Thursday, April 12, 2012

Vote for Lowell Textile History in 3D! (and my amazing mom)

One of my mom's award-finalist 3D models of Lowell, Massachusetts: the Boott Mills complex on the Merrimack River. Part of this section is used as a museum dedicated to the history of the textile mill era in New England

Readers, my mom—and my textile-history-rich hometown, especially its schoolchildren!—need your help.

I may have mentioned my amazing mom Beryl Reid a time or two or three zillion. My mom is the kind of woman who can do ANYTHING. When she's visiting I might come home from work to discover she's reupholstered all the furniture in fabulous fabric with lovely piping, sewn up 67 cloth diapers and a bevy of baby carriers, repaired the bookshelf, designed several dozen intricate three-dimensional building models to appear on Google Earth and done some intense genealogical research--all while my daughter was napping after a fun-filled trip to the Central Park Zoo.

Well, maybe not all in one naptime. Anyway, I bring her to your attention once again because her Lowell collection--200+ three-dimensional models of buildings in my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, which you can see on Google Earth--is one of only 6 finalists worldwide in Google's "Model Your Town" contest. Guys and gals, this is a really big deal! And she needs YOUR vote to win! (You can vote here--make sure to click on her set of models before voting, or it'll accidentally vote for a different set).

What's the sewing connection? Seriously, it doesn't get more textile-tastic than Lowell.

Also, if my mom wins, the prize is a donation of $25,000 to the Lowell public schools—very fitting, since my parents are both retired public school teachers, and my brother and I both attended the Lowell public schools. Lowell is a large, diverse working-class city made of up immigrants and their descendents from many eras, from the Irish workers who originally worked in the mills in the 1800s to Cambodian refugees who resettled in Lowell in the 1980s. And the schools could really use the funds.

So, please take a look at the contest--and if you like my mom's models of Lowell...

...please vote for her!

P.S. My husband and I had our wedding in Lowell, in a park right by one of the old boarding houses the mill girls used to live in:

Wedding 2007

5 comments:

  1. YAY! I VOTED! Hope your mum wins--her work is AMAZING (as is she!!!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. She got my vote! (Sorry, Kujawsko-Pomorskie...)

    ReplyDelete
  3. As usual, your mom did an awesome job! My vote is in!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks to all of you from me (and my mom!)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Voted! What amazing work! I live not too far from Lowell and my brother currently resides there- I am such a nerdy bird that I get chills thinking of the mill girls and the town steeped in its mill history. Thank you for reminding me of the museums- I haven't visited in a while. I plan on heading over to George's Textile Co. I hear it's great. J'adore tissu!

    ReplyDelete

I'd love to hear from you! But no ads please--I'll just have to delete them.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...