Even in the 20^th century, elegant hats, graceful hats, tiny hats….were still being worn into the 1950’s and 1960’s.  In fact, I even remember my mother wearing a tiny hat to church with delicate feathers and lace netting that barely covered her eyes . It perched saucily on top of her brunette curls at a clever angle making my mother look both elegant and regal as we marched behind her like ducklings in a row. And heaven forbid her daughters were naked of hats before church! Out came the inevitable hankie and bobby pin to fasten a scrap of lace
to our hair before entering.

Take the hats that westerners wear. Today, it still is a masculine symbol to wear a cowboy hat in places like Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana. And how many men have you seen that wear baseball caps? And how many of them do you know that collect them!

Hats were designed to origjnally protect us from the elements and shield us from falling debris. Women wore them to protect their faces and complexions. Man began wearing them, over time, as a status symbol.

Today, people order a lot of our western sunbonnets to shield their faces from the sun and wind while doing gardening work.  Why not visit our bonnet page to see our selection, one of the largest western sunbonnet choices on the internet. We guarantee you’ll be happy with the choices

M. Jacobs specializes in western women’s bonnets and aprons for reenactors  at www.rawhidestudios.com/bonnets Due to spam, this blog accepts only approved comments c/o our email address at www.rawhidestudios.com

And I just wanted to throw my 2 cents in about what I see. And tell you why it matters to me……….

I’m all for hope and optimism! But I also believe in healthy doses of reality. I think as a country we’ve forgotten to go back to basics, giving thanks to The One who ultimately has given us everything we could ever possibly need. As we look to governments and bureaucrats to solve our problems, we’ve forgotten The One who can easily solve all of our woes. I am worried that people look to the wrong things and the wrong entities to change the state of affairs we are now seeing and living with. We are looking on the wrong place!

This Christmas, as you look at your family and your loved one, as you are surrounded by gifts and material items, think about what you will do tomorrow if you had no one to turn to and who you would rely on for your future…..the very governments and bureaucrats who created the very mess we live in today? Or our Heavenly Father who wants only what is best for us!

Blessings on you and your family this Christmas Season

Please do not post if you are looking to provide a return link to your website. Many of the posts do not even apply to any of the current subject matter! I will not respond, nor approve the links and messages.

If you wish to contact Rawhide Gifts and Gallery, please do so through the website, a legitimate avenue for contacting us.

I wear one of the wider ones and find that it’s not an intrusive bracelet in looks or color. I have noticed that it really doesn’t leave any green tinge on my skin, but that could be just the way the bracelet works with my physical chemistry.

It’s easy to clean; I just polish with a toothbrush occasionally and that’s it. i wear it at work, in the shower, with street clothes. It’s just a nice lovely bracelet.

I only have about 9 of these lovely bracelets left and will probably not order anymore after this. So what you see on the page is all there is

Visit http://www.rawhidestudios.com/bracelets/ to see them.

Anyway, this last year has brought many changes; some good, some bad I guess. As with every year. I’m sure it’s been that way with you, as well. For us, we’ve had to streamline things in our brick and mortar store, take a good hard look at the books. We’ve realized that in our town, people are just not supporting us like we thought that they would the the last 5 years. The mall giant, Wal-Mart, remains ever popular and people in our area are far more interested in electronic items than in the unique, hard to find, unusual, different and rare quality items that we looked so hard to fit our store with for the last 5 years with.

So, with a very heavy heart, we made the sad decision to close the gift part of our store, put much, if not all of these items online for sale. For many of them, there is only one available. Sometimes there might be one or two. In any event, we will make sure to mark these items so that you will know how many are actually available. They will be usually shipped priority because we have found that priority shipping (Postal Service) is faster in general, and usually receives better care. UPS often will bruise and bash their boxes about.

Should you decide that you would like more than one item, you can certainly have us box up several things, choose a different shipping method and of course your shipping rates will be combined. Your shipping rates would of course go down. You also do not have to use PayPal on our website. Feel free to email us, let us know if you are interested in anything in particular and we can hold certain items for you by credit card, then combine your order for shipping as soon as possible.

Though sad for us, as we close out a chapter of our lives, it is a way for you to bring some lovely things that we worked hard to bring into our store for people to choose as gifts. Now, may they be wonderful gifts for you or a loved one instead!

We will be taking photos, adding descriptions and creating web  pages for our store items within the next 4 to 6 weeks. It takes and enormous amount of time to work with even a small amount of inventory so please be patient with us!

Rawhide Gifts and Gallery

I love guessing where all of the packages that people order are going. Then I play guessing games as to who they are buying what for; did they buy this windmill teapot for mom or gramma? Did they buy this bootjack for a cowgirl rodeo queen or just a little girl that hopes to get a horse one day? Maybe they bought these bone feather earrings for someone that collects unusual earrings?

Then sometimes I get to visit with people on the phone who actually tell me why they are buying what they do and who for! That’s even better! They have kids or grand kids that have a passion for Little House on the Prairie and want our bonnets for example Or someone’s husband has suddenly developed a yen to learn how to barbeque and wants one of our Cowboy Cookbook’s, and visiting with these people from all over is so wonderful that it’s special to me each year.

You see, all of YOU give ME a Christmas gift each year, too. The gift of yourselves, even if you never know it. You tell me that I’m diligent when, if your address won’t go through and I call you back to get an alternate one, I work to find another way to get your package delivered. You email me to let me know that you are happy with our service or the quality of our products.

As a small business that can’t possibly compete with a huge company, yes, you people give me a Christmas present every year. I just want to say thank you back.

Merry Christmas!

Each year we see an increase in the amount that we sell. It’s interesting to me because I really saw it an only a ‘western’ thing yet it’s not, I guess. I guess I’m learning a lesson, a valuable lesson, it ‘judge not’!

You see, because I take the orders and do the shipping, I see that while many of the orders come from places that are western in nature like my own state of Wyoming, (these places are California and Montana, Colorado and Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, for example) I’ve been consistantly surprised by the latest orders of the New England area and Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Singapore and the Bahamas.

Shame on you girl! (meaning me, lol) now who said that there weren’t horses anywhere else in the world?! I guess I will continue to keep on learning my lessons in ‘judge not’ while I continue to thank you all for buying our western bootjacks and thank you for the kind words you send us in your emails with your orders!

Merry Christmas to you folks and thanks again! Enjoy those bootjacks in good health

Madeleine

The coffee grinder is a replica of a traditional old style coffee grinder and grinds whole beans. Perfect in a traditional style Dutch kitchen or a blue-white kitchen…or even an old farm style kitchen!

These canisters are about 4 3/4″ tall and across the top have the english and dutch version of the contents (Coffee, Tea or Sugar) and each container shows floral and the traditional Dutch mills.

In beautiful cobalt blues. Visit http://www.rawhidestudios.com/delft/ to see more of our new delft items or to order our soon-to-be-discontinued items!

This fourth seemed special to me some how. Nothing different happened; the fireworks weren’t anymore special, and we didn’t change anything. But I admit that our world has definitely changed and taken a U-turn since 9-11. I don’t take anything for granted anymore. Any maybe part of it is that I’m older now.

I take my vote more seriously. I am more engaged in watching politics. I think the politics at the state level are very important as a business owner and I watch them ever so carefully because now, almost every law seems to affect me, adversely it seems. I watch the stage of world affairs. I care.

It is true. Freedom isn’t really free. Not anywhere. Not in other countries and not in yours and mine. Brave people who spoke up and made their words and ideals count, who took a risk, who took many incredible risks actually, died in so many wars so that you and I could continue to have the rights that we often blithely take for granted today.

This weekend, I want to take the time to say thank you and make sure that I didn’t take those rights for granted.

Thank you…..Thank you to all the men and women that were brave for all of us.