Happy Mothers Day!

My mother had a silk screen of the Brooklyn Bridge done by Wayne Thiebaud, very different from the work for which he later became famous. It was given to her in 1960 by coworkers at the Chico State library when we moved to Fresno. It hung over the sofa in the living room for forty five years.

She took it down to hang this, one of my first quilts. I liked the scrapiness of it and knew she would appreciate its earthtones. But it is an amateur’s work. Not all the points are sharp. Nor do they all meet. The quilting is mere wavy lines stitched across the front of the quilt. In fact, it embarrassed me a bit. She had friends who quilted, who would know this was the work of a beginner, and a beginner without much artistic talent. I urged her to put Thiebaud back up.

“I like it. I was tired of Thiebaud.”

She said she remembered the quilting frame set up once or twice a month in the parlor of her grandmother Ornbaum’s house and the ladies gathered to quilt. She showed me an old quilt her grandmother Ornbaum had made. It is beyond repair. I remember other quilts. We used them as moving blankets, wrapped them around the furniture. I remember a hand stitched multicolored wedding ring quilt frayed and tattered, perhaps one of those stitched in the Ornbaum parlor.

When my mother moved to a senior apartment, she sold or gave away the art work she had collected over her lifetime and took with her only pieces done by her daughters. I told her she should keep the quilt where she could wrap herself in it on the couch when she read, but she hung it on the wall.

“It’s not art, Momma,” I told her.

“I like it. It is too art.”

The quilt is in my house now. The golds have faded. Some of the red has washed into the browns. I didn’t hang it. I wrap myself in it when I sit on the couch.

Happy Mothers Day!

The Company of Women

Yesterday afternoon was the second meeting of our new knitting group – 15 women getting together once a month just to knit. More than half of the group are beginners. They were told to bring size 8 needles and worsted weight yarn. One member, a retired yarn shop owner, taught them the basics, casting on, knitting and purling. The rest of us brought works in progress.

The group came together through our church. We are Catholic and so don’t talk much about religion. For us, it’s more a private matter. Instead, as the beginners fussed over dropped stitches and the difference between knitting and purling, and the experienced knitters offered encouragement, we talked about the things all women talk about: husbands, whether at home, dead or divorced; children and grandchildren; the work we did and do, the goings on in our community; the things that make us happy and the things that annoy. We nibbled cookies and we knit.

Women need the company of women. In another time, when families were larger and less mobile, women grew up surrounded by older women who taught them to knit and sew and talked about life. Younger women learned about marriage and childbirth from women who married and had children before they did. They watched the older women lose children and husbands and learn to laugh again and they knew that they too could learn to laugh again. They watched their grandmothers, mothers and aunts age and die and understood that they, too, would age and die one day. Now our communities are too often segregated by age and we are denied access to the wisdom of those who go ahead of us. Childbirth is feared rather than celebrated. A mother is never good enough. And aging must be denied.

Our knitting group brought women together again and became the means for sharing the wisdom of our experiences again. The oldest knitter told us the yarn she was knitting into a poncho was yarn she had first knit into a sweater while sitting with her husband before his death. She didn't like the sweater and was knitting the yarn into something new. She told us about the yarn and we learned about the days she spent at her husband's bedside. We learned another woman had had cancer as she showed us the chemo hats she was knitting. The youngest knitter, a mother with school age children, told us about her daughters as she knit a backpack for her daughter to give as a birthday gift.

And so it went for two hours of knitting and chatting. After two hours we packed up our knitting, put away the tables and chairs, and lingered just a bit. Someone said we should have our meetings more often. And everyone agreed.

If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Right!

A strong streak of perfectionism runs through the women in my family.

If you were to visit me and see my housekeeping you might be dubious when I tell you I am a perfectionist. It’s just that I don’t direct my perfectionism to being a perfect housekeeper. My grandmother was! It wasn’t hyperbole to say you could eat off her floor. You really could! But, of course, she would have been aghast at any food falling on her floor. My mother complained that Gram’s housekeeping came before everything else when she was a child, that when the family headed out the door for fun they often had to wait while Gram finished cleaning.

My mother rebelled before me. She went to college and to work. Although she told us she didn’t want to be like her mother, we cleaned the house every Saturday morning. She never had any reason to fear a drop-in visit from the minister, or anyone else for that matter. The unexpected guest was always greeted with a clean house. One afternoon Mrs. M__, who lived across the street, gossiped to my mother that another neighbor washed her kitchen floor but never washed her baseboards. My mother laughed thinking she didn’t wash hers either.

“Oh, but you work!” Mrs. M__ was quick to recover.

I saw my mother washing the baseboards after that.

Before my mother went back to work she stayed home, hung starched and ironed ruffled unbleached muslin curtains in the living room, refinished antique furniture and embroidered. She did a sampler in cross stitch when I was very young which hung over the small kitchen table where my family ate most of our meals all the years of my child hood and all the years of my children’s childhood.

Now she is moving out of the house where the sampler hung and whose baseboards she washed into a one bedroom apartment. She wants her daughters and grandchildren to take her things, hoping we will value the things she valued.

I read the embroidered words,

“Hearts are happy, health is good, where loving hands prepare the food"

I told her I had always liked it, that it was a warm memory from my childhood.

“Here, take it now,” she handed it to me.

I held the wooded frame in my hands and looked at the stitching. It was not well stitched. I felt a moment of embarrassment for my mother. She had not known to carefully separate each of the plies of the embroidery floss before stitching with two or three to prevent the threads from twisting. Nor had she known to make sure all her stitches crossed in the same direction. The sampler had hung next to a beautifully stitched sampler a friend gave to her on her retirement. Had she known her own work was of an inferior quality? Did it bother her?

After she went back to work she decorated with the knick knacks, paintings and other souvenirs she collected on her travels rather than with things she had made. Those aren’t the things I want from her house. I want the sampler. That it was not well made did not make me value it less. It spoke to me of home, of a good time that is now gone. I took it for my son and daughter-in-law and now it hangs in their kitchen.

I wonder if my mother gave up hand work because she didn’t have the time or interest to do it better. I wonder if she felt that if it she couldn’t do it right, she shouldn’t do it at all.

A Week In the Pines with Friends and Fiber

Sunday after dinner we covered the dining room table with felt and plastic table cloths. Nancy and Kay set up their machines at each end of the table and I laid out my appliqué supplies in the middle. We set up an ironing board in the kitchen.

Monday morning we got right to work. Nancy is the most disciplined of the three of us. She finished three traditional two colored quilts from blocks she had pieced at home and had ready to sew together.

Kay sewed the blocks of what will be a beautiful batik quilt and I started work on my appliqué. Kay and I took frequent knitting breaks.

My appliqué was not a success. Although I thought I had started it 10 years ago, Nancy corrected me. I started it 5 years ago when she and I went to Asilomar together. In any event, my skills have declined and my fingers have stiffened since the last time I picked it up. The first day went well. I stitched the long smooth lines of the trunk and branches of the tree of life and remembered how much I enjoyed appliqué and had ideas for lots of applique in my future. But the second day I worked on one of the flowers and couldn’t get the petals or the leaves to point, the v’s between the half circles in my scallops turned into curved u’s. I wasn’t at all happy with my work. The third day I ripped out what I had done.

I have two choices: give it up and never finish or find another way. I’ve decided to try the machine. I’ll free motion stitch around the edges of each floral piece. This will give them a slight frayed edge when the quilt is washed. After the pieces are all down I’ll free motion quilt with colored thread, silk or sulky, repeating the shapes of the appliquéd motifs. It should work. And, this way there is a good chance it will be finished someday and it won’t ever be finished if I stick to what I started.

After I put the appliqué away, I spent the last days knitting. More on that later.

1970 Knitting In The Office

I didn’t think I had much in common with the other women. They sat all day at their metal desks, six lined up in the center of the room, three facing the walls, working at their adding machines and typewriters. I was in graduate school and after morning classes, worked afternoons in the university’s accounting department processing invoices. Each day I arrived during the lunch hour to find a big stack of invoices on my desk. My job was to take out the staples, put the invoice together with supporting papers in order with the invoice on top, staple the stack back together, add up the amount payable, stamp the invoice with a big rubber stamped form and fill in the blanks with the payee, invoice date, invoice number and amount to be paid. With slight variation, it was what we all did. Invoices were received in the mailroom; date stamped and assigned a number. Each of us was given part of the numerical sequence.

Promptly at 3:00 the yarn came out and for 15 minutes the women knit. I watched baby blankets, sweaters and one bikini take form. They knit every day during their morning and afternoon breaks. They knit at lunch too. They were cheerful and friendly and when one day I brought in yarn, they helped me. I began coming in earlier during the lunch hour to join them knitting before starting my work.

Most of them had returned to work after raising children and still went home at night to cook dinners and keep house for their husbands.

Thelma was the lead clerk. Her desk was a little separated from the others, off to one side, closer to the male supervisor who sat alone in a glassed in office in the corner of the large room. She went home at night to care for both her own elderly mother and her mother-in-law who both lived with her. She laughed about the burden of caring for the "mothers", the loads of laundry and special diets.

Marta crocheted blankets for the babies of nieces and nephews and told me about her big Mexican family and the successes of her husband and brothers. Jean knit a layette set for her daughter’s third child.

Merle, a divorcee who smoked at her desk, was the most flamboyant of the bunch. She was knitting the bikini and I enjoyed her rebellious humor. She was the first knitter I knew to hold the yarn in her left hand. Doing something just a little different from the norm appealed to me and I have been knitting continental since. One day Merle quit coming to work and one of the other women whispered she had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown.

Jackie smoked too. She was different from the others, single, almost thirty. When the yarn came out, Jackie reached for the book she was reading and ignored the chit chat around her. She wore straight skirts and tailored shirts, unlike the soft skirts, blouses and cardigans worn by the older women. She had graduated from the university and processing invoices was not how she wanted to spend her life. She often called in sick or went home early with a headache. Many afternoons Thelma sorted through Jackie’s in-basket and gave much of its contents to me.

It was 1970, my consciousness was not yet raised. I didn’t question that the open teaching assistant position would automatically go to the male graduate student. I was glad to have found this part time job, but I knew Jackie was trapped.

I only spoke to our supervisor once. He was a pasty face young man who didn’t mix with the women. After I had been there a short while he called me into his glassed in office to tell me my work was adequate. Then he asked me if I liked the piped in music that played while we worked. He told me he arranged for it as studies showed music made employees more productive. I told him I preferred silence. I needed to tell him I didn't plan on staying.