UNCOVERING UNION EXHIBITION

Alumni Check-In | Elizabeth Cytko

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People walking outside of Union Station. 2018.
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Cytko

Writing about the exhibition I created with fellow classmates is bittersweet. The winter semester of 2020 certainly ended abruptly. We did not get to attend many of the exhibition openings of our peers, and sadly have mostly parted ways without the chance to properly say goodbye. I want to acknowledge the hard work of my classmates, and say thank you for providing me with such an amazing time at the Faculty of Information. In the future I look forward to seeing everyone again, and celebrating our successes!

A group of attentive students on the Ottawa Museum trip. November 2019.
Three cheers for my amazing cohort!
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Cytko

My group, which includes myself, Erika Ilse and Karen Macke, is fortunate — our exhibition is digital. This meant that while we were not able to meet physically, we still had privilege of Skyping and putting together the website Uncovering Union.

The Battle for Union Station.
Courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives, Courtesy of City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 265, Series 1269, Subseries 7, File 2

For those interested in how a digital exhibition is put together, I will highlight some of the steps, so in future you can create one too!

1. Be on the same page as your team. Figure out your themes and what you want your exhibition to say. With Union Station we narrowed our focus to the social history, of the people who have a connection to the place. 
2. Make sure you know who your audience is. This will affect the style of writing and what sort of information you will include. If you will work with an educator, include them from the beginning! This will make the process much smoother!
3. Research! This involved delving deep into Proquest to dig up newspapers, taking out every book possible, and visiting the local archives! I spent most of my time at the City of Toronto archives reading up on my three stories – the archivists there are friendly and very helpful. 
4. Set a word limit and stick to it while writing your articles. 
5. Editing! Editing! Editing! Sometimes it is necessary to cut amazing ideas in order to fit the word count. That's ok! If you have too much information to share you're on the right track.
6. Somewhere around here, or maybe even earlier think about the overall design of the website. Choose your colours, fonts, logos! 
7. Make sure you have all the proper permissions in place for the images and multimedia aspects you plan to use. 
8. User testing! Have some people unfamiliar with the website go through it and make sure everything works. 
9. Launch!

In between all of those steps you are meeting your team at least once a week, and checking in with everyone. Things will unexpectedly crop up (such as a worldwide pandemic) so it’s important to give yourself some extra time.

Union Station food court, 2019.
Photo courtesy of Elizabeth  Cytko

This exhibition has given us the opportunity to peek into Toronto history, and learn how interconnected Union Station is to the very fabric of the city. Uncovering Union centres on nine social histories with stories that vary from soldiers returning from war and new families coming together to civic activists uniting to save the station from destruction. The station itself is not just a terminus for the end of a journey, but the impetus for a new one.

If you miss the hustle and bustle of Toronto life, those moments where you could walk down the street and pass by others whose stories you could barely imagine, I invite you to view our exhibition.

BRINGING BACK LOST CRAFTS

SEW WHAT?

BY: ANYA BAKER

If ever you need a reminder of how much fun social history can be, check out the BBC's "living history" series Tales from the Green Valley (and its subsequent series' Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm etc.). In it, a crew of social historians and archaeologists live in a Jacobean farmhouse for a year and try to recreate the workings of the farm using their knowledge of the period and a pile of research, recipes, and theories about how things were done. Figuring out how people did things by doing them yourself can be a murky, contentious practice in this area of research; just because you managed to rig up an outhouse using period-appropriate tools does not mean that you haven't sullied the historicity of the technique with your modern knowledge and expectations about how people would or should have built something.

Luckily for you, dear Reader, I am willing to tarnish history for my own entertainment. Which brings me to Lost Crafts: Rediscovering Traditional Skills by Una McGovern. It's definitely not a how-to manual, but it does advocate that the average individual take up traditional crafts and skills for the sake of carrying that knowledge into the future, and for people's own enjoyment and entertainment. The book briefly explains the context, history, and uses of a series of crafts relating to: farming, hunting and gathering, food and drink, home and garden, practical things, and decorative things. I haven't had the opportunity to attempt "Trout Tickling" or make my own wooden clogs, but the section on decorative crafts was basically written for me.

McGovern writes that "it is only within the last 40 years or so that people have begun to think seriously about preserving and reviving these crafts before they are lost forever."

The idea of crafts being lost to history was what prompted me to begin needlework, as if I were a one-woman bulwark against the march of time and industrial production processes. Of course, I cannot single-handedly save crafting from obsolescence. No one has ever done that. Throughout history, the people making coracles probably were not also shearing sheep and blowing glass and then sitting down to work on their sewing sampler. But many of these individual skills are incredibly rewarding: think of the pride you could have in making your very own dry-stone wall! That requires having a yard, though, which is why I am sticking with two smaller-scale crafts until I find a way to move out of my apartment and take over a country estate. Here, let me teach you two, too:

Tatting

I mentioned tatting once in a museum I was working at, and discovered that all the curators were tatters, too--it must be the unofficial craft of museum professionals!

I took a bunch of blurry photos of my hands to try to illustrate how to tat, but they explained nothing. However, as McGovern advocates in Lost Crafts, finding online communities dedicated to teaching specific crafts is a great way to become part of the movement: the online tatting community is rich with explanations, free patterns, and how-to videos. From youtube user 11Frivole:

Eventually, you end up with piles of lace and can start festooning your sweaters with it.

To make this lace lay flat and look pretty, I will need to "block" it by wetting it and pinning all the little bits flat to a corkboard. Image: Anya Baker.

Cutwork Embroidery

This craft was not in Lost Crafts, but it is one that I learned to do Maker-Space style by fiddling around and wasting thread until I got it right.

To begin: thread a long embroidery needle with two strands of embroidery thread. If your material is a heavier weight, you might not need an embroidery hoop to keep the material taut. If you have a plan, good. If you have no idea what you're going to do, even better. Here, I am embroidering a pair of cuffs for a blouse.

Outline the shape you want to cut out. Image: Anya Baker.

Use the satin stitch all the way around. Keep the stitches close together to prevent the material from fraying. Image: Anya Baker.

Cut out the middle with very sharp scissors. Image: Anya Baker.

Eventually, you get this. This is the neckline of the blouse. My scissors were obviously not sharp enough, because the edges are shaggy. Sharpen your scissors!

One day I hope to do embroidery of this quality. In the meantime, happy crafting!