What to Do About My Purse?

 My purse is falling apart again.  They never last long.  Should I repair it (it's leather but for some reason they made the handle out of cheap fabric)?

Should I buy the $350 purse I tried on today in the Coach store across the street from where I work (it's so well made - and my birthday's coming up!)? 

or should I create something completely me (who knows how long it will take or whether it will turn out okay)?  

Quilter Extraordinaire

I love the old fashioned women's calling cards and my mother's read: "Quilter Extraordinaire." As you can see from these closeups of her work, it's true!

I got a lot of comments on last week's post (Her Legacy) including a request to see details of my mom's applique quilt (the inside corner of "the fantastic white quilt" as someone called it) and a couple people asked to see the all satin quilt I described but didn't show, the one I call Ruby Red.  So here they are!

The quilting in gray thread on Ruby Red was difficult to capture in a photo, but just imagine how beautiful the quilt will look when, per my mom's instructions, I finish it in Trapunto style.  By the way, each of the squares on Ruby Red is a different design, in a form of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art called hex signs, the kind you'll see on old barns back in the Midwest where I'm from.

p.s. if you want to see the practical cotton backing on Ruby Red I talked about you're going to have to come to my house to view it.  Mom wouldn't want her undersides showing in public! 

In addition to her quilts, Marlene was a good writer too.  When I'm finished with The Red Coat,  I'm going to put together a book of the letters and quilts she sent to me over the years, after I left home and grew up.

Her Legacy

I have so many things that my mother made for me during her lifetime or that came to me after her death.

 I’ve not counted them, but there must be nearly twenty of her quilts in my possession, including the Ukrainian Quilt that hangs in my living room, the white wedding quilt that she gave me in an unwrapped white box when I was thirty and said “now go get married,” and that fabulous appliquéd, beaded and embroidered art deco masterpiece that is heavier than a queen’s mantle at coronation. 

Once I had the idea for her to make an all-satin quilt from yards of sumptuous ruby red, coral and blush satins I found on incredible discount at the fabric store in Santa Monica.  I purchased and sent them straightaway to her Blue Ridge mountaintop abode, including a wealth of the ruby red for what I envisioned would be the all satin backing of the quilt.

What came back was a skirt for me to hem and one whole-cloth, queen-size quilt, topped in ruby red, backed with soft white cotton flannel, bound along the edges by bands of the blush satin, and quilted with pale gray thread in twelve simple but startling Amish Hex signs.  Instructions that came back with it were to finish the quilt in Trapunto style, which is a whole cloth quilting technique producing a raised effect on the top of the quilt that originated in Italy during the 16^th century and became popular in the United States during the Civil War.  The round shapes of the Hex designs were to be stuffed with tufts of cotton batting inserted from small slits made in the backing of the quilt and then whipped stitched closed. A second satin backing could then be added to the quilt and normal quilting done all around: however her idea, pragmatic as she was, was to leave the flannel cotton backing exposed to keep the satin quilt from slipping off the bed. 

My mother will always be something of a mystery to me. Unlike other women I’ve known who sewed, she never joined a sewing bee and rarely sought the company or comfort of other women.  To me, she was a “lone sewer.”  The quilts that she left behind were more than expressions of love, gifts that she gave on birthdays, weddings, anniversaries.  They were magnificent, color-laden quilted works of art that seemed to issue from a deep need inside her to create. 

Indeed, she once said that you make the things you don’t have or you never got. 

Through my fairy tale for women that I am writing entitled “The Red Coat,” I want to show how a woman sews in order to create her life.  Sewing is all about gathering, arranging and binding and as such it is a very meditative art.  Like thinking a thought over and over again, hand sewing with a needle and thread can have a powerful effect on one’s inner – and outer – world.  I hope my book will inspire other women to explore their powers, to think more deeply about who they are and what they want to become.