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

Books and Quilts

Sitting with our books at the Pearl S. Buck Quilt and Garden Show, we had a lovely view of some stunning quilts. Color and pattern were all around us, including some beautiful sunflowers above our heads blooming for all they were worth.

            Sunflowers always remind me of the fullness of summer, the smell of corn in the field and the taste of just picked tomatoes in my mouth. I can see my father at the grill as I help my mother shuck the corn for dinner, my brothers screaming and chasing one another with cold water from the hose.

            We ate on the screened porch in the summer, sat there for the occasional summer thunderstorm, played cards and listened to the music of Frank Sinatra, my mother’s favorite singer.

            This one part of my childhood remembered because I sat under a hanging quilt.

                We writers find inspiration everywhere but finding it at the Pearl Buck house and gardens is special. We are surrounded there by the things that inspired a true artist, the little things of a life filled with family and purpose. Sure, we can see the prizes she won and the typewriter she used and that can be inspiring. But I like to see the table where she ate with her children and the books she read to them in her bedroom. I like the view from the different parts of the house and I imagine she watched her children run around much as I watched mine.

We can visit the house and grounds and then take it home with us to use in turn in our own work or to keep us company when we struggle to find the right phrase, the perfect word. Such is the fulfillment of a writer’s dream, a writer’s summer.
                                                                                         Susan Wagner

                                                         

The Quilt Hunter

The Quilt Hunter Captures a Quilt-Sighting

As a reader, I first met Kate Wilhelm’s novels in fantasy and science fiction.  In her 2002 novel Skeletons, Wilhelm poses a young college graduate against an old secret of her grandfather’s involvement with a lynching in Louisiana many years ago.  The title Skeletons does indicate something lurking in closets but this is no cozy mystery with a confined, small-town group of people with shared interest.  Rather the besieged heroine is dragged into a “witness protection” sort of life by a investigative newspaper and former teacher.  They end up researching the lynching and the subsequent mystery behind it.  A good read.

In the midst of this, however, Wilhelm uses the character of Aunt Lu to deliver some vital information.  During the process, the heroine Lee discovers some rags in her grandfather’s possession – rags, “scraps of fabric, prints, just bits and pieces of this and that.” (90)  The heroine’s Aunt Lu explains that, before World War I, good grade cotton cloth was scarce.  “See how closely woven it is? Two hundred denier? So the flour wouldn’t sift through.  Big fifty-pound sacks of flour or sugar. And the manufacturers know that the packaging was as invaluable as the contents, and they used cotton prints.” (92)

Aunt Lu continues that the “women would get together, and swap, looking for good matches, for colors that would go together, and every scrap was preserved for quilts.  When the shirts or whatever got outgrown, they would rip the seams out and make something else, and eventually add the material to the quilt box.” (92)

Authors use small details like this example to make a minor character like Aunt Lu more valid.  This, in turn, makes the heroine and her associates more real and more trustworthy.  Details can also provoke a reader to stop and assess her own reality by presenting a past reality.  Perhaps this comparison will make quilters appreciate the luxury of modern fabric stores

Imagine women handling fifty-pound sacks routinely and then patiently washing them and ripping out the seams to make clothing for their families.  One phrase within Wilhelm’s writing caught my attention.  The women took these precious flour sacks and would “wash them by hand and iron them like treasures.” (92)  Wash by hand? Iron?  Who of us remember either of those chores with affection.  This was done prior to the time of the easy-to-use washers and dryers.  Hand washing in a tub and rubbing the cloth over a wavy metal washboard with homemade soap in water heated on the stove is not a gentle action.  It demands muscle as does the stringing of the wet cloth on the laundry line and fastening it with wooden clothespins.  And then the ironing in days before the electric or steam iron.  Women had to heat flatirons on the kitchen stove and, using potholders, press the cloth flat, forcing the weight of the iron to do the work.

No wonder women held onto cloth for years.  Quilters, I am told, do the same with their stashes, accumulating pieces beyond what they can actually ever use.  Here, I must confess that this quilt-hunter never throws cloth away – never. It is as precious a commodity to me as it was to Aunt Lu’s generation of frugal women.  Cloth, like writing, has a story behind it and a future ahead of it.  A good writer never throws any scrap of writing out, no matter how simplistic or outdated.

You just never know when you might need it somewhere else…like the elusive quilt,  the right phrase lurks just ahead.

Since her first book in 1963, Wilhelm has written 50 novels in many fiction genres. She returned to mystery with the character of Barbara Holloway, a lawyer fighting for justice and her own happiness.  Try one of Kate Wilhelm’s books.

                                                          Anne Kaler

The God Box Quilt

Visitors to our show stopped to admire the God Box Quilt made by Helen Wolf. Helen so enjoyed Mary Lou Quinlan's book, that she made a small quilt with the book title. Visitors to the show wrote little prayers, wishes, or thoughts, on slips of paper and put them in the box on the quilt. After the show the quilt was sent to Mary Lou. Be sure to check out her website at: www.thegodboxproject.com and click on the blog.

And here is Helen writing one of the enclosures

Anne, the Quilt Hunter

I confess that I am here under false pretenses.  I am not a quilter – never have been, never wanted to be one, never hope to be one.  I am, however, a Quilt-Hunter. (Maybe I had better explain that term before the quilters come after me with their sharp needles.)

As a teacher, I learned to hunt down and capture elusive themes, symbols, and patterns in prose and poetry.  As an academic critic, I write about those “captures” so that others can enjoy them.  When I became involved with putting on a quilt show for Pearl S. Buck’s charities, I realized that many of the novels I had been reading for years contain quilts as symbols…and the hunt was on.

And what a successful hunt it has turned out to be.  Quilt references seemed to explode into view when I sharpened my critical eye to spot them.  They cowered behind the most illustrious names in romance writing and hid deep in the recesses of cozy mysteries but we – my companion-editors in the quest – sought them out and brought them to the light of day so that quilter-readers could enjoy them

The result is our book – Writers Who Quilt – Quilters Who Write – recently published and available on Amazon.  Even as we finished that book, I kept discovering how authors use quilts as symbols and literary devices…and so, the never-ending quilt hunt goes on.

Stay tuned for the Blog of the Quilt-Hunter as she tracks down this elusive quarry in all sorts of written material.