Backroad Therapy

The past couple of weeks have been filled with busyness; so we decided on a day of exploring.  Our country drive took us past peaceful scenes of green, pastures filled with cows, fields of hay just mown – and some just baled, and irrigation systems at work.  We were headed to Molena and Woodbury, to check shops we like in those towns, and Zebulon to visit the bookstore.

We explored several antique stores.  A few items came home with us but we mostly collected ideas.  Ideas for the porches, for decorating, for repurposing some old crates and boxes and cans.

Most shops weren’t very busy (one of the perks of being retired and being able to shop on weekdays) so we had Interesting conversations with shop proprietors.  There was the lady who had a midnight visit from a female cardinal in her workshop, there was the handyman who built a bench from an old spool bed, and we missed the Corgi named Macon in one of our regular shops.  It seems her owner had errands to run before opening the shop today, so Macon got the day off. We met Macon on an earlier visit I shared here.

The other customers who did appear offered opportunities for people watching and people listening.  I overheard a man say, “we could buy this and I could strip it down to the original wood.”  He was referring to a table I’ve admired before.  I admired it in part for its wonderful new chalk-paint finish.

Lunch was high on the agenda, because we remembered the fabulous food at The Blackbird Cafe.


The place is entrancing with tables and light fixtures made from pipes, peeling plaster revealing brick beneath, and condiments corralled in sewing machine drawers.  The food is wonderful, too.  Their homemade kaiser rolls were still warm from the morning’s oven and were just as heavenly as we had remembered.  Yum.

We were there early, so the photos showing the space without people is misleading.  The people did come.  They do come.  Every day.

 

More walking, more exploring, more driving about.  Then we went to Red Oak Covered Bridge. It’s the oldest in Ga, and you still drive across it.  We both marveled at the same feature – no graffiti.  Wow.  There is a sign saying “No Graffiti – $1000 fine”.  Maybe Meriwether County officials enforce that.

Another day spent enjoying the world, seeing the beauty close to home, and treasuring the pleasure of the moment.  Those are important goals since two funerals were included in our busyness recently.  Death is a part of life, but when it comes to someone we know, especially when it’s unexpected, we are reminded to enjoy the everyday.  Yesterday we did just that.

Sunday School Picnic

Another family photo has become a quilt.  This image of my husband’s grandparents was taken sometime around 1915, probably at Stone Mountain, GA.  The occasion was a Sunday School picnic.

I printed the image on a bit of vintage linen napkin, painted his tie, and machine stitched using free-motion quilting.  The rickrack frame is hand stitched around the photo on a layer of hand-dyed cotton fabric.

I used metallic thread to stitch the red layer to a vintage quilt remnant using a seed stitch, adding a bit of sparkle.

The label is a vintage coaster stitched to the old quilt remnant, too.  The final piece measures 12″ x 14″.

Westward Journey

We are home.

After our trip west to see the country, we are home. After 4788 miles, 18 days, 10 states, 15 nights in 11 hotels, and uncountable memories, we are home.


Even though we know travel to be a great educator, Jim and I are home bodies.  We love to get out and explore our world, but we typically make short trips of a few days’ duration.  This time, we were combining a photography class Jim was taking with friends with a chance to see the southwestern US by car.

So off we went, visiting some friends along the way, and seeing the landscape.  Our route to Arizona was along I-10 heading west and I-40 coming back.  Every day, we ventured off those interstates and saw some of the country from back roads.  Priceless sights included rice fields in Louisiana, bluebonnets and poppies in Texas, numerous new species of birds, new species of trees,  jackrabbits, tumbleweeds, shadows on adobe walls, and natural wonders like White Sands and the Grand Canyon.

There were many opportunities to do some people watching, and people listening.  There were lots of photos taken, Jim focusing on birds for his class, and on traditional landscapes.  I did some of the same and added to my album of street photographs – of people unaware.

We drove through the Texas Hill Country during bluebonnet season and visited the McDonald Observatory.  We toured the Desert Museum in Tucson, saw vast skies in daytime and at night, even saw a falling star over the Grand Canyon.  We saw snow-capped mountains, purple mountain majesties, lots of trains and windmills. We drove sections of the old route 66.

As we crossed the White and Cache Rivers in Arkansas, I had my camera ready, but we saw no Ivorybills.

Names of roads and towns fascinated us. Sundust Road,  Wild Horse Pass, Dead Man Wash, Bloody Bases Road, Horsethief Basin; Checotah, Henryetta, and Lotawatah Road, Oklahoma.  Wilderado, Muldrow, Porum, and Parkin.  And, back in Georgia, another new one: Hog Liver Road.

Unplanned stops at local parks, a farmers’ market, and antique stores gave us a glimpse into the lives of the people living in all these places.  That’s what we wanted to
see – people living their everyday lives; not catering to tourists.

For many of the miles, we didn’t play music, just marveling at the scenery and talking about how the pioneers must have felt following the trail westward.  At other times, we chose music of the area: Jimmy Buffett near Mobile, Al,  Jackson Browne and the Eagles in Winslow, AZ, Gillian Welch and Kate Wolf in Arkansas.

Inspiration for colors and design were everywhere.  The landscaping and decoration on the highway system in AZ is full of graphic designs which would easily translate to quilting.  As I studied the abundant cacti, I envisioned stitching them using tailor’s tacks and french knots (or Jude Hill’s thread beads) to mimic their textures.

Though the beauty of the southwest was magnificent,  Springtime in Georgia was a welcome sight!

Paper Dolls

My mother entertained little girls by cutting paper dolls from paper.  She would fold the newspaper or catalog pages accordion style, then cut one-half of a girl in a dress.  All of us squealed as she unfurled the string of girls holding hands.

I finally learned to do the folding and cutting for myself, even to change the cuts to make strings of little boys, or of girls linking hands up, then down, then up again.

I had some fabric on hand that looked like little girls’ dresses, so I made a template and appliquéd some of Mama’s dolls on fabric.

Later it occurred to me that one of the granddaughters might like a parade of little girls like she once played with in paper.  I happened to have fabric from five dresses she had worn as a toddler.  I cut a pattern so that five girls would fit on a vintage doily I found, and a memory was rekindled. I layered the dolls and doily on a bit of indigo dyed linen and used machine quilting to add dimension. Buttons from those five little dresses were used as embellishments and to secure the layers to a bit of a vintage cross-stitched quilt.  The finished piece measures 17” x 16”.  

Free Form Log Cabins

I love hand piecing.  There’s something about pulling a needle and thread through cloth that soothes me.  It’s the rare day that I don’t have to do a little stitching before going to bed.  Most of the time, it’s during the couple of hours after supper when we watch tv.

Even after spending hours in my sewing room as I did yesterday, cutting and sewing at the machine, I still find it necessary to unwind by stitching a bit.

My current project is pictured here.  Log cabin-style blocks that approximate 5” finished.  Mostly in blues and whites.  I was inspired by a blog entry by Jude Hill a few weeks ago when she was piecing some free form log cabins.  I started my own and can’t stop.  It’s so addictive.  Part of the fun is using special fabrics.  Many of these pieces came from clothing remnants, some from scraps of vintage linens.  I selected some special fabrics to be the “heart” of the blocks, too.  Some bits of embroidery, some pieces of a friend’s silk jacket, various old treasures lying about.

In theory, the blocks start with 1” squares and use 1” logs.  But, if the chosen center element is larger, I just adjust as I go.  I have some templates lying nearby and use them sometimes, but other times I just eyeball it and start stitching.

I’m using Jude’s technique of invisible basting the seam allowances open, too.  It makes subsequent stitching so pleasant.

I have no plan.  I’m just stitching for fun.  Enjoying the process, letting the assembly evolve.  I did scatter a few blocks on the design wall a few days ago, on top of a piece of silk I had dipped in the dye pot.  Here’s how that looked.

 

 

Some years ago, I made this little wall hanging.  (I wrote about this before, remembering that I sewed the binding on while visiting a B & B.) Here, I hand pieced tumbling blocks from assorted blue fabrics.  Then I did use a template to have exactly the same sized blocks, and I used commercial fabric.  I collected beloved blue fabrics, including the fossil fern (I love that fabric!) in the border.

A blue and white toile on the back is a favorite of mine, too.  I quilted it using free motion quilting, invisible nylon thread and cotton batting.  It measures 26” square.

Generally, commercial fabrics are not nearly so much fun to stitch as the softer, thinner, more loosely woven fabrics I’m using now.  And the memories ….memories of the homespun jumper my mother made for me and I wore for years, the shirt Jim wore with his overalls, the threadbare linen jacket of mine, and the remnants I dyed indigo last summer make these pieces special to handle.  Those memories don’t come off a bolt in a store.

Jerry’s Bottle Tree Farm

What an adventure we had this morning!  Our friends Jerry and Rose Payne invited us to their home, Tick Hill, so that Jim might photograph some uncommon butterflies, Giant Yucca Skippers.  We did see the target insect and some other species, but the highlight of the trip for me was the bottle farm.  Well, that and fascinating conversation with Jerry.
We have a bottle tree in our yard, and so far, it’s done its job of warding off evil spirits.  Jerry does not have a bottle tree, he has a bottle forest – made of 135 trees and counting.  That’s more than 10,000 bottles.  Amazing!

Jerry can tell you a lot about bottles.  He knows which companies use recycled bottles, which ones make brown bottles, or green bottles, or blue bottles, or frosted, or painted.  He knows spikes, too.  Winds at his place will cause bottles to pull the spikes out of the post if they are less than 6” long.  The spacing of the spikes is determined by the bottles he’s planning to use and the intended final design.

As a child in Virginia, Jerry was fascinated by bottle trees he saw on his walk to school.  His forest is a tribute to that memory and to individuals in his life.  There is a tree with colored bottles entwined much like a barber’s pole: a salute to his uncle who wielded clippers for a living.  Another has only bottles from the monastery where a friend resides.  Yet another holds pickle jars, all from a neighbor whose children eat a LOT of pickles.  There are trees comprised only of brown beer bottles, or frosted wine bottles, or medicine bottles, or tiny bottles, or bottles dug from a particular location.


As we walked, our conversation included weather, butterfly behavior, plant identification, educational systems, life in south Georgia, mutual acquaintances from years past, and the history of Catholicism in Virginia.  We exchanged stories of family experiences and art pursuits.  We learned more about each other’s educational backgrounds and professional experiences.

Jerry’s folk art is delightful and we were fortunate to bring home some treasures today.  Jerry paints bits of tree limbs and roots that he finds lying about as well as shells and bones from animals.  There were some roots and branches whose shapes said to Jerry they were a chicken, a whippoorwill, and a tadpole. Here you see the tadpole.

And this piece is one of a series where he painted insects on tortoise shells.  This one, Water Strider Flotilla, includes images of those known as pond skimmers, water striders, Jesus bugs, water skaters, or pond skitters.

Time spent with Jerry and Rose is a treasure in itself.  Rose was away for part of the morning, so our visit with her was abbreviated this time.

Dr. Payne is an amazing person whose breadth of knowledge seems neverending.  He is best known in some circles for his ground breaking work in forensic science.  In the 1960’s, he detailed the changes that occur as insects are introduced to decomposing pig carcasses.  A documentary film has been made about his life and a more complete biography is here.


And for those who read this blog hoping to see a quilt of some description, here is one of my latest art pieces.  A butterfly photo is relevant, don’t you think?  This is Swallowtail in the Briarpatch.  A photo of Jim’s I printed on silk fabric, quilted using free motion machine stitching with silk thread, then framed it with a batik and some cottons.
The stalk of the flower and some leaves are stitched with a heavier rayon thread.  The finished piece is mounted on foam core and measures 11” x 14”.

Mail Call

Oh, boy, oh, boy!  Excitement arrived in the mailbox today.  I opened a package from a distant relative and was transported back in time to the days when my Grandfather wrote letters to me from California.  I was in elementary school and he was my best pen pal!  He typed his letters on onionskin paper and folded them very precisely to fit just so in the red and white striped air mail envelope.

Our newsy exchanges were pretty humdrum everyday stuff, but it was exciting to me because our letters traveled by plane.  GrandDaddy had moved to California when I was a young child to escape the Georgia humidity with his asthma.  He did return to visit a few times,  and there were occasional long distance phone calls, but our deepest conversations during my formative years were by letter.

After my most recent post including him in a photo, Ilse and I chatted and she said she had more photos of his that she could send.  GrandDaddy (Homer Youngblood) had two families.  My mother was born to his first wife, Cora, who died when my mother was four years old and her sister was two.  Later, GrandDaddy married Miss Katherine and had two more children.  Ilse married Homer, Jr. and is the keeper of many memories and stories he shared.

Today is the anniversary of my first blog post.  Site stats say this is the 105th post I’ve written.  I never made a formal plan to share something on a schedule, and didn’t really have a plan as to what I would include.  If I had an original goal in mind, it was to continue the journaling I’ve done on paper, on cloth in 52 Tuesdays, and now on the web, to encourage others to record their stories in some way.

This blog has grown into a way to document my quilt stories, old works and new projects as well.  The new projects that excite me have included many photos, sometimes family members, so the old stories behind the photos have now been written down, too.  And I’ve been the joyous recipient of others’ stories (and sometimes their photos) once readers knew I was interested in such things.


This package from Ilse holds some family photos, both previously seen and new to my eyes, as well as some of unknown people GrandDaddy was hired to photograph.  All are interesting, but the treasures are the ones of him that I had not seen before.  Oh, my, I think Ilse in Arizona must have heard me squealing as I opened the package!

Now to scan, print, and stitch!

Four Brothers

The man on the far right…what’s that he’s holding in his hand?  That’s my grandfather, here with three of his brothers.  When I find a photo in which he is included, I’m always intrigued by how the photo was taken, since he was usually the one behind the camera.

I recently wrote about the coincidence that both my husband and I had maternal grandfathers who were professional photographers.  Sometimes we can find a cable in the photo leading to a remote shutter release.  Those were available from as early as 1918 in  advertisements like this one found here.

In this case, zooming and examining (you can click on any image to enlarge it) reveals no cable, and in the 1940’s when this photo was probably taken, there was no timer built in to cameras as we have now.  However, my Grandfather did have a son who helped him with his photography business by that time. Homer, Jr. went to work in the darkroom at age 7, in 1935.  It is likely that he, Jr.,  is the one taking this photo.  And, GrandDaddy is probably holding the remnants of a cigar.

I printed this photo on fabric from a vintage linen tablecloth, painted some elements, layered it on wool batting, and stitched around the figures with silk thread.  It is layered on cotton fabric, a layer of old burlap, and then on an old quilt remnant.  The resulting piece measures 14” x 17”.


The process of stitching these photos sometimes yields as interesting an image on the back as on the front.  Here you see what one viewer considered the shadows of these brothers.

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Man With Bicycle, 1905

Homer Carter and Homer Youngblood were both professional photographers in the early part of the twentieth century.  In our house, we have a lot of photos taken by these two men who, to our knowledge, never met.

Homer Carter was the father of Sadie, my mother-in-law.  Homer Youngblood was the father of Cleo, my mother.  Interesting, don’t you think?

This serendipitous happening means that we have some images on hand that were made with the best photographic equipment available at the time, and printed on quality paper.  Perfect for scanning and printing on fabric, I think.

This photo of an unidentified gentleman of the early 1900’s was compelling to me.  He was a client of Jim’s grandfather.  I printed his image on a remnant of a vintage linen tablecloth, painted the bicycle red, and quilted the layers with silk thread.  Free motion quilting gives dimension to the man and the bicycle with wool batting underneath.

The image is layered on a denim remnant, hand stitched with a Kantha stitch using red embroidery floss.  All is then layered and attached to a scrap of an old tattered quilt.

The label is written on a piece of an old man’s handkerchief.

Sewing Notions

Look at this bit of info I found inside a package wrapper on some vintage seam binding.  What a wonderful marketing strategy to entice sewing mothers to introduce their daughters to the craft!

I found this when I opened a package of rayon binding to use as ties in a drawstring bag.  There is no copyright date or price on this package, but a similar one with 1939 as the date has a price of 29?.

And then this one advertising a product to increase the length and breadth of a child’s dress is interesting, too.  My mother sewed beautiful clothes for me and for others, but I never recall seeing this product.  Maybe because I was so frightfully petite, there was no need to have “galloons” in our vocabulary.

This discovery was fun, the research on Wrights reveals its long history in the sewing industry…since 1897.  The name is still used on notions, but now owned by Simplicity.  This is according to Wikipedia.  Another site with even more info is here.

You know from past posts that I love buying vintage fabrics and trims.  I find the old ones to be superior because of materials used and the flea market pricing, but the history lessons are valuable, too.  I bought some of these trims on this adventure.

There is good news about young people learning to sew in today’s world.  The Modern Quilt Guild and the aesthetic they promote is enticing young people to sewing and quilting in a big way.  Applause, please.  Times have changed and children aren’t learning to sew from their mothers by making doll clothes any more, but children are interested in sewing.  And more good news:  it’s now ok to get boys interested, too.

The drawstring bags are made using a pattern from Jeni Baker here.  I see now that her site has a video tutorial for the bags, but the pattern alone is very clear.  Her design is great!  You quickly end up with a nice lined drawstring bag and directions are given for multiple sizes.