Quilting – The Second Oldest Profession?

 

As a dedicated bibliophile and wordsmith, I’m always searching for unusual, collectible, or out-of-print books. Imagine my surprise when I saw this title on a spine of a volume at the local church rummage sale: “Still Stripping After 25 Years” by Eleanor Burns.

 

Even though my background in printing might suggest a different meaning of stripping to me – one related to mounting photographic negatives for making printing plates – I confess my first thought was “another Gypsy Rose Lee!”

 

The book is about someone’s career, but the author wasn’t a woodworker, a cartoonist, a farmer, a soldier, a mechanic, a tobacco worker or a burlesque queen. Out of curiosity, I looked up the term “stripping.” From the Old English “strypan,” to plunder, stripping refers to removing clothing or a covering from something.

 

Many professions describe the act of stripping as part of the job. When a superior officer deprives a soldier of honors, rank, privileges or possession, he is stripped. A farmer can clear or strip a field of vegetation. A woodworker can strip an exterior coating from a piece of furniture. A tobacco worker can remove or strip the leaves from stalks. A mechanic can damage or strip the threads of a screw or the teeth of a gear. A soldier can dismantle a firearm, piece by piece, again the act of stripping. A cartoonist who creates a syndicated multi-panel comic makes a strip.

 

In addition to striptease and graphic arts, the term stripping is legitimately used by quilters who use strips (each two and a half inches wide) of material to create a myriad of different elements for quilts. Thus, when quilter Eleanor Burns sought a title for her book on quilt making, she had a legitimate reason to suggest that her art all began by stripping.  In her over thirty years of quilting and seventy-five books to her credit, Burns has revitalized the art of quilting into a timely, enjoyable craft for many women.

 

What started out as an uncovering—a stripping—reversed meaning to become a covering, a quilt.

 

Funny how a first impression can be turned on its head, how a simple term can be found to have many meanings, and how the old adage is still true: Never judge a book by its cover!

 

Linda Donaldson of Hatfield, who for 27 years owned a printing and typesetting business, is a PSBVA volunteer and helped format our book,“Writers Who Quilt, Quilters Who Write” edited by Anne K. Kaler.

Linda currently works part time as a web copy writer for a local wholesaler of school and office furniture. Since 2002, Linda has been selling collectible, out-of-print used books online through Abebooks.com and Alibris.com as Prints and the Paper.

The role of QuiltHunter takes us on many authors’ adventures into the world of fabric, color, and design.  One of these authors is Jacqueline Winspear, creator of the post-Great War era psychologist and detective, Maisie Dobbs.

        Although every novel is a created world manipulated against the setting of a once-real world, Winspear has the ability to recreate the world of 1933 on many levels. Her character has overcome social, economic, educational, and personal obstacles to become an evolving amalgam of women of that period.  She starts as the thirteen-year-old motherless daughter of a London produce barrow man who first becomes a scullery maid in a rich caring household, where they discover and develop her intellect.  Her college career is interrupted by her service as a nurse both in besieged England and in France.  After the war, in which the love of her life is seriously disabled, Maisie returns to college and is mentored in detective work by a psychologist, Maurice, until she opens her own agency.  Her only spot of color is a blue silk dress which she wore when she first met her love. The image of that dress becomes a symbol of what her life could have been but probably won’t be.

Winspear’s ability to create an outward stimulus matching an inward inexpressible emotion is “spot on,” as the Brits say.  In an early novel Messenger of Truth, Maisie is researching death of an artist on brink of major revelation and success.  During her investigation she discovers that he has preserved a military greatcoat from the war, still muddy and bloods.  The sight so unnerves her that she buries “her head in the folds of rough wool, breathing in the musty smell that took her back to another time and place.” Just the feel of the old coat increases her resolve to find the killer at the same time it serves as a tug of memory for her and for us as readers.  We are relieved when she puts the coat back into the wardrobe, patting “the material one last time, acknowledging an essence caught in every thread, as if the fibers had absorbed every feeling, every sensation experienced by the owner in a time of war.” She has put her past behind her with this action.

 

As a woman of that age, Maisie prizes her hard-earned independence. She has just rejected a worthy man who has been courting her because she is afraid of losing her independence and becoming just a housewife.  To explain her action to herself, Maisie uses image of Icarus’s fatal flight too near the sun when its heat melted the wax on his wings and he plunged to his death because of his hubris.  The author also pinpoints Maisie’s conflicting emotions: “In spite of the sense of relief, she already felt the cool breeze of loneliness cross her heart.”

Maisie’s introspection parallels her fear of disrupting the social order in a male profession and suffered for it with loneliness.  Only her strength of training under her mentor lets her “ability to continue as she had begun, standing firmly on her own two feet.  Even though those same two feet had crumpled under her not so long ago.”

However, as her ability to ferret out the solutions to complicated crimes grows, so does Maisie’s mental health.  For example, when pressed to attend a fancy party, she thinks first of her treasured blue silk dress.  As a result of her new boldness, Maisie ventures out in black trousers and a long sleeveless blouse with a boat neckline and a matching sash at the hip at a time when trousers were just beginning to be acceptable.

        As she pursues her way to the truth about the artist’s death, “there were more threads for her to gather up and spin onto bobbins.  It was as if she were herself an artisan, standing before a giant loom with her skeins of wool, each one held ready to form part of the finished scene, the picture that would reveal the circumstances of Nick Bassington-Hope’s death.  All she had to do was to create the warp and then the weft, her shuttle flying in and out, up and down through the threads, laying her hands across the panel, her fingertips testing for tautness and give, the comb pushing the weft down to ensure close weaving without the hint of a space.”

        This is the sort of quote to make a critical analyst’s heart beat fast.  As such a person, I glory in unweaving what the author has woven to enjoy her skill to a higher degree.

        Maisie does indeed have many “threads to gather up and spin on bobbins.”  She used a case map, a large portable map of everything connect with the death, which she studies to find out connections between disparate items.  Often, such literary detectives use such a physical stimulus to visualize tenuous connections. In her “in Death” novels, J.R. Robbs’ heroine Eve Dallas does so in her homicide division.  Carrie on Homeland  uses one to uncover terrorists’ plots.  Mallory in Carol O’Connell’s novels is aggressively OCD about hers.  Maisie, like the others, sees and feels the heft of the threads in their metaphoric hands as the readers do.  We feel them reach out to capture the thread and to wind it around a bobbin in that age-old practice of spinners.

        The “giant loom,” of course, is the visualization of how the colored threads will be integrated into the final picture.  The warp and weft she contemplates are the crossing points – the picks, if you will, in weaving – of the “skeins of wool” which will flesh out the outline which the warp and weft have created.  Look how closely this resembles the process of writing – the gathering of facts, of colorful characters, of points of interest  -- the arrangement and rearrangements and repositioning of major items – the outline, first rough, then refining  -- the waiting for the picture/project to shake itself into a recognizable form just before the final adding of a finishing edge to the project.

        The sensual feel of the words are masterful.  “The shuttle flying” through the open shed, the combing of the weft so that it is tight, the “fingertips testing for tautness” – all serve to intensify Maisie’s experience and our delight in recognizing a familiar art and craft.

The author has Maisie realize that “she had come to love color, both in the landscape of character and quite literally—on fabric, canvas, clay or a room…There was a potency, a fire that made her feel as if she were cracking open her cocoon and waiting, waiting for her wings to dry before taking flight.”

As an on-going inspiration, Maisie refers to an earlier incident in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: “’He could create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul’” and she wonders if she can do the same with her dull life.  She does.

The author provides Maisie’s growth through her series until, in the last published book, Elegy for Eddie, has the heroine somewhat at peace with herself and the person she has become.  We as readers are happy, if apprehensive, about her future.  The novel ends, as all good books should, with a sigh for the past and a nod to the future while the characters’ present is firmly situated in the hiatus between two great wars.

        “Then they sat back in silence, eating ice cream. Each with their own thoughts. Watching their world go by.”  Any novel that ends with two problematic lovers sitting in the spring sun eating ice cream cones has got to have its priorities right.

                 

 

Joan Musick, Guest blogger

In my previous post, I wrote about the article in Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine on Joan. I contacted her and asked her to write about her life as both a writer and a quilter. The following is part one. Visit Joan on her website: www.joanmusick.com

 

I lived on the semi-arid plains of Colorado in the shadow of Pikes Peak. My neighbors and I had houses on 5-acre plots of land that were covered mostly with short grasses, hardy wildflowers, and a lot of cactus. When we managed to get trees and flowers to grow, we all congratulated each other on our success.

One day, my nearest neighbor called and said the strangest thing was happening to her beautiful tiger lilies: every day when she went out of her house she saw that her flowers were missing...just the tops...like someone had cut them off with scissors. There were no roots pulled up and no footprints - just leaves with no tops! It made her very angry and she wondered if her old boyfriend was being mean. I thought about it for a minute or two and then offered this explanation to my friend, "Sharon, you have a bunny!" After a stunned moment of silence, we both laughed and she thought maybe it was so, but she was still very unhappy about her flowers being taken.

This incident tickled my funny bone and, being a recreational writer just for myself, I put some words down as if it were a story for children. I embellished wherever it seemed appropriate and finally came up with what seemed to me to be a fairly good story about a lady who had mysteriously disappearing flowers. Then it occurred to me that the bunny might have a point of view as well, so I wrote a story about how he wanted to get something to eat. I recalled a book I had as a child called "How to Love A Kitten," on one side and then when flipped over another story could be read "How to Love A Girl": two sides of the same story. It seemed that my bunny story was destined to be written that way as well because every story has two sides....usually.

Since I am a passionate quilter and fabric is my medium, I decided to try illustrating this story with an appliqued picture or two. One thing lead to another and the idea grew and grew until I had a full-sized bed quilt. For me, quilts always seem to take on a life of their own and frequently dictate which colors or shapes should be used. I really knew I was on to something when I put the eyes on the characters and they came to life. "Hello," they seemed to say. Anyone who could hear me in my studio must have thought I was going crackers, talking to my fabrics and laughing hysterically and mumbling about "Nice to meet you!"

A total of 14 separate panels depicting snapshots of the plot were created by the time I finished talking to myself. I had a great deal of joy in the whole process, trying to decide which parts of the story line COULD be interpreted in fabric and which ones HAD to be in fabric. As I worked on one panel, I would be thinking ahead to the next, spying that great grass print on the shelf that would be perfect for the meadow, or the perfect sandy brown for the floor of the barn. I even interviewed spider fabrics to see which one would work best in the corner of the barn rafters. The inspiration for the center panel was a beautiful gradation fabric that started with sunny gold and ended with soft purple, speaking of soft summer country days to me; of course it had to be the backdrop sky for the farm. As a final exclamation mark to my creative juices, I found wonderful nubby yarns and soft grassy-looking threads that begged to be included as embellishments on nearly every panel. As I said, anyone eavesdropping on me was sure I had gone around the bend.

At long last the top was sandwiched and quilted on my domestic Bernina sewing machine. Because I allowed the fabrics to dictate how they should go together to make scenes, the written story had changed along the way, so final editing was done to match the "illustrating" and I began the search for a publisher. After a relatively short search and several "God incidents," I quickly came in contact with Mother's House Publishing in the city where I live, "The Missing Flower Tops" and "The Midnight Snack" became a hardcopy double-sided children's book. I entered a new and exciting place that I never expected to be.....(to be continued).....

 

Pieces and Plates of Provence

Quilts, like angels, seem to hide everywhere.  I found one recently while “reading” the shelves in my local library and what a treasure it is.

          Like many Americans, my palette was geared to simple foods as a child but maturity drew me to love the Mediterranean and French cuisines.  But who knew that one book could contain details of both Provencal cuisine and quilts (and quilt patterns and instructions).  On a hot day in August, wandering down the two beloved paths of quilts and food was a delight.  The lavish pictures of both made the journey even more enjoyable.

          The book by Marie-Christine Flocard and Cosabeth Parriaud with photos by Jean-Michel Andre is entitled Provence Quilts and Cuisine.  Both authors are well known in quilt circles and both have lived and published in America and France.  They give expert details on how to produce each quilt, how to paint fabric, how to transfer photos, as well as how to cook the foods of that special region of Provence.

          The quilts themselves are exquisite.  What the authors have done is to extract the architectural images, colors, and native flora of Southern France for the design of the quilts.  For example, the fig leaf quilt featured on the front cover uses the nine-block pattern with painted leaves of varying greens and dark figs appliquéd onto it.  Just to see the shading of each leaf with different saturation of hues is worth the book itself.  Another quilt uses the arches pattern of the Roman aqueducts to form the Double Wedding Ring design in the brilliant yellows and reds of a busy farmhouse kitchen. 

          The photos themselves become possible quilts with the multi-hued rounded tiles of the roofs in Avignon and the grey stones of building block houses climbing the distant hills.  Another quilt provides splendid memories of the Provence itself through the photo transfer blocks.

          After all this wandering in foreign lands, my imagination turned to thoughts of food and – magically – they appeared under French names but the pictures spoke my language.  Cake aux Olives is an olive-ham-cheese-peppers bread tempted me to copy out the recipe. Ratatouille with fresh vegetables or Tomates Provencales translated easily into mouth-watering dishes.  A Clatoutis aux Apricots looked like golden nuggets swimming in a baked cake on top – delicious.

          Please understand.  I don’t quilt.  I cook and I write but I don’t quilt.  However, the patterns in the back of the book are so simple I am almost tempted, for one, very special reason – as a volunteer at Pearl S. Buck International, I know that her favorite fruit was the peach.  On her birthday in June, we serve peaches in every form we can find.  Next year, we will celebrate her 121^th birthday in a big way in late June with a Fiber Arts Festival with international exhibitors, juried crafters, renowned speakers, and peaches.  I mention this because the book has a wonderfully simple design for peaches, rather like the fig leaf design.  Very simple, almost compelling…almost…No, no, I am a writer, not a quilter!

                                      Anne K. Kaler aka Quilt Hunter

A Writer and A Quilt

In the August/September 2012 issue of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine, there is an interesting article titled: “Quilt Combines Writing and Quilting”.
            Joan Musick’s book “The Missing Flower Tops and the Midnight Snack” was the inspiration for a quilt.
            Musick enjoys writing, and translating her love of writing into something visual,  her love of quilting seemed logical.
            “For many years, I worked on making quilts that I could sell but the money never equaled the materials, time and effort required, let alone the feeling of selling one of my ‘children’. At long last, with this culmination of a story written in fabric, I can have my quilt and sell it too”.
            The quilt is adorable, and hopefully the author/quilter will do many more. Check out the rest of the story, and the wonderful photos.
                                                            Helen Wolf

Spinsters, Sinners, & Embroiderers in a Novel

 Margaret Frazer’s most excellent series on Dame Frevisse, a fifteenth-century nun-cum-detective, includes a tale of how one unmarried woman earned her living by her sewing skills in The Sempster’s Tale.

          While the terms seamstress and spinster define a woman who sews, Frazer chooses the word sempster for the title of her book set in 1450 because it refers to both genders.  She notes that the term seamstress appeared first in the sixteenth century about the time that gender-specific words appeared in occupations – actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc.  The term spinster indicating an unmarried woman in a household who performed the lowly chore of spinning yarn became the generic term for any unmarried woman. Thus, the occupation defined the status.

In simpler times, women not only carded and spun yarn but they also wove it into cloth and sewed.  While the ordinary housewife was occupied with sewing clothing for her family, royal ladies embroidered with finer yarn/thread.  The Bayard Tapestry which records an historic event in fabric, the Norman conquest of England in 1066, was probably embroidered by Queen Matilda and her handmaidens. Later analysis suggests that English women, perhaps those similar to Frazer’s heroine Anne Blakwell, actually completed this 230 foot-long strip of linen tapestry. 

So well known were the English embroiderers that professional textile workshops and guilds grew to regulate production and standards of their embroidery called Opus Anglicanum or "English work."  Although the making of church vestments had long been the provenance of cloistered nuns as the means of financially sustaining their convents, the demand for elaborately decorated clothing and hangings found its way into the top classes of society and soon the demand for heavily embroidered clothes exceeded the supply. 

As the daughter of a tailor, Anne Blakhall, a young widow in London in 1450, is skilled in plain-clothes-making but her marriage to another tailor allows her to learn how to make more fashionable clothes demanded by the rising middle class.  She learns as well “how to deal with the drapers and mercers from whom both cloth and thread were bought, and with the silk women who could provide her directly with the best silk threads to be used in her embroidery.” She supports herself as a femme sole, “a woman legally able to act in her own right in all her business dealings” and one who “could work in my own name.”

          It is this last statement that sets the tone for the rest of the book.  Frazer incorporates the back story of Anne’s skill into that important first chapter so that the problems of the story plot revolve around fabrics and Anne’s independence from financial ruin. At that time, most women and their dowries belonged to their husbands.  Many were forbidden to practice their husband’s trade after he died.  But if a woman were trained by a guild, she could become a guild member and be declared a femme sole, a woman able to conduct her own business.

Like the beguines of Europe, she also supports herself by teaching young girls “reading, writing, plain reckoning, and skilled sewing… [which] would be needed when they were London merchant’s wives and there was never harm in knowing how to sew.”

Her handling of the girls is sympathetic. When one student put “another unwanted knot in her thread…Anne took the sewing to herself, gently teased the knot loose with the needle’s point.” (3)  (How many of us still use this method of untangling knotted thread.) One student is “embroidering a pillowbere’s [pillowcase] edge with a double-running stitch of red-dyed linen thread” while another is “plain-hemming a white towel” with dubious skill and enthusiasm.  “’Four more stitches, and you’ll have it done,’” Anne encourages as the girl completes the towel with a “great sigh of someone finished with heavy labor” and survives her “trial by thread and needle.”

What charmed me most were the details of a committed sewer.  Frazer’s heroine sits at the source of natural light -- “her embroidery frame beside the parlor’s garden-ward window.”  (How many needleworkers seek a window or doorway to see the project in a better light.)

The author is careful to have Anne’s actions befit an embroiderer of her stature.  Specifically, Anne has been taught by a member of the Broiderers’ Guild how to handle the metallic threads of silver and gold that need “a delicacy and certainty of eye and hand” in the making of church vestments.  In her window seat, Anne is pictured “carefully setting the slightly twisted yellow silk thread in small, encroaching flat stitches along the outstretched wing of the St. John’s eagle centered in a roundel.”  She was using gold thread to finish the “eagle’s last careful shading by way of small stitches laid over larger, couched ones.”   Here Anne is securing the couching stitches which themselves hold the fragile gold thread to the background.  A special thread of gold-coated silver called silver-gilt  which wrapped around yellow silk secured the couching stitches more firmly and, in Anne’s case, created a shadow to highlight the goldwork itself.

What makes Anne’s occupation of embroidery of church vestments more poignant is that she is in love with a Jewish merchant Daved [sic] at a time when Jews were forbidden to live in England and were allowed in the city on probation, so to speak, only for specific times.  When the mystery of a brutal killing seems to indicate it being done by someone who knew Hebrew, Anne becomes involved with Dame Frevisse and others to bring the criminal to justice.  Set against the historical background of a peasant uprising of Jack Cade, the mystery twists and turns on itself like an embroidered Celtic knot, bringing a desperate solution and an unhappy separation for the lovers.

 Knowing that any further contact with Daved would lead to both of their arrests, Anne refuses to flee with him.  Instead, at the conclusion of the novel, her “gaze turned inward to some place deep inside herself: but calmly and with a pride that came from that far inward place she said ‘Whatever else, I am his eishet chayil [woman of valor]. That will have to do.’  And took up the embroidery lying there unfinished and began to sew.”

 Even at her moment of crisis and facing a future without love, Anne turns to sewing to soothe her.  Ironically, Anne is embroidering the same set of new vestments that the novel started with while her lover Daved is fleeing for his life from that same religious prejudice which separates them. 

Frazer creates a believable historical mystery by selecting her accents as carefully as an embroiderer chooses her palette of colors – a good read for a hot August day.

             Quilt Hunter…a.k.a. Anne K. Kaler

Writing and Quilting in Real Life

            When I promised to do a small quilt for Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts, I knew that I wanted it to be a tribute to my paternal grandmother Rose.  I didn’t realize that it would also be a reflection on her life…and on mine. 

So, in looking through old photographs, I came across an old black and white picture of Rose which I may use in the quilt. In it, four of her grandchildren, including a much younger me, surround my grandmother. We are all in our best Easter clothes and hats, smiling for the camera. She is not smiling.  But then, she seldom smiled, I remember.

            The oldest of eleven children born into a farming family in Illinois, my father’s mother, Rose, married and moved east, settling in Somerdale, NJ, where she raised three sons. Her husband, my grandfather, died when my father was only seventeen. I can only imagine the effect it had on her.  I know the effect his death had on my father and uncles.

I see Rose’s stern German face in family photos from that time. She had my trouble-making father still at home and a younger son, not yet a teen. The oldest son was away in the service, eventually fighting in World War II. To make ends meet, she had to go to work and got a job cleaning and cooking at the rectory of her Catholic parish. I suppose that’s all she was qualified to do – cook, clean, keep house, and probably quilt. She still worked there when I was small. As far as I know, she never talked about it.  After all, it was a job and an income.

            We saw her on holidays and special occasions and infrequently at other times. If she ever enjoyed her grandchildren, we never knew it. Visits were not casual things or particularly warm. They just were.

            By the time I was in high school, my grandmother had Alzheimer’s. We would get calls sometimes from the police in Somerdale when they found her wandering about. We also got calls from police departments as far away as Philadelphia. If my father or uncle could get her they would but on workdays that wasn’t possible. With young children to watch, it was hard for my mother or aunt to pick her up. So the police would take her home, handing her from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. At her house, a neighbor would meet her and sit with her to make sure she was all right. It took a village, more times than not, to help her remain in her own home as long as she could.

            My grandmother soon started giving things away, even to strangers walking by the house. Frantic calls from neighbors alerted us that the silver and china were put out in the garbage, piles of coins sat on the porch and furniture was being dragged to the curb.

            While my father and his brothers debated what to do, I began to visit her after school. Two or three times a week I made the drive, checking first with the neighbor for any news. I was seventeen. My grandmother didn’t know me and occasionally thought I was a daughter-in-law. Those were her good days. On bad days she didn’t remember her children, their wives or her grandchildren. She did, however, remember she had one great-grandchild, a girl named Crystal. How and why that stayed with her when everything else was gone, I don’t know. 

Still, even on bad days, she let me in and we would visit, walking around the house looking at things. She would name all the things she remembered and look at me for approval. I checked the cupboards for food and usually made her a simple meal, keeping her company while she ate. As often happens with Alzheimer’s, Grandmother Rose passed away not long after she finally had to leave her home.

Looking back, I am grateful for the time with her, just the two of us, even though she didn’t know me. She smiled when I was there and that memory makes me happy.  That’s what I want to pass on to my grandchildren – a memory of a smile.

            I am a grandmother myself now with four grandchildren, blessed to see them often. In fact, I plan to include them in the making of this small quilt. They may not know anyone with Alzheimer’s but they will remember the experience. It will be a labor of love for me. The children will enjoy seeing me as a child and maybe feel a connection to their great-great grandmother Rose.  Maybe, just maybe, their grandchildren might someday remember me as more than an old photograph or dusty quilt.
                                                                                             Susan Wagner