[Link] Star-gazing Girls of Georgian England

Making do ...

My experience of the uncanny with the Solar System sampler may have arisen from this same tension of scientific ideas in a craft form. This might also be a tension between what women wanted to do and how they had to do it – needlework was a way for this young girl to represent scientific, conventionally masculine ideas, without reproach. The resulting object refuses to fall easily into either category of craft or science, and simultaneously calls into question the associated ideas of what women should do and how they should do it.

Via the Museum of Childhood , Star-gazing Girls of Georgian England