Pet Parade

Grades are due in three days, so of course I am quilting.

I entered one of the more tractable chickens in our local pet parade a few weeks ago and aside from winning the prize for "Most Unusual Pet," we also got a gift bag with treats and coupons and pens and such, including a t-shirt.

I hardly ever wear printed t-shirts, so for some bizarre reason (like grades being due in three days), I decided to make it into a tiny quilt for Steu's dog crate.

Yep. Grades are due in three days.

Wedding Quilt

Our friends Andy and Hope got married earlier this year in a wonderful ceremony on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. Everything was just beautiful--low key but full of love.

Weddings are tough for me, largely because of the expense of a gift. I usually can't afford to get something off the gift registry. I thought and thought and thought about what to get Hope and Andy and finally decided to make them a quilt.

I used five pairs of jeans. Four came from LB and one (the darkest) from me. I particularly like the hickory stripe jeans border. That particular pair had been ripped down the front of one leg, so I really had to do a lot of piecing, especially on the last strip in order to get enough fabric. Still, I love to see piecing on a quilt--to me, it tells a story.

Here's the story of this quilt:


I went with a long cabin pattern because Hope and Andy bought some rural property in the foothills of the Ozarks and are developing it.

Andy plays the stand-up bass, so I inserted a little scrap of vintage square dance fabric.


He met Hope at a dance, so I put her in too. Hope is prettier though.


Finally, I put a block for the two of them dancing at the center of the log cabin.


I didn't use any batting because the denim is already fairly heavy. Hope works for an environmental firm, so I knew she wouldn't mind some paint splatters and spots on LB's jeans. I hate the idea of working so hard on a project only to have the recipients decide it's too nice to use.


For the backing, I used some vintage blue and green fabric (circa early '60s, I think) a friend gave me. I've got lots and lots of this fabric, so I expect it to show up in future quilts too.



On the back, I signed the quilt by appliqueing on a pocket from the hickory stripe jeans.


I wish them both much happiness.

Ephemeral Chaos

I've got a bunch of dotty type items today, some about ephemera. Hence the title.

Here we go, in roughly chronological order.

First, here's the story of a collection. A few months ago, I went to my favorite antique store and picked up some inexpensive CDVs. In looking at them, I realized they were mostly by the same photographer, Mrs. W. A. Reed of Quincy, Illinois.

I was intrigued by the location, but even more, by the fact that the photographer was a woman. Curious, I googled her and found out how amazing she was. So when I returned to the antique store, I had to buy the rest of the CDVs. I also picked up some mother-of-pearl buttons, an ironstone dish, and some nightstand reading material.



Next, my students had decorated the classroom this week.

I made a quilt for Ann to thank her for taking me to the World Series game.


Knowing that Ann's taste in quilts is much more modern than mine, I found some great inspiration on Pinterest, which I adore beyond all reason.

Finally, I got around to cleaning my sewing machine and whipping up a cover out of an old feed sack I had in my stash.


Today, I did some major yarn stash reorganizing, which I am hoping will inspire some more projecting.

Yay!

Fiddle Blankets

We have a joint birthday party to attend this weekend and wanted to come up with some nice gifts. Don't worry, the recipients don't read this blog (I think). One guy is an attorney and the other is a union rigger who travels the country doing concerts and such. Seriously, what could I get with no budget?

Fortunately, I've been diligent about keeping my craft room tidy. I've so much more to do, but I've been deaccessioning, completing, and most importantly, tidying up afterwards.

Both friends are fiddlers, which is how I know them, so I decided to make what I now know are called "fiddle blankets." Fiddle blankets sit in the fiddle case between the fiddle and bow and protect one from the other.

First, I got on facebook to see what kind of cases these two guys had. Fortunately, both use the same modern, single-fiddle case. Next, I went to the violin shop where I used to work, took some measurements (8.25" by 23.5" for the record), and asked some questions about fabrics and drape.

My old boss dug through a box in the back and popped out with these beauties:


There's tambour work, silk crewel, wool, velvets, silk ribbons, pinked scallops, cording, machine quilting, and just more gorgeousness than I could believe. Old cases were shaped (and often made by coffin makers btw), but I didn't have to worry about that.

For the backing, I chose some burgundy silk and a vintage poly lining. The bias tape I had from a vintage apron project I planned about 8 years ago and never executed. I probably shouldn't have used the yellow, but I did, and I've made my peace with it. Ideally, the fabric closest to the fiddle should be relatively slick so as not to scratch the varnish or leave lint.


For the top of one blanket, I dug into my stash of quilting cottons and made 3" blocks. I've collected quite a few music and dance fabrics. I also needed more blocks to harmonize (I so didn't intend that pun) with the chocolate and raspberry on the back. That color combination, it turns out, was popular in the nineteenth century, so I supplemented with a variety of reproduction cottons.


For the other blanket--and this was a fairly emotionally wrenching choice--I cut a panel from a vintage skirt I'd bought on ebay ages ago. I'd never worn the skirt as it was teen-sized with about a 22" waist, and I had even gone so far as to take out the side seam and waistband years ago.

I went back and forth about cutting into it just to give it away, but my friend Willie had stopped by for a visit. Willie is, to put it mildly, a minimalist--as in live-on-the-beach-in-Baja minimalist. The combination of him lounging nearby while I worked, the pleasure of crafting in a tidy craft room, Steu laving Willie's feet, and one of surely the last warm breezes of the year coming in through the open window, came over me. I cut that fabric.


I'm glad.

Here they are together. I hope my friends like them. I figure at the very worst, they can use them for a table runner or wall hanging.


________________

A few other quick pics just to get them over with:

For LB's birthday last month, he asked for a chocolate bombe. I made two as I owed a favor to another friend. There's nearly two pounds of chocolate in each. Inside, there's white chocolate mousse, chocolate mousse, a layer of pecan cake, and the outside is covered in chocolate ganache and chocolate curls.


Second, the cochineal scarf is progressing beautifully.


More on that another time.

ps: I forgot to mention that for the batting of the fiddle blankets, I used some wool flannel I had in my stash. Total cost of projects (not factoring in that at one point I did actually spend money on all this stuff): $0.00!

Piecework

The latest Piecework is out to subscribers, but has not yet hit the bookstores. I've had a chance to leaf through it, but not to read everything. It's all about textiles for the historical reenactor.

Years ago, the doyennes of Civil War knitting declared that there was "no such thing" as i-cord during the Civil War. Fortunately, more research has revealed that such a thing did exist. I was glad to see that this myth, while not exactly debunked, was not perpetuated in the article on Civil War sontags.

I look forward to reading the issue when it hits the stands.

As far as piece-work goes, I've finally finished a quilt block for a quilt raffle in Jacksonville, IL. Nothing fancy, it's just a basic applique block. I loosely based it on a Baltimore Album Quilt block from an 1847 wedding quilt. If you know how to "read" an applique quilt, it's based on block D3 in the photograph. We were given three fabrics to work with and allowed to add more. Since we were given only fat-eighths, I had to add a fabric for the background.

Somehow, in spite of a light box, one of my branches ended up slightly askew. I washed the block, let it dry, and tried to sleep on it for two nights. When the time came to mail it, I just couldn't. All I could see was the error. I ripped out all those teeny-tiny stitches done with silk thread, erased my pencil marks, reset the branch, and celebrated with some lambic.

I Spy with My Own Little Eye

• a stack of ungraded papers.
• a copy of the anniversary issue of Vogue Knitting. I have knit the anniversary scarf and made up the flowers. It's been up in a grocery sack in the sewing room waiting to be assembled since December.
• a unfinished bit of hairpin lace.
• Emma, which I am supposed to be reading for a KAL. I'm about three weeks behind. Neither Emma nor Mr. Knightley appeal to me much.
• a spool of blue quilting thread for a quilt I haven't been working on in months.
• an unfinished mardi gras stole. I did manage to knit 6 rows on it yesterday.
• a small fragment of fisherman's wool left over from a charity hat. It should be thrown away because the cats have taken to playing with it, but I just can't bring myself to toss it. It's just enough for a stripe.
• an ad for the orchid show at the Missouri Botanical Garden I would like to see. It ends in a week.
• an unfinishedFidget. I only need to knit about an inch, but have misplaced the pattern.
• Victorian Lace Today, set aside because I could not find my size 8s for a shawl I have no business starting.
• a single sock knit to the ball of the foot, so that LB could try it on this morning. In the less than five minutes between when he tried it on & I went to the kitchen for the Pepsi One, a certain cat (probably Yma) bit the yarn in half.
• a gossip mag and two half-completed crosswords my sweetie presented to me as a surprise this morning. At first he just said, "I thought you would like these," but when asked where they came from, said "The dumpster...but they were on the top."
• the inevitable partially-drunk can of Pepsi One (sweetened with Splenda).
• a short stack of unread magazines. The bigger stack got shoved onto the floor and is out of the frame.
• a Bud Plant catalogue. I have had a $30 credit with them for at least 3 years, waiting on me to order something, anything.
• Three yarns and a crochet stitch pattern to help reproduce a civil war scarf I saw in a photo. It's not working very well.

The only completed things in the photo are the following:

• A coffee-stained quilt
• The deluxe DVD of Pride and Prejudice watched in one sitting yesterday.
• a handout I wrote for an upcoming Civil War dance program

Jesus. Is it any wonder "Chaos" is my name?

Cat Mat

Inspired by Wendy and by a flyer I picked up at a Craft Mafia show, I decided to make a cat mat and sprinkled catnip inside the blocks as I sewed them together.

No new fabric was purchased for this project. It all came out of used clothing, except for the light blue flannel print, which had been lingering in my stash for a few years. That makes it free, right?

The cat mat was very well received.

There was sniffing.

There was rolling

There was a bit of biting and plenty of licking.

But it turns out I should have made two.

Sanitary Fairs

Without much notice, I was drafted into participating in a sanitary fair next month.

Sanitary fairs can be a challenge to reenact, simply because of the scale. It's a bit like trying to reenact a world's fair. Many were huge (more than two miles long) and had buildings specially constructed for the purpose. It's simply not practical to reenact one of the larger fairs. Still, smaller towns held fairs and there were even children's bazaars.

If you plan on recreating a specific fair, good luck to you. Get started on your research now, and in six or seven years, you may be ready. Another option is to research sanitary fairs in general and pull your scenarios from several different fairs. To get an idea of a typical sanitary fair think of a combination of a church bazaar, a silent-auction fundraiser with goods from local businesses, a raffle, a cafeteria, a kitchy museum, and a world's fair. The whole place would be covered with bunting and flags. Each booth would be decorated with more bunting and swags of greenery or flowers.

Short of knitting until my arms fall off, I've had to find some other options to recreate. Specific references will have to come later, but at the moment I've been reading:

• Jasper Cross, "Mississippi Valley Sanitary Fair," Missouri Historical Review 46 (1952): 237-46.
• William Y. Thompson, "Sanitary Fairs of the Civil War," Civil War History 4.1 (1956): 51-67.*

One of the first things you will have to figure out is how to deal with money issues. Sanitary fairs were wholly charitable, although they did have some paid staff. Today, getting reenactors and businesses to donate goods can be difficult, especially if you are trying to convey the sheer volume of goods present at a typical fair. Some portion of the fair should include money raised for preservation, but you may want to let reenactors either sell their items outright or pretend to sell them.

For example, women of the south held bazaars to raise money for gunboats and raffled off what became known as gunboat quilts. Typically done in brodierie perse, like this image, this kind of quilt could easily take hundreds of hours to reproduce. Letting go of it, even for historic preservation, would be difficult, and the money raised would likely be far less than the actual value of the quilt.

Following are some options and roles for your reenactors that would add to a more authentic fair-going experience:

• Hold an opening parade with military divisions, farmers with produce wagons, carts of children singing, etc.
• Have two people stationed at the entrance to charge admission and/or collect tickets. There were season passes, but daily ticket prices were along the lines of 25 cents for adults and 10 cents for children.
• Hand out or sell copies of the daily newspaper. Many fairs published their own papers, sort of like a literary magazine with news of the fair, prize results, poems, advertisements, and patriotic sentiments.
• Reproduce some patriotic CDVs and have children sell them to earn a certificate.
• Set up an art gallery. There are frame shops that specialize in Civil War artwork and they might be willing to set up a display.
• Hold raffles for actual or pretend items. Items raffled at fairs included farmland, horses, pianos, a billiard table, a buggy, framed pictures, rifles, a ship's model, silver bars, and unsold merchandise. Raffles were actually controversial, as some considered them a form of gambling. Some reenactors could pretend to object to the raffle.
• Hold an auction for letters and documents by "well-known personalities." These could be copied long-hand from printed texts.
• Cast ballots (at $1 each) for favorite general. A variant would be to cast ballots for the reenactors, as in best overall display, most patriotic display, etc.
• Set up donation boxes to collect money for the Freedman's Aid Society, Refugee Aid Society, Soldiers' Home, Soldiers' Orphans Home, etc.
• Have a lecture, concert, performance, ball, or tableau. All were a part of many fairs.
• Have a visit and speech by a historic personage. President Lincoln spoke at the Philadelphia and Baltimore fairs.
• Display some curiosities and relics like taxidermy or captured flags.
• Arrest a female pickpocket, put a placard around her neck proclaiming her as such, and parade her through the fair.
• Sell refreshments. Many fairs had historically-themed restaurants were local women dressed in "colonial" dress to serve old-timey New England meals.
• Present a flag to the president of the fair for all his efforts.

The variety of handicrafts and goods sold was enormous and included silverware, glassware, all kinds of groceries and merchandise from local stores and businesses. Farmers donated produce and local women busied themselves making fancy goods like pen wipers, bookmarks, knitted items, cushions, linens and the like. Foreign countries donated goods like coal, artwork, and cases of champagne. One fair included items like fans and rings carved by Confederate prisoners of war in exchange for tobacco. It might be possible to find some carved items and market them as such. At the end of the fair, pretend to box up the left over items to be shipped off to the next fair.

There's lots more to be said on sanitary fairs, with room for much more research particularly in primary sources, but that's half the fun.

___________________________

* You'll have to trust me that I've read more recent articles. These are just the two I happen to have with me today and they have fairly detailed accounts.

Sick

Today. Today I am sick. Spring cold. It's not a pretty thing.

While a wee bit of knitting has been happening, along with watching A Soul Haunted by Painting and Sex in a Cold Climate, I'm too foggy to be articulate.

Fortunately, I saved this link to pre-1850s American quilts. Tour, enjoy, stay healthy.

The Paths of an Obsession

In my typical fashion when I have a project due, I'm currently immersed in researching something else, particularly the Mississippi Valley Sanitary Fair of 1865. I've unearthed all kinds of fascinating tidbits, but I've also accidently turned up some amazing hints about machine sewn quilts during the 1860s.

There's always been a bit of a debate about how charity quilts were assembled--hand quilted or tied. Almost all I've seen have been hand quilted. The quilts made to raffle off for soldier's aid were often very, very fancy.

Go to this page on the Ladies' Union Aid Society.

Scroll own to see the photo of the interior of the Boston branch of the US Sanitary Commission (the St. Louis fair was run by the Western Sanitary Commission, btw).

Two more photos down is a closeup of a quilt to be sent to the troops. Compared to the scale of the chair, the quilt blocks must have been quite large, say 8-10". In addition, it's pretty obvious that the quilting is done by machine.

That probably means something to only a handful of people, but let me just say--it's pretty cool information.

Clean Sweep

I have a good feeling about 2007.

It started out really well at a great party/jam session and with a Burning Man(dolin) ceremony and about 7 kinds of sausage from G&W. There's nothing I could put my finger on that said why it was one of the best parties I've been to in ages, but everyone just seemed comfortable in their own skin. Yep, I really think that was it. There was no desperate cleavage exposure, posturing, egos, or angst. I think we're all growing up. Oh, and there were kittens.

This morning had just the right tone of surrealism that I like. A neighbor invited LB over to hear a eulogy for his alcoholism and to help bury beer cans in the back yard. I hear I was invited too, but I think the fact that I stopped speaking to this guy about 6 months ago has finally registered. Here's to boundaries in 2007.

Then a lesbian couple down the street invited LB to be the first person to cross their threshold in 2007. Apparently they tried a woman last year (the soon-to-be-ex wife of the aforementioned alcoholic neighbor) and had a horrible year. That meant that the first person to cross my threshold in 2007 was LB. How nice! Just what I would have chosen had I actually given it any thought.

And I spent the morning watching the Rose Bowl parade, working on a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and observing all the surrealism from afar. We've got two open houses to go to today, but that's it.

Delicious baked goods have been coming from my kitchen, knitting is happening, a utility quilt got finished in 3 days and slept under last night, and my sister liked the gauntlets I knit her.



Yep, I've got a good feeling about the coming year.

The Big Picture

Anyone who has quilted knows how easy it can be to lose sight of the big picture. We spend hours and hours focusing on connecting one 2.5" block to another and tend to see every little error. We notice where our corners don't match, where we accidentally rotated a directional block, or where we had to piece.

It's only when the quilt is on the bed and we step back, that all those minor details disappear. Because our faces are finally more than a foot from each piece, we simply don't see any small errors anymore.

As I was working on patching the sweaters, all I could see were the patches. I had warned my friend about how hard it could be to match yarns, but she said, "Oh, one is a generic brown and the other is black. They won't be hard to match." Hah!

One was an unplied tweedy tan lambswool in a sportweight. I substituted a handspun, plied, natural sheepy tan. The other sweater wasn't really black; it was a charcoal heathered grey Pendleton lambswool. I substituted Brown Sheep fingering wool in black.

Every time I looked at the sweaters, all I could see were the patches. They were tidy, but they were patches.

At Duff's though, when they held them up across the table and admired, I couldn't see the patches at all, even when I looked for them.

My friend Vivian has a wonderful saying she got from her mother: "Looks pretty good from a galloping horse."

As Christmas starts to make you crazy, don't lose sight of the big picture.

Who cares if you buy your Christmas cookies from the grocery store? Or don't rubberstamp and embellish your Christmas cards? Or can't manage to decorate 11 themed trees?

Are you loved? Do you love? Really, that's all that matters.

_______________________

Of course, this week I noticed a woman I'm not particularly fond of, walking around with her dress tucked up in her underwear. I briefly debated about whether or not to tell her and decided not to. Her underwear wasn't actually showing, and I sure was getting a lot of amusement out of the whole situation.

I'm still wildly amused, but I'm not sure I really want to know how that fits into the big picture.

Oh, and the backlog has not changed, but my bee stripe sock has turned the heel and is past the gusset.

Starting Out

I read blogs regularly--okay, obsessively--and I deal with writing for a living. I have pretty high standards, which is why I've been avoiding writing a blog. The best blogs have a kind of unity, a strong theme. Go fug yourself--great blog. Knit and tonic--I adore, adore, adore her writing. I could post links to bad ones, but generally, I don't read bad blogs, which is exactly my point.

My blog?

Perhaps my blog should cover teaching and the hilarious student essay I got with the following sentences: "I was down in the basement playing swords with my friend Eric. I was Santa and Eric was the weird elf." Who wouldn't want to hear more about that?

Perhaps it should talk about knitting obsessively?

Perhaps civil war reenacting?

The cats? Junking? Dancing? Sewing? Quilting? People who annoy me? People I love? Lewis Carroll? Old-time music? Cooking? Flylady? The Oscars? Politics? Celebrities? Swedish weaving? Overshot coverlets? Vintage clothing? Antique dumbbells? Hello Kitty?

I had a professor who called me a dilettante once. It still burns, but it's seeming more and more likely that he was right.

Any blog I keep will never have any kind of unity. I do too many things. The only connection between some of those activities is that fact that it's me doing them.

Still, in order to post a comment on a certain blog, I was finally required to create my own.

So here it is, and in the immortal words of one of my 020 students, who ends every journal paragraph thus, "And that is that."