Old Jail Arts

Deborah Newton Stocking Cap from Vogue Knitting--Done!

2012-01-29T19:02:00.000-08:00

As soon as I saw this wild and woolly stocking cap on page 67 of the Holiday 2011 Vogue Knitting, I knew my darling daughter would love it. It wasn't easy to knit; all the color changes, of course, and my own stupidity made it take much longer than it should have, but it's finished with plenty of winter left to wear it in, and my 2012 knitting year is off to a great start. January isn't over yet, and I've already completed something! Here's DD, back in her old room for a night, modeling her new cap.

What's next? I have lots of projects at the museum, and maybe I'll tackle a UFO or two. I've lost 30 pounds so far and nothing fits right, so I might just spend some time taking in my old clothes, although it would be a lot more fun to just make (and shop for) new ones.

It takes a village...of Santas

2012-01-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

Remember when the kids were small, and their Christmas presents were Legos and Barbies and board games and picture books? When their eyes shone just looking at the lights on the tree or the twinkling fake icicles dangling from the soffit? When everywhere you went you could find something you knew they would love?

Those days are so gone. Our kids are 20 and almost 17. Their toys are electronic. Their clothes are expensive. Their tastes are unpredictable. But one thing they still love, no matter what is in the gift--the tag.

What? The tag? Who reads past their own name on the tag? Ah, if you do not live in the village of many Santas, you may be missing the best part of gift giving. Let me explain.

Years ago, I got tired of putting "To ________ From Santa" on every tag. It was so boring, so uncreative. And generally left unread. So I started sneaking in different names for Santa. At first it was just alternative monikers like "St. Nicholas" or "Papa Noel" (the French version). The village of Santas just kept growing, though, and DH and the kids got into the spirit and started labeling their gifts with silly Santa names that sometimes hinted at the contents as well.

This year the re-naming of Santa provided us with hours of entertainment. Consider the example above, on a gift of athletic socks (DS goes through at least a pair a week, and they fit nicely into the stocking, but socks are right up there with underwear in the "gift you really don't want to open" category). As it turned out, the tag was more fun than the gift, and we all had a good laugh over it. Other notable examples: on a replacement tripod for DD, who has suffered numerous spills with the cheap one she currently uses for oil painting, "Life is too short to waste on bad equipment Santa." On a gift to my husband of the former California governor's favorite pumpkin seed oil, "Arnold Santa-negger." "Vintage Santa" brought me a lovely beaded scarf, and "Lame Sister" received a book from "Even Lamer Brother Santa." A bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream came from "Tam O'Santa," and "Santa D'Or Dali" gave DD several new tubes of oil paints.

We had so much fun with the Santa village that I'm already thinking up Santa names for next year. I hope you all enjoyed wonderful Christmas and New Year's celebrations. Let's make something wonderful in 2012.

Teal Bulky Sweater - UFO Finished at Last!

2011-12-09T08:53:00.000-08:00

Remember that teal Blue Sky Bulky yarn I bought a few years ago? I started by designing an original pattern for a cardigan, made it too big, ripped it out, and made it smaller. I tried it on at the beginning of fall--it was shapeless and too big for my (happily) shrinking figure. I ripped it out again. I found a new pattern on the Blue Sky website, designed by Sylvia Hager. It looked adorable on the website, so I bought it ($9, yikes!). I knitted four or five inches, found it was also way too big, ripped it out and started over. I had some trouble with the directions for the bust shaping, did more ripping out, re-wrote the directions so they made sense, and continued. The Sunday after Thanksgiving I worked most of the day on the sweater and had it almost finished when a giant hole appeared in the front. I don't know what caused the hole, but I'm guessing it was one of my knots tied too close to a yarn end badly frayed from so much ripping out and re-knitting. Vowing not to be defeated by the yarn demons, I ripped almost 70% of my work out one more time, all the way down to the hole, and knitted the sweater again.

Success! All done, and cute! It's so bulky you can't tell I've lost 25 pounds, but that's okay. It's warm and comfy and I still love the color. Plus I get to check a long-festering UFO off of my list, just before the start of a new year.

Merry Christmas, everybody, and best wishes for a happy, productive 2012!

Recipe Report - Roasted Sweets & Greens

2011-10-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

I found this recipe in the October 2011 issue of Better Homes and Gardens. You can also find it here: http://www.kitchenmonki.com/recipe/Roasted_Sweets_Greens. It's on the bhg.com website, too, but I needed to log in to access it, and I just refused. I chose this recipe because it packs 6 grams of fiber and 4 grams of protein into a 236-calorie serving, and because I love sweet potatoes.

The recipe took about 45 minutes to make. The arugula was expensive (close to $4 for a box) and I think the recipe would have been just as good with spinach or parsley, frankly. DH was wildly enthusiastic about this dish, and would have gladly eaten the whole pan by himself. DS wasn't that impressed, although he ate a good-sized serving, too. I didn't think I liked it much, but then I caught myself going back for more. All in all, if you want a filling, tasty side dish to make up for a lightweight main course, this is it. After a serving and a half, I had little room for anything else.

By the way, counting my calories and upping my exercise has paid off in a big way already; I have lost 17 pounds. I feel like I'm peeling myself like an onion (at 15 pounds lost, I was back to 2007 when we moved to Indiana from overseas; at 17 lost, I'm the weight I was in 2003 when our daughter was a seventh grader and our son was eight). I'm trying not to set any impossible goals, but 20 lost would be a nice start. Anyone interested in committing to a life of eating what your body needs instead of what it wants might want to check out myfitnesspal.com. It has been a godsend to me; I have the app on my iPhone and enter every single thing that I eat every day.

Where did the summer go?

2011-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

What a summer! Lots of stuff happened, some of it really good, like the visit by my friend Michelle from New York (shown with yours truly above at Spring Mill State Park) and our trip to Chicago together, some of it really not good, like the four days my mom spent in the hospital (she's better now, thankfully), and some of it just busy, busy, busyness brought on by trying to keep up with volunteer commitments and life in general.

DD had two guests in August; her boyfriend (who has been described in this blog before--tall, handsome, Lithuanian, and now so hairy that her friends have dubbed him "six foot Jesus"), and her former host brother from France, an adorable boy who doesn't speak much English, but when he does, the accent is pure foie gras. When she ran out of stuff to do with them (or food to feed them) in Bloomington, she brought them home to the old jail, which I loved. We traveled around the southern Indiana countryside, we ate, we went out to restaurants, we ate, we cooked up great food in the kitchen, we ate... Did I mention that we ate?

And now time to pay the piper. I avoided getting on the bathroom scale until everyone was back in school and the fun and craziness were over, but on Friday morning I ran out of excuses and faced the music. Not good. Really not good. So now I'm trying hard to get it all back off. I've vowed to work out every day and limit my calories until I can bear to look at a photo of myself in a color other than black. I've appointed DD my "accountability coach" so I won't have to bore you with the details. Wish me luck.

I Broke the Knitting Jinx

2011-06-09T06:25:00.001-07:00

Some time ago I donated several pieces of woven cotton to a woman who makes bonnets to sell in our museum gift shop. In return she gave me, among other things, a knitted cotton washcloth. I had never understood the passion some people seem to have for knitted washcloths until I took this one to the kitchen and employed it in place of the sponge for washing dishes. It had a nice diagonal pattern that created just enough friction to get the dishes clean, and I just loved the feel of it. Unfortunately I have used it so much that it's looking pretty stained and ugly, so I'm not going to show it to you, but I will show you the new washcloth I was inspired to knit as a result of how much I liked the gifted one.

Oops--I'm getting ahead of myself. What I wanted to explain was, I haven't knitted anything for a while. That teal bulky sweater that you may remember from several years ago now is the reason. No matter what I do with that bulky yarn, it doesn't work and I rip it out again. I refuse to buy any more yarn until I use that up--I paid $100 or so for it, on sale, and my failure to come up with a winning design mocks me every time I look in the sewing room closet. So I putter around in the kitchen, as you know, and work on my little translation, and play Spider Solitaire, now that Lent is over, and in general accomplish very little at home. Until yesterday.

Yesterday was really hot--95 or so. Here in the old jail we don't have central air conditioning, which is pretty inefficient, anyway, and most of the time that's not a problem, but yesterday the heat was just beastly, so I spent the afternoon sitting under the ceiling fan in the living room knitting a washcloth in a corner-to-corner design called a "diagonal bee stitch," similar to the one I was given as a present. I found the pattern here: http://hakucho.blogspot.com/search?q=diagonal+bee+stitch+

The yarn, a high-quality worsted-weight cotton, was left over from some long-ago project; I love the color as much now as I did then. I have a nice hot pink in the same yarn and I think I'll make a second one when time permits. I love the way this one turned out, and I'm crossing my fingers that the knitting jinx is broken and I can make a few more interesting things in cotton before the weather turns cold and I can tackle that teal Blue Sky bulky for the last time.

Recipe Report - Garden Veggie Linguine with Cilantro Pesto

2011-06-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

The recipe appears on page 161 of the May 2011 issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. I have been wanting to make it for some time, but there has been a shortage of cilantro in the grocery stores in our town (honestly, I looked at all four and the farmer's market). I finally got to make it tonight, and it was well worth the wait. In the meantime I reintroduced the boys to fresh oranges and zucchini, which I had to buy a couple of times waiting for cilantro to appear.

This stuff is delicious. DS couldn't get enough of it. I made it with fettucine instead of linguine. The noodles end up covered in spicy olive-y goodness, and the carrots, oranges and zucchini offer individual taste sensations that complement the noodles and cilantro well. I cut the salt in half and didn't miss it at all, and I used Grey Poupon mustard instead of dry mustard, which I don't use enough to justify keeping in stock. The recipe is relatively cheap to make. It's a bit of a calorie bomb (518 calories a serving), but could be dinner all by itself, so we'll definitely be making it again.

If you don't subscribe to Better Homes and Gardens, the recipe is also available on-line at the following address:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/from-better-homes-and-gardens/better-homes-and-gardens-may-2011-recipes/#page=12

Blame the weather

2011-05-22T20:40:00.001-07:00

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted anything. I have lots of excuses--it's fundraiser time at the museum again, and DH and I have been working on a house that we will put on the market this spring. It's out in the country about fifteen miles from our old jail, and once there we don't come back quickly, as you might imagine. Even though he has been doing the lion's share of the work, I have kept busy there, too. Today we finally got the kitchen cabinet doors back on (after taking them off, removing all the hardware, shopping for new hardware, applying several coats of new paint, and putting all the hardware back on). We're one tile backsplash away from finishing the kitchen, hooray!

In the breaks between regular life (work, laundry, cooking, etc.) and fixing up the other house, I've been going through the motions of the spring-to-summer transition here at home, but I haven't been inspired to do anything interesting. I bought new cushions for the porch furniture (you may remember that the old ones were lumpy and faded and basically only suitable for napping cats), but now I hesitate to put the new ones out because Mr. Fuzz and his friends will just make a mess of them.

I did have a very good time the other day pulling up dandelions with the Fiskars Weed-Eater and transplanting the tomato plants. There's something about puttering around outside on a sunny day (we haven't had many of them this year, unfortunately). Maybe that's why I'm not getting much done. It's not that I'm procrastinating, indecisive, and unmotivated. It's the weather, right?

Braised Peas with Scallions and Lettuce

2011-04-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

Ever on the lookout for new ways to serve green vegetables, I marked this recipe in a recent issue of Better Homes and Gardens and went out to shop for ingredients. In the meantime, my sister-in-law ended up in the hospital for a few days and I took her a stack of magazines to read, including the one with this recipe. I hunted for it on line and was happy to find it here:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/printRecipe.jsp?recipeId=R160253&adCategory=null&catref=rcbhg1

I didn't even start dinner last night until 8:15 or so, after choir practice, so I needed something nutritious that could be prepared quickly. I put a package of salmon fillets in the oven, set DS to preparing whole wheat macaroni and cheese, and started chopping green onions and romaine lettuce. Dinner was on the table in a half an hour and the new recipe proved very tasty, an excellent vehicle for serving green vegetables, including the season's very first harvest of fresh mint from our yard. The picture shows how it looked in the pan; it looked even better next to the orange of the salmon and the yellow of the macaroni and cheese, but I was too hungry to think about taking another picture.

This recipe is by British chef Jamie Oliver, whose "Food Revolution" has sparked more than a little controversy on this side of the pond. Jamie crusades to make school lunches healthier, occasionally putting himself at odds with budget-strapped school systems and frankly, people who just don't want a guy with a chopping knife and an English accent telling them what to do. Not having been much of a fan of peas as a child myself, I'm not sure how this recipe would fare in an Indiana school cafeteria, but DS liked it, praising the tangy flavor, and he backed up the praise by eating two or three helpings. The nutritional content is impressive: 142 calories, only 5 grams of fat, 4 mg of cholesterol, low in sodium, carbs and sugar, a decent level of fiber and protein and 55% of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. Two thumbs way, way up!

Tomato Redux

2011-04-07T12:57:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers may remember our tomato debacle of a couple of years ago when my well-meaning DH managed to kill the plants that DS had spent the whole spring nurturing from seeds. Last year DS, stubborn like all the men in my family, refused to have anything to do with plants, but this year there were signs of a thaw, so I planted a variety of tomato seeds in twenty-two pots using some potting soil I bought at Lowe's. DS got eleven of them for his east-facing window and the west windows of the kitchen got the other eleven. We already had the pots, so all I had to buy for this venture were seeds and soil, so I spent less than $10 total.

It took a couple of weeks for the first seedlings to appear. The potting soil is very loose and every time I pour in water the soil floats up and rearranges, which can't be good for the seedlings. DS had already proclaimed the entire enterprise a dismal failure before the first telltale loop of green appeared in one of the pots. We now have more than twenty tomato plants. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for another bumper tomato crop here at the old jail. DS is starting to show some interest, but he leaves the watering to me, and we are both watching DH closely to make sure he doesn't decide to "help."

Sewing Patches on Letter Jackets

2011-03-15T05:04:00.000-07:00

When I picked up DS from track practice last night, he was grinning from ear to ear and for once wearing enough clothes for the weather. His long-awaited letter jacket had arrived. I had a museum meeting to rush off to, but I promised him that after dinner I would sew on all the patches he had been awarded so far. Five hours later I sat down at the sewing machine and proceeded to make good on my promise.

Attention all well-meaning mothers of kids with letter jackets: First, notice the zipper hiding in the bottom of the back lining. It's there for a reason. I didn't notice this wonderful convenience until I had already sewn five patches on through the lining and made a bit of a mess of them. I had to remove two of them so that I could re-sew them through the outer fabric only. A letter jacket is big and bulky (especially the leather sleeves) and hard to turn in the sewing machine, but with perseverance it is possible to avoid sewing these things all on by hand.

Here's the result of my evening's labors. Someday I might go back and pull off the other three, but they're all right for now. The boy was still beaming from ear to ear as he left the house this morning, and all is right with the world.

We dodged a bullet!

2011-02-11T06:43:00.000-08:00

We love our old building, we really do. We are committed to saving it for future generations, no matter what it costs, we really are. That said, anyone contemplating doing anything like this should go into it with eyes wide open. Let's talk about insurance.

Since purchasing this building in 2005, we had had it insured as our home through a regular homeowner's policy with the same company I have used for all my insurance since 1979. Without naming names, keep in mind that I became a military officer in 1979 and said company was extremely exclusive and popular with military officers. The building was insured at approximately the price we paid for it, plus some for our personal belongings and upgrades. A few months ago a representative from this company called and said that the replacement value of our building had been determined to be more than ten times the value we were insuring it for, above the ceiling this company had for a homeowner's policy. Therefore, we could no longer insure our house through the only company I have used for over thirty years. The drop dead date for the end of the policy was set at 12:01 a.m. on February 11, 2011. Today, in other words.

I set out immediately looking for insurance locally. I was told the same thing by every agent I queried--all the companies use the same underwriters and have the same limits. Since I am a regular HGTV viewer, I knew that even the new "replacement value" figure, while outrageous for Bedford, couldn't be that unusual on a national basis (I mean, just last night I saw a condo in New York City listed at $10 million); who insures these high-value homes? One kind agent suggested I call Indiana Landmarks, which I did, and they set me up with a national organization that offers insurance policies for historic landmarks.

This was great, except for one thing: given the new "replacement" value for the building, the cost of the new insurance was going to be more than three times what we were paying before. The monthly insurance payment would buy me a new car. Still, I didn't see any other options, so I said, go ahead, with a desperate sinking feeling in my heart that we would never be able to spend another dime actually renovating the building because our whole budget would go into insuring it. The kicker in all this is that we couldn't sell this property for one-twentieth of the new "replacement" value.

DH didn't take the news well. He's become a real cheapskate in his old age and he loves to send me off in search of bargains. I had already spent a lot more time on this than I wanted to (how fun is it to spend your day on the phone with insurance agents who all give you the same bad news?), so I put it back on him. "Find me an agent who doesn't use the same underwriters as everybody else, and I'll make the call."

Well, bless his heart. At the eleventh hour he got a contact through one of his contacts. I called the agent and left a message in the middle of a big snowstorm a couple of weeks ago. It took a couple of days to get a call back, but in the end everything looked great to start at 12:01 this morning, with premiums based on cash value instead of replacement value, at a cost of one and a half times what we were paying before, but still within reason. The agent sent me a form, and I filled it out and sent it back.

Uh-oh. New glitch. As many of you know, we like to offer our studio space to artists who want to teach classes and such. Recently Tara Jones, a gifted local photographer, has moved her base of operations to the dispatcher room, and Tara has an exhibition scheduled to open tonight. (The gorgeous photos above of our old jail are Tara's work.)

You can guess the rest. The new company was adamant that we would only get our insurance if Tara had her own. Instead of spending yesterday getting ready for her exhibition, Tara spent it getting her own insurance so that she could open her exhibition today. For now no other artists will be able to use the space unless they come up with their own insurance, so the entire "art center" concept has become a lot more complicated. Still, I feel that we dodged a bullet and emerged from the experience older and wiser. Thank you to not one but two insurance agents who really hustled to make this all happen!

If you are in the Bedford area, come on out to the exhibition. It's up all weekend and you can get more information at www.guerrillashots.com.

Recipe Report - Spicy Chicken with Cucumber Yogurt Sauce

2011-02-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

The January 2011 issue of Better Homes and Gardens has a lot of recipes that look interesting. I already reviewed one of them (see "Super Bowls" from January 1), but instead of trying something from the February issue, I chose another recipe from January. This one is called "Spicy Chicken with Cucumber Yogurt Sauce." There's a picture of it on page 83 (the picture above is my version, not BHG's) and the recipe begins on page 99. The marinade for the chicken involves some ingredients I don't use often, including fresh ginger, fresh mint leaves, and curry powder. I thought plain yogurt was a strange base for a marinade, but DH says it's common in Middle Eastern cuisine. Add garlic, paprika, cinnamon and cayenne pepper and you've got a great-smelling marinade.

The recipe called for chicken wings or SMALL drumsticks; unfortunately all they had at our local store were big, fat drumsticks. I should have slashed them before they went into the marinade, to make the marinade soak in a little better, but I didn't think of it. DH also observed that instead of baking the chicken fast on high heat (400 degrees) for 40 minutes, it would have been better to bake it longer at lower heat. I was astounded by this observation, coming from the man who cooks everything on the highest burner setting, but maybe he discovered the other numbers on the dial while I wasn't looking.

The chicken was nice; the ginger in particular made for a wonderful aroma. The real winner in this recipe, though, is the cucumber yogurt sauce. If you've ever had tzatziki at a Greek restaurant, you've got the general idea. I used plain yogurt, full-fat, plus grated cucumber, garlic, salt, cumin and mint. Cumin is another one of those ingredients that doesn't get trotted out too often. Anyway, as I said, this sauce was a star. Long before the chicken was ready, DH had eaten half the sauce as a dip with veggie chips.

I served the chicken and sauce with basmati rice. I don't really like to serve rice plain because it tends to be dry, but the yogurt sauce solved that problem. I probably should have added carrots or broccoli to the menu for color if nothing else, but both the boys inhaled their dinner without noticing what it looked like. When I asked DS what he thought of the dish, he said, "Good." When I asked him if I should make it again sometime, he said, "Sure." So there you have it, from the boy who won the "Silent Man" award last year from his cross country coach.

Pea Soup Memories

2011-01-22T04:33:00.000-08:00

We lived for four years in College Park, Maryland when our kids were both in elementary school. I left at 7:00 a.m. every morning for my job in Washington, D.C. and returned just before six in the evening.

One evening our daughter met me at the door with a dreaded handout from school.

"Tonight's Medieval Night. We have to bring pea soup and we have to have costumes."

I don't remember why I was given such short notice, I just remember that my desperate "My kids will not suffer just because I work full-time" mom gene kicked in. I had exactly forty-five minutes before we had to leave for school. I took a couple of worn-out t-shirts, turned them wrong side out, cut out the sleeves, slit the front neck about six inches, poked holes on either side of the slit and laced seam binding through the holes. The kids slipped them on over their clothes, and voila! medieval costumes.

With a half hour to go, I took one look at the pea soup recipe and saw that it just wouldn't do (back in the Middle Ages they made stuff from scratch). There were three or four cans of Green Giant peas in the cabinet. I dumped all four of them in a bowl, mashed them with the potato masher, added a cube of bouillon and a lot of water, heated it up and voila! pea soup. DD looked at it doubtfully. DS was in first grade and couldn't care less (he would have been happy to stay home and play Freddie Fish on the computer), but we had pea soup.

"Where's your costume?" darling daughter asked, by this time a little awed, I think, and just throwing in things to test me.

With fifteen minutes to spare, I raided my collection of clothes from Africa and came up with a white cotton gauze number with a long skirt and fancy embroidery. I bet they were wearing these things in Ethiopia in the Middle Ages. Anyway, I put it on and off we went to medieval night. No one was any the wiser. I might have confessed to one of the friendlier parents at this tony private school that the pea soup was not made exactly according to the recipe, but the main point of this story is, Super Mom rode to the rescue on her white horse. Again. Oh, wait a minute, that's not the point of this story. The point is, I learned something about pea soup. That last-minute concoction was actually pretty tasty.

Fast forward five years or so. On one of our many trips to the Hoosier state from overseas, I got a cookbook from my mother. It was a simple affair, with colored paper pages and comb binding, called "Skinny Cooks Can't Be Trusted," by a fellow named Dave Kessler. I added it to my cookbook collection, and the first thing I remember trying is a recipe called "All American Split Pea Soup." This recipe marks the beginning of my like affair with real homemade pea soup, not exactly the way it was made in the Middle Ages, but close.

Still, Dave's recipe needed some tweaking. For one thing, you know how I hate recipes that use ALMOST the whole package but not the whole package. Dave's recipe also calls for a whole stick of butter, when a half or three-quarters will work just as well, and a whopping four cups of milk. DH doesn't care for cream soups, so over time I have reduced the milk incrementally, until yesterday when I did away with it altogether. So, with all due respect to Dave Kessler, here's my version of this recipe, perfect for snow days:

Not Exactly Medieval Split Pea Soup

1 package green split peas
One box of chicken broth
As much garlic as you can stand (I use a clove or two)
One large onion, or two small ones if you like onions
Five or six carrots, or more if you like carrots, chopped into 1/4" pieces
Whatever celery you have wilting in your fridge, up to and including the whole package, chopped into somewhat larger pieces
Six potatoes, peeled and cubed
One-half to a whole stick of butter, depending on how much fat you want clogging your arteries and how much it takes to saute the carrots and celery
1 can cream of chicken soup, or you could probably leave this out and be just as happy
A package of Kielbasa sausage, sliced about 1/4" thick
Salt and pepper

Wash the split peas, then cook them in a big soup pot with the broth, garlic, onion and as much water as you think it needs. About forty minutes into the cooking, boil the potatoes in a separate pot and mash them up AND saute the carrots and celery in the butter. When the split peas have cooked about an hour and more or less dissolved, add all the other ingredients to them. Keep the pot on low heat for a while to coax the juices out of the kielbasa, stirring frequently so you don't end up with burned peas on the bottom of your soup pot. If you're really feeling like Supermom, whip up a batch of cornbread to have with it.

Yummy, filling and nutrient-rich, even if you do use up a lot of dishes to make it.

Recipe Report - Super Bowls

2011-01-01T15:45:00.001-08:00

I read somewhere that the reason the Italians traditionally eat lentils on New Year's Day is that lentils look like little coins, and eating them on New Year's Day guarantees an ample supply of money throughout the year. I'm not that superstitious, but I like even the most flimsily-supported traditions, and the Better Homes & Gardens recipe report is rapidly becoming one as well, so for today's New Year's dinner I prepared a lentil recipe from page 102 of the January 2011 BHG magazine, called Chunky Vegetable-Lentil Soup.

I immediately became disenchanted with the recipe because it called for one cup of lentils. Give me a break. Lentils come in a bag. Who cooks a single cup? I ignored this part of the directions and put the whole bag in, then compensated with an extra can of vegetable broth. The weirdest thing about this recipe was the pound of mushrooms it called for. Mushrooms and lentils are not an obvious marriage, kind of like Michael Jackson and Lisa-Marie Presley. I mean, really! Anyway, I dutifully cut the mushrooms into quarters, since I couldn't find any small ones, and followed the recipe as faithfully as possible. It called for a cabbage garnish, but my hungry teenage son came down to the kitchen near the end of the cooking and nixed the idea of topping the lentil soup with anything remotely smelling of cabbage, so in the end I served it unadorned with a side of cornbread.

The verdict? Edible. Probably very nutritious. Not terribly interesting. I forgot to take a picture, but it looked pretty much like the photo from the magazine, with more lentils and without the garnish. The mushrooms were still pretty firm and their flavor didn't seem to jell with anything else in the soup (lentils, carrots, celery, onions and garlic). If I ever make this again, and I'm not saying I will, I think I would slice the mushrooms thin and brown them in the olive oil at the beginning with the onions and the garlic. I'll probably just go back to my regular Hoppin' John recipe for future New Year's dinners, but who knows? Maybe next year BHG will have a recipe for lentils with peanut butter or something really yummy.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

2010-12-19T12:07:00.000-08:00

DD finally made it home from college, and we all had a great time today trimming the tree and putting up decorations all over the house. I love our mantle. I piled all the extra lights that still worked even halfway in a big jumble and then added the stockings and other miscellaneous decorations and voila! there you go.

DD is going to help me fit the back of that jacket and then I can do as you suggested, Angela, and finish the thing and get on with my life. My daughter and I have big plans for this vacation to revisit some other projects. There are any number of them waiting for us, so we'll see what comes out of this midwinter blitz.

Polyester? Nein, Danke!

2010-12-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

Some time back, I bought some chunky variegated teal yarn on sale from In a Yarn Basket in Bloomington. (You can read about it somewhere in the blog archives, if you really want to know the details!) Teal is one of my favorite colors, and I thought I would try designing my own sweater. I started out knitting from the bottom up in one piece. The first time it came out way too big, so I unraveled my work and started again. About a year ago I got the sweater to the point where it became obvious that there was not enough yarn to make sleeves. I decided to sew something long-sleeved to go under it, and my mom and I went to a nearby Jo-Ann Fabrics to see what we could find.

I ended up buying the embroidered polyester suede-like fabric you see in the picture above, not because I liked the fabric (I really hate polyester), but because the colors were perfect to go with the sweater. I also had to settle for polyester lining, because I was shopping at Jo-Ann's and not someplace upscale like G Street Fabrics in Maryland where I used to live. Normally I only line in rayon. My mom thinks I'm a snob about these things; you may, too, but hear me out.

We didn't have time to choose a pattern at Jo-Ann's, so I bought enough fabric (I thought) for a long-sleeved top and skirt, and then went on line and got the pattern, Vogue 8627, from voguepatterns.com. I've never been crazy about raglan sleeves, but I didn't want to put too many seams in that embroidery. The jacket had a little waist definition and a deep V neck, both flattering for my Mrs. Santa figure, I reasoned. I cut the jacket out sometime last spring and then let it sit until a couple of weeks ago.

Note on sewing polyester in winter: Don't! The static is awful! One of my fingers is numb from a static shock I got while ironing the lining. Both fabrics stick to everything and make my hair stand on end. The synthetic suede won't hold a press, either. I just tried on the jacket shell and it definitely needs something. I hate to put in shoulder pads (too '80's), but this thing has no shape at all. What do you think? Is there any way to make this project work?

Speaking of the '80's, the title of this post is a reference to a bumper sticker I used to see all the time in Germany in the early 1980's. The sticker said "Atomkraft? Nein, Danke!" which means, "Nuclear power? No, thank you!" Over the years DH and I have used "Nein, Danke!" to express our disdain for any number of bad concepts.

Recipe Report - Spicy Pasta With Sweet Potatoes

2010-11-16T05:56:00.001-08:00

This recipe appears on page 188 of the November 2010 issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. I'm not sure what happened to October; like the month itself, the BHG issue just disappeared. Anyway, I chose this recipe because it involved some of my favorite ingredients, including sweet potatoes, peanut butter, cream cheese and Sriracha hot chili sauce, all mixed together with rigatoni. It was fairly quick to make (about half an hour). The sweet potatoes and green onions had to be chopped (DH did the chopping for me, which made the prep even faster!), but otherwise there was very little prepping to do.

The verdict? Very tasty. Spicy, rich, and filling. I was in the middle of savoring the fruits of our labor (with a glass of Creekbend white wine from Oliver, a local winery), when my cell phone rang. Thirty Cub Scouts were waiting at the door to the museum; I had agreed to do an after-hours tour and forgot! Oops! Off I ran--when I got back an hour and a half later, a quick warm-up and the casserole was still delicious, even though my boys had deserted the kitchen for their electronic toys.

I wish I'd made this crocheted stingray...

2010-11-09T13:42:00.000-08:00

...but I didn't; it's the work of one of the many volunteer crocheters who made a whole coral reef to teach kids about the need to protect our environment (there's even a section of the crocheted reef that's dead, with trash tangled up in it). I happened onto the Indiana Reef in September during a visit to the Indiana State Museum to see the Titanic exhibit (fabulous, by the way--two thumbs way, way up!). Here's a link where you can find out more about the Indiana Reef:

http://www.indianamuseum.org/about/newsroom/newsitem.asp?newsid=24

Crochet was the first needlework I learned how to do and it still has a special place in my heart, although I have to agree with the site whatnottocrochet.wordpress.com that crochet can be really tacky in the wrong hands. My mom and dad are moving and unearthing treasures from the distant past every day, so I'm hoping for the rediscovery of several crocheted outfits I made in high school, particularly a purple pantsuit made of worsted weight acrylic. Stay tuned for that one.

In other news, I survived another October at the museum, and with huge effort and massive expenditure of time we managed to raise about $2000 from our two fundraisers, just about what it cost us to pay for the routine annual maintenance on our heating system. Sigh.

This morning DH and I celebrated my relative freedom from fundraising responsibilities, and some gloriously warm and sunny fall weather, to do some outside work on our little property in the country. I ripped out or mowed down thousands of weeds taller than myself before declaring just before noon that I was finished for the day. He's full of energy (of course) and making noises about going back tomorrow. We may both require Ben-Gay and ibuprofen just to make it out of bed in the morning, but oh, well, it's exercise.

A very cute little yellow kitten attached itself to me while I was working outside. Unfortunately I hadn't brought any snacks (well, fortunately for me and unfortunately for the kitten). I'm thinking tomorrow I should raid Mr. Fuzz's and Vickster's private stash; I'm sure they would agree to sharing with those less fortunate than themselves.

I resisted naming the little guy, but one more morning of pulling it out of harm's way every five seconds and I might succumb. This kitten has zero survival skills and likes to sleep on the big truck tires and play with the weed whacker. Really, kitty, didn't your mother teach you anything?

Talbots "Final Sale" in More Ways than One

2010-09-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

During the 20 years I was in the Foreign Service, I spent thousands and thousands of dollars on clothes from Talbots. There were lots of reasons why I loved my Talbots clothes (nice quality, beautiful fabrics and colors), but the most important was that they always fit. I am short and overweight and those WP sizes really worked for me. I have always liked to sew my own clothes, but with two kids, a 24/7 job, and a need to occasionally sleep, it was great to be able to rely on Talbots to provide my professional wardrobe. The clothes weren't cheap, but I tried to take advantage of the sales, and the sight of a red and white box in the mail always made me happy.

I knew something had changed a couple of years ago when I ordered a pair of jeans on sale that was way, way too tight, made for a different species of creature altogether. We're talking tight from the knees up, and wouldn't button at the waist. I never got around to sending those jeans back, nor did I magically shrink to fit them, so after they had hung several months in the closet I dispatched them to a thrift store where some short person with skinny everything hopefully found them useful. Still, I didn't lose faith in Talbots, which had outfitted me so well for so long, and I picked up a pair of black embroidered capris last year that were cute and comfortable. I have already worn and washed them to death.

I reasonably assumed that whatever the fit issue was with the jeans, it had been solved, and a couple of weeks ago I ordered three t-shirts and another pair of black capris, these denim and spandex, on sale. The total, with shipping, was $125.15, which wasn't especially cheap, but hey, Talbots has my size and the mall, forty minutes away in Bloomington, doesn't.

Well, as you have probably guessed, the black capris, like the jeans a couple of years ago, were designed for no woman alive. The crotch length suggested hip-huggers, but the waist was cinched in at least two sizes too tight and scooped down in the front. The waistband wasn't contoured in the back and stuck out awkwardly. The lower hips fit well, but that waistband cinched me in at an awkward place and created a double muffin top that no t-shirt could hide.

One of the t-shirts was a little loose, one too small and one just right. I decided to send back the capris and the too-small t-shirt. When I looked at the receipt, however, I noticed that the capris were not listed on the return form because, according to the order summary, they were "Final Sale". I had never seen such a thing in over 20 years of shopping from the Talbots catalog, so I called the 800 number on the back of the order summary and asked what Talbots could possibly be thinking, sending out pants that fit no one and marking them "Final Sale".

The very nice fellow who answered the phone explained that Talbots had just instituted the final sale policy recently, because of the large number of returns.
Evidently it occured to no one at Talbots that after a customer has been tricked once into purchasing a poorly-designed, ill-fitting item that can't be worn or returned, she is not likely to purchase anything else in the future. That could solve the problem of the large number of returns, but perhaps not in the way that Talbots management was hoping.

I managed to halfway fix that waistband by inserting a triangle of fabric on both sides to make more room. It wasn't a professional fix by any means, but it does mean that I can wear them with a long shirt and breathe, too. Still, my faith in Talbots is deeply shaken. Next time I'll just go to the mall.

Recipe Report - Indian Chicken Stew

2010-09-01T15:28:00.001-07:00

For dinner tonight I made the "Slow Cooker Indian Chicken Stew" on page 215 of the September 2010 issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. I changed the recipe slightly, adding a whole box of chicken broth instead of a cup, which was a mistake, because it turned out a little watery, and cooking it for a half an hour in a pressure cooker instead of five to ten hours in a slow cooker, because I don't own a slow cooker, and because I was expecting a ravenous DS home from cross country practice within the hour. As it turned out, I didn't have any curry powder and while I was out in a long line at the local grocery buying a jar, DS showed up and ate a bowl of cereal.

None of that changes the essential result, however, which was really very tasty and nourishing. We ate it with saffron rice, generously prepared by my darling husband. It made a lovely dinner without anything else but iced tea. Mildly spicy, thanks to the curry and ginger, colorful thanks to the red and green of tomatoes and spinach, comfort food with an exotic aroma. Even DS, who was no longer ravenous thanks to the bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats, ate a whole plateful.

And we got a bonus: This recipe came on one of those pull-out pages to be added to our red gingham-checked BHG cookbook for future reference. How great is that? Another success like this one and I will completely forget about the peach and blackberry slaw fiasco.

Free Pattern - Knit Cotton Cardigan for 18" Doll

2010-08-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

Like Andy in the Toy Story series, my daughter is now a college student and has outgrown Victoria, her American Girl doll, but I still have fun dressing Victoria every now and then. I've been wanting to work on my knitwear design skills without the pressure of a full-size project, so I designed this classic cardigan for Victoria that goes very nicely with the Daisy Kingdom outfit I sewed up for her last winter. I'm giving you the pattern below, just in case you'd like to make one for one of your own favorite dolls.

Cotton Sweater for 18” Doll

Materials: One ball of Coats “Blau Tulpe” thread or any similar cotton thread
2.5 mm or U.S. size 1 knitting needles
Three 3/8” buttons

BODY OF SWEATER

Cast on 74.
Rows 1-4: k 1, p 1 to end.
Row 5: k all stitches.
Row 6: p all stitches.
Rows 7-20: repeat rows 5 and 6.

Right front shaping:

Row 21: k 10, leaving remaining stitches unworked.
Row 22: p 10.
Rows 23-32: Repeat rows 21 and 22 five times.

Neck shaping, right side:

Row 33: k 1, sl 1, k 1, psso, k to end of row.
Row 34: p entire row.
Row 35: k entire row.
Row 36: p entire row.
Rows 37-44: Repeat rows 33-36 twice.
Row 45: Bind off all stitches, cut thread and tie off.

Right armhole and back shaping:

Row 21: Reattach thread at beginning of remaining stitches on row 21, bind off 14, k 26, leaving remaining stitches unworked.
Row 22: p 26.
Rows 23-42: k odd rows, p even rows on 26 stitches.

Right shoulder shaping:

Row 43: k 7, leaving remaining stitches unworked.
Row 44: p 7.
Row 45: Bind off 7 stitches from row 44, cut thread, tie off.

Neck and left shoulder shaping:

Row 43: Reattach yarn at stitch #8 on row 43, bind off 12, k 7, leaving remaining stitches unworked.
Row 44: p 7.
Row 45: Bind off 7 stitches, cut thread, tie off.

Left armhole and left front:

Row 21: Reattach thread at beginning of remaining stitches on row 21, bind off 14, k to end of row (10 st).
Row 22: p 10.
Rows 23-32: K odd rows, p even rows on 10 stitches.
Row 33: k 7, k 2 tog, k 1.
Row 34: p all stitches.
Row 35: k all stitches.
Row 36: p all stitches.
Row 37: k 6, k 2 tog, k1.
Rows 38-40: repeat rows 34-36.
Row 41: k 5, k2 tog, k1.
Rows 42-44: repeat rows 34-36.
Row 45: Bind off remaining stitches, cut thread, tie off.

Block, then sew shoulder seams.

Neck band and collar:

Attach thread to the right front corner. Pull up 30 loops to the shoulder seam, 18 across the back neck, and 30 on the left front.

Row 1: k1, p1 across all stitches.
Row 2: k1, p1, yo, k2 tog, (k1, p1) twice, yo, k2 tog, (k1, p1) twice, yo, k2 tog, work remainder of row in k1, p1 rib. (This makes three buttonholes.)
Row 3: k1, p1 across all stitches.
Row 4: Bind off 25 stitches on right front, work 28 st in k1, p1 rib, leaving remaining stitches unworked.
Row 5: p1, k1 rib on 28 stitches.
Rows 6-10: continue to work 1/1 rib across 28 stitches.
Row 11: Bind off remaining stitches.

Attach thread at beginning of remaining stitches from row 4 and bind off to end, cut thread, tie off.

SLEEVES (MAKE TWO)

Loosely cast on 30 st.
Rows 1-4: k1, p1 to end.
Row 5: k 1, k in back and front of next st (inc 1), k3, inc 1, k18, inc 1, k3, inc 1, k1.
Row 6: p all stitches.
Row 7: k1, inc 1, k to 2nd from last st, inc 1, k 1.
Row 8: p all stitches.
Rows 9-18: Repeat rows 7 and 8 five more times.
Rows 19-22: k odd rows and p even rows.

Sleeve cap shaping:

Row 23: Bind off 5 st, k to end.
Row 24: Bind off 5 st, p to end.
Row 25: k 1, sl 1, k 1, psso, knit to within 3 st of end, k 2 tog, k 1.
Row 26: p entire row.
Rows 27-39: Repeat rows 25 and 26 seven times.
Row 40: p entire row.
Row 41: Bind off, cut thread, tie off.

Sew underarm seam on sleeves.
Sew sleeve into armholes.
Sew on buttons.

Recipe Report - Peach and Blackberry Slaw

2010-07-31T18:04:00.000-07:00

I like magazines; I subscribe to several and my mom gave me a gift subscription to Better Homes and Gardens, which is fun to peruse with all its home decorating ideas and recipes. I decided to try at least one idea from every issue, beginning with August 2010. I found a recipe on page 176 for something called "Peach and Blackberry Slaw" that sounded delicious--peaches, blackberries, cabbage and blue cheese--how could it not be delicious?

Well, I'm sorry to report that this recipe is a waste of perfectly good ingredients. DH wouldn't even spoon a bite of it onto his plate. Our son gamely let me dish out a large portion, and after a couple of bites declared, "This tastes like crap," and pushed his plate away. Folks, I slathered mine with blue cheese dressing and finished the entire plateful, but I've had years of experience being a professional food garbage disposal so that's not saying anything.

In trying to dissect what exactly was the matter with this recipe, DS and I concluded that the flavor of the cabbage overwhelmed everything else, there wasn't enough dressing and the dressing, having equal parts of wine vinegar and olive oil, was too acidic. The Wal-Mart peaches were mealy and the blackberries were sour, which, to be fair, is not the fault of Better Homes and Gardens. Also, coached by my darling husband, I shredded the cabbage until it would stick to the wall instead of making nice big photogenic chunks (see my picture above, and if you're still interested, compare it to the photo on page 136 of the magazine).

Am I discouraged? NO! I can't wait to see what's in the September issue!

Check out my Bobbin Lace!

2010-07-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

I've been working diligently for the last few days on this bobbin lace yoke that I started a couple of years ago, and just finished it a few minutes ago, so I wanted to share it with you, along with this picture of what it looked like on the bolster. This is one of those projects that I just picked up every now and then, abandoning it for months at a time, but it's my summer to finish projects, and I'm on a roll. Reading "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin reinforced my desire to finish my current projects and release my imagination for new ones.

The next step is to buy some fabric to make a blouse for this lace to decorate. I love this color blue. The thread, by the way, is Aunt Lydia's. It was part of my friend Stephen Bowman's stash that he let me have when I was enrolled in his bobbin lace class. I ran out of the dark turquoise at one point and he was nice enough to lend me a ball of each color. Thanks, Stephen!

DH is also working hard to finish something--the last bedroom on the second floor of the sheriff's house, along with a tiny, but complete, bathroom and closet. I'll show you pictures when there's something to see. This is the room that used to be my sewing room, so I'm thinking hard about how to make a sewing space that won't look cluttered.

Summer is winding down for our son, and I still haven't figured out what shots he needs to get before school starts. The school system came up with some new requirements, and since our kids got their shots all over the place, it's hard to sort out what they had and didn't have. We're looking forward to getting our daughter back from Texas next week, along with her sweetheart, for some quality family time as the long days of summer come to an end. I hope you are all making the most of the bounty of this wonderful season.

Postage Stamp Quilt--Signed, Sealed and Delivered

2010-07-19T07:47:00.000-07:00

And here it is--the quilt that I started in Tbilisi, Georgia, sitting in my first floor sewing room on a busy street, listening to passersby exclaim, "Ra, Bicho!" and the like. Sometimes our kids would be down there, too, helping to cut the little squares and laying out the blocks. I am so proud. The binding and quilting was done by Lisa Mowery, and it came out just beautifully. What a lot of blessings I am enjoying this week! Old floors and a finished quilt!

More Floors

2010-07-18T16:05:00.001-07:00

DH and I spent the weekend removing the paint-stained plywood that had served as the floor for the second-story hall and the sewing room since we moved here three years ago. We thought that, after taking out the plywood, we would cover the sub-floor with the hardwood we reclaimed a few weeks ago from the house that was being torn down next door (see June 9). Very early on, though, we discovered that what we thought was a sub-floor was actually a really great old floor. Even through several layers of peeling paint, we could tell it was a keeper. I was so excited to find a hundred-year-old floor already intact and just waiting to be sanded and refinished (okay, and patched in a couple of places) to become the floor of my dreams. In my mind's eye I could see the workers who built this house pounding the nails into that floor. I'm not sure why I'm not as enthusiastic about the workers in the 1970's who pounded the nails to lay the plywood, but somehow they don't inspire me the same way.

Now I feel really silly that we didn't take that plywood off when we first got here. Three years of trying to cover up ugliness that I saw every time I took the stairs anywhere. It wasn't that easy, though; I'm pretty sore from pulling out nails. And of course we chose two blistering hot days to do this work, so we were both sweating buckets, but every time I look at those six-inch planks I know it was worth it.

The pictures above are the "before" and the "during." Stay tuned for the "after."

My Fury, Final Chapter

2010-07-05T19:24:00.001-07:00

You may remember a previous post in which I detailed the history of my very first car, a Plymouth Fury, sold to me when I was a college sophomore by my friend Jon Wesick, who was graduating and moving to Maryland. Jon is now a well-respected poet in California, but I digress. When I went overseas the first time I lent the car to a family member who abandoned it on the family farm, where it has sat since 1979. Buried to its axles in mud, DH and I tried twice this spring to remove it, but heavy rains, bad tires, a broken spring in the trunk, and a steep narrow incline up which it had to be towed kept the car right where it was, lodged in the woods behind an old Corvair and a Chevy truck.

I documented our first couple of visits in this blog on February 6. A few weeks later, our son came along and the two he-men wrestled off the four doors, the hood and the trunk lid, which brought about $40 at the recycling place. We had to leave the rest of the car. DH inflated three of the four tires but one was too far gone to hold air. On that visit we almost mired our own truck in a muddy patch just before the incline.

Today we returned with a replacement tire, and the third time's a charm, as the cliche goes. DH re-inflated all four tires and hooked the car up to a cable behind our red Dodge truck.

"I need you to steer the Fury," he said.

I looked doubtfully at the driver's seat of the old car. It was covered with dirt, leaves, pieces of rubber foam and who knows what else. I imagined mice, or worse, snakes, living under the floor. "I'll stand outside and steer it from there," I said.

"We have to go fast to get up that hill."

Glad to have a baseball cap to protect my scalp from whatever was hanging from the ceiling, I brushed off the seat and got in the car. I could feel a couple of inches of skin exposed on my back and prayed the snakes wouldn't notice and bite me there. It took all my strength to move the steering wheel. The car jerked into motion. I strained to keep it going in the same direction as the truck in front of me. We slid around in the muddy patch, but didn't get stuck, and started up the hill. I kept my eyes on the Dodge's red taillights and wrenched the steering wheel from left to right to avoid hitting any of the other junked cars in our family's scrap metal graveyard as we raced up the incline. Intent on keeping the car on track, I didn't notice until too late that we had made it up the hill and were headed back down. DH parked his truck and, without brakes, the Plymouth rolled right into it.

Fortunately there was no damage to the truck and we hugged happily and changed places to tow the car the rest of the way off the farm. We put it on a tow dolly at the end of the driveway and took it straight to the scrap metal place, where I proudly explained to the young guy on duty that it was my very first car. He looked me over and I imagined him thinking I didn't look to be in much better shape than my old car. After dropping the Fury near the scrap pile, we got back on the scales and discovered that the old car weighed 3,480 pounds even without all the pieces we had already removed.

As I looked at my old car one last time, I said, "I don't know what I was thinking when I bought this big heavy car." Then I saw the crunched-up left rear corner and remembered.

In the summer of 1978, five of us IU students took turns driving my car out to Fort Riley, Kansas for Army ROTC summer camp. One of us turned out to be a pretty terrible driver; while the rest of us slept, he pulled the car in front of a tractor-trailer. It could have been a deadly accident--both vehicles were going about 60 miles an hour. The metal over my left taillight folded like cake frosting, but the taillight still worked and no one was hurt. The tractor-trailer sustained considerable damage and had to be towed away. Maybe I didn't know what I was doing when I bought that big, heavy car, but my guardian angel was hard at work as usual.

I stayed in the truck while DH went inside to collect our money--a whopping $261. When he came back he said, "They asked if you were crying."

I laughed.

"I told them you were glad to see it go."

UFO Finished At Last--But Do I Wear It?

2010-06-16T11:14:00.001-07:00

Two summers ago I was living alone in our former house in College Park, Maryland, working every day for our government and preparing for a two-month assignment in Africa. I started a little turquoise dress with yellow piping from some cotton I had picked up for a song at G Street Fabrics (a great store, if there ever was one). The pattern I chose was McCall's M4768, which from the picture looked like a classic princess-line sheath, but there was something very strange about the seaming around the bustline, and I could never get it to lie smooth. I bought a little yellow nylon lace sweater to wear over it, thinking to cover up the poorly-fitting bodice, but I was dissatisfied with the entire enterprise and never finished it.

I pulled the dress back out the other day and finished it, very thankful that it still fit. I clipped the princess seaming and the facing to get it all to lie a little flatter, but it's still not perfect. I also dug out the little yellow sweater, which reminds me more of Grandma's bed jacket than proper clothes, and which got a polite thumbs-down from DH. I put it all on this morning and asked DS to snap a few photos. I will only wear the sweater in desperation, but here's what the dress looks like. I need some brutal honesty now because I'm becoming fond of how comfy and cool it is: Do I look ridiculous? Or shall I keep this one?

Saving the world, one board at a time

2010-06-09T05:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday DH and I removed flooring from an old circa 1900 house that is being demolished next door. I had been looking for hardwood floors to reclaim for a long time--for some reason our second floor stairwell has no flooring and we have been living with paint-splattered plywood for three years already. The doomed house used to be the thrift store for St. Vincent's Catholic Church next door, until this year when the church constructed a tin building to replace it. I won't editorialize here about the prevalence of tin sheds in downtown Bedford historic districts, much as I would like to. Anyway, the old house next door was coming down, and we needed floors, so Fortune smiled on us.

DH and I started early--the floors were on the second level of the house, under the eaves, so we knew it would be hot work. Fortunately yesterday was a beautiful day. Temperatures were in the 70's and we stayed pretty comfortable. My job was to hammer a pry bar under each of the nails so that DH could come through with his saw and stick the blade in the space I created and cut the nails. We kept most of the boards in the room to stand on, then at the end threw them all out of the window to be loaded onto DH's dump truck.

I had no idea how many people visited that thrift store until I watched them come and go all day. Parking is pretty tight, so inevitably every time I wanted to throw a board out, I had to stick my whole body out of the window to make sure I didn't endanger anyone with falling wood. Then of course I would hit my head coming back in. At one point DH said, "It would have been a lot easier to just buy hardwood, but no, somebody always wants to save the world."

Everything went great until about 2:00 in the afternoon when my hammer hand started to go numb. At this point we were almost done getting all the boards loosened and nails cut, so I stayed to finish that part and left DH to load the truck. After a shower and a nap I felt a lot better and this morning I'm sore but completely functional. Added to the wood DS and DH reclaimed last week from the first floor of the same house, we now have enough for our whole second floor stairwell and my sewing room, too, I think, so life is good, as long as I don't think about how much work there still is to do to remove all those cut-off nails and then actually install the floors. Saving the world is a messy business.

I also got one of DD's charcoal drawings framed this week at Acorn Valley Frames. Gene Abel does such a good job. Here's the drawing--it's of a jacket she bought in France that she wears all the time. DH thinks it looks like a crazy bunny and is too creepy for our old haunted house. I like it, but if she wants to take it this fall for her new apartment that's okay with me. What do you think?

Lovin' the Fiskars Weed Remover

2010-05-05T06:12:00.001-07:00

I have never been much of a gardener, and lawn care has always been DH's thing, not mine. As a matter of fact, he has the lawn mower so personalized that I couldn't fire it up if I wanted to. I normally try not to obsess about our yard, but this year I just couldn't ignore the dandelion infestation. Ten minutes after mowing (okay, maybe two hours), a forest of ugly dandelion stalks towers over the grass.

Not wanting to endanger the health of future generations with toxic chemicals, I searched for manual solutions on line. Some people suggested pouring boiling water on the pesky devils, but that would have required 100,000 trips in and out of the house carrying a steaming teakettle, so there was no way I was going for that option. Other people swore by the vinegar cure, but that sounded smelly and would require gallons of vinegar hauled from the grocery store to the car to the yard, and then the disposal of all those plastic vinegar bottles (more toxic chemicals).

I was convinced by the folks in the "rip 'em out by the roots" school of thought, and learned that there was such a thing as a dandelion puller (who knew?). Sunday evening DH and I went over to Lowe's and after considering all the options, I chose a Fiskars Weed Remover. There's a picture of the thing ripping a dandelion out by its roots right on the cardboard wrapper, plus I own several pairs of quality Fiskars sewing shears, so it was an easy choice. DH approved of the heavy-duty blades, but complained a bit about the price (around $30), but I was determined.

This morning I finally had a chance to take the new weed remover for a run, and I love it. I worked for about an hour, completely addicted. Only two caveats: if you don't center the blades over the plant properly the first time, you might have to go back a second or third time to get the roots out. Also, don't believe the picture on the back--the blades should be open when you push it into the ground, not closed. Once you get the hang of it, it is ridiculously easy to use and involves no bending or stooping. You will have to sacrifice some of your topsoil, though. The ground was a little wet this morning, so I think I'll try again when it's a little drier and see if more of the soil stays in the ground.

The pictures above are out of order; on the bottom you see the "before" and truthfully, I didn't take the "before" until I had already pulled a few, so the problem was even worse than it looks. Mr. Fuzz is modeling the "after" (and yes, I know the grass needs to be mowed, but that's beyond my control--I'm the dandelion removal specialist, not a lawn mower mechanic). What a difference! I'm a sweaty, but happy, camper.

Mr. Fuzz and the Patio Furniture

2010-04-22T05:12:00.000-07:00

My return flight from Tbilisi in 2007 was complicated by our three adopted Georgian cats, Mr. Fuzz, Vicksters and Snow Puff (all named by our children). Poor Snow Puff was killed by a speeding car a few months later, but Vicksters and Mr. Fuzz have proven remarkably adaptable to the mean streets of Bedford. Vicksters is sociable and has made friends in the neighborhood, but Mr. Fuzz is loyal and spends most of his time on the front porch.

I love having a cup of tea or dinner on the porch, watching the neighborhood go about its business, and my generous sister-in-law donated a set of patio furniture to the cause. Unfortunately, Mr. Fuzz likes the furniture as much as I do, and has a lot more time to spend rubbing his furry self all over the cushions. I have tried a number of strategies to ensure the human beings who want to sit on the porch don't have to sit in a nest of white cat hair, but none of them have been successful. My most recent attempt was to drape the chair cushions in sheets and tablecloths, but these mismatched covers looked like laundry drying in the breeze from the street, reinforcing the "Beverly Hillbillies" look I have been trying studiously to avoid.

This morning I had a new inspiration, and draped the seats only in pillowcases that are less likely to fly around. I have some great fabric I bought in Africa two summers ago, so if this works, maybe I can recover the cushions and achieve that put-together, non-Granny Clampitt look I so covet.

Here is Mr. Fuzz, dirty as can be (he's really white!) enjoying a fresh new cover.

History Festival 2010

2010-04-18T17:10:00.001-07:00

I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Lawrence County History Festival, which is always a great event involving reenactments, arts and crafts demonstrations, and other fun history-related activities. This year was the best ever, as it included the first-ever Native American Pow-Wow in Indiana. The colorful costumes of the Indians, the dancing and singing and the steady, solemn drum beat were very moving to watch and reminded me of the many courageous Native Americans with whom I served long ago in the Army.

Only a few feet away from the Pow-Wow, but miles away in history, my friend Stephen and I demonstrated bobbin lace for the third year in a row, both of us in historic costume. It had been a while since I had worked on my turquoise lace, but fortunately the bobbins hadn't become too tangled (it stayed far away from my visiting nieces and nephews this year!). Stephen was making four-inch-wide burgundy and cream lace trim for a queen-sized sheet, which was beautiful and made me want to finish my own project so I could start his pattern.

I always love the first day of the festival, which is when we get to show hundreds of fifth graders how to make lace, and watch them try. The general reaction is "Cool!" and there are always a few who come back to make another stitch or two.

This year I was also keeping track of our museum booth, where we had set up a kind of a quiz machine with questions about local and Indiana history. The kids liked it all right (mostly making the red and green lights flash), but it was a bigger hit with their parents and grandparents, who lived through much of the history in question. I spent more time giving hints to quiz-takers and handing out pencils at the museum booth than I did making bobbin lace on Saturday and Sunday, so unfortunately my turquoise lace didn't grow very much this weekend.

I'm happy to be home now and back in regular clothes. Someone told me, as I hopped out of DH's big red pick-up truck in my mobcap and colonial garb, that I looked like Granny Clampitt. I think it's time to retire that dreary colonial outfit that I made for DD's third-grade class trip fifteen years ago, and make a pretty Civil War dress with a low-cut bodice and a big hoop skirt. Maybe I'll finish the turquoise lace to trim the neck.

1970's UFO - Finished at Last!

2010-04-07T12:18:00.001-07:00

I was blessed by visits from four of my five sisters this past week. We had lots of fun together and I think I managed not to traumatize the one brother-in-law brave enough to make the trip. My sister Dee found an unfinished dress in my mom's sewing room that she thinks either she or I started in the 1970's, when we were both teenagers. Of course, I smugly thought that I always finish all my projects, so it must be hers! (This would not be the time to remind me about my quilt top or that teal bulky sweater, thank you very much.) The dress fabric is a cotton blend, reminiscent of the one-to-two yard pieces we used to buy at George's Gateway for a pittance back in the good old days, and the print is so cute and retro--bright orange-red with hearts and flowers, like the embroidery on a Pennsylvania Dutch apron.

Dee sewed all the seams together on this little dress before heading back to New York. Since it fits my daughter very nicely, I finished the seams and hemmed it this morning. It looks a lot cuter on a live model, but even on the hanger you can see that it has a flippy little skirt and a wrap bodice. Cute, huh?

Here's the link to the "Profiles" Show!

2010-03-09T05:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.schooltube.com/video/7aace9c6e7b179b9f021/Profiles

"Profiles" Show Air Times

2010-03-05T13:47:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have access to Star Channel 14 in Bedford, Indiana, the program "Profiles" featuring our old jail and sheriff's residence will air from this Sunday, March 7, through Wednesday, March 10. Air times are 3:00 and 7:00 a.m. and 3:00, 7:00, 9:00 and 11:00 p.m. I haven't seen it yet, so I'm not sure whether I should be recommending it or not.

On Wednesday I rode to Richmond, Indiana, with one of our museum volunteers to pick up twelve mannequins we were borrowing from the Wayne County Historical Museum for our clothing exhibit. What a wonderful museum! It was made up of several different buildings and had a small "village" set up in the basement as well as a striking collection of antique automobiles, an old plane, bikes, and an Egyptian mummy, among thousands of other interesting things. We took the advantage while we were in Richmond to have lunch at Little Sheba's Restaurant, also wonderful in every respect. I had a portobello mushroom sandwich that was delicious, along with yummy raspberry iced tea. I can't wait to go back to return the mannequins and do it all again.

Our Old Jail will be on TV!

2010-02-26T06:05:00.000-08:00

On Monday our local access channel, "Star" Channel 14, taped an episode of their lifestyle program "Profiles" at our house. We walked around the first floor of the sheriff's house (now our house), the art center, and the top level of the cell block. Of course, some of the footage might be edited out (we taped for at least an hour). There's no word yet when this show will air, but it sure was a lot of fun to make. For those of you who live out of the area or who can't get local access TV, the program may eventually be put up on schooltube.com. I'll let you know when and if.

On Tuesday my mom and I had a girls' day out. We spent some time at Z Spa here in Bedford, then after we looked as fabulous as possible, we drove to Bloomington and had lunch at my favorite restaurant ever, FARM on Kirkwood. Lunch was excellent as usual--I had the best BLT imaginable, with avocado and chevre cheese on whole grain toast, and wonderful potato salad made without mayonnaise so you could actually taste the potatoes.

After lunch we paid our first visit to the new Second Street Antique Mall, and picked up a number of important things, including another piece of blue and white ironstone (I know I said I wasn't collecting anymore, but at Thanksgiving the single gravy boat just didn't go far enough, so my mom bought me a Samuel Ford & Co. "semi-porcelain" gravy boat with a matching plate to catch the drips, and I think we were entirely justified). The blue is a little greener than most of my collection, so it adds depth, too (as if I needed any more excuses). The picture might not do it justice, so you'll have to trust me when I say it's lovely. Do I have a great mom or what?

Our next stop was Jo-Ann Fabrics where I bought buttons for that teal bulky sweater, and some fabric to make a dress to wear with it. I spent at least forty minutes flipping through pattern catalogs without finding a design, so who knows what this outfit will finally look like. At 5'2" and not slender, it gets harder and harder to dress myself to any exacting standard.

That Postage Stamp Quilt

2010-02-19T05:04:00.000-08:00

You might remember last year about this time I blogged about a postage stamp quilt top I had completed, or at least, I thought I had completed. When I compared the dimensions of my quilt top with the dimensions of a queen-sized piece of quilt batting, I realized that my quilt actually needed to be a foot larger both length- and width-wise, which translated into twelve large blocks of four smaller blocks apiece, each containing 16 two-inch squares. You do the math. I would have gotten back to it sooner, but DH moved stuff around and I lost track of all the pieces for a while. Thanks to some heavy snow that kept us housebound for a few days, I have found everything and am back at work. So far I finished one large block and three-quarters of a second. And here's the result.

At Ash Wednesday service I was impressed by our minister's saying that Lenten fasting didn't just have to be about food, it could be about anything you enjoy. In response, I have given up Spider Solitaire for the month of Lent. This may not sound like much of a sacrifice to you, but I love Spider Solitaire--there's something addictive and satisfying about lining all those cards up and making them go away, and as soon as DH and DS leave in the morning, I like to win a game before I do anything else. Some mornings it takes forty-five minutes to an hour before I win a game, so I should have a lot more free time for quilting, knitting, and other worthwhile pursuits now.

How about you? What are you working on?

Remembering Daisy Kingdom

2010-02-07T14:10:00.000-08:00

When DD was eight, she got Victoria, an American Girl doll, not one of the historic ones, although she admired them greatly and read the books about them, but one with olive skin and long dark hair made especially to look like her. My mother gave her several wonderful fabric panels with American Girl-sized doll dresses printed on them from a company called Daisy Kingdom. They were rich in detail, those Daisy Kingdom panels; the outfits had pleats, tucks, contrasting trim, and accessories to match.

DD loved those doll panels and sewed them up like crazy. As a matter of fact, Victoria had a much nicer wardrobe than my daughter, who preferred to wear leggings, t-shirts and the same fleece pullover to school every day. DD became such a good seamstress that she started designing her own doll clothes, and made over $100 selling them at her school's Christmas sale the year she was in fifth grade. Even after she and her friends didn't play with the dolls anymore, we both still loved to discover a new Daisy Kingdom doll panel, and I bought a couple on eBay when my mother's favorite source, Wal-mart, stopped carrying them. Eventually, though, they became impossible to find even on eBay. Evidently the Daisy Kingdom company doesn't exist any more, which is a real loss to budding seamstresses and their American Girl dolls, if you ask me.

I thought all of our doll panels were gone until a few weeks ago. Digging through my fabric boxes looking for inspiration, I found this one and sewed it up right away, then was frustrated in my search for Victoria. Because of the constant construction in this house, boxes get moved from one place to another frequently, and I finally gave up on locating the one that held the doll. Until today, when she showed up under a bunch of old quilt blocks. This outfit includes a hair scrunchie and a little purse. What do you think--isn't she cute?

My Fury

2010-02-06T06:56:00.001-08:00

A long time ago, when I was in my second year at IU, I bought my first car, a gray 1972 Plymouth Fury, a big heavy tank of an automobile. I didn't choose it very scientifically; one of my good friends was graduating from IU that year and his parents were buying him a new one, so he sold me his old car for $1000. Had I been thinking I might have chosen something a little more economical to drive and with less room for passengers. I drove the Fury until I shipped out to Germany shortly after graduation. My clueless younger self couldn't be bothered to sell it, so I gave it to my sister, tags and insurance intact, and left.

When I returned to the family farm on leave a couple of years later, I was unhappy to find my old car had been stripped of its relatively new tires and was parked at the edge of the woods on concrete blocks. The sister to whom I had given the car had moved on to Virginia and left it behind. I demanded that the relative who took the tires put them back; still, I was only home for a few days. I canceled the registration and insurance and left again. Like Sleeping Beauty, my car waited in the woods for thirty years.

Now that I'm older, back in Indiana, and spending a lot of time with other people's heirlooms at the museum, it really bothers me that my old car is rusting away in the woods, even if I'm not the person who put it there. I have enlisted DH to help me retrieve it for recycling, but it isn't easy. On our first trip to the farm we discovered that it had been moved from its original spot to a much less accessible one, blocked by other abandoned vehicles, thick thorn bushes and a stand of new trees. Funny--the Fort Riley sticker from ROTC summer camp in the summer of 1978 is still intact and still bright orange, but the seats are completely destroyed. All four tires were buried up to the rims in frozen mud. My ever-practical DH lost enthusiasm for the project, citing the number of hours and resources it would take to extricate the Plymouth, but I was Ahab and the car had become my white whale.

This week we returned, better equipped with a small chainsaw and a large jack. It was a clear steel-blue day and the air was fresh and biting, but we worked in the cold for about three hours this time. We cut the new trees and the thorn bushes away and put boards under the flat tires. We even managed to drag the car forward five feet, but discovered the wheels wouldn't turn. This, DH declared, was a major obstacle to towing. And so we left my Fury again, but not before taking this picture.

Scarf finished!

2010-01-31T10:20:00.000-08:00

I ran completely out of purple yarn, so the reverse knitted scarf was a little shorter than it was supposed to be. I compensated by single-crocheting an inch on each end with the rest of the green yarn and a strand of something called "Squiggle" by Crystal Palace Yarns in the same lime green. DH thinks I ruined it, but sight unseen DD pronounced the idea "awesome" so I think I have a winner. What do you think?

Reverse Knitting

2010-01-20T05:08:00.000-08:00

I think I told you before that DD and I were learning to reverse knit. Now that she's gone back to school, I sit up evenings and diligently work to finish this scarf we started (the pattern is in Debbie Stoller's book "Son of Stitch 'n B****"). The directions in the book are very clear and I love the way the two colors alternate on each side of the knitting. The two layers of knitting also make a very warm scarf; DH has admired it several times, so if I ever finish this one I might have to make another one in more subdued colors for him. The pattern calls for 23 repeats of a 14-row design; I have finished seven so far, so we'll see if DD gets to wear it this winter or not. In the meantime my bulky sweater project sits in the corner mocking me, so I have my hands full of knitting.

I've also become quite a fan of a blog called "Gertie's New Blog for Better Sewing" (blogforbettersewing.com). Gertie is working her way through the Vogue Sewing Book and the results are gorgeous, plus she refers to other sewing blogs she likes, which led me this morning to "The Two Windmills" (thetwowindmills.wordpress.com), which made me really want to sew a new skirt! Perhaps by now you are thinking that I should stop blog reading and start actually making a skirt, or finishing my sweater, or doing something concrete and practical, and you are right, except for one thing.

Our museum (lawrencecountyhistory.org). On Friday we learned how to carefully clean and wrap antique textiles to preserve them for posterity. We have a huge collection of clothing and other textiles, many of them donated years ago (the first box was wrapped in newspaper dated September 1957, just as an example) that we are trying to get identified, documented, and properly stored in anticipation of a really stunning exhibit this spring. Unwrapping those newspaper parcels is like Christmas. Such wonderful things. Two 1850's dresses, so tiny that we'll have to make special mannequins to display them on. A brown velvet capelet, trimmed in lace and tied with ribbons, right out of an illustration for "Little Women". An old fox fur with the head still on (this one made us a little queasy). I go to sleep dreaming about these clothes. And it's not just clothing--I unwrapped a parcel labeled "quilt blocks" and found this sampler embroidered by a 13-year-old girl named Zilpha Colby in 1834. Small wonder I can't concentrate on my needlework, not to mention sweep my kitchen floor.

An overnight in Indy

2010-01-05T15:19:00.001-08:00

DD and I are just back from Indianapolis--we went up last night and stayed at my friend Renata's B&B (http://www.renatasbandb.com/). Renata is so much fun--this was my fourth stay, since I get to Indianapolis on various kinds of business fairly frequently and I never stay anywhere else. Here she is with DD. Her house is a real Sears Roebuck house that she and her husband have renovated top to bottom. It's just gorgeous. We were lucky that she still had her Christmas decorations up (another believer in waiting until Three Kings Day!). DD tried to take a good picture but my iPhone isn't that good in low light. There's probably an app for that. Anyway, here's a picture of Renata's living room and her pretty tree.

This afternoon we went over to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (www.imamuseum.org) to see "Fashion in Bloom", a wonderful exhibition of clothing from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. All of the fashions used flower motifs in some form or other. We two fashionistas couldn't resist all those beautiful clothes! Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take any pictures of the exhibit, so you will have to just go see for yourselves. Don't be surprised if the person on duty at the exhibit is a real sourpuss; evidently the IMA doesn't train its employees to be friendly. We still had fun and to prove it, here's DD cutting up outside the museum.

Happy New Decade

2010-01-03T06:36:00.000-08:00

DH insisted on a live tree again this year (it's so cute that he hates to cut down a tree just for Christmas). This one looked kind of silly even in the field, but we were a couple of weeks late going out to choose a tree and it was the last one. It is a Norway spruce, fat around the bottom and sparse higher up. I wired a crocheted Christmas angel that my mom made to the top; it stood up straight for a while and then started to sag to one side, as if the angel had just given up all hope (fortunately, real angels don't do that!). Almost immediately after we got the tree set up in the house, the needles started to fall off in clumps. We watered it religiously, but it was determined not to be pretty. As the branches sagged, the ornaments slid off, stripping every needle and crashing to the floor.

I normally keep the tree up until after Three Kings' Day, but if we wait that long it will be nothing but sticks, so I'm contemplating a break with tradition this year. I really hate to take it down so soon, because the house looks bare without it.

It was a fun holiday. DD was home from college, without the love of her life who went back to Lithuania to visit his own family, so we had lots of mother-daughter quality time. We learned together how to double-knit and are making an argyle scarf together. I've helped her design a special gift for her sweetheart (I can't tell you what it is, just in case he sees this, but when it's done I'll put up a picture). Two of my sisters were with us for a few days before Christmas and we took in the Barbie exhibit at the Indianapolis Children's Museum--what a great time!

I am pretty pleased with the festive touch we gave to the dining room chandelier--a roll of ribbon and a box of ornaments from Lowe's can work wonders! And I still love the hand-carved wood nativity scene from Georgia that DH and the kids gave me some years ago--I think it looks great in front of this photograph by my friend Gia Chkhartarashvili (for more see http://www.pscphotographs.com/bridge_over_the_ocean/gia/index.htm) of the village of Ushguli in the high Caucasus mountains.

Here's wishing you and yours the happiest of new decades, filled with love and creativity!

A Thanksgiving Surprise

2009-11-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

We celebrated Thanksgiving Day here at the old jail. Two of my brothers were here with their families, plus my mom and my sister-in-law's sister, Amber. In addition to a wonderful salad, Amber brought with her a scrapbook of clippings and other mementos that had been assembled by a woman who lived here for eleven years in the 1940's and 50's when her husband was the sheriff. The scrapbook included a lot of things about our old building.

I spent several hours for a couple of days after Thanksgiving scanning the clippings and photos that pertained to our building into my computer and printing them out for my own scrapbook. In the process of doing so I learned a lot that I hadn’t known before. I was especially excited to see a photograph of the fireplace mantle and wood moldings on the first floor, all of which had been removed by the time DH and I bought the house. I was saddened by a story about a little 10-year-old boy who committed suicide in his cell in 1948, discovered by the sheriff's wife when she went to bring him his dinner. When I read about a couple of prisoners who had enlarged a hole in the southeast corner of the jail and used it to escape, DH and I went into the cell block to look for the place where the wall had been patched. There was a cute photograph of a bunch of kids celebrating a birthday party on the jail steps, just in front of the "Visiting Hours" sign.

As I removed the items from their plastic covers for copying, it occurred to me that the last person who had touched them was probably the sheriff's wife who had assembled them, maybe even sitting in this same room, which was most likely her bedroom. I felt close to her, this hard-working, underappreciated mother of six who toiled daily for no salary, feeding the prisoners and her own family, seeing things no woman ever wants to see. She obviously felt a special connection to the old place, because included in the collection are clippings pertaining to the sale of the building long after her residence here. Near the end of the book was an article announcing the death of her husband at an untimely early age; I thought about how shocked and grieving she would have been as she placed it into the book.

Old buildings are like that--for a time they are the center of our whole world, the place where holidays are celebrated and tragedies are mourned, where children grow up and leave and return with their own children. Then we move on and another family takes our place and the whole cycle starts all over again.

What happened to the train?

2009-11-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

The picture above hangs in the entrance hall of the Lawrence County Museum; I see it just about every day and it reminds me of why historic preservation is so important. It is of J Street in downtown Bedford, the same street our castle faces, at a time when the railroad was a daily presence in the life of our town.

I remember being stopped by a passing train in Bedford on lots of hot summer days before car air conditioning. My siblings and I would count the cars while the sweat ran off our faces. A hundred or more wasn't uncommon. When DH and I bought the old jail and moved back here in 2007, the train still passed once a day, and it was always fun to wave at the engineer and hear him blast the horn so loud it made our windows rattle. Cars would line up on the street out front, waiting for the train to pass. The Christmas parade that year had to stop for ten minutes to let the train roll through downtown.

When I came back from my trip in early July of this year, I noticed that the train didn't come by anymore. I don't know why; I suppose I could research it, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that another part of our history has been lost, at least for the time being. Maybe some Bedfordians are glad to be rid of a noisy train, but I miss it.

October was really nuts--three big fundraisers to organize at the museum (take a look at www.lawrencecountyhistory.org for details), and both my kids were sick at some point. The kids are both healthy now, thankfully. The last of the fundraisers will be over tomorrow night; it was all fun but it will be great to be free to think about something else.

I'm looking forward to a visit from one of my sisters who lives out of town; Friday and Saturday I hope to go out with her and my mom for some girl stuff (probably antiques/crafts shopping and lunch in some cute southern Indiana town--stay tuned for a full report). I'm always on the lookout for places that serve real meringue pie, made with real eggs and browned in a real oven. If you know of any place like that within an hour and a half of Bedford, please share the information!

Behind Closed (Pocket) Doors

2009-10-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

You may remember that earlier this year we traveled to Detroit over a weekend to buy pocket doors to replace a set that was removed from our house who knows how long ago. I even included a picture of my handsome DH posing in front of the salvaged doors. What I didn't show you is what lies behind those doors--the first floor turret room, which is mostly round and which serves as our living room.

This room still isn't finished--it needs baseboard moldings and the fireplace needs to be reopened. I would love to build in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves one of these days, and add some furniture that hasn't been bought at a garage sale. Still, it is my favorite room, and when I turned on these lights the other night after a couple of hours of dusting, what I saw made me happy. After hauling out buckets of crumbling plaster, sanding floors, and stripping woodwork in this old house, we can take our coffee into the living room and savor the feeling of home.

No Time for Fun

2009-10-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

I've been volunteering a lot of time at our local museum and haven't had much left over for my needlework (or blogging). I did manage, one sleepless night, to rip out a lot of the teal Blue Sky Bulky sweater I started late last winter and re-think the design. I'm pretty sure I'm only going to be able to knit the body of the sweater with the yarn I have, then maybe the sleeves can be felted wool dyed to contrast or something. More on this later.

Saturday was my birthday, always a reminder that time stops for no one. DS had a bout of flu last week that was remarkably focusing; I spent a day at home playing board games with him (he won them all) It was great; having one child off to college this year makes me savor the time I have with the one still at home. My dear husband is up to his elbows in things to fix as usual.

I'm taking a drawing class--in the first class I mostly drew cylinders. Maybe this week I'll move up to cubes! I look forward to drawing something well enough that I won't be embarrassed to post it here. That might be a while.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes

2009-09-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

When the days were still short and it was cold outside early this past spring, our son planted tomato seeds in egg cartons and placed them on his windowsill. He tended the plants like children, transplanting them into pots as they outgrew the egg cartons, then reluctantly moving them outside when the time came. Once out of doors the plants required very little human attention, although they got a lot of attention from a certain groundhog.

There was a tense day in June when DH, who doesn't always read labels, decided to spray all the plants for bugs. Not only did DS, an organic gardener, not approve of the use of chemicals on his children, but the spray DH used appeared for a time to have killed the plants. Contrite, he hosed them all down, hoping to save not only the plants but his son's happiness. Fortunately a few survived, and DH sneaked in a few more he bought from the Feed and Seed across the street. Had all the plants lived I don't know what we would have done with all the tomatoes.

For the last few weeks we have been awash in tomatoes. We have orange ones. We have Roma, which always make me think of the gypsies I encountered overseas. And we have the classic red ones that taste great on a ham sandwich. It is a great joy for me to pick them in the gentle September sun and lay them carefully into a doubled Wal-mart bag, which I lug into the kitchen and empty onto the counter. A mixed blessing, however, is figuring out how to use them all. I've given as many away as I could find recipients for. I've made salsa, I've made spaghetti sauce, I've frozen a dozen Ziploc bags full, I've made more salsa, I've made more spaghetti sauce... DH grumbles that there's no room in the freezer for anything important, like ice cream.

I hate to admit this, but I left several dozen to rot on the vine. The groundhog, who early in the summer got thumbs-down for getting fat off the fruits of our son's labor, now gets an indulgent smile when I see him race away with a big orange tomato in his mouth.

World's oldest known fibers found!

2009-09-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

Check this out: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090910142352.htm

The thing I love about this story is not that people have been working with fiber for 34,000 years, it's that even way back then, we dyed them. It wasn't enough that the flax be functional, from the beginnings of time our fibers had to also be pretty. Is that great or what?

I took a particular interest in this discovery because as many of you know, I spent four years in the country of Georgia and have great admiration for the Georgian people, the single most artistic group I have encountered in my travels. Every person you meet in Tbilisi can recite poetry. The flowers in the first picture are from a wall hanging in Georgian theka, or felt. The second picture is of a handmade Georgian rug. These are only two of many examples of the beautiful textile work done there. It's no big surprise to me that the first person to spin flax into thread might well have been a Georgian.

Blue and White China

2009-09-03T05:26:00.003-07:00

I love blue and white china. Here are a couple of pictures from my dining room, just to prove it. It seems I'm not the only one--I discovered this wonderful painting of a woman with a blue and white china ruff and bonnet at an exhibition at Vascoeuil Castle in Normandy this summer. The image above is a watercolor done by my daughter Isabella (aka DD), using my blue and white Delft teapot for inspiration. She claims to prefer Fiesta Ware for herself, but she's still young.

It's funny--my collection started entirely by accident, when one of my former high school teachers called me up one summer during my college years. He said that he and his wife were divorcing; he was moving back in with his parents in northern Indiana and he didn't know what to do with his half of their china service. He thought my sister and I might want it. I said yes, sight unseen, and he arrived with four blue and white English ironstone plates, cups, saucers and bowls. Sorry as I was for his misfortune, I was immediately smitten with the dishes and a life-long love affair began. Fortunately when my sister moved to a different apartment she left the blue and white for me, and the rest is history.

I probably have two hundred pieces by now, and I love them all. Many I bought for myself and many were bought for me by family and friends. My DM (darling mother) contributed at least a couple of dozen pieces, often precariously mailed through the diplomatic pouch. The collection traveled the world with me; at one point, during the 1993 military mutiny in the Central African Republic, I thought I had lost it, but it all eventually arrived at our new home in Djibouti. Fortunately the Foreign Legionnaires who occupied our house during the hostilities were honest and had no interest in china.

There was a time when I couldn't pass up a nice blue and white piece at an antique store, but my passion for collecting has cooled somewhat and now I enjoy rearranging them in our castle, finding new uses for them, and setting a pretty table occasionally. I'm still on the lookout for a covered vegetable dish that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, having passed up many beautiful but expensive ones, however regretfully, many times.

Thank you, Mr. DeBeck, wherever you are.

Yes, I visited the Alamo!

2009-08-27T13:27:00.001-07:00

And here it is, with the two-person universe of happiness posing nearby. It was a quick visit to San Antonio, and a hot one, but I not only got to see where Davy Crockett drew his last breaths, I also got to visit the River Walk twice. The last evening was spent with five college freshmen and a high school junior at the Hard Rock Cafe, and I've got a glass (and this goofy picture) to prove it, except as usual I'm not actually IN the picture because I'm the one taking it.

It was fun to hang out with the kids, if a little exhausting, but back in Bedford it's time to harvest a bumper crop of tomatoes and get back to work on the house. I helped DD move into her college dorm yesterday, a bittersweet occasion. She's the third generation in our family to attend Indiana University. We had lunch at the Runcible Spoon, which I remember from my own college days (I'm not sure how long it has been in Bloomington, but there were thirty years' worth of literary journals on the bookshelves.) The iced coffee with mint was sweet and good.

Back Home Again...

2009-08-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

in Indiana. It was a quick trip that included Washington, D.C., the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the great city of Pittsburgh, which I had never visited before. I chose Pittsburgh because it would allow me to do the Eastern Shore-Bedford, Indiana drive in two days with something interesting in between.

Our first impression of Pittsburgh was an exciting one, until a driving rain obscured everything but the road in front of us. We checked into the Lady Palm suite at the Parador Inn (www.theparadorinn.com), a fabulously restored 1870's mansion-turned-B&B on Pittsburgh's North Side, and since the rain had stopped we proceeded to explore the neighborhood. Seconds after stepping across the street we got caught in a downpour and sought refuge in one of the arches of the Calvary United Methodist Church. Learning that the church was open, we jumped at the chance to not only get out of the rain but see those famous Tiffany stained glass windows from the inside of the dark sanctuary with the fading afternoon light behind them. We couldn't make out anything of the interior (I hear the oak ceilings are also impressive), but the windows took my breath away.

I just had to see the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, which was designed by H.H. Richardson, pioneer of the Romanesque Revival style that inspired the architecture of our jail. It was only a block away, so I ran through the rain to get a better look. It was impossible to take a decent picture with water dripping all over my face, needless to say. We had dinner at a nearby Thai restaurant, and it was all delicious. Our waitress at the Thai place, a pretty young woman with an abundance of glitter highlighting her eyes, brightened when we told her where we were staying; she hopes to have her wedding at the Parador.

A few years ago I had negotiated (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to have a Warhol exhibition in the overseas country I was serving in at the time. I had wanted to visit this museum ever since, so after an excellent breakfast at the Parador we took a walk down Millionaires' Row, imagining Pittsburgh at the turn of the last century, and spent a couple of hours in the museum learning about the life of Pop artist Andy Warhol, a Pittsburgh native. I was pretty young in the late 1960's and early 1970's when Warhol and his friends were considered the coolest people in New York City, so it was fun to relive that era, with its striped bell bottoms and long play albums in Warhol covers, Mick and Bianca Jagger and a very young, fresh-faced Michael Jackson. The seventies were one big party for Warhol and his friends, evidently. By the time we got to the end of Warhol's life, however, to his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat on a long line of Jesus punching bags, it was obvious that the party was over and it all just seemed sad somehow. That final impression stayed with us as we checked out the offerings in the gift shop, where we spent a half an hour and didn't buy anything.

It was almost two o'clock when we emerged from the Warhol Museum, and we had a long drive back to Bedford ahead of us, so we scrapped plans to visit the Aviary and the Mattress Factory and hit the road. Pittsburgh is definitely worth another visit, and its proximity to the road to Washington pretty much ensures I'll be seeing it again in the near future.

Adventures in Hot Glass and Remember the Alamo

2009-08-01T17:05:00.001-07:00

Last night an exhibition of glass artistry by Ross Thackery opened at the Old Jail Art Center. I am showing you just three of the gorgeous glass items on display in the hopes of enticing you to come see the rest. There's not a lot of time--the exhibition closes this Wednesday--so hurry! In addition to being a very talented artist, Ross is a great teacher; he has taught two very successful stained glass workshops at our center so far. This fall we are again offering stained glass, and are adding a fusing/beadmaking workshop as well. I was one of Ross's first stained glass students, and I loved it. I'm looking forward to taking fusing next month as well. There's something magic about glass, as I'm sure you'll agree if you've ever watched a glassblower at work.

I'll be in and out this month (mostly out, I suspect) traveling with DD and the aforementioned sweetheart (hers, not mine--mine will hold down our very large limestone fort as usual!). I have visited the great city of San Antonio numerous times (DM, my darling mother, lived there for years, with my youngest siblings), but I have never, believe it or not, visited the Alamo. DH and I did get to the River Walk once, where we drank a beer with my sister Jessica and her husband while we paid the "little kids" (at this point teenagers) ice cream money to go away and leave us alone. Anyway, that was a long time ago, too--Jessica and Don have been married for 26 years this summer and DH and I for 25, and the youngest of the little kids turns 36 in November.

This time I will see where Davy Crockett took his last breaths, I really will, at last. I will blog about it, too. Stay tuned!

Dvasos Church

2009-07-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

The two pictures to the left are of a beaded artwork in the Dvasos Church in Vilnius, Lithuania. I don't know the name of the artist, but I was dazzled by the beauty of the work and thought I would share it with you. As a person who dabbles in needlework, I could imagine the hours and hours the artist put in to create this piece, and how proud she was to see it hung on the walls of this gorgeous church. (I suppose the artist might have been a "he", but it seems unlikely.) The Dvasos Church itself has an unusually colorful interior, painted bright green, pink and turquoise with gold trim; according to my guidebook it has both Rococo and Baroque elements. The top photo is of the altar.

Our Lithuanian Boy Genius (aka the love of DD's life) didn't see what all the fuss was about; evidently this church is not considered an important jewel in the Vilnian crown, but I appreciated the exuberant use of color. Most of the churches we visited were austere, painted either white or left in natural stone; to me their spareness, although beautiful, reflected a more subdued, even somber, side of the Lithuanian national experience. Dvasos Church suggests something else altogether, joy, maybe.

Sculpture Gardens at the Chateau of Bois-Guilbert

2009-07-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

My DD had the fabulous luck, during her school year in France, to be hosted by three wonderful families. The third of those was the Thierry de Pas family, who run the first Pony Club to be established in France. All summer long the pony club is hopping with kids learning to ride and care for Shetland ponies. The first morning I was there we accompanied Thierry's daughter Agathe to bring in the horses from a back pasture--what an adventure to follow more than 300 horses through narrow country lanes back to the barns of the pony club. The de Pas family were wonderful hosts and I enjoyed getting to know Thierry, his wife Delphine, and their children, in the week I spent as their guest.

Next door to the pony club, on what used to be the same estate, is the Chateau of Bois-Guilbert, owned by Thierry's brother Jean-Marc, a celebrated sculptor. Jean-Marc has established beautiful sculpture gardens at the chateau, and this summer he has organized the "Sixth Bienniale of Sculpture in the Gardens of Bois-Guilbert." (You can see more at http://pagesperso-orange.fr/le.jardin.des.sculptures/index2.htm, if you can manage your way around a site in French.)

Never being one to miss out on an opportunity, I did not neglect to visit the chateau and its gardens. The beauty of the place was breathtaking. We spent a couple of hours walking through the gardens, taking in the sculpture and its interaction with the landscape, shooting photo after photo with my iPhone, and getting more inspired by the minute.

I've posted a couple of pictures for you to enjoy as well. One is of the chateau as you approach it from the road; you will see DD and her host brother Jeremie in the foreground. Closer to the castle is a sculpture by Robert Arnoux. The other picture is of a sculpture just outside the little chapel on the estate; I believe it is by the owner, Jean-Marc de Pas. To me this sculpture reflects the aristocratic history of this wonderful place, handed down from one generation to another.

The Hill of Crosses

2009-07-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

DD and I had a wonderful trip; we met in Paris, where we spent a single night before traveling to Vilnius, Lithuania the next day. Her sweetheart Andrius, who really IS a sweetheart, showed us all over his country for the next two weeks, joined by his wonderfully hospitable parents Viktoras and Rasa as soon as they arrived from Tbilisi. Altogether this family made sure we didn't miss anything in their beautiful country; they are a real class act.

One of the most memorable places we visited in Lithuania is called the "Hill of Crosses." The way it came about is this: Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, a group of Lithuanian partisans were killed by the Soviet authorities and buried in unmarked graves on or near a small hill in the northern part of Lithuania. Some of the local people erected crosses on the graves, to honor the sacrifice these brave individuals had made for their country. Even though religious displays were strongly discouraged in the Soviet Union, others added crosses of their own, and the hill became full of crosses. The authorities brought in bulldozers on occasion and destroyed the crosses, but the people always returned and put up more, even after guards were posted and it became much more dangerous to do so.

Now, of course, Lithuania has won its independence and there is no penalty for putting up a cross of your own on the Hill of Crosses. There are more than 200,000 today. Some make you want to cry, like the one above, placed by a young American soldier to honor a fallen comrade. Others are kind of funny, like the one that uses children's magnetized plastic letters to convey its message. All of them together testify to the power of faith to change the course of history.

In France, ask for "wee-fee" to connect!

2009-07-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in a cafe in Rouen, France waiting for DD to join me so we can go to a meeting of the Rotary Club that sponsored her stay here during this past school year. I've been Internet-less for most of the three weeks since I left Indiana, so there's a lot of unreported news, but I'm typing with one finger, so most of it will have to wait. Let me just say that I am blessed with a wonderful daughter and am happy beyond words to be with her again. We spent two weeks in Lithuania where I got to know the young man who is the love of her life and not surprisingly, he's terrific, too.

Unfortunately, my iPhone won't let me upload any photos, so stay tuned. We leave for home this Thursday.

Pocket Doors

2009-06-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

When we removed all the plaster from the stairwell in our old house we discovered the rails for sliding 8' double pocket doors between the stairwell and the living room. Of course in my quest for historical accuracy (not to mention more light and openness), this meant that we had to find old pocket doors to fit in the space, and thus began a daily early morning Internet search that eventually yielded a pair of promising doors at Sunset Antiques in Oxford, Michigan (www.WilliamsArtGlass.com), north of Detroit, more than eight hours from here. DH, ever one to seize the day, insisted that we had to go the next weekend or miss our chance altogether, and so we trekked north in two vehicles. DH, DS and our exchange student son from Brazil led the way in our truck, and I followed with my sister from Texas in my little Toyota.

It was a long trip, involving an overnight at the very comfortable Waterloo Gardens Inn. When we finally got to Oxford on Sunday morning, the doors were just as stunning as we thought they would be. The folks at Sunset were very accommodating and found wheels for them, too. While we were there my sister and I fell in love with several stained glass windows, including a gorgeous nativity scene sadly removed from a cathedral in a neighborhood in Detroit hard-hit by difficult economic times.

There was an ominous black cloud in front of us as we crossed the Michigan-Indiana line, and it erupted into driving rain for several minutes, during which my heart sank as I envisioned our beautiful doors, protected only by a tarp in the back of our red truck, all swollen and waterlogged. I called DH on my cell, advising that we tuck into a gas station with a large roof until the rain let up, but he knew better, and as usual he was right: the doors arrived in perfect condition, and he wasted no time at all in getting them installed. Now when the doors are open the stairwell and living room are like a single space, and when they are closed they are beautiful.

No, I haven't been anywhere!

2009-06-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted on this blog--I think about it every day, but every day gets away from me somehow. Anyway, I wanted to make sure and let everyone know that this Friday, June 5 from 5-8 p.m. you will have a great chance to see a lot of wonderful creative work on display in downtown Bedford. Put on your walking shoes (it really isn't that far--maybe six blocks if you walk the whole thing) and park behind the Lawrence County History Museum. You can pick up a map at the Lawrence County Art Association tent and go from there. We are supposed to have beautiful weather and I look forward to seeing all of you there.

Reason to Smile

2009-04-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that this tatted collar and cuffs set looks like a big smile the way I have pinned the pieces for blocking. That smile pretty much represents the way I feel about finishing the tatting on this project--now I have to design the top to go with it. I've gotten inspired from some of the offerings on etsy.com to create a top that is not at all granny-ish. Wish me luck.

The collar and cuffs pattern is from Barbara Foster's book "Learn Needle Tatting Step-by-Step." One of these days I'll take the online shuttle tatting class, but in the meantime, I'm happy with what I can create with a needle.

I'm starting to work hard on our Gallery Walk, scheduled for June 5. There are still a lot of decisions to be made and people to be talked to. It is shaping up into a big, fun event with a lot of different things going on in downtown Bedford. Put it on your calendar for 5-8 p.m. and go have a nice dinner afterward.

You're gonna LOVE Barbara Lynn!

2009-04-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

I'm really looking forward to Barbara Lynn's exhibition at our center, which opens with a reception on Friday, May 15, from 5-7 p.m. Barbara is one of the most naturally creative people I know, and her work always brings a smile. I get a big kick out of this gourd clown, and the gourd mushrooms pictured at oldjailarts.com. I haven't seen everything that is going into this exhibit, but I know there will be a lot of happy surprises and I know you're going to love Barbara's work. Put the opening reception on your calendar and come celebrate with us.

I'm pretty much finished with my tatted collar and cuffs, but haven't found time to block them yet, so stay tuned for a photo.

What can you make with 2,688 tiny patches?

2009-04-10T14:12:00.001-07:00

This quilt! I finished the top today and am ready for a celebration. I started this quilt on another continent, in Tbilisi, about four or five years ago, in the downstairs sewing room with my kids. The fabrics are scraps from thirty years' worth of sewing projects, my husband's old shirts, clothes I wore as a kid, worn-out sheets, and donations from friends and relatives. Each patch started out as a 2" square, sewn into 16-patch squares, sewn into 64-patch squares...well, you can see how it turned out. And now to get it quilted.

Streamcliff Farm near Commiskey

2009-04-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much time for needlework in the couple of weeks since my last post, but I wanted to let you all know about a lovely place about an hour east of Bedford called Stream Cliff Herb Farm (check it out at www.streamclifffarm.com). We went there last Sunday to celebrate DS's fourteenth birthday; he loves plants and good food, so Stream Cliff, with its gourmet restaurant and huge plant selection, was the perfect destination. In addition to a wonderful lunch (the berry cobbler a la mode was a high point in a lunch full of culinary delights), we enjoyed walking through the greenhouses and gardens; some of the adults among us had fun sampling wines at the winery. The farm dates back to 1821 and has been in the same family for six generations. Its success is living testimony that there is a market in southern Indiana for wonderful things.

In the pictures you can see our family grouping testing the weight limits of a little Monet-style arched bridge, and my niece enjoying a walk through one of the greenhouses. We were expecting rain at noon but it held up until late afternoon, when DS's new plants were all tucked away in my brother's van and several bottles of wine rested on the back seat of our truck. With DH at the wheel, I allowed the windshield wipers to lull me into a soothing nap all the way home.

Historical Finds

2009-03-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

DH and I have spent several days removing crumbling old plaster from the walls of the stairwell of the sheriff's residence. The house is a big mess, of course, but we made a few finds that have helped us learn more about this old building.
A closet had been added to the stairwell, just left of the front door, at some point late in the last century. The closet had a ceiling that was several feet lower than the stairwell ceiling, which is pretty high. When removing the closet, DH found an old Crane ammo box between the two ceilings. It was a time capsule, put there in May 1968 by a fellow from Mitchell named Ron Trueblood. My guess is that Mr. Trueblood is the person who built the closet and added the ubiquitous dark woody paneling to most of the rest of the house. I'm not going to say much about the time capsule just now, since the Times-Mail newspaper is in the process of writing a story, but it was very interesting to travel back to a time that I remember only vaguely from my childhood, when all the important businesses were around the Bedford square. I immediately called my friend and fellow history enthusiast Mary Margaret Stipp, who came over to go through the contents with me. What do you know--on the front page of one of the newspapers in the box was an article by Mary Margaret about the first Lawrence County jail, which was built in Palestine in 1818, before the county seat moved to Bedford.
Removing the plaster walls also revealed some evidence to support my theory that the red brick 1850's jail was at least partly incorporated into our limestone building. I had read that the "new" (i.e., 1904) building was built on the foundations of the old, but there are a number of walls on the first and second floors, and in the attic, that frankly wouldn't have been there had any normal architect designed the building from scratch. A photo and a sketch of the 1850's building in the Lawrence County History Museum confirmed this theory at least partially, and most people agree with me that our kitchen at least is older than the rest of the house.
DH's first find was a square hole, four bricks in size, in the brick wall over the attic stair landing. It seems pretty obvious to me that this hole held a beam of some kind, maybe a roof support given the two-story height of the first jail. What that would mean is that the entire north wall of the 1850's jail was built into the 1904 building.
The second find was even more exciting; a window in the wall between the kitchen and the stairwell, proving that the wall predates the house. The window is at an odd height--too high up for the first floor and too low for the second. I can't say why it is so exciting to find evidence of a 150-year-old window that has been hidden for over 100 yers, but it is, and I'm thinking hard about ways to finish the stairwell without hiding it again.
All the breaking and hauling of plaster (and cleaning of the resulting dust) has left me with little time to work on any of my other projects, unfortunately.

Pfaff City

2009-03-10T06:14:00.000-07:00

In 1980, while I was serving with the U.S. Army in Frankfurt, Germany, I went to the PX and picked out the sewing machine of my dreams, a top-of-the-line Pfaff 1222E, all metal, made in Germany, with a switch to allow operation on U.S. 110-volt and European 220-volt electricity. It cost me somewhere between $600 and $700; I put it on layaway (a great thing in those pre-credit card days) and it was a few months before I could take it home.

This sewing machine has been my most beloved friend for almost 30 years, dragged from one side of the Atlantic to the other several times. For a while, unable to imagine living without it for even a day, I carried it on the plane with me, since it fit under the seat nicely. Occasionally a stewardess would argue with me as I tried to bring it in, but I generally won those arguments and used it as a footrest on countless transatlantic flights. I only abandoned that practice when I had to carry babies and diaper bags instead.

With my Pfaff I made a beautiful outfit that my handsome young husband wore in a fashion show, a wedding dress for my friend Pat, a raw silk suit for my mom, two suits for my mother-in-law, two sets of blue and white draperies for the bay window of our house in Maryland, bedding and curtains for the nursery, a whole queen-size quilt top and lots of other things too numerous to list. My Pfaff was more faithful than most friends and never let me down, until recently.

You could say it let DH down. While trying to patch his own clothes, he managed to break the machine. I don't really blame him; it IS 29 years old and he is normally the person who fixes things; he's not a breaker by nature. He tried hard to fix my machine, but it needed a part that a broad Internet search revealed to be no longer available.

I suppose I could have just bought a new machine, but you know how it is when an inanimate object becomes a member of the family? I couldn't bear to retire the old Pfaff. I also suspect that no new machine could be as good as the one I already own. Thus began our search for twin machines that could be used for parts. We had several false starts on eBay, but were finally successful in buying one whose motor supposedly didn't work. It arrived, much newer-looking than mine, and guess what? DH managed to fix it, more or less. Of course that meant we still needed spare parts for my machine, so we bought another one. This one was missing a lot of parts, but had the one we needed, plus a much nicer case than mine, which was itself a replacement bought after the original case got damaged in shipment back from Africa ten years ago.

So now I have two Pfaff 1222's, both more or less working, and an extra for spare parts, all sitting on the table in my sewing room. There's no room to actually do any sewing, but how great is that?

Free Tatted Edging Pattern!

2009-03-03T05:07:00.000-08:00

My mom and I like to make day trips into the Indiana countryside, and on one of those trips, I found the antique white dresser scarf you see in the picture. I was struck by the way the designer of this edging stacked large ovals to form columns, reminiscent of classical architecture. I had never seen this particular design of tatted edging before, and the price was right, so I bought the scarf for my friend Stephen Bowman, lacemaker extraordinaire, who was having a birthday soon, as I recall.

Stephen is gifted in all the lacemaking arts. He is the founder of the Bedford College of Lacemaking, our first tenant at the Old Jail Art Center, and he was/is my tatting and bobbin lacemaking teacher. Check out Stephen's website at www.bedfordcollegeoflacemaking.com for more information on lacemaking classes and other fun stuff. Stephen rose to the challenge of preserving this edging pattern for posterity by figuring out, stitch by stitch, how the original artist made it and documenting his findings. He worked it up in a blue size 20 thread (see the top photo), and checked his enormous library of tatting patterns (including about 40 years of Workbasket magazine) to ensure we wouldn't be violating any copyright laws in making the pattern available to you.

Here is the pattern for an antique edging that Stephen calls "Rowena's Tatted Edging" and I call "Tatted Columns." Enjoy.

Abbreviations:

R = (ring) Ch = (chain) Clr = (close ring) Rw = (reverse work) + = (joining of picots)
P = (picot) Rnd = (round) Tw = (twist stitch) Ds = (double stitch) Sep = (separated)

R 3ds, p, 3ds, p, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, p, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, rw

*

R 6ds, p, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, join, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 2ds, p, 2ds, p, 2ds, p, 2ds, p, 2ds, p, 2ds, p, 2ds, p, 2ds, rw

R 6ds, join, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, join, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, join, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, join, 3ds, p, 3ds, clr, DO NOT REVERSE WORK

Ch 4ds, p, 4ds, DO NOT REVERSE WORK

R 3ds, p, 3ds, p, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, join, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, p, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, join, 4ds, rw

R 6ds, p, 6ds, clr, rw

Ch 4ds, join, 4ds, rw

Repeat from * for desired length.

Ross's Stained Glass workshop was terrific!

2009-03-02T05:07:00.000-08:00

Four of us Old Jail Art Center regulars took a preview class on February 28 of Ross Thackery's Stained Glass workshop, scheduled for this coming Saturday, March 7. What a great time we had, and how exciting to be learning a new art form! I've posted a photograph of my completed Easter basket, the project we worked on in class, and my mind is abuzz with the possibilities of new projects. Yesterday in church I studied the stained glass windows with renewed interest, imagining the artist at work creating the detail in a dove with about 20 tiny pieces of white glass. Of course mostly I paid attention to the service, but it was a sunny day outside and those beautiful windows glowed with color.

Anyway, if you were thinking of signing up for this class, I highly recommend it. Ross is wonderful and gives each student just the right amount of individual attention. If, like me, you generally leave the power tools to the man of the house, you might be surprised at how fun it is to shape glass with an electric grinder. Getting the right shape and size is harder than it looks, but all four of us managed to fit the pieces together to make a cute Easter decoration.

Don't miss our new exhibit!

2009-02-23T05:12:00.001-08:00

I'm giving you a sneak preview of two of my favorite paintings in our exhibition of work by Lawrence County artist Janet C. Foster. I have always had a deep appreciation for our southern Indiana Amish community, and in these two paintings I believe Janet has beautifully depicted the quiet dignity of their lives. The Amish are not her only focus, however; Janet's work captures both Indiana and western landscapes and people with honesty and love. Don't miss this exhibition! You can view it through March 4, and admission is free.

I've become, as some of you have suspected, addicted to tatting, and since my last post have finished several small projects. The most recent, just completed yesterday, is this edging lace, from the book "Tatting" by Carol M. Winandy. It looks pretty on the towel, but those large holes in the center may cause trouble when I try to wash it. Stay tuned for the final verdict.

The loom has been shipped from California and is due to arrive later this week. We'll see if weaving manages to displace tatting and quilting in my affections; so much art, so little time!

A Loom Looms!

2009-02-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

Woo-hoo! I was the top bidder on a 36" Harrisville four-harness floor loom on eBay. I have wanted a floor loom since I was about five, when my Grandma Cross took me and a half dozen paper grocery bags of rolled-up rags out to see a weaver in the woods around Elkinsville. This lady had a huge loom on the back porch of her little hillbilly-style house, already warped and ready for my grandma's rags. I sat there on the porch and watched her turn those rags into rugs, and I have wanted to weave ever since.

Last year I took a weaving class at Yarns Unlimited in Bloomington and was really hooked, but life and the Foreign Service intervened and those trips to Bloomington got farther and farther apart. Now we will have a loom right here in Bedford. Too cool.

The loom is in California, so it will take some time to get it here, but stay tuned for weaving adventures. Save your old t-shirts and we'll make some rugs.

Last post on tatted hearts, I promise!

2009-02-09T05:19:00.001-08:00

I'm taking some of these hearts to the Waldron in Bloomington tomorrow to put in a "Valentine Mart," but I thought I would put up a picture to show you what our door looks like in all its glory.

I had a lot of fun tatting, but it's time to move on to the next project, a sweater in Blue Sky Bulky yarn that I bought on sale at In a Yarn Basket (www.inayarnbasket.com). I took every skein they had, but I'm pretty sure it isn't enough to finish the sweater. I'm scouting around for a yarn in a solid teal that will coordinate with it well--any ideas? Here's a photo so you can see how really chunky this yarn is (I'm using #17 needles).

Renovation update: DH spent most of the last week installing window moldings on the second floor of the sheriff's house. I'm getting loopy from the smell of polyurethane, but it's worth it. Some day the house will be finished and we can turn our attention to the cell blocks.

Morenna

2009-02-07T17:31:00.001-08:00

Back to Solsberry--this time to check out the offerings at Robin Edmundson's studio (you can find her at www.morenna.com). I met Robin in October at the Fiber Arts Festival at Corydon, just as she was closing up her booth and tucking the most beautiful yarns into boxes. She said she welcomed visitors, and so I arranged a visit for myself, Bev and Necoe, both students in last fall's sock knitting class.

Robin lives a few miles from Solsberry on a back road that was covered with packed snow and quite hilly, so we held our breath on our way in. We needn't have worried--my old Toyota clung to the road and we cruised up and down the hills and right on into Robin's driveway. We found her in her studio with her two daughters, who were spinning yarn like professionals. There were so many beautiful yarns that it was hard to focus at first, but since (as you all know by now) I am obsessed with tatting hearts, I picked out some pinks and a variegated cotton in shades of blue for a summer top (by this time the temperature was in the high 40's and we were all thinking about spring). Necoe and Bev fixated on a soft angora blend and proceeded to split what was left of it between them. Robin also makes irresistible fragrant soap, a couple of bars of which found their way into my bag. As Necoe's former sock knitting teacher, I was delighted when she chose an expensive but intriguing hank of yarn to make "watermelon socks." What with ooh-ing and aah-ing over all the great stuff, we were there about an hour before our stomachs told us it was time for lunch. A quick stop back at Ellie Mae's for more of that green apple and passionfruit soap I bought the last time, and a handwoven rag rug that I talked myself out of the last time, and we were off for heartwarming chili and grilled cheese at the cafe on highway 45.

All in all, Solsberry is getting to be a happening place, and we Lawrence County girls had a whale of a time. The thread I bought is a little finer than I'm used to tatting with, but I made a heart with it anyway. The art center door is getting too small for my collection of crocheted and tatted hearts. Good thing it's only a week until Valentine's Day.

At long last, tatted hearts!

2009-01-29T05:30:00.000-08:00

Boy, am I proud! Take heart (no pun intended), would-be tatters, the fog does eventually clear and you can make pretty things, too. (That message was especially for you, Angela.) Giving credit where credit is due, both patterns came from the book "From my Heart" by Betty J. Goetgeluck. They are called "January Hearts" which I find entirely appropriate, especially since it took me a good chunk of January to make them. And while I'm handing out kudos, thank you, Stephen, for lending me the book.

DH and I used the ice and snow outside as an excuse to linger a little longer over coffee yesterday morning--I took this picture after spending at least an hour perusing a book about cathedrals and another about impressionism. I wish I were a painter; I love this still life.

Heart Decorations, Part 2

2009-01-25T13:43:00.001-08:00

Well, I got back to work creating heart patterns in crochet, and I came up with these two.

Then I decided we needed a tatted heart to go along with all the crocheted ones, and I made one, but it's not ready for prime time yet.

I found a set of heart-shaped cookie cutters at Wal-Mart and used one of them to shape a needle-felted heart that is now hanging with the others. It looks a little like an air-conditioning filter, but I like it with the pale winter sun shining through it. Here's a picture of the view out the art center door now--it needs a few more hearts, but it's getting there.

You might notice that the purple tatted heart is no longer there. That's because it looked more like a skull than a heart. I might bring it out again for Halloween!

Look

2009-01-25T10:48:00.001-08:00

Ellie Mae's in Solsberry

2009-01-21T15:21:00.000-08:00

I had heard that there was a new shop in Solsberry, Ellie Mae's, that had been opened by Marcy Heshelman Cook, so my mom, my aunt Bert and I set out this morning to investigate. I've known the Heshelman family since I was in high school; several of my siblings and I were members of Future Farmers of America under Gary Heshelman, and I babysat for the Heshelman kids one summer when Marcy was about five. They are a fine family and the kids never caused me any trouble. But I digress.

Ellie Mae's is in the cutest little white cottage right on Main Street in Solsberry. I wish I had taken a picture for the blog; I vowed I would but then forgot as soon as I saw the place and couldn't wait to check out the inside. If you are looking for a "Made in Indiana" gift, as I was to send to DD in France, this is the place to go. Bert bought a fab hanging oil lamp made from an old bottle and my mom picked up a jar of preserves, but I was too busy to notice which kind, because I was scooping up cranberry bread mix, scented soaps, local organic flour and the softest turquoise gloves (to match the coat I showed you in December--I have expensive leather ones but they are getting a bit ragged). There were tons of other things worthy of perusing; rag rugs, butter-soft bathrobes, cute pajamas, personalized cake pans and lids (I took the flyer and can't wait to have one made for DS), lots of jellies and jams and baking mixes and fun stuff. Check it out.

We worked up an appetite with all that shopping and chatting with Mary Alice, so our next stop was the Corner Cafe on highway 45 near that triangle where 45 meets 54. Lunch was likewise entirely satisfying; Bert and I had a beef-rich patty melt sandwich and my mom had the grilled tenderloin. We finished off with peach cobbler and ice cream and left the place feeling extremely well-fed, Indiana-style.

Before returning to the castle and the financial aid applications for DD that have been driving me so crazy, we spent a little time at Bert's admiring all her handwork. She's an accomplished stained glass artist and after seeing all her beautiful things, my mom and I are both itching to try it out ourselves. Lucky we found a teacher and have a class scheduled this spring! Bert also has a couple of new quilts nearing completion, to add to all the gorgeous ones on the beds in her house. I left the place thinking, someday, when the dust subsides, maybe my house will look that nice...

Hearts Inspire

2009-01-18T11:37:00.000-08:00

Hearts always make me happy; over the years I have acquired a collection of stuff-paper-cloth-stickers-ribbon-metal-wood-ect.Why, so I can make Valentine cards to send to friends. I started doing this yearly when my three daughters decided they wanted to do Valentine cards with Mommy;since then I still do it cause it is fun and I always have my eye out for blank cards on sale, stamps, glue,
lace...above all words and friends to share the fun with- you know chocolate-wine-giggles-creating!!!

Heart Decorations, Part 1

2009-01-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

I saw a Valentine's Day decoration on http://www.marthastewart.com/ that involved making hearts from two layers of waxed paper with crayon shavings in the middle--you run your iron over the waxed paper (through a regular piece of paper so the wax doesn't come off on your iron) and the colors all melt together and look really pretty, at least if you believe the picture on the website. I wanted to make some waxed paper hearts to hang on the door of our center, then I thought, "But Rowena, you can crochet some beautiful ones!" I hate it when I get like that, don't you?

So I looked for materials. The only thread I had was purple, and that didn't belong to me, but I had held onto it since the tatting class my mom and I had taken with Stephen last year, and he wasn't screaming for it, so I figured I could use it. I found that I don't own any crochet hooks small enough to crochet with the purple thread, so I decided to tat a heart instead. I found a tatted heart pattern in "A New Twist on Tatting" by Catherine Austin, and got busy. The instructions for the three motifs were easy enough to follow, but I didn't understand the instructions for the border at all, so I just made it up as I went along, and you can see the result in the picture. Not exactly a heart, but kind of pretty.

So I went to Ben Franklin in Mitchell (see previous post) and bought three balls of thread (Aunt Lydia’s, made in India)—one red, one dark pink and one light pink—and two crochet hooks. I spent about an hour looking for a suitable crocheted lace heart pattern on-line before giving up and asking my mom. Now you should know that my mother is a master crocheter who probably crocheted her way through the delivery of all nine of her children and owns every crochet pattern ever published. She couldn’t find a crochet lace heart pattern, either, but she did find an actual heart, which she donated to the cause so that I could copy it.

Well, that heart was done in microscopic thread with a hook that would be at home in a dollhouse. I copied it with my Ben Franklin thread and after the second row it was obvious that if I kept at it, I would have a tablecloth. At this point I told myself, “Just make something up!” And here’s the result. Not bad, huh? Unfortunately I didn’t write down what I did, so the red and dark pink ones will be all-new adventures.

Some Good News

2009-01-16T07:59:00.001-08:00

There's a nice new cafe in Bedrock. Some of you may have noticed that the old BRI headquarters on 16th Street west of the square, formerly Churb's Cafe, was showing signs of life. I stopped by the Side Street Cafe yesterday and was impressed with the clean, continental look of the place--except for the absence of cigarette smoke, it felt like a cafe in France or Italy. The owner, Arlisha Charles, was very friendly and we chatted while I wolfed down biscuits and gravy, my favorite breakfast. I'm looking forward to trying it out for lunch as well, and one of the many coffee variations on the menu. Living so close by may not be good for my waistline!

I finished the last two quilt blocks last night and am undergoing a sort of withdrawal. I still have a lot of work to do on the quilt, but cutting those little 2" squares and arranging them into blocks had become my favorite pastime. Thanks to DS, whose math is better than mine, I now know exactly how many squares are in the quilt: 2,688. In anticipation of completing the top, I investigated batting and liner fabric at Ben Franklin's in Mitchell the other day and was impressed with the selection of materials available. I love Bloomington as much as anyone else, but it's great not to have to drive 20 miles to find things. The Sewing Center right here on J Street is another excellent source for quilting fabrics and tools, although they don't sell batting. I found replacement blades for my rotary cutter there and met an interesting textile artist at the same time, so that's another nice destination for a downtown walk, when the temperature rises again. (-7 degrees this morning; can you believe it?)

A few things never to declutter

2009-01-10T04:53:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year when I am naturally drawn to sites like http://www.unclutter.com/ and http://www.flylady.com/, that preach decluttering, simplifying one's life, etc. Taking down the Christmas decorations and making lists of New Year's resolutions can put a person into a cleaning, sorting, discarding frame of mind that is very useful when applied to things you really don't need or want, like old newspapers (piling up in one of the cell blocks as I write), magazines (piled in the dining room since Thanksgiving awaiting my dear brother's taking them to a doctor's waiting room that supposedly wants them), or outgrown/unwanted but still serviceable clothes (DS grew five inches last year and is picky about what he wears; there's no point leaving the stuff hanging in his closet when someone can use it).

I was interested to read recently that unclutter.com had received some angry mail attributed to the economic downtown. Unfortunately, none of the hostile posts made it onto the site, so I don't know what reason the writers gave, but I imagine it had something to do with the need to conserve all available resources as we go into the Great Depression Part 2. Now, even though I support the principles of decluttering in general, I started thinking about the things I have never been able to get rid of, and thinking that maybe it's not so bad to hold on to certain things that I haven't used in years. Here's my list. Add to it if you want.

1. Scraps of fabric, yarn, and trims: Self-explanatory. Creativity starts with raw materials. The best raw materials are those that don't require a trip to the store.

2. Used clothing in fabrics you love: I have a couple (okay, more than a couple) of outfits made from the most wonderful fabrics--a hand-dyed green and black silk dress with broad shoulders in the size I wore in Bonn in 1987, a tie-dyed raw silk in shades of spring green from my Djibouti years, 1996-99, and a red tartan plaid wool jumper that I wore often in Tbilisi, with bright red platform loafers, to the horror of my chic Georgian colleagues, I am sure. These will not be released to the universe; they will be recycled into something fabulous. Someday.

3. Old sheets, men's shirts, and other woven cottons: I have used all three in my quilt. Items too faded for the quilt get ripped into strips and crocheted into a round rug for DD's round bedroom (take a look at the picture). The rug is thick and heavy and will be impossible to clean, but it makes me happy just to look at it--I see DD sitting on the floor in our sewing room in Tbilisi, her slender shoulders bent over that rug with a big wooden hook, a basket of rag balls nearby. Sheets also are very helpful in protecting floors and furniture during painting, sanding, grinding and other dirty renovation activities, about which I could write a book.

4. Gifts from people I love: I know lots of declutterers will disagree with me on this, but if someone gives me something, I cherish it, especially if it is handmade. It doesn't matter if it isn't something I would have bought or made for myself; the point to me is that by having that item I have a permanent reminder of that person. I still have every outfit my mother made my kids when they were little.

5. Stuff I made in the past: Some years ago, in a fit of clearing space for the new size I had become, I gave away a beautiful pale gray cabled vest in expensive Shetland wool that I knitted while living in Mainz, Germany in 1983/84, and I still regret it. It would look so cute on DD now. Most things I kept, and I even exhibited one (my prom dress) recently. Somehow the word "heirloom" didn't resonate back then the way it does now.

6. Blue and white dishes: They look so pretty; how could I part with a single one? There was a time when I could hardly pass a piece of blue and white English ironstone in an antique store without bringing it home. When we were evacuated from Bangui, for a while it looked as if we might have lost everything, and I wasn't worried a bit about those dishes--I knew I would have a good excuse to shop for more.

The challenge in holding onto too much stuff is finding it. For our last exhibition I wanted to include a table scarf crocheted by my mother's mother, who died before I was born. I searched through box after box, every box in the house, I'm sure, and it never turned up. I'm sure I'll find it when I look for something else, though, and when I do it will be Christmas all over again.

Southern Indiana culture

2009-01-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

When I was overseas working for our government, I spent a lot of time promoting American "culture" and answering questions about what it was and wasn't. Most of the people who thought they didn't like American culture, I discovered, were actually opposed to the idea of a global culture, much of which isn't really American. For example, Britney Spears is American and she is also a part of global culture. The Harry Potter books are globally recognized but they are not American; J.K. Rowling is British. Japanese cartoons are available to every kid in the world who has a television and a satellite dish, and some people don't even realize they are Japanese.

I found common ground with these people by explaining that I, too, and many Americans, are not that crazy about global culture. What I like, and promoted overseas, were those elements of our culture (like bluegrass music or the Gee's Bend quilts or the writings of John Steinbeck) that come from a specific place and time in our country's history. When we started the art center here in Bedford it was with the idea of promoting local artists and the continued development of our unique southern Indiana culture.

So what IS our culture? Quilts, for sure--my grandma made them and your grandma probably did, too, and so do we. Crocheted doilies, but not just doilies--collars, christening gowns, afghans--crochet seems to have been in our culture from the beginning, but it developed, and continues to develop, over time. Limestone--Bedford, also known affectionately as Bedrock, was built on it. The work of southern Indiana carvers and stoneworkers adorns buildings both stately and humble here and around the country. I felt a special connection when I took the kids to the National Cathedral in Washington knowing that my grandfather cut some of the stone used to build it.

The food of our area deserves its own paragraph. Persimmon pudding--I've never had it outside of Indiana. Brown beans and cornbread. Biscuits and gravy have a wider following and may not have originated in Indiana, but both my mother and grandmother made them, and DH, not a native Hoosier, has come up with his own wonderful version.

Music--when I was a kid and my parents told me "Stardust" was their song, I didn't get it. To my child's ears it sounded slow and meandering, without a catchy refrain. Now I'm old enough to love the song, and young enough to play it over and over on that marble contraption at Wonderlab in Bloomington. If you haven't tried it, I recommend it. You might have to elbow a couple of toddlers out of the way, but it's worth it. Nothing says Bloomington, Indiana like "Stardust." Folk songs that my dad used to play on his guitar for us all to sing at family reunions, like "Go Tell Aunt Rhody." I've never heard that song anywhere but at family reunions. To tell you the truth, I never really liked it; it's sad and I don't like sad songs, but it's ours, anyway.

Our upcoming exhibition of Janet Foster's work really celebrates what is great about the southern Indiana out-of-doors. I'm not giving you any hints, although there's a tiny example at www.oldjailarts.com. Janet zeroes in on what is unique about our landscape and the people who make their lives here. Please join us for the opening if you can--Friday, February 20 at 5:00 p.m., and sometime during the exhibition if you can't.

Let's Celebrate Three Kings' Day!

2009-01-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

Lady Mudwerkes, let's have our own little arcane celebration of the arrival of the Magi. And anyone else out there within easy driving distance of Bedford, too. Tomorrow, around lunchtime. Give me a call (606-1758) if you're in.

I'm working on a quilt that I started in Georgia a few years ago. It's a postage stamp quilt, and I decided to make it queen-size so that it can actually be used on a bed (mine and DH's), so as you can imagine it is taking a while. I get distracted from it all the time (see previous posts), but my first New Year's resolution, ahead even of losing the weight I found since returning to Indiana, is to finish it. I'll post a picture when the blocks are all complete and sewn together.

I was trying to remember whatever prompted me to begin such a time-consuming project. I was asked to give a presentation in the spring of 2004 at an American Studies Conference at Tbilisi State University, and since quilts had been such an important part of my life, I chose to do the presentation on quilts. I had a few wonderful examples with me in Georgia, including two by quilting genius (and my sister-in-law) Kay Capps Cross (you can see her work at http://www.crosscutsquilting.com), and one by my daughter Isabella. I had a poignant story to tell about DH's rescuing the two quilts my grandmother made me in the middle of a military mutiny that reduced Bangui to rubble and forced us to flee that African city with a single suitcase. To complete the presentation I went on line and found some pictures of all the major American quilt designs, and there were a couple of stunning postage stamp (i.e., made from tiny pieces) quilts. I was obsessed with the possibilities--a way to create something beautiful and use up the tiny scraps I had collected over the years. And so I began a project that has given me countless hours of pleasure, in the downstairs sewing room in Tbilisi, and in the upstairs sewing room in Bedford. And I still haven't run out of scraps, although I'm constantly looking for new prints to salvage, just to keep things interesting.

Ephany

2009-01-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

Just for the record hardly anyone celebrates the visit of the Three Kings any more but the offical arcane name of the holiday now means inspiration.
By the way your gift here is still waiting for you!!!

Christmas, part 2

2009-01-03T06:01:00.001-08:00

At the same time as I was waxing eloquent about making Christmas last, my colleague Stephen was taking down the tree in our art center. It turns out that very few people in Bedford subscribe to the "Twelve Days of Christmas" concept, beginning December 25 and ending just before Three Kings' Day, on January 5. Most of my friends here regard the Christmas season as beginning the day after Thanksgiving and ending on December 25. Stephen even joked that he always thought "Boxing Day" (December 26) was so named because it was the day you boxed up all the decorations and put them back in the attic.

The whole idea that the Christmas season has been adjusted to match shopping (and selling) habits I find more than a little annoying. I have nothing against putting up decorations the day after Thanksgiving, which more or less corresponds to Advent, but taking them down on the 26th of December just reeks of "What is Christmas when all the presents have been opened?" More, so much more.

The lights in front of the old jail are failing in big chunks, leaving some strangely-lit shrubbery, but they'll be on every night until January 6. Unless the poltergeist agrees with Stephen and Tonie.

Thinking about Christmas

2008-12-28T19:04:00.000-08:00

It's December 28, but we're still in the middle of Christmas here. When we were overseas, off and on for about twenty years, it was very common for Christmas cards and gifts to arrive in January and occasionally even in February. Christmas really was a season, and since the tree was artificial (just try to find a fresh evergreen in Djibouti!), we left it up for ten or twelve weeks. When presents arrived, DH and I arranged them under the tree and told the kids Santa had come again, which delighted them no end. When we were in Georgia, we easily stretched the holiday season to include Orthodox Christmas on January 6 and Orthodox New Year a week after that. So I never feel let down at the end of Christmas day anymore; there's so much more Christmas to look forward to!

Something very interesting happened this Christmas. DH, DS and I returned late in the day from a lovely family dinner to see the little tree in the window of our art center sparkling with light, a bright, hopeful glimmer in the long, dark, almost sinister facade of the old jail.

"Who turned on the Christmas tree in the studio?" DH asked.

"I don't know," I said, and it was true. I had been in there several times in the last few days, trying to de-clutter by consolidating all my knitting patterns and needles in one place, and the place had been dark and cold.

"Looks like your poltergeist is back," he said.

I smiled as we pulled into our parking lot and the last twinkly light disappeared from view. There is something magic about this old place, and something magic about Christmas.

Mrs. Woody's Quilt

2008-12-24T05:27:00.001-08:00

A couple of months ago I went to an auction on Woody Farm Road in Bedford, hoping to buy a spinning wheel for our center. I didn't get the spinning wheel, but I did buy a couple of old unfinished quilt tops, entirely hand-sewn. The prettiest of the two is made in a six-pointed star pattern of tiny 2" patches (see the detail in the picture) and measures about four feet by two feet. It came with a whole box of completed quilt blocks that just needed to be sewn on.

The name of the man whose estate was being auctioned that day was Woody, and I call the quilt artist Mrs. Woody even though I have no idea who was actually making the quilt. Mrs. Woody must have put hundreds of hours into carefully cutting the tiny pieces and hand-stitching them together, arranging the colors beautifully, but one day she stopped, mid-seam, leaving a block half-sewn onto the quilt, and never returned.

When my sister-in-law Trish was here over Thanksgiving, she and I vowed to continue Mrs. Woody's work, and thanks to my brother Doran's taking their two very active young sons on a long hike, we were actually able to spend a couple of hours in our round living room hand-sewing a couple more rows of blocks onto the quilt. As we sewed, Trish and I talked about the woman who started the quilt, what she was thinking, how long it took her to get as far as she had, when that was and how old she was at the time, whether she had small children as she made it or whether her children were already grown, and what made her stop so abruptly and never return to her work. We thought perhaps a family crisis, a death or disappointment, had caused her to lose her creative spirit. Maybe she was a young woman with no children when she started the quilt, and when the kids came she had no time to work on it anymore, like the tablecloth my mother finished crocheting after fifteen years. Or maybe she herself became ill or died suddenly. It was strange and wonderful how completely into Mrs. Woody's mind we were as we worked to complete a project she had labored on so long. No longer a total stranger, through her art she had become a friend and helped to seal the friendship between the two of us, sisters-in-law separated most of the year by the long road between Indiana and Texas.

Fellow artists, when we sit down with a needle and thread, or a handful of clay, or a crochet hook or knitting needles or a palette of paint and a gourd, we begin an adventure that will live long after us, whether we finish the work or not. Enjoy every minute of it. There's no better time to think about the continuity of past, present and future than at Christmas, a time of deeply honored traditions all over the world. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Hooray! We broke the comments jinx!

2008-12-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

Now I know what to do--I have to add people as authors before they can comment. So, if you haven't already been invited to be an author, send me an e-mail at oldlawrencejail@gmail.com, and I'll invite you. Lady Mudwerkes, I love your work and encourage all of you following this blog to check it out.

Connections

2008-12-22T08:37:00.000-08:00

Greetings-so many choices-so many buttons to tap.I can not wait until I have a space with you not only to give Handbuilding with Clay classes but also I am putting together a truly FUN Mixes Media Class....Interested people in the classes need to let us know, also, if any reader wants to see my work they can go to ladymudwerkes.etsy.com HAVE A GRAND NEW YEAR!!!

Still trying to enable comments...

2008-12-22T08:03:00.001-08:00

I keep hearing from some of you that you can't make comments on this blog. I don't know what the problem is, but I'll keep trying to fix it. I really do want to hear from you! If you send your comments to oldlawrencejail@gmail.com in the meantime, I will cut and paste them here so that others can see them. It's awkward and medieval, I know, but what can I say? I love to spend my time making things and I hate to spend it messing around with the computer, so if there is a low-tech way to get there, I'll take it.

It's really, really cold in Bedford right now (7 degrees Fahrenheit, up from 1 degree early this morning), so it's perfect weather for staying inside and having fun with fibers in the sewing room. The heat in this old pile of rocks we call home is good but expensive, so DH goes around turning down the ancient hot-water radiators and I turn them back up as soon as I enter a room. As you might imagine, this does little to lower our heating bills. Anyway, the sewing room can get pretty toasty if DH stays out of it long enough.

I took the kids (DS and his cousins) to Bloomington yesterday to see the "Grand Tour" exhibit at the IU Art Museum (wonderful, and closing soon, so if you haven't seen it and you want to, you'd better hurry). The wind really whipped around our heads on the long walk from the parking lot to the museum and back, but it was worth it. On the way home I stopped at one of Bloomington's two yarn stores (Bedford unfortunately doesn't have any) and picked up the knitting and tatting needles I needed, and some yellow roving for making star ornaments. Unfortunately the store didn't have single tatting needles, just this four-needle contraption that won't fit into the points of the star, so we'll see if I can manage that challenge. Stay tuned, stay warm, and stay creative.

Felting/Knitting Setbacks

2008-12-20T13:00:00.000-08:00

I'm bummed--the tip of my felting needle broke off already and there's nowhere close by to buy another one. SO even though I dreamed about felting last night (no kidding), I can't work on anything until I replace the needle. I should probably order these things in bulk.

Stymied by my inability to felt, I got out my latest knitting project and discovered the needles aren't long enough (it's one of those sweaters that you knit all in one piece up to the armholes). This must be the universe's way of telling me to stop playing around with wool and finish preparations for DS and DH's Christmas stockings.

You know, the thing about being the mom is, you spend all this time and energy filling stockings for your darling children and their father and then what do you have in your own? Only what you put there! One of these days I'm going to use the stocking as an excuse to buy myself some really peachy presents for Christmas, like a huge bottle of Chanel No. 5 or a sapphire and diamond ring. Maybe a bottle of Godiva Chocolate Liqueur, if I can figure out who sells it around here.

Needle felting is addictive

2008-12-19T05:25:00.000-08:00

Help, I can't stop needle felting! I've made four more ornaments from that little kit I told you about earlier. So cool--when I need a new color I just go to my yarn stash, pull out some yarn, rip it apart so it somewhat resembles roving, and poke it in. My friend Stephen just shakes his head and says, "We have to get you some more roving."

Here's a picture of the little snowman that started it all--so cute! It's going to be a package tie on a present for someone who collects snowmen--don't tell; I want it to be a surprise.

For my next act I'm going to put a piece of wool fabric between two thin layers of roving and try to come up with a felted fabric like Tina Kldiashvili's. Tina is the Georgian felting artist who made my beautiful coat. The picture shows a detail of the back left shoulder--imagine, the whole coat looks like this, just gorgeous. You can take a look at Tina's work at http://www.welcome.ge/gallery_texstylet/. "Theka" is the name for felting in the Georgian language, and Tina is a Theka master. I would love to get Tina here to show us how she does it; we had hoped to bring her to Indiana and Michigan last summer but history got in the way. Maybe we'll have better luck in 2009.

Great news--we have a stained glass teacher!

2008-12-18T06:01:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy to announce that Ross Thackery, a glass artist based in Bloomington, Indiana, has agreed to come down to Bedford on March 7 to get us started in the art of stained glass. Take a look at Ross's art at www.abrimagery.com. He makes gorgeous glass and I know this will be an exciting class. Wow, that rhymed... There's never been a better time to learn to work with stained glass right here in Bedford, so sign up soon. We won't be able to accommodate more than six students due to the size of the space.

I have been an admirer of stained glass work for as long as I can remember, starting with the beautiful windows of some of the old limestone churches here in Bedford. If you haven't seen the lighted windows at the Presbyterian Church at 15th and Lincoln on a winter evening, you should, just for a particularly stunning example. I know it's hard to think about taking a walk outdoors when it's so cold and icy, but some things are worth being uncomfortable for. Like the Bedford Parade, for example.

I'm getting close to announcing our felting class as well, so stay tuned for more good news in the coming days.

I know lots of you are busy putting the final touches on handmade Christmas gifts; what a win-win for the holidays! We love to make them, and the recipients love to receive them. Enjoy yourselves fully and stay inspired.

On a technical note, I just learned that for some reason, dear readers, you are unable to comment on anything you read here. I am working with the techies to solve this problem, so keep trying!

Needle felting--so much fun!

2008-12-16T04:24:00.000-08:00

Last night while I was watching TV with my DH and DS ("darling husband" and "darling son"), I opened up the needle felted ornament kit I bought at the Corydon Fiber Arts Festival a couple of months ago. It's a little snowman, and includes undyed, black and red roving (that's unspun wool for those of you who haven't taken our spinning class yet). I poked that needle back and forth through a couple of HGTV shows (I can't believe DH and DS actually let me watch them) and then half of a sappy Hallmark Christmas drama, et voila! the cutest little fuzzy snowman appeared like magic. I can't wait to make another one--I'm looking through my yarn stash for new colors for the scarf. It looks like I have enough undyed roving to make a couple more, so the kit was a bargain at $10.00. The kit is made by Big Springs Farm and Fiber LLC in Pekin, Indiana; their website is www.bigspringsfarm.com. This was my first adventure in felting, and the instructions were completely clear--what an ah-ha! moment when that roving starts to mesh together into a thick layer of felt.

I also have a lead on a teacher for our stained glass class--stay tuned for more good news on this front.

Stained glass and felting teachers wanted!

2008-12-15T07:01:00.000-08:00

I'm psyched by our new schedule of classes for January through March 2008 (see our website www.oldjailarts.com). During the early part of the year a lot of us try to compensate for the overeating, overspending, and general excesses of the holiday period, so it's a great time to learn a new skill and develop our interests. We're offering a new class in sweater knitting (taught by yours truly) and some old favorites. We're still looking for teachers for stained glass and needle felting, so if anyone out there has these skills and would like to share them, please let us know. You can post to this blog or e-mail us at oldlawrencejail@gmail.com.

I had a good day at the Lawrence County Museum's Authors and Artists Day sale last Saturday. Visitors bought a lot of ornaments; Tonie's tatted crosses and mittens were favorites as were Stephen's felt skating Snoopies. I met several interesting and talented writers, so my mind is already at work on the idea of having a reading some cold evening in early 2009. When I was a grad student in English at the University of Maryland, I went to a number of readings and even read my own work on occasion; after all these years I can still remember them well. You never look at an author's work the same again after hearing that person read it aloud.

Witless Knitting

2008-12-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to knit a tiny Christmas ornament, a red and white candy cane striped sweater a couple of inches wide. I've had two false starts, and I'm about to give the whole enterprise up. I should have knit it flat instead of trying to work with five double-pointed needles (or maybe I should have traded in the needles for toothpicks!). The constant color changes didn't help, either; I ended up with strings hanging everywhere, and a few holes where stitches should have been. I love making things at Christmas, but this year I might have to content myself with the little wooden snowman heads Tonie taught me how to make a couple of weeks ago. They're cute; we're going to make a few more to sell at the museum event tomorrow.

Come play in our sandbox!

2008-12-11T05:10:00.000-08:00

That's what our lacemaking artist Stephen says when someone new comes to our center, to take a class or visit an exhibition, or just to chat and see what we are up to. By "we" I mean the small group of fiber artists, gourd artists, and other fun people who have become the core of the Old Jail Art Center at 1002 17th Street in Bedford, Indiana, in the building everyone calls the "Old Jail" because, well, that's what it is. It's a great old limestone building that once served as the Lawrence County Jail and Sheriff's Residence. I put that in capitals because that's how it is designated on the Indiana Register of Historic Places.

But I digress. What I wanted to say was, come play in our sandbox. If you are interested in the arts, however large or small, and in promoting the arts in off-the-beaten-track places like Bedford, we'd love to hear from you. Please also visit our website at www.oldjailarts.com, and let us know what you think. And most of all, if you are anywhere near the Bedford area, please write and arrange a visit to our center. We aren't keeping regular hours yet, but as our one-year anniversary approaches, that might change soon.