Patty Yoder’s Beautiful Sheep, Again

Just about a year ago, when I started my blog, I wrote about an exhibit of hooked rugs I had seen at Shelburne Museum, in Vermont. These rugs, made by Patty Yoder, are so beautiful and so successfully bring an new artistic vision to an old craft form that I was excited to share them.

The problem was, I had just started my blog and almost no one was reading it yet! So the delightful, sweet, hand-hooked sheep were enjoyed by only about 4 people.

We went back to Shelburne last week, and visited the sheep again–they are still splendid. I took some new photos and am refreshing what I wrote, with hope that you’ll find them as compelling as I do.

The Shelburne Museum website says the following about the rugs: “The Alphabet of Sheep series combines two of [Yoder’s] favorite things: the sheep on her farm and the alphabet. Her rugs incorporate her family, friends, or sheep as the subject matter, a joyous celebration of one woman’s life.” And joyous is the perfect word to describe these rugs!

The exhibition features about 20 of the 44 hooked rugs Yoder made in the 13 years between her retirement and her death in 2005. That’s a very short time to develop skill and a personal vision but these rugs are amazing in both ways.

Have you ever tried rug hooking? I have. It was hard! All those strips of wool sitting around, flat and uninteresting, and the maker needs to be able to envision how those pieces fit together, how to vary color, how to bring them through the backing fabric in a consistent manner. Yikes. My failed attempts at rug hooking made me much more appreciative of what Yoder accomplished with her work!

I wish my pictures were better. I wish Shelburne had more photos on their website. I wish you could see these in person, to appreciate the texture and color with your own eyes. Patty Yoder found her creative outlet, building on a traditional, utilitarian craft and, like so many other makers, finding a way to express herself and her passion with her own hands.

The Patty Yoder show is up through October 31, 2014. I know most of you will never be able to see these in person but I hope the photos give you a sense of how loving hands can transform strips of fabric into a whimsical farmyard of sheer delight!

Life Lessons from Linens: A Blog Series to Visit!

Susan Nowell and My Place to Yours

Hey, lovers of “hands at home,” all things vintage, and especially vintage linens! I want to direct you to a fun and interesting blog series that I think you’ll like.

Susan Nowell, the blogger behind My Place to Yours, has been doing a series this month called, “Life Lessons from Linens.” As she says, “This is a series of 31 posts dedicated to life lessons I’ve learned (or been reminded of) while working with vintage linens.” The lessons range from “We learn about Life when we look beyond ourselves” to “Look for the beauty in every season of life” to “’Imperfect’ is okay”.

The most recent post, “Figural Linens Told Me: People Matter,” is one of my favorites and, no, not just because Susan includes some of my cool linens in the post. When she writes, “When I see figural linens, I always wonder *who* the person was–both the person who designed and sewed the piece…and the person depicted in the design,” it makes me think of some of the posts I’ve written about the human touch, the people with the “loving hands at home.”

Check it out if you have the chance—the posts are very readable and include beautiful images of all kinds of vintage linens!

Sewing Hands at Home, with Attitude

I don’t sew.

Well, I do sometimes, but I hate it. I like sewing by hand well enough but I just hate using a sewing machine. I hate any sewing machine but I loathe my expensive computerized machine.

My problem is I hate a couple of other things more than sewing so I find myself sitting at a sewing machine every once in awhile, like I did last week when I made these curtains.

A couple of years ago, we took out the wall between two guest rooms and put in French doors, with the intention that any company we had could use the space as a kind of suite—lovely, right?

But, as the saying goes, the path to hell is paved with lovely intentions and hell, in this case, is one very nice guest room, connected to a room that has become the repository for all the vintage linens I have purchased and have yet to list in my shop. Hellish, indeed.

So, until I can get those linens under control, we needed a way to block the view from the guest room into hell. And that’s where the curtains came in.

I had a clear idea of what I wanted in curtains and to find them I was going to have to shop, spend money, and settle for something that didn’t live up to what I envisioned. And those are exactly the things I hate more than sewing.

I really don’t find any joy in shopping, unless it’s for vintage stuff at great prices. I rarely go to a store and, instead, make do with what I have rather than facing the hassle of buying new.

I wanted simple curtains, anchored at the top and bottom with rods, with blue and yellow. I wasn’t going to find those in a store so my other option was to have someone make them for me.

But . . . but . . . pay someone else to do something I could do myself (even though I hate doing it)? My pesky Puritan work ethic simply wouldn’t allow that happen. And so the windows stayed uncurtained.

Everything started coming together about a month ago. I found a bolt of new, old-stock Stevens linen toweling fabric on eBay. That’s a lot of adjectives but they’re all important to me. The bolt meant I got 20 yards of fabric and I needed a lot. It was vintage and originally would’ve been sold to women as yard goods, to make their own dish towels, but it was also brand new and never used. Stevens is an American company, still in operation, that has been making towels for over 150 years.

The fabric was a beautiful natural linen color, with bands of yellow and thin accents of blue running along the edges. And to make it even more perfect, because it was meant as toweling, it was 18 inches wide; I could make two panels for each of the French doors and not have to hem any sides. All I would have to actually sew was the top and bottom rod pockets!

And we had company scheduled to arrive, which really lit a fire under me.

So I dusted off my loving hands and sat down to sew. I still refused to use that nasty computerized machine, opting instead for my mother’s old mechanical machine. It was more than up for the task!

I cut the fabric so I knew it would be plenty long enough and then did the top on all four pieces. First, I double-turned and stitched a quarter-inch hem because the fabric was a loose weave and wanted to ravel.

Then I folded over about 2 inches of fabric and pressed it and stitched two rows, one along the very edge of my double-turned hem (so, two inches from the top edge) and the other one inch in from there. The space between those two lines became my rod pocket and left about an inch of header fabric. Am I making any sense?

In the meantime, my husband hung the rods. The top rod was done as usual, with the brackets facing up to let the rod sit in them, but the bottom brackets were placed upside down, so I could hook the bottom rod over them.

I hung up all four panels on the top rods and stepped back to admire my work—that’s the only good thing about sewing!

To finish the bottom ends, I sat on the floor and pulled the fabric in each panel to the degree of tension I wanted and pinned it. I didn’t try to do any measuring because the panels were so long and because it seemed easier to just fake it. I did one panel at a time and did run back and forth to the guest room to double-check everything a lot so that, if I messed up, I wouldn’t ruin everything.

The bottom hems went in just like the top ones. I didn’t trim the extra length until I put the finished panel up and made sure it was just right. If it was too loose or too tight, I could’ve picked the stitching out and made the adjustment.

But they all came together perfectly! And because of the tension on the panels, when the rods were snapped into place, I didn’t even have to iron them.

I honestly love these curtains—they are just my style and just what I envisioned. I have fabric left over so I can make more curtains or pillows or dish towels, for myself or to sell.

Don’t get excited, though. I still really don’t like to sew. But it certainly is a useful basic skill to have and to fall back on. Am I alone in my antipathy for sewing? Can you sew? What can I do to learn to love it?

You Complete Me

For me, a special feeling comes from picking up a project, begun with good intentions by a woman who now can never finish her own work, and seeing it through to completion. I always imagine that long-gone woman smiling, to know that her effort was not wasted and that her work lives on.

If you love to embroider or quilt AND you love vintage AND you love the sense of a connection across time and place and experience, you can find almost limitless opportunities to work on vintage linens that need attention from you to be completed. It’s the best of all worlds—you can add your touch to the work, feel great about it completing a project that never would’ve gotten done without you, and be further rewarded by a vintage design done with quality vintage fabric!

Just as so many of us buy patterns and fabric with big plans but end up, instead, with UFOs (un-finished-objects), our foremothers did, too. Etsy and eBay are crammed with these projects, either never started or only partially done, and all are just waiting for a pair of loving hands to complete them.

If this all sounds appealing, you have lots of options to choose among, including the three I’ll cover here.

Vintage embroidery, waiting to be finished

I did a quick search on Etsy just now that yielded over 100 vintage items, ready to be stitched and turned into something lovely. You could find many more on eBay. The projects range from pillowcases to napkins to aprons to towels and the fabrics range from Irish linen to cotton and easy-care-options. Some of these projects are completely unfinished and some are nearly complete. You can even find sets that include the original thread.

This is an example that I found recently and will list on Etsy if I ever get around to it.

The embroidery here is finished and accents the colored cotton. The pieces are designed to be assembled as potholders and I think the girl’s face and bonnet piece is meant to be a caddy for the round potholders. The long piece with the embroidered word “holders” may be meant to be folded in half and stitched to the girl, as a handle that could be put over a drawer pull.

A couple of other examples:

Pretty flowers, already in the hoop

I love this Arts and Crafts design; it seems to need only a strap to finish it.

Vintage transfers

Iron-on transfers were very popular in days gone by and a favorite technique for women to spiff up plain towels or other household items. These pieces of tissue paper had a design that could be transferred to fabric with a hot iron and each woman could choose her own design and colors for embroidering. Vogart was a huge purveyor of these designs and there are literally hundreds of sets of Vogart designs available on Etsy and eBay at any given moment.

If you are lucky enough to have some vintage towels or pillowcases that belonged to your grandmother or mother, you can replicate the work they may have planned to do by using these transfers and doing the embroidery. And, if you are NOT lucky enough to have plain linens waiting for your loving hands, of course you can purchase those in lots of places, from garage sales to antique stores.

Monograms? Check.

Vintage monograms, in lots of styles

Pin-Up Girls? You bet.

Pin-up girls for fun

And how cute are these chefs?

French chefs for any occasion

You can even get transfers to create quilt blocks that can then be turned into a full-size quilt, just like one your grandma might’ve made.

Transfer patterns for quilt blocks

Vintage quilt tops

And speaking of quilts, it nearly kills me to find a beautiful quilt top, pieced or appliquéd by hand, that was never completed and used. All that work! All that love! All that unfinished business  . . .

I understand how this happens. Most people view the creative aspect of quilting to be making the top—piecing the precious scraps or appliquéing the thrilling colors. It’s a lot more fun to make the tops than to do the necessary, but long and nit-picking, work of the actually quilting together of top, batting, and backing. So many more quilt tops were made than ever got turned into a finished product. But, still, an unquilted top never achieves the essence of “quiltness”—keeping a person warm while brightening a room. It’s like a caterpillar that never gets the chance to be a butterfly! You can change that!

I was lucky enough to learn to quilt by hand on an unfinished top made by the venerable Grandma Van. She finished many quilts but wasn’t able to get this one done. I was learning to piece my first quilt top and was a long way from being done but wanted to try my hand at quilting. My husband had brought this quilt top home when Grandma Van died and I knew what I needed to do.

It’s fun to look at this quilt now because my learning curve can be tracked from the middle of the quilt, where I started with ragged, long stitches, to the edges, where I was getting pretty good at regular, tiny stitches. It was almost like Grandma Van was there, guiding my hand! And I finished the quilt—I brought it from a pretty, but basically useless, piece of pieced fabric to the finished treasure Grandma Van meant it to be.

If this sounds appealing but don’t have a Grandma Van in your past, there are thousands, and that is not an exaggeration, of quilt tops available on Etsy and eBay. Quilts in every style and pattern and color combination you could want, from the sophisticated to the folky:

A warm wool quilt top

A surprisingly modern-looking fan quilt top

All kinds of unfinished projects would benefit from your loving hands. The next time your fingers are itching for a new challenge, instead of starting from scratch with a new design and new materials, consider helping a “friend” finish her project. Trust me, she’ll want you to keep it when it’s done.

These projects need you. You complete them. And along the way, you may just find that they complete you.

Making Doilies Modern

The loving hands at home made LOTS of doilies and they are seriously under-appreciated these days. You can find them for very, very little money. I think they get passed over because, of all the vintage textiles, they seem the fussiest and most old fashioned. But, as this wonderful blog post from Maggie Overby Studios shows us, it IS possible to bring doilies into the 21st century! Aren’t you inspired? I know I am!

Loving Hands: Connecting Two Generations

When it comes to a trove of items made by “loving hands at home,” I am one of the lucky ones. I have many, many treasures made by members of my family.

I am very sentimental about these things and I like to have them out where I can see them. I have a wooden knife box, made by grandmother’s grandmother’s father, in the kitchen holding my dishcloths. We use my husband’s grandmother’s hand embroidered pillowcases on the bed. And I used the scrap of an old, old quilt, with my great-grandmother’s signature, to make a silver pendant.

The quilt: An old patchwork quilt, done as a friendship quilt; each person would stitch a block with their signature in the center, then the pieces would be put together by the group. Sometimes these quilts were made as a gift to a person marrying or leaving to move West. Sometimes they were made by members of a church, with each signer paying for their block, as a way to raise money for the church. This quilt was made in a variety of fabrics, set into off-white cotton and with a center square for the signature.

My quilt had been used hard and then stored badly for too many years. By the time it came to me, it had huge holes through the fabric and batting and was filthy. Though some people will say I was wrong to do so, I cut it up and salvaged what I could, with an eye toward doing something to preserve the remnants at a future date. I saved all the signature blocks, including a number with names I recognized, made by women and men. One block said “Grandma Banker.”

Based on the other signatures and family memories, I identified the “grandma” as Ella Banker, mother of my paternal grandmother and born in 1867.

The pendant: I studied jewelry making as an art student in college and then did nothing with it for years. I became a college professor in an entirely different field but the college at which I worked offered jewelry making and silversmithing so, after about 25 years, I was back in the studio.

We received the assignment to make a piece of jewelry that represented our notion of “precious.” I knew I wanted to focus on family and connections so I chose to incorporate the “Grandma Banker” quilt scrap into the jewelry.

I made the pendant of sterling silver and created a tiny oval box into which the fabric would nestle. I cut the front and back, using a jeweler’s saw, and scalloped the edges to suggest lace. I used tube rivets to hold the pieces of the box together; these hold tightly just by fitting them properly and I thought the hollow middle of the tubes added to the look of stylized lace.

I used plexiglass on the front, to protect the old fabric. I wanted to be sure that the piece wasn’t airtight, so the fabric could breathe and not get mildewed, so I used my saw to spell out my great grandmother’s name and birth year on the back of the pendant.

It was hugely satisfying to find a way to incorporate an old one-of-a-kind family treasure into a new one-of-a-kind piece. I still haven’t done anything with the rest of the quilt pieces but I have ideas!

I’m always drawn to the re-purposing of old treasures. I’d love to hear about ways you continue to weave the pieces of your family’s past into your present life!

Hands at Home: Rug Hooker Patty Yoder

If you love quilts and coverlets and samplers and hooked rugs, you NEED to make a trip to Shelburne Museum in Vermont. The museum provides a fascinating view of Vermont cultural history, with some of the most spectacular displays of antique American textiles you’ll ever find.

We went to Shelburne last week, spent the day, and just dipped our toes into their vast collection. They have 700 quilts, although they only have about 50 on display at any given time so it’s always an adventure to go back! I’ll write more about the antique quilts and other textiles at some point but today I want to focus on a current exhibition that is simply stunning—The Alphabet of Sheep series of hooked rugs, made by Patty Yoder.

The Shelburne Museum website says the following about the rugs: “The Alphabet of Sheep series combines two of [Yoder’s] favorite things: the sheep on her farm and the alphabet. Her rugs incorporate her family, friends, or sheep as the subject matter, a joyous celebration of one woman’s life.” And joyous is the perfect word to describe these rugs!

The exhibition features several of the 44 hooked rugs Yoder made in the 13 years between her retirement and her death in 2005. That’s a very short time to develop skill and a personal vision but these rugs are amazing in both ways.

Have you ever tried rug hooking? I have. I was awful at it! All those strips of wool sitting around, flat and uninteresting, and you need to be able to envision how those pieces fit together, how to vary color, how to bring them through the backing fabric in a consistent manner. Yikes. My failed attempts at rug hooking made me much more appreciative of what Yoder accomplished with her work!

I wish my pictures were better. I wish Shelburne had more photos on their website. I wish you could see these in person, to appreciate the texture and color with your own eyes. Patty Yoder found her creative outlet, building on a traditional, utilitarian craft and, like so many other makers, finding a way to express herself and her passion with her own hands.

The Patty Yoder show is up through October 31, 2013. While you’re there, be sure to visit the “Wyeth Vertigo” exhibit as well, with paintings and other works by 3 generations of the Wyeth family, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth. Not exactly “hands at home,” but a wonderful chance to see paintings of this American art dynasty all in one place!

shelburnemuseum.org/