The Rickrack Rag

Tomorrow is Halloween, so I guess today is Halloween ee’n….. also the day before our 14th anniversary. For Halloween, I’d love to show feedsacks with jack o’lanterns, ghosts, goblins and witches, but I don’t know of any - nary even a black cat! So barring those, I’ve chosen some sacks in some of the scarcest colors in feedsacks - orange and black.

Orange occurs rather more frequently in floral and other patterns, but as a background or predominant color, is hard to find. Even less common, though, and perhaps more useful in quilting and other design work, is the black background - so again we’ve also settled for sacks where black is at least the dominant color.

Have a happy Halloween, everyone!

In the world of antique and vintage quilts, you truly never know what you’ll find next. Here in Pennsylvania, we know we’ll always see a certain number of beautifully crafted antique quilts in any number of traditional patterns, and many of these can be truly astonishing in their beauty and workmanship. But we have a place in our hearts for the unusual, and have presented a few of them here in the past.

This week we found a quilt unlike any of the traditional PA quilts we’re used to; in fact, it resembles much more closely those quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama that have been so widely celebrated since their discovery a few years back. And like those quilts, this one is delightful for its originality, its exuberance and joy in the use of what were obviously scraps of cast off material to create a thing of utility and beauty.

It’s a heavy quilt, quite warm no doubt, constructed of mostly brightly colored corduroys. But there are numerous other fabrics included as well, from wool army blanket to 1970’s poly knits. It’s not quilted, but tied with strings or heavy thread in blue and red. And as if it weren’t enough to have pieced all these various fabrics together in these colorful variously sized arrays, rather than finding larger pieces for a backing, the quiltmaker has pieced another joyful top!

This reverse side clearly shows the ends of the ties, and features a somewhat cooler palette than the front, but is otherwise every bit its equal in originality and creative use of scrap fabrics. On both sides are strips of fabric clearly added in order to make squares of various sizes fit together, and other strips to square off the whole, but there’s a freedom apparent in the sheer variety of fabrics, patterns, shapes and colors that belies the cohesiveness of the final product.

Because it’s so different from everything else we find here, so unfamiliar to us in every way, we don’t quite know what to make of this quilt. But we can’t help smiling when we look at it, and that’s a good thing. And the more we compare it to those famous quilts of rural southern black communities, the more it seems to us to resemble them, to be representative at least of that tradition. Barring the unlikely discovery of where it originated and how it came to be here, we are left with little else but conjecture. That said, in the world of quilt history we often use a certain amount of conjecture along with our knowledge of fabrics and historical data to determine a probable origin, etc. So while we obviously cannot tell the name, locale, skin color or even the gender of the maker of this quilt, it certainly bears comparison to the housetops quilts of Gee’s Bend and other rural southern communities.

And as I said, it sure makes us smile to look at it!

We’ve had our first frost here now, the outdoor growing season is at an end. Luckily for those of us who love feedsacks, we’re able to carry our flowers around with us on our fabrics! One other way to keep our flowers and plants past the frost is to have them in portable pots and planters, and these, too, are represented on feedsacks. Here’s an assortment of potted plants:

Potted plants seem to turn up with a lot of other kitchen items on feedsacks as well - I could have included the first two in last week’s post about aprons, since they depict little aprons in their scene…

We’ll probably see a few of these again if we do Feedsack Friday with other kitchen themes, but we thought we’d better get those plants in out of the cold.

Once again we’ve bought a quilt we weren’t expecting at an auction. In fact, there were several quilts prominently displayed at this particular sale, none of them particularly intriguing. But since we look for a lot more than just quilts at an auction, we stayed for the duration, buying a bunch of tea towels, framed prints and needlepoints, and sundry other textile items. At some point, the auctioneer said, “Now we have a quilted baby blanket.”
Looking up, expecting to see a crib pad or some other machine made cover, we were surprised by this:

Not exactly what we’d call a baby blanket, rather a bars pattern crib quilt. All solid colors, the reds and the black are wools, the blue is cotton. And it’s beautifully hand quilted in dark thread. To us, this looks suspiciously like an Amish quilt, in pattern, fabrics and quilting design. And the fabrics are not new. There’s a little damage - some small moth bites and some whitish paint/glue that we haven’t really tried hard to remove, until we figure out if it’s safe to do so.

It is hard to understand why a Berks County auction would have a quilt like this, practically hidden away, while it openly presented other mediocre offerings. Again, we were able to buy it for practically nothing. Are we missing something? Are little treasures like this one really just a dime a dozen?? If they are, I guess we’ll probably end up with dozens of them!

Today we got the November issue of Country Living Magazine in the mail - and there’s a feature article on aprons. One of the aprons shown is this one:

Made from feedsack, this one’s featured as an example of 1930’s style aprons. Aprons were one of the many popular uses for feedsacks, and there were certainly many of them made. Here’s a selection of some of our favorites:

We think that feedsack probably accounts for a third of the bib aprons we see around here, fewer of the shorties.

There are always a few available on our site: Sharon’s Vintage Aprons

Missed last week again, but we’re back this week with another edition of Feedsack Friday. This week’s topic is Autumn Leaves. Many, many feedsacks have flowers with leaves, trees with leaves, etc., but we’re featuring sacks this week with just leaves, no flowers or other objects. You’ll find that the color scheme is far more varied than what Mother Nature offers us in the annual north to south redecorating of our woodlands. Here are several colorways each of some feedsacks with smaller leaves:

These leaves are a bit larger, and seem to have picked up some spots.

(more…)

A brief posting today, after a busy day at our fall show, with one more day to go. It would be a terrible show indeed if we didn’t find at least a few feedsacks, and we did find some. Probably came home with 2 dozen or so, here’s a sampling:

No doubt a few of these look familiar to you. Now to bed early, another early day tomorrow.

There are a number of plants in the nightshade family, most prominent among them the potato and the tomato. Late last night, President Obama was on the Late Show with David Letterman, and accepted a gift from an audience member - a heart-shaped potato. Did you see that dinky thing? That was no potato, that was simply an aberration! At least, that’s how it appeared compared to our potato, posted on this blog back in April:

Now that’s a heart-shaped potato! I knew I should have sent it off to the White House!

In other nightshade news, there are two new appearances of Tim Stark on the net. One is from NPR’s Science Friday on the subject of late blight, the same problem that caused the great Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century. This year it’s wreaked havoc upon the tomato crops in the northeastern US. Here’s the video:

And there’s another video just up on youtube. It’s an intro for a video chefs tour of New York city being produced by the website dineindie.com. Much of the video is filmed at Tim’s farm and at his market stand in New York, at the Union Square Greenmarket. Here’s the intro:

Can’t wait for the rest of the tour! Thank God that many of the tomatos have so far escaped the blight. I’m not tired of them yet, nor have I frozen enough to last me over the winter.

About this time last month I wrote about the problems with my trusty Canon A-80 digital camera. I can’t say enough about the great service from Canon - free return shipping, free repair, and back good as new in only 8 days! Or it seemed good as new, except a little less sensitive to light, and therefore with a slower shutter speed when the light isn’t bright enough. This can be a problem when you’re trying to take detailed shots indoors, with no tripod.

But I didn’t complain, after all it was turning out the usual great pictures again. For two whole weeks, two and a half, even. Then suddenly a series of pictures that came out totally overexposed and washed out. Ok, turn it off, change batteries, back on…. it’s working fine again. For three more days. And then, blackness. Darkness. Nothing.

Canon is again fixing it at their expense. How can I complain about a 5 or 6 year old camera that I’ve used for more than 26,000 photos? I mean, it has to die eventually, right?? So, everything considered, I am still very pleased with Canon, both for quality and service. And when my camera comes back again next week, I expect it will go on working for some time.

All that said, the A80 has always had limitations, most notably the fact that I have to get pretty far away from something to get it all in the picture. A large quilt, or tablecloth, won’t all fit unless I hold the camera waaaay up over my head. And it does tend to use up batteries fairly quickly, though a new set of rechargeable ones will usually go several hundred pictures per charge. Unless I leave the camera turned on after downloading pictures…. (a bad habit!)

SO, I bought a new Canon. This time it’s still a PowerShot but a step (or 2 or 3) up. And since technology has come a long way since the A80, lots of improvements. It’s an SX20, with a much wider angle for near shots, more manual adjustment capability, 12 megapixels vs. 4 in the A80, so lots more detail and definition is possible, and it zooms to 80x for telephoto shots. And a different sort of memory card, too. I have been accustomed to downloading after every 50 shots or so, since my memory card was then nearly full, and a larger one - back when I bought the A80 - was rather expensive.

This time, a 4 gigabyte card was $15 with the camera, and holds more than 900 shots at the highest resolution. A larger, brighter display makes outdoor use easier on a bright day, and I love the lcd that swivels to various positions - one thing the A80 had too, and I didn’t want to be without. Can you tell I’m enjoying my new toy?

My buddy Chiru here is helping me check it out:

A pretty steep learning curve, but the basics aren’t bad. And so far, even with all the zooming, the large display, electronic continuous focus and image stabilization, among other features, still on the first charge of the batteries.

I promise, I will still love the A80, and will probably take it with me more often to lots of places since it will now be the second camera. What a world of difference from my first Kodak digital. 1 whole megapixel, a battery hog, and all. I’m embarassed about many of my old pictures from that one, but I’ll be making up for it.

Last week we took a week off from feedsack Friday, but here we are back in the fold!

Just about every critter imaginable has found its way onto feedsacks, this week we’ll deal with those fluffy, fleecy lambs. These three feature alternating stripes with lambs and flowers:

These two pink sacks are a good example of the sometimes very subtle differences between feedsack patterns. Essentially the same print, they differ only slightly in hue and in the darker outlines present around the figures.
This feedsack can also be found in a blue colorway.

And the next two are among several colorways of what has become known as the Little Bo Peep feedsack, featuring little sun-bonneted shepherd girls with tiny lambs. Thia one’s also been done in green, though I don’t have an example to show.

That’s all for this week, next week is our fall show at Kutztown, but I’ll try to do feedsack Friday too, if possible.