Welcome!

    I am delighted that you have chosen to spend time reading this blog.  I'm sure there are many things which demand your attention, and I hope this blog will be a refuge from the pressures of daily life for a few moments, especially in this period of the COVID pandemic.

    You may be curious about the name of our blog.  Scott A. J. Johnson from the Low Technology Institute (https://lowtechinstitute.org) is a reader of my Facebook page, The Dancing Lamb, which contains a number of the posts you will find in this blog.  The Low Technology Institute is a long-term experiment in living with minimal technology, and Scott and I have demonstrated flax processing and spinning together.  After reading a number  of my Facebook posts. Scott dubbed us the Victorian Technology Institute, and the name stuck.

Our home in Southern Wisconsin, built in 1896.  

    We live in a small town of just over 5,000 people which is located about 35 minutes southwest of Madison, Wisconsin.  Evansville boasts the largest number of historic homes of all the small towns in Southern Wisconsin, and indeed, we do have a sizable historic district of about 300 homes in which we live.  If Currier & Ives married Mayberry, RFD, Evansville would be their child.

With the exception of cars versus carriages and the dome top of the corner building, Evansville's Main Street has changed very little.

    

    I've been interested in pre-industrial life since I was a child.  When I was growing up, our house had lots of antiques in it.  My dad, Antony Ellis, was a scriptwriter for CBS and wrote for a series called The Monroes (a precursor to Little House on the Prairie), so I used to pretend I was a pioneer.  Thanks to an exceptional high school history teacher, I began to wonder about how people lived in pre-industrial times:  how people made clothes, what they ate, how they cooked and washed and grew food - the lives of the common people behind and around the nobility and the wealthy.

    I started shopping for antiques in my first year of college, and I spent hours looking at old photos, comparing the stiff poses and faces with the faces in modern photos - so alike, yet so different.  Who we're these people, and how did they live? Shortly afterward, I decided I wanted to live in a Victorian house and learn how the Victorians lived.  

    When I was about 23, I took my first spinning lesson from a wonderful woman who lived in the California desert near Death Valley.  She had a wood cookstove which she used during cooler weather and baskets and baskets of raw wool which had that unforgettable, comforting smell of sheep.  I started spinning seriously when I was about 30, and this led to the purchase of several spinning wheels, a small flock of sheep, and learning about shearing sheep.  Chickens arrived at about the same time.

One of the many spinning wheels in our house

    In 2004, Harvest and I achieved our dream of owning a Victorian house when we moved from California to our home on Main Street in Evansville and began the adventures you will find in this blog.  In the past few years, we have acquired a small flock of chickens, built gardens, installed a wood cookstove, and hung oil lamps throughout the house.  I started wearing Victorian clothing as everyday wear, which included getting used to wearing a corset (they're wonderful, but that is a post for another day).  I've taught classes in wool and spinning, become a fleece judge, and learned to knit.  Harvest has discovered all kinds of crafts including weaving and embroidery.  We've pulled carrots, split wood, hauled water, made sourdough bread, and learned more than we ever imagined, and it goes on.  You'll find an account of all our adventures in this blog, including a few that were published earlier but are still worth the telling.  

    We hope you will add your own comments - reminiscences of your family or tips and hints on how you learned to do the things we do or where you learned them.  So much has nearly been lost and needs to be preserved before it disappears forever, and there are other folks out there who are learning from the past.  Whoever you are, modern or old-fashioned, please do share.