The quilt frame arrived yesterday. It arrived in good condition (we had the woman at the UPS store pack it - though probably never again - I didn't realize how expensive their "packing" services were). And I now have a 4' long box almost full of foam peanuts to deal with. (I hate foam peanuts).

I got the quilt out.



(It was still dark out when I took these photos so I didn't even bother considering to take it out and peg it on the clothesline like I often do to photograph quilt tops). There are two small holes (that I've found so far) in the pink backing, but I can fix those, and there's one worn spot on one of the printed patches, which I think I'll probably darn.

It's interesting in that the quilter did a sort of "gradient" of fabrics. I don't know if that was an intentional plan, or if she (I'm assuming it's a she; years back nearly all people who pieced quilts were) just put the quilt together as she completed blocks. Or if she was trying to separate the fabrics that "matched less."

As I said before, the color combination is a bit unusual and probably would not appeal to someone buying the top merely for decorative value, but for me, the interest is in the age of the fabrics and their prints and the top, even with the wonky color combination, is not without charm.

Here are most of the fabrics in close-up:



Turquoise and purple seemed to be a popular mid-century color combination for fabrics; I've seen a lot of older fabrics with these colors together. I like the combination. Also, a lot of feed sack prints have these kind of geometric designs on them. (I'm assuming the fabrics are feed sack based on the weave and the style of the prints. If I were really motivated I could go to some of the various feed-sack websites that are out there and see if I could match any of them up. It's my understanding there's pretty extensive documentation of feed sacks out there).



This is a pictorial scene, probably intended to be Mexican or Southwest. It shows up very poorly in the photograph but some of the red shapes are long dresses on women. There are also cacti and what look like palm trees and adobe buildings and small figures of "peasants". It's mostly a grey and red print and the grey doesn't show up well in photographs.



I think this is my favorite fabric in the quilt, because it's so bright. It's sort of shields with palm trees and then a background of those rosette-like things. You wonder what kind of mood the fabric designer was shooting for, what they intended the fabric to be used for (like Hawaiian shirts?)



And then, finally, there are the more "conventional pretties" - floral prints (and one has grey butterflies in it as well). These are sort of typical of what I've seen for the floral-print feed sacks.

Feedsacks fascinate me. (For the non-quilters in the audience: yes, these were actual cloth bags that (mostly) animal feed came in, years back. Several of the companies got the idea of printing the fabric with designs - both as an enticement for people to buy their brand, and so that people could recycle the sacks after the feed was used. One website with a little information is the Quilt History website)

They started being offered in the 1920s (another feedsack history site). They probably were most popular (from what I've read) from the 30s through the early 50s, but continued to be printed into the 1960s.

I think I'm fascinated by them because they seem to me to be from such a vanished world, and yet, they are really not from that long ago. (My mother talks about wearing dresses made from feedsacks when she was young.).  Also, it's one of those things that makes me smile because it was sort of "unnecessary." The manufacturers did not HAVE to print pretty patterns on the bag - they could have (as many did in the early years), just sell plain white cloth sacks with the manufacturer's name printed on them. (Many women wrote of wearing bloomers made of these sacks when they were little girls, and the embarrassment if their dress flipped up and revealed the logo). But they decided to do it - because it appealed to people, and because it allowed the natural frugality of the times to take on a little bit of happiness. (I don't know about you but I'd rather recycle a pretty printed cotton sack than a plain white one).

In my mind, it's kind of similar to that brand of laundry soap (I think it was?) that used to package things like hand towels in their boxes. (I KNOW there was. I remember my grandmother showing me some of the small bathroom hand towels she had and telling me she got them with soap powder. ETA: It was Breeze detergent that did that.)

Companies don't do that any more. (It's even rare, any more, to find a cereal box with a prize inside. And that was a big big deal when I was a kid. It makes me a little sad to think that there may be kids today who never get the experience of a "prize inside.") I suppose it saves money for the company (and increases profits for the shareholders), but it does make me a little sad - as all "cutting things to the bone" makes me a little sad. (I hate "petty oeconomies" - to quote Trollope)

I also like feed sacks because the colors - even though some of them may seem a little gaudy - appeal to me. I think part of it really is that some of my sense of taste, of what appeals to me, was formed by the summers spent at my maternal grandmother's home, where little in the way of decoration had changed since the 1950s or so, and where she still had textiles going back to my own mother's childhood.

Another interesting tidbit about feed sacks: before the 1948 presidential election, the Staley company (IIRC) conducted what they called a "pullet poll" (using the sacks for their chicken feed). Half of the sacks where printed up with a Democratic paper label; half with a Republican paper label. Purchasing a sack with a particular label counted as a "vote" in the poll.

The interesting thing is - you might remember, 1948 was the Dewey-Truman race, and most of the newspaper polls were predicting Dewey would win (so much so that there's the famous photo of the victorious Truman holding up a newspaper that says "Dewey Defeats Truman" and grinning as he does). But the "pullet poll" was actually accurate: they predicted that Truman would win!

(The book where I found that, the author said she believed it was because the newspapers polled mostly urban, Easterners - the sort of person that Dewey was - whereas Truman was a Midwesterner and he did a lot of "stumping" in the farm communities. And probably the farmers "understood" him better and liked him better than they did Dewey.  Probably also - I don't know how polls were done in those days but if they were telephone polls, I think a lot of rural areas still didn't have much phone service then.)

More sites on feed sacks:

Quilter's Muse (That looks like an interesting site in general; they also have a blog that I will have to check out)

Feedbags: from rags to riches

Quilt made of novelty fabrics, probably some from feed sacks. LOTS of novelty-type fabrics were printed on feedsacks - both travel prints (like the two I have), and "boy's prints" (Western scenes, sports scenes), and cute animals, and one company was even licensed to use images from Disney on feed sacks.

***

One other thing I did last night was something I almost never do.



I painted my fingernails. I had been planning on doing my toes...I often do in the summer when I'm running around in sandals a lot of the time, but I decided to do my fingers too this time. (The toes are the same color). I may come to hate it and have it get all chipped and take it off in a couple days - I don't know for sure how successfully one can sew and such for extended periods of time (though I did hand-quilt some last night without any problems) without chipping the heck out of the polish.

The photo (and my hands) make me smile because they look like little-girl hands to me with such short nails. But I find that that's actually the ideal "practical" length for me - for one thing, if they are much longer than that, they "click" on the piano keys when I play and that bugs me. And for another reason: when my nails are much longer, I often break them or catch them on things and wind up having to cut them even SHORTER than they are here, and that can hurt until they grow back some.

So I don't know. I may keep the painted nails, at least until the heavy soil-involved fieldwork starts up again. (Yes, I COULD wear gloves, but it's over 100 degrees here right now and I would rather de-polish my nails than wear latex gloves for fieldwork.)

I finished the Lace Ribbon scarf that I've been working on for (I think) over a year.

(July 12 of last year, based on what I said on Ravelry).

I finished and blocked it Saturday night:



It's Fleece Artist "Sea Wool," a wool and "seacell" (fiber made from algae, don't ask me how they do it) blend. The color is called "dandelion."

I tried it on to see how it looked. Granted, a deep-purple skirt is not the best match with this, but here it is:



When I saw the finished picture, I had to kind of laugh. No, not over the (empty) tea mug sitting on the side table, or the pillowcase that I am still embroidering on (that's what that white thing is) next to it. I had to laugh because the picture looks so very *Victorian* to me - both the way I am sitting (I guess I do tend to sit pretty demurely) and also all the framed family pictures up on the wall all around me.

I got to thinking that I should take another picture, using the 'sepia' filter on my camera, but meh, that would take more work. So instead I used my rather-cheap photo editing software (Pixela, which came with my camera) to crop, make black and white, and blur a little, part of the photo.



Hah. I could almost print that out, frame it, and hang it up with the similar photos of my maternal great-grandparents. (they have a similar slightly blurred effect to them, at least the "casual" photo of the whole family sitting in their parlor). Or it looks a bit like one that might show up in the old, old yearbook of a ladies' seminary...the Botany professor at home in her living room or somesuch.

My (belated) Christmas present to myself came yesterday, and I promptly put it up:



It looks vintage, but it's actually not. It's a reproduction from Victorian Trading (made in India, I note with a bit of dismay, despite the stamp on the front of the object).

I like it because it looks like something that my grandmother would have had in her house (in fact, I think she had something very similar to this, but that sat on the floor rather than hung on the wall).

I also like it because it is a so-simple-it's-elegant solution to a problem - having a convenient place to hang various unmentionable items while they dry. (I do think I will keep some scraps of plain white cloth in the cabinet below where it hangs; I am not at all sure that the stain on those arms won't transfer to things).

It will also work to hang up damp-but-clean kitchen towels.

And when you're not using it, it folds up neatly out of the way:



It looks very right in my kitchen. As I've said before, I live in a vintage 1946/1947 house and I sort of like to have a few of the impedimentia that might have been around during the era when the house was first built. (OK, the original of the dryer is probably older than that, but I am sure people in the 40s had similar things to dry clothes, especially in the winter or in damp weather when you could not hang things outside).

****

My jaw is still somewhat sore, so I decided to make some chocolate pudding to have with dinner last night. This is a simple but not-quite-instant (because it can take 10 minutes or so to thicken up as you stir) recipe, originally from the (sadly out-of-print) Square Meals by Jane and Michael Stern:

4 T cocoa (I used Hershey's "Special Dark," but I suspect the pudding would be really spectacular with a high-grade gourmet cocoa like Droste or Valrhona)

4 T corn starch

2/3 cup sugar

1/4 t salt

You mix those things together in the top of a double boiler and put it over a pan of hot but not boiling water. Then you add

1/2 cup light cream*

and mix it all together.

Then, you scald (I did, though maybe it's not strictly necessary) 1 1/2 cups additional cream and SLOWLY add it to the mix while stirring. Then you stir constantly until it thickens (this is the time consuming part, add 1 T vanilla (or whatever flavor you like; I suppose you could spike it with rum if you are into that). Put in a big bowl or serving dishes, cover well (to avoid a skin) and chill.

Be sure to stir WELL. My pudding actually wound up a bit lumpy because I stirred kind of lazily, and I also think I might have had the water a bit too hot - I think I heard it boiling before I turned the heat down.

The recipe claims it makes 4 servings but what I wound up with looks more like 6 to me. Then again, the Sterns are not known for stinting on portion size.

Even with just the plain old Hershey's (though I think the Special Dark cocoa powder is better than the regular), it was fantastic. Much better than "box" pudding, and not THAT much more work to make.

(*I grabbed, by mistake, heavy cream, and didn't realize until I got home [stupid Friday wal-mart]. My mother confirmed what I thought: that mixing it half and half with milk would approximate light cream, but she also added, "I make a similar recipe and just use skim milk." Which would be more accessible (I don't keep cream on hand) and would be much lower fat. But I like to make a recipe as-written the first time and then change it up. But I suspect you could use any grade of milk or milk-like liquid in this; perhaps even soy milk, which would make it both vegan and lactose-free...but I suspect you'd have to be even more careful heating and stirring to keep the soy milk from curdling.)

***

And here is the second "Vanna's Choice Taupe Mist" critter. This is probably the most unusual amigurumi I have ever made.

Some years back, when Beanie Babies were in their first popularity, there was a list making the rounds of "failed Beanie Baby characters" or something. It was marginally funny; the one that I remember best (because it struck me as the funniest one) was Tapey the Worm.

Well, this isn't Tapey, but it's his cousin, Flats:



Yes, it's a crocheted planarian. The pattern is a freebee on Ravelry. You crochet two flat pieces and then sew them together. The only little change I made was to do the eye spots with embroidery floss rather than the yarn scraps recommended.

It's about 9" long and I think it would also make an amusing cat toy if you had a largish cat.

****

I'm not sure how to post about this without seeming a bit of a Pharisee (in the sense of it looking like I'm publicly advertising how "good" I am), but whatever.

I put the binding on the Bento Box quilt last night. And I decided it wanted to go out into the world and make its living (like they say in the fairy tales).

And, coincidentally (but perhaps not*), I received the regular e-mail newsletter from Quilt Asylum. And what do they mention but being a drop-off point for Project Linus? So I take that as a sign that the quilt needs to go with me this morning and head out to its new life, hopefully to comfort some child somewhere:



(*There are really quite a lot of things in my life that happen that could be interpreted as coincidences or could be interpreted as not-coincidences. I don't know if it's simply a fact that I'm very good at seeing "patterns" in things, or maybe if there isn't maybe something more to it.)

Interesting set of paper ephemera and other items on Flickr.

Conceivably, one could print some of the "paper toys" (and the paper dolls like M. Epinard) out and actually assemble them.

(She also has a blog - en français - with lots of ephemera here. There are some of the paper-toys - like a neat set of c. 1920 racecars - there as well.)