So, I was talking to a friend of mine about our mutual hobby of film photography. We both like to shoot black and white film and hand-process it (relatively simple to do, actually, the materials you need to do it can fit under a bathroom sink), as well as printing the photos (a bit harder to do, the equipment for that is kind of bulky). Does anyone else have any skills or hobbies or what not that are more or less lost to the world as a whole?
were you a photographer before the advent of digital photography?
I got started when I was a kid in the early 90’s, but I didn’t get into the darkroom side of it until around 2005, which was when film was steadily losing ground. I found out that the professor of the multimedia class I was taking (HTML, CSS, some basic Adobe Flash, that sort of thing) also taught photography and that there was a fully equipped photo lab in the basement of one of the buildings on campus. Also a lot of old derelict equipment and busted up old cameras and the like. Treasure trove for a geek like me.
One of the nice things about B&W film is that the chemistry is relatively simple to work with compared to color film, so it’s the sort of hobby you could do in a bathroom or your garage provided you can light proof your work area. Color developing is a bit more complicated and much more sensitive about temperature and time.
In any case, I also own a turntable and a typewriter. I’m a bit of a fan of doing things in the old fashion. Considering getting a ham radio and a telegraph key just for shits and giggles.
ROFLMAO. Give me a couple sheep, my farm, mrAru with some hand tools and I can produce an item of clothing. Of course you have to start by chopping down a couple oak trees, a moderately small pine tree, 6 decent sized saplings, and wait for a couple months to get started [to dry the firewood, and peel and dry the saplings.]
First dig out enough and process enough clay from the clay bank to male a 3 gallon thickwalled pot, a spindle whorl and a set of loom weights, and fire them using part of the oak firewood. Take enough shakes from the oak tree to make a lye cradle and put the ashes from firing the pot in and run enough passes of a gallon of water until your lye will float an egg. Save the lye. Shear both sheep, pick one and kill it. Take the tail and any obvious carcass fat and render it in your ceramic pot. Remove and reserve the rendered fat. Scrape the hide, and cut rawhide thongs from the skin. Using the saplings and the thongs, build a warp weighted loom. Turn the sheep into dinner while you wait. Use the lye and soap to make soap. Scour the wool and wash it. [remove all the non-wool like dirt, shit and burrs] lay out in the sun to dry thoroughly. WHile waiting, clean a suitable [large cooking chopstick] small branch and hook the end for a drop spindle. Spin up your wool.
After a month of spinning in every moment of your spare time set up your loom, make a shuttle and beater out of more spare aged oak, and start weaving. If you want colord fabric, you can dye in the ceramic pot using stuff like onion skins [a nice mustardy yellow] or woad [first year gets green, second year plants make blue] or madder [red, but not entirely colorfast] with a chunk of rusty cast iron and salt in the dye water. Way back when you ate the sheep, you killed time by whittling down some bone shards into needles which you use to sew the garment together, and decorate with some carven bone broaches, beads and buttons.
Lost art enough for you ? =)
Aruvqan, Home Life In Colonial Days says that colonial settlers would actually add fat to wool to aide in the spinning process. Any comments on that? It also says that a percentage of every fleece, the part on the outside, was such a mess that it had to be clipped and discarded. Truth?
Anyway: gimme the yarn and I can knit socks. No pattern needed. Been knitting all my winter socks for several years now. Have too many of them. Have to knit for my husband instead now, and he has big feet.
And he designs, builds, and sells vacuum tube amplifiers and pre-amplifiers. He makes enough to support the family. They’re big in Scandinavia. And the West Coast.
I started learning calligraphy about 30 years ago. I still have my pens and still use them to write the occasional letter, but very rarely these days. Nobody ever writes back, they just send me email.
I play Old Time/Mountain fiddle. Not particularly useful I suppose but the style is not widely heard any more.
Back in the day, one recorded music on magnetic tape and edited it by cutting it physically with a razor blade and taping the segments back together. This is not a skill that’s particularly in demand anymore, but I can still do it.
I play a killer game of something that was called “poker” before the hot-rod, speed-game, let’s-add-a-bunch-of-rules TV-friendly poseur took over the name.
I mastered so many now-obsolete skills that it’s downright pathetic. I don’t mind having a hard manual technique superseded by a better one, but so many of the new approaches are half-assed and ‘good enough’ for amateurs to putz around with.
At one point in college, I could use a slide rule, because our prof had forbidden calculators, and my dad happened to have a nifty 1965-era model hanging around the house. (I’m 41, and this was in about 1994 or thereabouts)
That surprised our prof something fierce, let me tell you. We started the exam, and I whipped out the slide rule and went to work. On the final, he went out of his way to forbid any and all calculation devices.
I can still (I assume) conduct legal research in a law library using books instead of a computer data base. Having learned the skill in the 1980s, I doubt I shall ever forget it. I haven’t conducted research in that fashion for at least 20 years.
Good one. I used to be able to do that too. For the morning news on the local NPR station.
I know a little bit about sailing an old, square-rigged sailing ship, and how to use a sextant. Don’t get the chance to ever practice it, though.
Truth. Especially around the belly and butt–loose wool traps everything including shit. You can pick a small amount of discrete shit out of the fiber when you’re going over it pre-washing, but when there’s full sheep turds or they’re squashed into the wool–well, ain’t nobody got time for that. There’s also sections that get so badly matted you can’t comb them back out, and even if you could the fiber would be rough and weakened.
As for the spinning, a lot of people who process their own fleeces like to spin “in the grease” ie, without the lanolin washed out of the wool. I got my first fleece this year, and while I haven’t spun any of it yet, I can tell by playing with samples that the stuff that still has a little lanolin left in drafts differently than the totally grease-free bits. I think most commercially prepared spinning fiber either has some small amount of the lanolin left in, or some added back in during the final rinse.
Give me a fiber and a crochet hook, and I can make anything from a sweater to a fishing net.
I make handmade glass beads.
I fix electronics. Replace bad capacitors, fix bad solder joints, etc. Also sometimes “adapt” something so it can do a bit more than the mfr. intended.
So when the thermal fuse recently blew on our new coffee maker, it was back and running in no time.
So much more fun than the alternate “art” called “throwing it out”.
A little anecdote to go with that.
When I was a TV/Radio major in college, one of our assignments was to take a tape of jumbled words recorded by our professor, and edit (via physical splicing) into the Star Spangled Banner. All the words were there, we just had to re-order them. We knew his intent was to make us physically cut and glue the magnetic tape together, BUT his instructions were written in a way that could be interpreted in other ways.
So I did. I used two tape machines to accomplish the task without ever touching the razor or the glue. This was back in the day before electronic editing became the norm, so I knew it would be pushing the envelope, but what the hey, I was in college, aren’t you supposed to THINK.
Anyway, turned it in. In class the next week he played some of the submissions. Some were really horrible, some were okay. One was absolutely perfect. Yep, mine. I’m sitting there waiting for the other shoe, and then it does. He knew what I had done of course, since I had turned in a tape with absolutely no physical edits on it. He calls me up to tell everyone how I did it, and then he admitted that he was hoping someone would do it that way. He proved his point, I got to feel cutting edge for a minute. Win - win, right?
Nope, he made me go do it the old way just to prove that I could. I did, and probably still could if I had to.
I learned calligraphy too, and like you, rarely do it any more. Nowadays, it seems more people know how to use Photoshop and calligraphic fonts than can use a pen and ink.
I can count back change. That seems to be a lost art.
Not lost but not really common, I can play the dulcimer. (Not great but some.)