Duchess or a Marchioness, so Lady it will have to stay.

She's named after Gundel Gaukeley, by the way, which is the German name for Disney's Magica de Spell. The initial plan had been to make her a Nanny Ogg (Discworld), but her sleek black look and the way Gundel sounds to German ears - at least mine - made that a way better name.

My little witch lady was quite the fighter in the early days. Understandably, she was not sure how far she could trust me, and often when I petted her, she snapped at me, never seriously, but very quickly and it made me jump every time. That quickly got less and less, though, and she hardly ever does it now unless I'm terribly annoying (meaning I pet her three seconds too long, so that's fair).
Only if I try to pill her directly, she turns into a clawed octopus, a deadly one. Luckily, I can crush the pills she's getting (allergies) and liquid snacks - I call them squishies - are too tempting for her to refuse. I wish I could put eye drops in her food, too! She's fine with me cleaning her eye, but not putting something in it. Yeah well, I don't like that myself, either.

Lately, she has developed a few bad, but not tragically bad habits, influenced by the brat, no doubt. One of them is the ripping out of the kitchen baseboard/s under the cabinets (she definitely learned them from him).
I put her on a Wanted poster for vandalizing and she bitterly complained about that on Ponder's blog which she has taken over.
You know how cat people often are, though. We are secretly proud of what brats our feline overlords can be, and after Gundel had been down for months after problems with both knees, it was good to see her up to shenanigans again.

Gundel, my sweet, here's to eight more years (at least)!

Silent movies - Suspense

Comedy, science fiction, horror, romance, crime, adventure, fairy tale, slapstick, animation, is there something that is still missing in my silent movie journey? There is indeed - documentary.

An obvious choice would have been the first film to be called a documentary (which is debatable as a lot of it was staged due to the realities of film making in 1922 and also represented the Inuit life as it had been, not as it was at the time of filming) - "Nanook of the North" - but I'll be honest, I wasn't ready to deal with hunt scenes and the life of polar dogs at the time.
Instead I called up a list of silent documentaries and picked "The Epic of Everest" without knowing what exactly it was about although it was not difficult to guess that it would involve mountaineering, a topic I'm not really interested in.
Of course I'm fascinated by the majesty of the Himalaya and Mount Everest - known as Sagarmatha in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet - how could you not be, but why someone would want to climb it, is beyond me and my strictly non-adventurous mind.
I had of course forgotten about donkeys and yaks carrying heavily loads, and a half hour into the film they had lost me when they showed a baby donkey born on the trail and said how many miles this poor baby allegedly had to walk. It hadn't signed up for this!

What to do now?
I went back to the list, but nothing sounded as if I was up for watching it.
Understandably, that was still the time of the great explorers and exploring something always involved animals, livestock or wild ones and therefore inevitably scenes I didn't want to see. Even those filmmakers who wanted to point out what humans did to wildlife used that same wildlife to stage situations for their documentaries - for example Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack of "King Kong" fame.
I know those were different times and therefore those films are interesting in more than one regard, not just for their content, but also why or how that content was collected, but my skin is not thick enough for it these days.

I will keep searching and have one movie on my list, but for this post I needed something short and quick now.
What I found was "Suspense" by Lois Weber from 1913 which is in the public domain and which you can watch here.

As this is a silent short film of 10 minutes, the plot is told rather quickly (spoilers as usual!).
At a remote house, a maid quits letting her employer, a mother with a small baby, only know by note. She leaves the key under the mat. When the mother finds the note, she locks doors and windows.
A tramp has seen the maid leaving, goes to check out the house and finds the key. When the woman notices him, she calls her husband who has to work late, but the tramp cuts the line.

The husband hurries to help her by taking the first car parked in the street and racing off followed by the owner and police.

While the woman has locked herself in the bedroom with her baby and put a dresser in front of the door, the tramp looks around the house, and the man gets held up when he hits a man standing in the middle of the road and helps him up again.
The tramp hears sounds from above, and armed with a knife, he breaks into the bedroom. Just then the cars arrive at the house. Shots aimed at the husband panic the tramp, he runs downstairs where he gets overpowered by the husband and police.
The man runs upstairs to find his wife and baby unharmed. He explains everything and is of course forgiven.

I have to admit that I had never heard of Lois Weber before, another example of not just an early maker of silent films, but a woman whose achievements had been forgotten.

Public domain

Actually, Weber was a pioneer in early film, the "first American woman to direct a feature film" and the "leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood", not to mention that she also acted, for example as the mother in "Suspense". Eventually, she even had her own studio.

This isn't supposed to be a post about Lois Weber (and her husband Phillips Smalley with whom she mostly worked until their divorce), though, especially as I haven't seen any of her other movies yet that have survived. She had a large output, but a lot is lost like so many silent films.
There are four links at the bottom if you would like to know more about her, and who knows, maybe she'll be turning up in another post of mine eventually.

To the movie now.
The title doesn't promise too much.
Like other films, "Suspense" was likely inspired by a French Grand Guignol play from 1902 - "Au Téléphone" by André de Lorde and Charles Foley - which didn't have a happy ending, though. The husband has to listen to his family getting murdered without being able to help.

Weber used different techniques to build up suspense, for example the split screen showing the three narratives - the husband at the office, the wife and baby at home, and the tramp breaking in.
In the car chase, there is the mirrored image of the pursuers coming closer.
You have interesting angles like when the wife looks out of the window and sees the tramp outside.

There is a lot more to say about the technical side of the film of course, but I leave that to the experts. Instead I want to tell you what I thought when I watched it a second time as there is rather a lot to see for a short of 10 minutes and you know me and my weird brain. I always have questions.

- The maid who contemplates announcing her leaving, but decides against it. Does she think she can't pull it through when she's looking the mother in the eye?
Without seeing her, the tramp might not even have got the idea to take a look at the house, and she unknowingly made it easier for him by putting the key under the mat. What did she do that for, anyway? Why didn't she just leave it on the table with the note?
And why does the mother not go and get the key from under the mat when she locks all the doors?

- The tramp eating the sandwiches, rummaging around a bit, not very convincingly, and then going for the woman. I've heard of people eating or drinking at crime scenes, but usually after the deed is done.
Why the sudden urge for making a "simple" break-in even worse?

- The husband hitting the man in the road. I find it rather nice that he doesn't just drive off, but gets out, pats him down, asks him if he's okay, but then he stops to look out for his pursuers twice (!) before getting back in the car and driving on. Oh, my wife is in danger, la-di-da ....

Does that make it sound as if I didn't like the movie? Not at all. Those are just things I started thinking about after watching it a second time.
Of course all of those things had to be just like this to increase the feeling of suspense which worked just perfectly.

From what I read, Weber's other movies often revolved around social issues, so "Suspense" seems to be an exception, and of course a lot of her work is lost, but I'm definitely putting her on my watch list for more.


Sources:

About "Suspense"
1. Fritzi Kramer: Suspense (1913) A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, April 24, 2016
2. Short of the Month: Suspense (dir. Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, 1913). On: Nitrateglow, February 11, 2022
3. "At the telephone" - English translation of "Au téléphone" by André de Lorde. In: "One-act plays for stage and study, second series, 1925, edited by Walter Prichard Eaton"

About Lois Weber:
1. Angelica Aboulhosn: Lois Weber: An Early Hollywood Filmmaker with Her Own Studio. In: Humanities, vol. 44(2023), issue 4
2. Shelley Stamp: Lois Weber. On: Women Film Pioneers Project. October 15, 2019
3. Lea Stans: "The Muse Of The Reel" - The Pioneering Work of Director Lois Weber. On: Silent-ology, January 25, 2018
4. Travis Lee Ratcliff: A History of Silence: The Cinema of Lois Weber. On his YouTube channel

Nostalgia - Princess / Prinzess Victoria needles

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections have mostly stopped growing due to different reasons, but they are still there and still loved. I also have vintage items, some inherited, some gifts, some from fleamarkets, some more interesting than others. So I thought it could be fun to share some of them every, now and then and tell their story.

As this is a collection that's still growing, I have decide to give it its own page on the blog now, so I can update it more easily now.
You can find it here.

Actually, I already started talking about today's small collection a few years ago as part of a homage to needles, I just didn't know then this would turn into a collection of its own.
I have used and broken quite a few needles since I started beading. Bead embroidery, especially on the beaded sneakers (no idea why Blogger insisted to have extra space between the lines in that post) and the HeatherCat sneakers (this is the last post of four which has all the links if you are interested), was extra hard for them (well, and my hands).

In the homage post, I talked about how I discovered vintage paper needle packs while looking for beading needles and how I fell in love with some of the labels.
Most intriguing to me were the Princess Victoria needles because there were variations, and I thought they deserved a post of their own by now because there will probably be one or the other addition to them.
That means I will then update this post instead of the other one which might get a bit too long otherwise.
In fact, this one is also quite long already.

It's nice that the packs don't take up much space, though, and of course I can always use the needles if I need them as most packs are full, this isn't just decoration (or so I tell myself). The packs are scattered throughout my Steiff collection, rather fitting I think as most of it are sewn animals.

So what are Princess Victoria needles? I honestly wish I knew how they got that name.
When I got the first tiny pack - not even an inch - of size 12 sharps, I started searching, but without any success.
What I do know is that there are all sizes, that the packs can have a red or a golden edge and "banner" around Victoria, and that there are different pictures of Victoria. Some have a more vintage look, some look quite modern, some have a blurry or messy print, some a very clear modern looking one.

Some labels are all English, some are all German (saying Prinzess instead of Princess and using the German terms for the needles, such as Frauennadeln), some are a mix of English and German using the word "Prinzess" and "feinste", but the term "sharps", for example.
I even found a picture on eBay UK with an Italian label (and now wish I had bought that pack)!

There are those without a country of origin, but also some that specify it, "Germany", "Made in Germany", "M.i W. Germany, Imp. Allemagne OCC" (between 1949 and 1989), but also "Made in Czechoslovakia" (which means between 1918 and 1992) or "Made in the Czech Republic" (after 1992).
Last but not least, most of them that I have seen don't have a company name printed on, but there are exceptions. So far I have seen "Prym", "Rhein Nadel", and a name I'm not sure about, "St. Witte", "Stowitte"? What's up with that?
Did the needle production go from one company to the next?

And who is this Princess Victoria, anyway?
Does the name refer to an actual Princess Victoria, such as Queen Victoria's daughter (who eventually became the German Empress) or the daughter of Edward VII.? Or does it refer to the Queen herself? I think that's possible because there are also Queen Victoria needles with a similar Victoria on a slightly different background (I don't have any of those). Doesn't it make sense for it to be the same one?
As you will see further down, the needles have been around for a long time, but after all Victoria was crowned in 1838, so could it have been that long?
I doubt she was really important enough for someone to think the name would appeal to buyers before she was a Queen.

At some point, someone must have said "let's call them that forever and ever", but why? Because, you know, you can actually still get a mix of sizes from Prym, but in a plastic tube and not with silver-plated or gold-plated eyes anymore to "protect the environment".
Possibly the manufacturer(s?) intended them mainly for the British market and therefore used the name to appeal to buyers there? Why would they bother to make a difference between the "Princess" and the "Queen" needles at all then?

Then I found this older blog post by Papergreat again that I had already commented on in 2022 and then forgotten right away.
Chris had found the following in The Economist of November 18, 1899, page 1629 - 1630 from the correspondent in France:
"A deputation of cravat manufacturers was received this week by the Minister of Commerce to make representations on the use of false trade-marks on importations of the articles they sell from Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Italy. These goods, the deputation declared, are marked with the words "Made in London," or other words implying that they are of English origin, which appears to be a recommendation with buyers, and the Minister was consequently asked to put in operation Article 2 of the Madrid Convention, under which they may be seized. ... The prices at which these goods are sold are probably lower than those at which they can be imported from England, and French makers are sufficiently protected against imports from England by the higher cost and the heavy duty. It is, however, a common practice to import German goods marked as English, and recently the attention of the British Chamber of Commerce was called to the sale, in France, of packets of needles bearing a portrait of the Queen, with the words, "Prinzess Victoria Needles" and the name of a fictitious manufacturer at Redditch (Note: makes me wonder if it said Redditch on the packs). The spelling of the word princess betrayed the origin of the article, but would escape the attention of the buyer."

So does that mean that a bunch of German companies used that name for the needles trying to disguise where they came from - but why the mix of languages and why the different Victorias? Might they be able to tell me something about the age of the needles, like different Steiff buttons indicate the time period an animal was made?
This is only getting more intriguing. I'm afraid I'm not done with this rabbit hole yet. I'm a librarian and determined which means I'll probably be having a look at some of our databases to see where I can get with those.
Ok, so I'm probably not just determined, but obsessed with these now.

Click on the photos for more detail.

This was the one that started it all. Such a tiny pack, only about 1 inch!

Update Victoria needles April 2025:
I got some more packs. One pack is as tiny as the one above. This time we actually have a name, but I'm not sure what it is.
Googling, I can find one result for "St. Witte & Co." which doesn't help in any way, but there is something between the T and the W. Could that be a badly printed O (I found the name Stowitte, but again without any more info) or is it a kind of abbreviation?
The only other name I found was "Schmidt, Witte & Co.", a shipping company, that didn't help much, either. Or could this be a fictitious company?
Anyhow, this time we have German words for these size 10 sharps and even the Prinzess is written with a z as it would be done in German.

I got these three packs for a great price. All of them are unused and full of big, fat size 2 needles. As you can tell, we are back to English words, too.

To show you the size difference, I took a picture of all of my new acquisitions together.

Then I got these - some sharps and some "betweens", two of them with a German print and one by "Rhein Nadel", another former needle producer in Aachen (which changed their field from needles to automation eventually, so this pack must be from before 2003).

How funny that the one "Made in Germany" has the English print, but still the Prinzess with a z. Even funnier is that the print is very clear and looks more modern, but the "Prinzess Victoria" got mirror-inverted!
This pack looks identical to one I have seen marked with Prym. Did a company make these and then marked them for different companies or did Prym just take over from Rhein Nadel?
Is this a plot to drive me crazy? 😂

Then I went on a bit of shopping spree, but that's going to be it for a while, I swear!
If I get something new, it will have to be some kind of variation (uh-oh, I may have ... in May ...).
This is one result of the shopping spree. It's old new stock from a seller who gets her items from warehouses.
Now I have all the sizes for sharps and finally some packs with the red "banner" instead of the golden one. The edges are golden on all of them - except one which is yellow!

I think the one marked "gold ey'd" should be the oldest, it's also the only one with the "Princess" print and without a country of origin.
All the others are marked "Prinzess" and "Made in Czechoslovakia" except for one that says "Made in Czech Republic", but I don't think they all have the same age as there are different fonts. My guess is that the ones with the red banners are younger, also because one of them is from the Czech Republic which we know must have been after 1992.

Here's a comparison between the two packs of size 0 sharps.
The print is so much more beautiful and elaborate on the old pack, the crowns are completely different, Victoria has a lot more details down to the pendant she's wearing! Even the flowers are more beautiful.

By the way, this is what "gold ey'd" (later gold eyed) looks like. Some of the needles are corroded, but I bet they are around 100 years old if not older, so that's to be expected.

Update May 2025 (any updates after May 20 will be on the new blog page).

This little cutie is also one of the tiny ones.
It's the first one I have with both the German and the English description of "Frauen Nadeln" and "Sharps" and once again Victoria looks different.
The color print is quite messy, though.

This one is my favorite so far. My guess is that it was a sample card, maybe used for representation in haberdashery shops.
It has the sizes 1 to 10 safely tucked into cord loops and an extra needle pack marked 1/9 with the /9 added in handwriting, but actually there are 12 different needles in it.
The numbers under the sample needles with the article number 126 and "Et. 925" (no idea (yet) what that could mean) are also by hand, very carefully done.
The pack is marked "Gold Ey'd Sharps" and "Made in Germany".
Also - yet another "Prinzess Victoria"!

This is a bit of a different needle book that my last acquisition is glued to. I found several examples of this early 20th century needle book in past auctions and one of them showed the exact same needle pack, but in different condition, so I know it wasn't mine.

Victoria looks the same as in the sample card, but this time we got "elliptic gold eyed sharps" in the sizes 3 to 9.

Does someone need a needle? I happen to have one or two ...

Here's the Princess/Prinzess gallery of different faces so far.

"Engelhörnchen"

"I collect "Engelhörnchen"", my colleague said. My empty stare probably told her that I had no idea what she was talking about.
"We have some here in the library, you know. Engelhorn's allgemeine Roman-Bibliothek." Engelhorn's General Library of Novels? I got curious and looked it up in our catalog.
Engelhorn was a publishing house in Stuttgart, our state capital and the city where I work.
"A selection of the best modern novels of all peoples" - that sounded interesting, especially because there were a few hundred volumes from 1884 to 1902 in our stacks and the titles sounded intriguing.

In fact, the "Engelhörnchen" series - I guess that was my colleague's personal nickname for them as I couldn't find it anywhere online - has over 1000 volumes! That doesn't mean over 1000 novels, though, as many of them were published in two parts.
Starting 1884, there was one (or half of one) novel every other week, after 1924 fewer until the series was cancelled with 1930 being the last year of publication.

Special about it was not only the price of 50 Pfennig for the softcovers and 75 Pfennig for the linen bound books, but also that there weren't just German authors available, but "all peoples" meaning authors from England, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Poland, the USA (and possibly more, I didn't go through the whole list), translated into German.

Commercial (public domain
via Wikimedia Commons)

The series became the Engelhorn publishing house's biggest success and was so popular that more than 2 million copies were sold.
When the first volume was published, "Die Gartenlaube", an "illustrated family paper" of the time, praised Engelhorn for offering the German people the opportunity to get more acquainted with foreign literature as "the knowledge of other peoples' literature is far less widespread in Germany than is generally assumed" (not without expressing their hope that Engelhorn will "exclude the dirty and poisonous excesses of foreign fiction", however, taking a special stab at Émile Zola for being "grossly realistic").

This wasn't the only source approving of the "Roman-Bibliothek" over the years.
There were also series by other publishers, but not in the same quality for such a good price.

Engelhorn even printed one of the reviews in their books. Enjoy the language.

"This is a venture that deserves to be supported in every way! When the first red volumes were published more than 24 years ago, the short-sighted and narrow-minded may have shaken their heads at the great daring of giving away really good and valuable intellectual fare at such cheap prices. If you look back over the long period of years, how much has not already been achieved! Almost no house, no family where the solid volumes have not found their way into; almost no private library, however small, would want to do without the red friends in their midst presenting themselves so friendly. And yet, there is still a lot to do! There are still houses in which the rotten and decayed backstairs novels are preferred to be read. Here it would be the duty of everyone close to displace the poisonous seed and put in its place the healthy and always good fare of the "Engelhornschen Allgemeinen Romanbibliothek". The happily healed will, when seeing clearly for the first time, certainly pay thanks to the friendly helper."

Wow. If this didn't stop people from secretly reading "Hintertreppenromane", I don't know what could!
That's especially funny because one of the few novels I couldn't resist at fleamarkets because they were almost as cheap as at original price was by an American author who didn't get too good reviews for some of his books.

When we entered the series in our library system, I picked out one or the other volume to read it if the title caught my eye, like "Liebe und Gymnastik" = "Love and gymnastics" which sounded really funny to me, but whose original title was "Fra scuola e casa" which simply means "Between school and home". I seem to remember it was about a gymnastics teacher and that things were complicated, but after all those years I'm not sure anymore if she actually found love.

I know it sounds as if I want to make fun of the series, but I that's not my intention at all. I just don't think it's even possible for such a series to offer consistenly "good fare", and for us today it could even be more difficult to enjoy the style of those days.
I did read the books that I have, by the way, but don't remember a word of them. Maybe I should try one again. How about the scary stories by Dick-May (the pseudonym of French author Rosalie Jeanne Weill, by the way)?

Aren't the books really pretty, though? It's a pity having them stand on a shelf so you can only see the spine.
Having so few volumes myself, with two of them newly bound in brown and marbled paper, I can't say if there were more versions of the covers.
Here are closeups of the two different logos of the angel blowing the horn. I like the more elaborate angel, but also the roses of the other cover.

Something I also like about old books are bookplates.
The first one shows a man drinking from a fountain with a head on a stone - Walter Kopfstein, the last name translates to head stone.

And a very different heraldic style here.

My colleague has long since retired, I wonder how far she got with her collection.
I'm going to hold back myself. As interesting as I find this project and the fact that the series ran successfully for so long, I don't have the space for 1000 volumes I won't be able to read. Maybe I'll get weak if a cheap copy is throwing itself in my way, but I won't go searching for it actively.
If I want to read one, I could always go online, many libraries have digitized these volumes by now. It won't be the same of course - you know I love printed copies -, but if I feel the need for an old adventure novel for example, I'll know where to look.


Sources (in German):
1. Engelhorns allgemeine Romanbibliothek. On Wikisource
2. Die Gartenlaube 1884, Heft 36. On Wikisource
3. Carl Engelhorn. On: Engelhorn Family Web Site. Citation from the thesis of Sabine Schust: Carl Engelhorn und die Volksbibliothek Stuttgart, page 9 ff.