Week 24: Artistic

 ARTISTIC

I have made mention before of the needlework crafts done by my mother, Eveleen "Sis" Allen (nee Schell).  As a young girl she learned the usual knitting and crotchet as well as tatting from relatives.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember if it was her paternal grandmother, Mary Schell (nee Deadman), who lived with them (the woman was quite ill her last few years of life) or one of her many aunts that frequently visited.  Some of the lessons may have come from her mother, Irene Schell (nee Bates) but for most of my mother's childhood her mother was busy helping on the family farm as well as providing room and board for one of the local teachers.  Mom used to say that she and her sister Lena were rarely given cooking lessons by their mother as the woman would be rushing to get the meal done and did not have time to teach her daughters.  So I suspect there was similar limited time for teaching needlework.

Growing up, I would see my mother knitting and crotcheting as she watched television.  Usually the items were given as wedding or baby gifts to family and friends.  In the late 1960s, at the insistence of a close friend and neighbour, Mom started sewing clothes.  She used the portable Singer sewing machine that her sister had bought years earlier but was no longer using.  Many an outfit for myself and my mother was made on that machine sitting at the kitchen table.  I have that machine in my crafts room, although it is not my main machine.

One summer when Mom and I went to visit her brother and his family.  My cousin asked Mom to teach her knitting and crotchet as her mother was not a crafter.  Mom decided if she was teaching her niece, she would teach me as well.  I was not interested, so my aunt took me out and bought me a kit for liquid embroidery.  To this day, I still do not knit or crotchet.  I have made feeble attempts, but still little interest in doing it.  But my time doing liquid embroidery did progress to learning to do needle embroidery from my mother.  I eventually process to cross stitching and plastic canvas - crafts my mother never did pick up.  I'm sure psychiatrists would have an explanation as to why I do not do the crafts my mother did.  

At one point, probably in the 1970s, Mom decided to start quilting.  Depending on the pattern, the top may have been hand sewn or pieced together with the sewing machine.  The quilting was definitely done by hand and my mother had the rough fingers to prove it.  She used the quilting frames that her parents delivered to her.  I cannot remember if they were my grandmother's or from another family member.  At first she did the quilting in the basement, putting the frame over the pool table.  In later years she did the quilting in her bedroom, with the frame over the bed, supported by furniture and chairs.  At night, the frame would be propped up against the wall which necessitated maneuvering for access to her closet. 

At first she did the quilts just for something to do, but soon ran out of storage room for the quilts.  By this time, my 30+ cousins had started getting married, so Mom decided instead of the crotchet trimmed or embroidered pillow cases she would give the bride and groom a quilt.  She felt bad for the two cousins that had already married before she started this tradition and eventually did give them a quilt as well.  

As the years passed, Mom did start selling quilts to friends as well as through consignment shops.  She never submitted any of her quilts (or other needlework) to craft shows or fairs as she never felt confident enough in the quality.  By this point in time, her sister had retired and started hand sewing quilt tops but left the quilting to Mom.  I did the same as well.  Mom also did the quilting for other people.

After a number of years, my mother's market for quilts was dwindling.   So Mom started making tote bags out of log cabin quilt blocks.  They were a big hit.  She never advertised, her sales were just done by word of mouth and people seeing someone with one of the bags.  Her sister lived about 5 hours away and would take a supply home with her after visiting.  Lena would walk into her local seniors card club with her arms covered in the bags and would sell every one of them.  Mom always kicked herself that she never kept track from the beginning as to the number that she sold.  I still have several that she gave me.

Like my mother, I would gift my needlework to others.  For my parents' 40th wedding anniversary, I created a sampler which I did in counted cross stitch.  My husband has always admired the sampler hanging on the dining room wall.  We recently celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary and he asked me to do a similar one for us.  We are currently in the process of building our home and my craft supplies have been in storage for over a year, but I have promised him that once I have access to my supplies, I will do one.  I'm pretty sure when packing last year, I still had the graph chart from my parents' sampler that I had done in 1989.  Yes, I'm a hoarder - but this is an example of why one should not throw out anything.

The first big project that I did, and had professionally framed, was a full size Monopoly board.  I did not create the pattern, I did it from a pattern I had purchased.  When we have guests and they are mystified why we have a Monopoly board hanging on our wall, my husband delights in telling them to look close at it to see the cross-stitching.  Another project I did, was hand embroidered printed blocks and had my mother quilt the finished top.  I took me about one week to embroider a block, working on it during coffee and lunch breaks as well as at home.  I was finishing the last block while home sick and watching television when the American hostages were finally released by Iran as Ronald Reagan was being sworn in as President of the United States.  I had the quilt as a wall hanging in my apartment.  When I asked my father for help in mounting it to a board, he was concerned the weight of the quilt would pull the board down.  He used heavy duty nails, almost like spikes, to attach the board in the wall in my apartment.  I believe I left the board behind when I moved out of that apartment as I was afraid of what would happen if we removed the nails/spikes.

In 2019, when my step-son was getting married, I wanted to follow my mother's tradition of giving a quilt as the wedding gift.  By this point in time, Mom's eyesight and arthritis in her hands prevented her from being able to do the quilting.  I was living two provinces away so I would not have been able to use her quilting frames.  And I would not have had time to try to do the hand quilting myself.  I sewed the top on my sewing machine and bought a quilting frame.  Instead of quilting like my mother, I tie quilted the item.  I copied some the designs from the 40th anniversary sampler into the quilt: on a centre panel, I embroidered the names of the bride & groom as well as their wedding date and the names of the bride's children.  The bride was in a gothic phase, so I did a black and white quilt.  They loved visiting us in New Brunswick during lobster season, so when I spotted lobster print fabric, I had to buy it and incorporate it into the quilt.  I love the creativeness of the planning even more than the actual stitching (or in the case of this quilt - hand tieing).

 Like many people, I made face masks during Covid.  That reawakened my enjoyment of sewing.  But I was never in lock down as I worked in a retail store deemed to be an essential service.  Now that I am retired, I am looking forward to getting back into sewing once we get settled into our new home.  I'm envisioning doing a lot of craft fair items like quilted coasters, hotpads, etc as well as quilts and tote bags.  But quilted on a sewing machine, not by hand.  It will be a case of "Not my Momma's Quilts".  Remains to be seen if I will be able to create a market to sell them, or if I will just be making items for our new home as well as gifting to family and friends.  As I tell my husband, I get more like my mother every day.  Opinions vary as to whether that is a good thing or not.  But at least in the artistic arena, I believe it is a positive thing.

My mother passed away this part February at the age 95.  Several of her nieces/nephews and spouses travelled 3-4 hours in potentially bad winter weather to attend the funeral.  Many of them made a point of telling me how they have appreciated their wedding quilt, and even decades later, still had the item displayed with honour.  One of my long time friends had not been able to attend the funeral.  When she emailed me her condolences, she included a photo of the tote bag she still had and uses - over 35 years later.