A Turkey Trip to Seattle With Quilts

One of the side effects of having adult children is a change in how we celebrate holidays. DD#2 is currently an assistant manager at Nordstrom in Seattle, so it was a given that she was going to have to work Black Friday.

[One of my cousins also lives in Seattle and is a buyer at Nordstrom. She has been a wonderful mentor to DD#2 and has encouraged her to think about applying for a corporate job at the mother ship downtown, so this may be less of an issue in the future.]

DD#1 usually spends Thanksgiving with her boyfriend’s family, but his parents went to visit relatives in the midwest this year. I said I would come to Seattle and spend Thanksgiving there. My mother and sister also made plans to fly in from the east coast.

Driving from Kalispell to Seattle takes about nine hours in good weather. I’ve done that trip many times. During the winter, though—and with only about seven hours of daylight—I prefer to break it up into two days and stay in Spokane overnight going and coming.

On my layover in Spokane over last Tuesday, I made a visit to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture to see the Memory and Meaning: Textiles from the Permanent Collection exhibit. I confirmed that photos (without flash) were allowed, so I took some pictures to share. This is not a huge museum and the exhibit only featured about ten quilts, but I enjoyed seeing and reading about the quilts that were on display. The first one was pieced by a young woman named Rene Snider between 1900 and 1902. Sadly, she died in childbirth the following year, but her sister-in-law, Trissa Snider Moore, finished the quilt in 1928 with the help of her own children:

People, this is at least a queen-sized quilt made up of alternating plain and pieced 3” squares, all pieced by hand. Look at the detail of these tiny hourglass units. No scrap left behind, indeed!

Amazing.

Several other quilts were hung in a group:

That appliquéd flower quilt (second from right) invited closer inspection. It was another tour de force of handwork:

Those stitches are TINY. On the order of Margaret-quilted-them tiny. And there are a lot of them.

I haven’t tried making a crazy quilt, although they are becoming more popular these days. The quilt store in Spokane has offered some classes on making them. This one was pieced and embroidered by Eudora Parker Mead, who worked as a dressmaker in Spokane to support herself and her daughter while her husband was off prospecting.

That embroidery. Oh, my goodness.

The highlight of the exhibit was the Bengali quilt. This quilt is so old and fragile that it was not hung, but instead laid out horizontally on a high platform. I had a hard time getting a good picture:

Quilt historians have dated this quilt to the 17th century. It likely is one of the oldest surviving quilts in the United States. Apparently, it came over with a family who settled in Massachusetts and was passed down through the descendants, finally ending up in the possession of a man who came to Spokane and started the company that eventually became Avista Power. As with many family heirlooms, its story became embellished through the years, so historians had to sift through what was legend and what was truth. Family history held that it had been embroidered by a couple of Queen Elizabeth’s attendants, but the timing was wrong. (I am paraphrasing all of this and I think I have it correct.) It appears to have been made in Bengal‚ which has a long history of producing and exporting fine textiles to European markets in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It is one thing to see artifacts of metal and stone dating back several hundred years—they do not deteriorate quickly—and quite another to stand in the presence of a textile piece that age, especially one of this scope and detail. Whose were the hands that created this piece? What were their lives like? I forgot to ask, but I don’t think this quilt is going to be part of a traveling display, unfortunately.

The museum also had a number of embroidered pieces on display. I know I’ve dismissed embroidery as being a bit of “frippery,” but it really did have a practical application. Back when textiles were time-consuming to produce, they were considered valuable household items. Being able to label your household’s textiles with an embroidered name and date ensured you could keep track of them. (Fabric markers hadn’t been invented yet.) And if you’re going to go to all that work, why not make it pretty, too?

Off to the side, in one of the smaller display alcoves, I found the delightful story of Pearl Allen:

Widowed in her twenties after only three years of marriage, she filled lonely hours tatting and sewing. She remarried in 1922, but money was tight. Pearl often used cloth from chicken feed and flour sacks to make tablecloths and other objects. She made many of her own clothes and sewed for her children.

Her work took a creative turn when she developed a method of “writing” with thread. Using her old treadle sewing machine, she decorated potholders and other items with favorite poems and sayings, recipes, and historical information, often giving them as gifts.

This is a a tea towel embroidered with a recipe for cocktail sauce:

I find machine quilting difficult enough with a modern sewing machine. I can’t imagine doing this with a treadle.

Speaking of sewing machines….

I really am trying not to add to the collection. You probably all think I doth protest too much, but it’s true. After I left the museum, I hit up a couple of thrift stores in the area. I’m looking for vintage apron patterns now, not sewing machines. At the Union Gospel Mission thrift store, however—which almost always has a couple of vintage sewing machines for sale—I found this:

No, it’s not a vintage machine, but it is valuable (to me) nonetheless. This is a Janome Jem. A few years ago, these machines were elevated to the same status as Featherweights. Everyone wanted one. Janome, oddly enough, makes even their lower-end machines with beefy metal guts. Despite being small and having a plastic case, this machine weighs about 12 pounds. Quilters wanted the Jem models as portable machines to take to quilting classes (and indeed, this one had a quarter-inch foot on it). These machines retail for between $150- $200. This one was $16.00, so I scooped it up. I’ve been looking for a machine that I could take back and forth to Seattle with me, because it seems that DD#2 always has clothing in need of mending or alterations.

On the way home from Spokane yesterday, I made a quick stop at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store in Coeur d’Alene, another place known for having a lot of vintage machines for sale (although I was looking for vintage patterns, remember?). In the furniture section, I spotted a Singer case on the floor, likely with a vintage machine in it, and knelt down to take a peek inside. A man behind me said, loudly, “I’m buying that machine!” I stopped what I was doing and stood up. “You can look at it if you want,” he said, a bit less forcefully. “No worries,” I responded, and headed off to see what else there was. I found a table with half a dozen machines in cases—including some good vintage models—but nothing I wanted to take home. When I turned around, though, I spotted this hiding on the floor underneath another table:

There are some machines I will not leave in thrift stores whether I need them or not, and that includes any of the Singer 400 or 500 models. This is a Singer 401. I love these slant-shank machines. (I wondered briefly if the man buying the other Singer had seen this one, but I didn’t stop to ask him.) It needs a thorough cleaning and a foot pedal, but I expect it works just fine.

I’ve got more to share, but this post is long enough. Look for more in the next couple of days.