Good morning,

Happy Friday! I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter, which is about work by and for women’s hands.

Let’s kick off with the illustrator Tom Seidman Freud, who developed a lovely illustration technique involving hand colouring on stencil. FYI if you want to click through on this, it is a very sad story, so if you’re feeling fragile today just enjoy this illustration for a children’s Hebrew alphabet book:

Tom was born in Austria in 1892 into the assimilated bourgeois Jewish Freud family. Her given name was Marta Gertrud, but at age fifteen she chose to be called by the name “Tom.” The family wandered from Berlin to London, where Tom studied art. When she returned to Germany, she continued her studies in Munich where she published her first book of poems featuring her own illustrations.

http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/library/reading_corner/Pages/Tom_Seidmann_Freud.aspx

There’s a mini-genre of photo that I’ve not featured in Fem Fri in ages, which is women operating industrial machinery. This ends today with these photos of women welding Waterloo Bridge. And there’s more in the accompanying article!

By the time war broke out in 1939, 500 men were reportedly working on the bridge; by 1941, that number had dropped to 50. And so, as with other wartime labor shortages, the contractor, Peter Lind & Company, drafted in women to do the work. According to the U.K.-based Women’s Engineering Society, around 350 women worked on Waterloo Bridge.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/women-waterloo-bridge

Finally, enjoy the work of jeweller Ebba Goring, who makes pieces based on traditional handicrafts like crochet and knitting. So every ring is made for hands, and by hand. Here’s the full (I mean, to the extent that anything on Instagram can be “full”, I expect there were a load of boring bits in between as well) journey from design to making to the final piece:

And here’s a nice interview with Ebba about the materials and traditions she works with:

All my jewellery designs are inspired by a love of traditional needlework, and a passion to translate textile skills – handed down from generation to generation – into a material that will preserve them forever. I’m fascinated by changing the nature of a material. My designs start off in cotton thread, something that is malleable and perishable, but then I cast it in silver or gold and the piece become something that could last forever.

http://www.molliemakes.com/meet-the-maker/mollie-makes-meets-a-wooden-tree-ebba-goring/

Have a great weekend!

A xx.