Sepia Saturday 157; Christmas colours in my garden;

King Parrot, a visitor...

Mussaenda

Poinsettia...

Scots Bonnet chili..

Merry Christmas and a very happy 2013

Sepia Saturday 157;

Please visit 

©Photos My garden;

Thursday; sun..

Sun

everyday

rises

freely

feeding

light 

warmth

into

 dark

Life 

     

©Photo/text  Ts

Wednesday; wonderful;

Watch please! Big screen!

Monday; Christmas;

1963

2006

Carols

2009

2010

Merry Christmas 2012

©Photos Ts

Sepia Saturday 156; A playful Kiss;

2003; my grandaughter Raphaelle Portia; she always wanted to be an actress.

For more hugs and kisses link to

Sepia Saturday 156;

©Photos Ts.

Thursday; unusual pressies;

The perfect Christmas present for a sailor;

Shoes for a fashionista;

A violet Laser for the geek.

Designer Bandaids for the blister prone..
 Currently sold only on online Japanese lifestyle store Sugoi Life for $7.95.

Buttons to spruce up a t-shirt or a jacket etc.

Polar ice cube maker...aren't they fun?

The fun of  shopping for inexpensive Christmas presents.

Wednesday; simply holidays;

Fabrizia  making Anzac biscuits;

School holidays at Somerset International school  began on Monday. School holidays leave time to spend with Grandparents. 

Here is the recipe  from 200 years of Australian cooking; Cosmopolitan spice;

6ounces or 180 g rolled oats

6ounces or 180 g flour

6ounces or 180 g desiccated coconut

6ounces or 180 g brown sugar

1 1/2  teaspoons baking powder

6ounces or 180 g butter melted

3 tablespoons golden syrup

Mix all the ingredients together, shape into small balls, place on a baking sheet lined with baking paper or buttered. Flatten the balls with a fork, bake in a low oven at around 150C or 300F about 15-20 minutes.

They are easy, quick and delicious for a crowd of children.

©Photo Ts

Sepia Saturday 155; Blue and famous;

In 1873 Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent to make the first riveted men's work
pants out of denim: the first blue jeans.

History

Jacob Davis, a Jewish emigrant from Latvia, was a tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth made from hemp from Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale house. After one of Davis' customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. Davis did not have the required money to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Strauss suggesting that they go into business together. After Levi accepted Jacob's offer, on May 20, 1873, the two men received U.S. Patent 139,121 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patented rivet was later incorporated into the company's jean design and advertisements.
Contrary to an advertising campaign suggesting that Levi Strauss sold his first jeans to gold miners during the California Gold Rush (which peaked in 1849), the manufacturing of denim overalls only began in the 1870s. The company then created their first pair of Levis 501 Jeans in the 1890s, a style that went on to become the world's best selling item of clothing.Modern jeans began to appear in the 1920s, but sales were largely confined to the working people of the western United States, such as cowboys, lumberjacks, and railroad workers. 
Levi’s jeans apparently were first introduced to the East during the dude ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easterners returned home with tales  examples of the hard-wearing pants with rivets. Another boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. 
Between the 1950s and 1980s, Levi's jeans became popular among a wide range of youth subcultures, including greasers, mods, rockers, hippies and skinheads. Levi's popular shrink-to-fit 501s were sold in a unique sizing arrangement; the indicated size referred to the size of the jeans prior to shrinking, and the shrinkage was substantial. The company still produces these unshrunk, uniquely sized jeans, and they are still Levi's number one selling product.

"The competition"

Although popular lore (abetted by company marketing) holds that the original design remains unaltered, this is not the case: the company's president got too close to a campfire, and the rivet at the bottom of the crotch conducted the fire's heat too well; the offending rivet, which is depicted in old advertisements, was removed.In 1991, Levi Strauss faced a scandal involving pants made in the Northern Mariana Islands, where some 3% of Levi's jeans sold annually with the Made in the USA label were shown to have been made by Chinese laborers under what the United States Department of Labor called "slavelike" conditions. 
Today, most Levi's jeans are made outside the US, for sub-minimum wages, seven-day work weeks with 12-hour shifts, poor living conditions and other indignities.
The activist group Fuerza Unida (United Force) was formed following the January 1990 closure of a plant in San Antonio, Texas, in which 1,150 seamstresses, some of whom had worked for Levi Strauss for decades, saw their jobs exported to Costa Rica. During the mid- and late-1990s, Fuerza Unida picketed the Levi Strauss headquarters in San Francisco and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins in protest of the company's labor policies.

In June 1996, the company offered to pay its workers an unusual dividend of up to $750 million in six years' time, having halted an employee stock plan at the time of the internal family buyout. However, the company failed to make cash flow targets, and no worker dividends were paid.
In 2002, Levi Strauss began a close business collaboration with Walmart, producing a special line of "Signature" jeans and other clothes for exclusive sale in Walmart stores until 2006.
Excerpts  courtesy Wikipedia

In every country he has visited - from the Philippines to Turkey, India and Brazil - Miller has stopped and counted the first 100 people to walk by, and in each he found that almost half the population wore jeans on any given day.

Jeans are everywhere, he says, with the exception of rural tracts of China and South Asia.

link    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17101768

My view, they are practical but ugly. Also a boring piece of clothing as everybody wears them! Clever advertising has done the trick to conform people like Mao did with his blue jackets and pants, which was  thought of  in the capitalistic Western world to be ugly and awful and only communists  would or could wear something like this! 

Levis Jeans are what they were intended for Hard Yakka gear.

Please visit   Sepia Saturday; 155;                             

Friday; blessing;

May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light.

 May good luck pursue you each morning and night. 

    Irish blessing

©Photo Ts

Thursday; play "a bit";

Change a photo into a painting; print it on canvas

  et  voilà;

©Photo Ts

Wednesday; over the fence;

a mighty gum tree; Koalas love it.

©PhotoTs

Tuesday; purple;

The last jacaranda blossoms; my garden;

Nothing lasts for ever;  Titania

©Photo/text Ts

Links   Poetic Takeaway's;

T-Picturesque;

Monday; snap..

Orchid Dancing Ladies; Oncidium;

I bought a new camera, Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5, playing around with it and trying out its different settings. I must be patient to learn about and use its full potential.  It  has an easy, automatic setting as well!!

©Photo Ts/ my garden

Sunday; 2/12/2012

Happy day any day...Titania;

Sepia Saturday 154; Bridges of sighs;

The most famous or infamous Bridge of  Sighs.

The Bridge of Sighs,  Ponte dei Sospiri 

is a bridge located in Venice. The enclosed bridge is made of white limestone and has windows with stone bars. It passes over the Rio di Palazzo and connects the New Prison to the interrogation rooms in the Doge's Palace. It was designed by Antoni Contino(whose uncle Antonio da Ponte had designed the Rialto Bridge and built in 1602.

The view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last view of Venice that convicts saw before their imprisonment. The bridge name, given by Lord Byron in the 19th century, comes from the suggestion that prisoners would sigh at their final view of beautiful Venice through the window before being taken 

 down to their cells. In reality, the days of inquisitions and summary executions were over by the time the bridge was built and the cells under the palace roof were occupied mostly by small-time criminals. In addition, little could be seen from inside the Bridge due to the stone grills covering the windows.

A local legend says that lovers will be granted eternal love and bliss if they kiss on a gondola at sunset under the Bridge Of Sighs.

Hertford Bridge,

 popularly known as the Bridge of Sighs, is a skyway joining two parts of Hertford College over New College Lane in Oxford, England. Its distinctive design makes it a city landmark.

The bridge is often referred to as the Bridge of Sighs because of its supposed similarity to the famous Bridge of Sighs in Venice. However, Hertford Bridge was never intended to be a replica of the Venetian bridge.

There is a false legend saying that many decades ago, a survey of the health of students was taken, and as Hertford College's students were the heaviest, the college closed off the bridge to force them to take the stairs, giving them extra exercise. However, if the bridge is not used, the students actually climb fewer stairs than if they use the bridge.

The Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge

is a covered bridge belonging to St John's College of Cambridge University. It was built in 1831 and crosses the River Cam between the college's Third Court and New Court. The architect was Henry Hutchinson]

It is named after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, although they have little architecturally in common beyond the fact that they are both covered. 

A common myth states that it was the students who named this bridge "bridge of sighs," as the context of its existing within the college grounds means that the "sighs" are those of pre-exam students. This belief probably has much to do with the function of the bridge—linking two quadrangles of St John's College together in a covered path, as opposed to Kitchen Bridge, which is an open-air bridge. Students are rumoured for their sighs on proceeding from their quarters on the Backs to the tutor's offices in the main college quadrangle.

Långholmsbron 

 is a bridge in central Stockholm, Sweden. Connecting the major island Södermalm to the minor island Långholmen.

The bridge was formerly called Spinnhusbron ("The spinning house Bridge") in reference to the precursor to the Långholmen prison, and, popularly, Suckarnas bro ("The Bridge of Sighs"), also in reference to the prison. 

The Virginia Street Bridge in Reno, Nevada,

known for being the place where newly-divorced women coming from the Washoe County Courthouse would toss their wedding rings into the Truckee River.

Now, build a bridge and walk over to Sepia Saturday 154

Sepia Saturday 154;

Thursday; new shoes...

come on ...walkies...

The oldest known leather shoe, about 5500 years old, found in Armenia.

The foot contains more bones than any other single part of the body. Though it has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in relation to vastly varied terrain and climate conditions, the foot is still vulnerable to environmental hazards such as sharp rocks and hot ground, against which shoes can protect.

The earliest known shoes are sandals dating from approximately 7,000 or 8,000 B.C. The world's oldest leather shoe, made from a single piece of cowhide laced with a leather cord along seams at the front and back, was found in a cave in Armenia in 2008 and is believed to date to 3,500 B.C. Ötzi the Iceman's shoes, dating to 3,300 BC, featured brown bearskin bases, deerskin side panels, and a bark-string net, which pulled tight around the foot.

 However, it is estimated that shoes may have been used long before this, but it is difficult to find evidence of the earliest footwear due to the highly perishable nature of early shoes. By studying the bones of the smaller toes (as opposed to the big toe), it was observed that their thickness decreased approximately 40,000 to 26,000 years ago. This led archaeologists to deduce that wearing shoes resulted in less bone growth, resulting in shorter, thinner toes. These earliest designs were very simple in design, often mere "foot bags" of leather to protect the feet from rocks, debris, and cold. They were more commonly found in colder climates.

Many early natives in North America wore a similar type of footwear known as the moccasin. These are tight-fitting, soft-soled shoes typically made out of leather or bison hides. Many moccasins were also decorated with various beads and other adornments. Moccasins were not designed to get wet, and in wet weather and warm summer months, most Native Americans went barefoot

As civilizations began to develop, thong sandals (the precursors of the modern flip-flop) were worn. This practice dates back to pictures of them in ancient Egyptian murals from 4,000 B.C. One pair found in Europe was made of papyrus leaves and dated to be approximately 1,500 years old. They were also worn in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus Christ. Thong sandals were worn by many civilizations and made from a wide variety of materials. Ancient Egyptian sandals were made from papyrus and palm leaves. The Masai of Africa made them out of rawhide. In India, they were made from wood. In China and Japan, rice straw was used. The leaves of the sisal plant were used to make twine for sandals in South America, while the natives of Mexico used the Yucca plant.

The foot contains more bones than any other single part of the body. Though it has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in relation to vastly varied terrain and climate conditions, the foot is still vulnerable to environmental hazards such as sharp rocks and hot ground, against which shoes can protect.

While thong sandals were commonly worn, many people in ancient times, such as the Egyptians, Hindu and Greeks, saw little need for footwear, and most of the time, preferred being barefoot. The Egyptians and Hindus made some use of ornamental footwear, such as a soleless sandal known as a "Cleopatra", which did not provide any practical protection for the foot. The ancient Greeks largely viewed footwear as self-indulgent, unaesthetic and unnecessary. Shoes were primarily worn in the theater, as a means of increasing stature, and many preferred to go barefoot. Athletes in the Ancient Olympic Games participated barefoot – and naked Even the gods and heroes were primarily depicted barefoot, and the hoplite warriors fought battles in bare feet and Alexander the Great conquered his vast empire with barefoot armies. The runners of Ancient Greece are also believed to have run barefoot. 

The Romans, who eventually conquered the Greeks, and adopted many aspects of their culture, did not adopt the Greek perception of footwear and clothing. Roman clothing was seen as a sign of power, and footwear was seen as a necessity of living in a civilized world, although the slaves and paupers usually went barefoot.

 There are many references to shoes being worn in the Bible. During weddings of this period, a father would give his son-in-law a pair of shoes, to symbolize the transfer of authority. Slaves were also commonly barefoot, and shoes were considered badges of freedom since biblical times:

A common casual shoe in the Pyrenees during the Middle Ages are espadrilles. These are sandals with braided jute soles and a fabric upper portion, and often includes fabric laces that tie around the ankle. The term is French and comes from the esparto grass. The shoes originate in the Catalonian region of Spain as early as the 13th century, and were commonly worn by peasants in the farming communities in the area.

By the 15th Century, pattens became popular by both men and women in Europe. These are commonly seen as the predecessor of the modern high-heeled shoe while the poor and lower classes in Europe, as well as slaves in the New World, were barefoot.

 In the 15th century, the Crakow was fashionable in Europe. This style of shoe is named because it is thought to have originated in Kraków, the capitol of Poland. The style is characterized by the point of the shoe, known as the "polaine", which often was supported by a whalebone tied to the knee to prevent the point getting in the way while walking.

 Also during the 15th century, chopines were created in Turkey, and were usually 17.7-20.3 cm high. These shoes became popular in Venice and throughout Europe, as a status symbol revealing wealth and social standing. 

During the 16th century, royalty started wearing high-heeled shoes to make them look taller or larger than life, such as Catherine de Medici or Mary I of England. By 1580, even men wore them, and a person with authority or wealth was often referred to as, "well-heeled.

Many medieval shoes were made using the turnshoe method of construction, in which the upper was turned flesh side out, and was lasted onto the sole and joined to the edge by a seam. The shoe was then turned inside-out so that the grain was outside. Some shoes were developed with toggled flaps or drawstrings to tighten the leather around the foot for a better fit. The turnshoe method was replaced by the welted method around 1500.

Eventually the modern shoe, with a sewn-on sole, was devised. Since the 17th century, most leather shoes have used a sewn-on sole. This remains the standard for finer-quality dress shoes today. Until around 1800, shoes were made without differentiation for the left or right foot. Such shoes are now referred to as "straights.

Only gradually did the modern foot-specific shoe become standard.

Since the mid-20th Century, advances in rubber, plastics, synthetic cloth, and industrial adhesives have allowed manufacturers to create shoes that stray considerably from traditional crafting techniques. Leather, which had been the primary material in earlier styles, has remained standard in expensive dress shoes, but athletic shoes often have little or no real leather. Soles, which were once laboriously hand-stitched on, are now more often machine stitched or simply glued on. Many of these newer materials, such as rubber and plastics, have made shoes less biodegradable. It is estimated that most mass-produced shoes require 1000 years to degrade in a landfill. Some shoemakers picked up on the issue and began to produce shoes made entirely from degradable materials.

In 2007, the global shoe industry had an overall market of $107.4 billion, in terms of revenue, and is expected to grow to $122.9 billion by the end of 2012. Shoe manufacturers in the People's Republic of China account for 63% of production, 40.5% of global exports and 55% of industry revenue. However, many manufacturers in Europe dominate the higher-priced, higher value-added end of the market.

Courtesy Wikipdia

More intersting facts about footwear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe

Wednesday; Bookshelf;

Beautifully written but a very disturbing novel.

 January 1692 - May 1692/ 

Page 162/ ... Within  the  week, we would hear from  Richard that on that day, on that exact hour, a four year old girl, Dorcas Good, was examined by three judges in the Salem Town jail. Her little feet and hands were bound by iron manacles so she could not send her spirit out and torment further the girls who were her accusers. They would later return Dorcas to her underground cell, where her mother had been sitting chained in the dark ...

The absence of  kindness,  feelings, humanity, is abhorable. The cruelty, harshness and meanness frightening.

Zealots and Perverts  are still around doing the work of their gods whoever and whatever they are, the nature of humans has not changed.

Loui our little holiday guest;

Open please, I am here...

...I was looking forward to this holiday...

...it was so tasty...

...if you don't mind I am a bit tired...

...now I have a little nap.

 Loui the Westie;

©Photos/text Ts