Celebrating home, smithies

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Hi.

You'll never guess where I am.

I'm at home.

Sweet, isn't it?

(Note: If you are here because of our annual report, please visit here first. Then, you might be interested in this spot as well.)

Today Adelphia arrived and hooked us up. Lady Steed just caught up on her email, Thmusings and Nem's blog and has a headache. So I'm taking over.

Given that this post is being written at and will be posted from home, I feel a need to do a homey post. And what could be homier than Martha Stewart?

This year is Martha Stewart Living's fifteenth anniversary and in honor of that milestone the magazine is featuring Fifteen Years of Dessert, Fifteen Years of Garden Greats, Fifteen Years of Good Things, etc.

I admit that I read much of Lady Steed's Marthas. I enjoyed the articles on peppers in this month's for instance, and I remember one on lemons I really dug.

But what I am really looking forward to is next month's issue, which will feature Fifteen Years of Metallurgy. I lost the instructions for making gilded nickel doilies and I've been wanting to make some in the cluny style.

The thing that most people don't realize is that metallurgy is not just for women. In fact, many men have been involved in metallurgy from the earliest ages--from Achilles to Vulcan to Nephi to Aaron Burr to Napoleon Dynamite. It is a tradition with wholly repectable masculine undertones.

What bugs me is that I can't even mention metallurgy without people conjuring up images of prim and proper ladies gathered around a forge, gossiping and making frilly things out of copper.

Copper!

It's all that %@#* Susan B. Anthony's fault of course, barging into places where she didn't belong. If she had stopped at the polls this world would be a better place. And no doubt women can work a forge as well as any man, but why did men have to be banned from smithing?

What was once a perfectly respectable profession for men is now as bad as being a nurse, librarian or lumberjack! It's just not fair!

Of course, you know, I'm joking.

And if any of you women have a cast iron cluny pattern, I will accept it from you with the utmost humility.