Bothilda (Thilda) is my great-great grandmother. She was born March 11, 1848 in Kristianstad, Skåne, Sweden.
When Thilda was 8 years old, her father passed away. This left her mother alone to provide for Thilda and her younger sister. Life was hard and they were poor. Thilda had to begin earning a living when she was only about seven years old, making match boxes in a match factory.
She learned from a very young age to be very industrious.
Her mother remarried and her step-father was an alcoholic and very mean to Thilda. Her mother could no longer stand to see Thilda hurt so she sent her to live with a family friend who was very wealthy.
While living with the Akerhjelms, she enjoyed a peaceful life and was treated very well, but it was still hard for her to be away from her mother and sister.
Because she was living in a well privileged household, she learned many useful skills. She became expert in carding, spinning, weaving, knitting and sewing, cooking, and setting a table fit for royalty.
This excellent training was to later be the salvation of her own family both in her native land and after she emigrated to the United States.
I will share more of this story in the future when we do another lesson about her.
I wanted to help Thilda come to life for the kids, so in planning this unit, I had the idea come to me that we could learn some of the skills (at a very basic level) that she was so proficient at. The first of these is carding and spinning wool.
I found some wool (from an Icelandic breed sheep named Dahlia, who lives on a farm in Minnesota… via Etsy).
We are learning how to card the wool and then spin it into yarn, using a drop spindle. After we have enough yarn, we are going to knit a hat (or more than one depending on how much yarn we get spun in time) – on a hat loom because I don’t know how to knit for real and I can only handle so many new skills at the moment. Haha.
I realize that this is a bit ambitious, but we’re up to the task. 🙂 I want us to get a feel for what it was really like to start completely from scratch.
I know some people don’t like long videos, so the top video is the short version and the bottom video is the longer version (long version is mostly so I could record more of the details)
