Quilters

The late Republican Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois is quoted as commenting in a Senate floor debate on an appropriation measure over 30 years ago, "A million here, a million there--soon we're talking real money!"

So it is with quilting. The seams are a quarter inch, but with a mis-step here and a fudge there, pretty soon we are talking about some serious real estate. So in the interest of humility, here is some of the piecing I have done on the quilt I mentioned yesterday. Yes, there are some errors. I am a humble person. I suppose we could transfer the analogy to other aspects of our lives. The soufflé falls— a humility meal. Little Johnny gets expelled from school—our humility child.

Actually, I didn’t want to leave the subject of quilting without mentioning a splendid play. When my sister-in-law, Mary Ann, ran the box office at the College of Du Page (and employed, for a while, Sean Hayes, as in Will and Grace ), we often combined our visits to her with some great theater. Quilters made a great impression on me, and I am surprised that more theater groups don’t perform it. There is music involved, and it calls for an all-female cast. Basically it is a study of the history and function of quilts and quilters in the western expansion across the prairie. There are a collection of vignettes, and we see the quilt as a literal lifesaver during the freezing nights. We see quilts as community builders, and quilting parties as an acceptable way to socialize and pass on new ideas. Even a good way to meet guys (I was trying to find the music for “Seeing Nellie Home”, but the words will give you an idea of how the it all worked in 1912.)

There is one scene of a devastating fire and the efforts of the community to make quilts for the survivors. That happened after Hurricane Katrina too. Some things never change.

Humility Blocks

I am making a quilt. I don’t pretend to know what I am doing, but I am determined to improve. I have done a few baby quilts, but this one is full sized. Kate made Eleanor curtains from some pretty Laura Ashley fairy material and since there was some left, I volunteered to see what I could do about incorporating the extra fabric into something for her bed. This required what we in the business refer to as “fussy cutting”, so I could get the maximum of fairies, and figuring out the math involved to get striped sashing. I had planned to do some hand quilting, but at the rate this is going, I think I will settle for major ditch stitching.

By co-incidence a fellow Grosse Pointe blogger posted links to some inspiring quilting sites recently. I am plenty inspired, it's the know-how I need. I intend to take a class, but meanwhile I try to teach myself from books. The subject of “humility blocks” was new to me. I found the topic in a book called “Let’s Make a Patchwork Quilt” by Jessie MacDonald and Marian Shafer:

For at least 5,000 years it has been the custom of art needleworkers to express their reverence for the gods by making one or more intentional mistakes in their handiwork. They believed that only their God could make a perfect thing. The custom has been noted in Oriental, Mid-Eastern and Native American (notably Navajo) artifacts.

The tradition was faithfully carried out by American quilters. If their quilts were perfectly made, they rectified the situation by painstakingly creating a mistake. Quilt blocks containing errors were called “humility blocks.”

I told Ernie about the concept and he was most intrigued. I suppose for a lover of philosophy there is an over-riding element of redemption. For me there is a justification as I create my humility blocks. Humility quilt? Eleanor is only two, and in her eyes, Grandma can do no wrong.

Canadian Weekend

We spent the weekend in Canada, as the guests of our friends Vic and Peggy, at their cottage on Mountain Lake on the Bruce Peninsula. We drove up with our fellow guests, Buck and Dorothy, and Buck spent the entire trip entranced by his splendid new GPS system, and its spectral voice (Recalculating. . . ) They are still looking for a name for her. Dorothy wasn’t keen on Angelina and she didn’t warm up to Moneypenney either. Crossing into Canada these days is way more complicated than it used to be and we were delayed a while in Sarnia as we tried to cross the Bluewater Bridge. “A situation”, the authorities said.

But we made it and had our usual enjoyable time with good food, conversation and companionship. And golf for the guys. It was great to be surrounded by quiet and the occasional bird song. There had been a bear sighting earlier in the summer, but we saw nothing more ferocious than birds making a beeline for the feeders.

On Sunday we made the trip to Stratford in time for lunch and the matinee of South Pacific. It was a powerful production, blending comedy and pathos, all showcased by great music and wonderful voices. A dinner in the country and a night in an elegant bed and breakfast topped it off.

And Moneypenney got us home in time for a Labor Day celebration with Kate and Elizabeth and their families.

Holy Humor

I wonder if the Presbyterian Church ever holds an awards show (and the Simon Peter for the best homily based on a quote from a pop song, George W. Bush or South Park goes to ...). If they do and they need an emcee, they need look no further. The pastor of this church in Grosse Pointe Woods has been deservedly featured in many articles. The signage outside his church is the epitome of wit. I had to go home and get my camera to capture this message.

I Was Certified

As a teacher, that is. I still have the letter, dated September 13, 1963. It begins:

“The Minister is pleased to inform you that, having completed to his satisfaction a scheduled course of training, you are eligible for the status of qualified teacher.”

Back then there were two ways to become a teacher in England. You either got a bachelor’s degree and went out and taught whatever your degree was in, or you took a one-year teachers’ training course first. The difference in pay was negligible and no-one cared if you took the course.

It was, however, common knowledge that the year could be most enjoyable as long as you didn’t attend classes and the government was footing the bill anyway. So I applied to the University of London Institute of Education.

The methods courses, under the direction of Professor Sharwood Smith and Barbara Hodgeson, were wonderful. The practice teaching was invaluable and we were monitored carefully. I did pretty well and still have the letter of recommendation I received from them.

As for the other classes—the history of Education, the Psychology of Education, Comparative Education—I don’t recall a thing. The only person is our cohort of classicists who did any work for these papers was the only one who failed. He went on to become a respected wood-carver. As I was “organizing” the other day, I came across the question papers for the examination which made me certifiable. Apparently I also took a course in Health Education. You had to write three essays on topics all from Section A or all from Section B. I am assuming that Section B was for students returning to or intending to teach in her Majesty’s colonies, since they addressed such issues as, “What are the various points to be observed in the construction of a village well in order to prevent contamination of its water”. You certainly didn’t need to be able to answer question 10, “What might lead you to suspect that children in your school were infected with hookworm” to teach in Welwyn Garden City.

No, I tackled three from Section A. I avoided the question which asked: “To what extent do you consider that you can make a contribution to health education through the medium of your own subject?” I was going to teach Classics! What did they expect? The outline of a class which studied the history, customs and culture of the three parts into which, in the immortal words of Julius Caesar, Gaul was divided, with particular attention to their attitude to brushing their teeth? No, I answered this question:

What is your attitude as a teacher to two of the following:

1. cigarette smoking
2. sex education
3. accident prevention

Was I for them? Did it matter as long as I argued my point logically? I’ll never know, but the Minister was quite satisfied.

Sides to Middle

I have spent the last year getting to know my new sewing machine. It is both a miracle of Swedish engineering and a tribute to über-grammatical translation:

The flat side of the spool holder shall be pressed firmly against the spool. There shall be no space between the spool holder and the spool.

I salute, sew my seam and reminisce.

I learned to sew on my grandmother’s treadle machine. That’s Nana round the corner. There’ll be more about her later. (You already met Garby down the Lock on Christmas Eve, 2005.) The machine sat by the window in Nana’s dining room/living room/all purpose room. My mother did not inherit Nana’s sewing skills, but she did have her knitting skills. It was my mother’s older sister, my Auntie Doris, who was the sewer. She was, in fact, a professional seamstress. She never used patterns and I still remember some of the dresses she made for me. How I loved my summer school uniform: a green and white striped dress and a green and white checked dress. In fact she made all our dresses, my mother’s and mine, until her untimely death in her early forties.
Here she is on her wedding day to Uncle Bill. I thought he was the handsomest man alive and he was as gentle and loving as Auntie Doris. It was one of life’s cruel blows that he too died shortly after she did.

I do remember gong round to Nana’s as a teenager and sewing some dresses on her machine. It had one stitch and one direction, but it worked fine. What I remember most, however, is the procedure Nana supervised for my mother every once in a while. It was called “sides to middle.”

Remember, these were postwar years and everything had to be purchased with coupons. Nothing could be wasted. Our sheets were cotton and—in the spirit of Henry Ford—they were any color we wanted, as long as it was white. When our sheets wore thin in the middle, my mother cut them in half and sewed the two side selvedges together. Voilà, new sheets.

I don’t know what happened to that old sewing machine. Mine came with a video, fancy attachments and a couple of instruction books. I wish Nana and Auntie Doris could have had something half as nice.

Fort Wayne, IN

I always thought of Fort Wayne as a place we had to bypass on our trips to take Lucy back and forth to Saint Louis University. Turns out it is a city working to become the epicenter of the fashion industry in the mid-west. I got my first inkling of this when Nancy Nall linked to an article in Fort Wayne Observed on an esoteric fashion accessory. That article linked to another piece on the same subject from that bastion of fashion information, Arkansas.

I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the whole phenomenon (even though the subject of these articles, Vera Bradley bags, was one I had written about a couple of weeks earlier ) if it had not been for the piece mentioned in Laura Kluvo’s Blogging Project Runway . There is so much written on this show, but Laura has singled out a long article which appeared in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

So remember, when the Parsons School of Design opens a satellite campus in Fort Wayne, you read about it here.