Wednesday, March 31, 2010

1970s Crazy Quilt


1970s Crazy Quilt

I think this 1970s Crazy Quilt was made by my former Mother In Law, Ruby Thompson of California and Oklahoma.  It is a utility quilt, with wide bright velvet top panels and some funky red and blue herrigbone houndstooth wool and some chartreuse fabric along the side panels.  It is a tack quilt-- a common quilting style for casual home quilts that were designed for warmth and to hold down the covers.  It is heavy and the backing is hemp or linen in cream with about an inch-wide binding edge.

Look close, and you can see that it was constructed by sewing five panels of varying widths together vertically.  Each panel was first made up of some foundation blocks.  This one is constructed with so much asymmetry that it is almost possible to understand the order in which each piece was added.  We know from the seams further toward the top that the Red V panel and the Black Brick panel were sewn together before adding the Burgundy/Gold panel, and the edges at top and sides were added thereafter.  (Actually, this is photographed with the bottom of the quilt at the top of the pic--- it was made probably for a small bed and the borders were intended to hang on the sides and foot of the bed.  I'm guessing it was intended to lay under the pillows, flat.)

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Cathedral Windows Quilt from Cherokee County, Oklahoma

Cathedral Windows Quilt
Made in Cherokee County, Oklahoma

A closeup inspection of this colorful quilt makes it worthy of a lifetime achievement award.  Oh, it is ragged in spots and torn in places.  It is machine-mended but mostly hand-made.  Each color spot that you see is about 3 layers thick and has a great deal of time applied.  For Cathedral Windows, you start with a large square and then tack it back on four sides.  This one was done with the centerpiece of each square added last and sort of nudged into place with greater or less skill.  We can make some assumptions about when it was constructed by looking at all of those centerpieces.  Some are double-knit polyester of the kind popular in the early 1970s, and that seems to be the most recent distinctive clue--- I would say it was made from 1970s fabric... but it may have been put together more recently than that.

When I bought it, it was at a flea market or yard sale, and the seller told me it was made by a family member or friend---  a woman who lived at Woodall all her life and passed away at age 90 in a house fire.  Woodall is a community Southwest of Tahlequah in Cherokee County, Oklahoma.

How much time and patience, tenacity and artistry and skill such a quilt takes!  When I see a quilt like this at a sale, sometimes I can't resist to add it to my own little tacky quilt museum in the hall closet, as a tribute to the labor of women in a simpler time. 

Monday, March 29, 2010

1909 Charm Afghan

1909 Charm Afghan
Despite rumors that I was a little girl in 1909, this is not one of my creations.  This afghan was purchased.  Always ask when you buy an old textile item, because often you can keep the info about its history which adds an interesting factor.  This afghan was made by Berta Conklin Alteres, who was born in Fort Smith Arkansas.  She lived in Wagoner County Oklahoma, and this afghan was purchased in Wagoner or Cherokee County, Oklahoma in the 1990s.  I love the wool crocheted ruffle, although there are some raggedy places in it.

"Charm" textiles are made with scraps and surplus.  They tend to be less "patterny", more random and funkier than perfectly planned textiles.  I like to see the random or raucous color combinations.  It is a delight to see how women Skwooched things together to make them fit and become orderly despite limitations such as mixed quantities of different wool.  This one is all wool.  Crocheters will attest-- using wool takes more finger power than acrylic yards today.  Wools are dyed differently and take color less evenly than acrylic. 

The person who sold me this afghan thought it was made in about 1909.  But as usual, I have a red flag question.  One square is varigated, and I'm wondering if varigated commercial yarn was invented back then?  But maybe, it wasn't commercial yarn and Ms. Alteres or someone else dyed it ombre/varigated herself.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Pin Wheel Quilt

Pinwheel Quilt
Somehow along the way I have sort of lost track of my quilt provenances.  I don't recall how I came to own this lovely bright happy quilt top.  It is small and it is oh-so-badly stitched (by hand).  But it is darling, and one day if I ever find the time to take it and quilt it up....


Saturday, March 27, 2010

Bootleggers and Quakers, and a Family Quilt


Bigmom's Quilt

My grandmother was Mary Katherine Enlow Kirk Davis.  She grew up around Notchie and Blackgum and Qualls, then lived at Boudinot, Stone Chapel and Tahlequah.  She was a seamstress and tailor, and she owned a dry cleaners.  She had five children and four of them were girls.  So back in the 1940s and 1950s she designed and executed a lot of prom dresses and fancy girls' outfits, not just for her own daughters but also for all of their friends.  She was pretty amazing as a seamstress.  Cherokee County was kinda different when she was a teenager.  Her brother Roy had the first car and was quite the popular guy.  Roy, um, was a bootlegger.  He was older and Mary would get her parents' permission to spend the night at his house in town, along with her girlfriend.  Roy kept a stock of bootleg liquor under the flooring in his house, and the girls would help him lift out the bottles so he could load up his car to make a delivery.  She told me, "Daddy would have been ashamed if he knew we'd been helping with bootlegging.  They didn't know Roy was involved in that.  But he'd give us money to buy a new dress every time we helped him and I'd come home with that new dress, looking proud."  Bigmom also told about life at Qualls when she lived there with her parents.  One time Pretty Boy Floyd came to their house and, as was the custom, anyone who came for a visit was invited to join in for a meal.  He left some money under his plate.

Cherokee County was the home of a few outlaws back in those days and later on.  Perhaps some time this blog will tell the story of Kye Carlile, who was just kinfolks to most folks around what is now the North end of Lake Tenkiller.  Back then, he was a wanted man. 

My grandmother passed away when my daughter Katy was about 4 years old, so it must have been 1989.  She was the most patient and happy, hard-working and skilled woman I have ever met.  She was funny and I always loved to stay with her because we'd make cookies without a recipe or eat big globs of honeycomb, drink Nehi Grape Soda, plant trees, pick strawberries or peaches, play with dogs, gather eggs, shop for Easter dresses-- and once she let me eat Exlax Chocolate because I threw a fit for it.  We had tea parties with the neighbor girls, too.  I don't think she ever said anything harsh to me.  She claimed to be kin to Ulysses Grant, but made me promise not to talk about it because he was bad to drink and had disgraced the family.  She said that one of men in her family in generations past (Abraham Enlow) was the birth father of Abraham Lincoln, and that Abraham Lincoln's mother had worked as a servant to the Enlows.  She was from Quaker ancestors and her parents were fervently religious.  She was a Nazarene for a while there. 

When my grandmother passed, my aunts wanted me to have this quilt by her.  I was the only family member quilting at that time, and this is just a quilt top.  I have been saving it to make up for a wedding gift for my daughter (oops too late) or a niece.  It is sateen blocks set into what you might call a lightning bolt pattern in pastels.  I'm guessing she was making it for Katy and just never finished it.  It looks like bright Mexican giant rickrack.  Sateen is not a sturdy or durable fabric, so I just take it out every few years and admire it and then put it back into a dark closet, waiting for some future time.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Walnut-Dyed Chief's Quilt



I made this fun quilt quite a few years back, and it won an award in the Cherokee National Holiday Quilt Show.  You can see that some of the fabrics are satin.  Satin is not a dyer's cloth because it doesn't absorb and hold color without being shocked.  Um, that means "runined."  So look at the shiny strips-- those are the commercial satin.  The flat strips are hand dyed with walnut hulls.  The cool thing about walnuts, you already know if you've ever picked up big dog food sized bags of them in the fall--- they stain.  On a nice Autumn day when Kanny and Kaleb were little, our Saturday fun was to station a drum and wheelbarrow in the yard, and practice throwing walnuts into the barrel from wherever we found them in the yard.  (It soon became apparent that walnuts may go IN to a wheelbarrow, but if so they'll probably knock out at least as many or more walnuts in doing so.)  So there we were at the end of the day, with brown stained hands that nothing could clean except time.

Later in the winter a pickle barrel full of walnuts was sitting under the eave and got filled with rainwater.  THAT is a stinky mess.  I took a bunch of recycled sheets and jammed them down in the water, covering with a lid, and let them soak till Spring.  I didn't use any mordant or fixer, and I didn't precondition them with alum or anything.  In fact, they had been washed with soap on multiple occasions and were plain white sheets.

I was delighted when I pulled them out and saw the subtle shading.  Some places were foxed from being at water level.  Some places were paler or darker.  Even some sheets took the color better than others.  It is amazing to get disparate results like on these strips when using basically the same technique, right down to putting them in the same dyepot.  We can guess that there may have been a difference in the cotton content, with some sheets having more synthetic fibers... although I thought they were all cotton.  Even bleaching in a former life may have influenced the color variance.  The circle and the color "clouds" are all things that showed up in the natural dyeing process.

A cool thing about walnut dyeing is that walnuts are plentiful--- you just use the hulls and all.  And it can be done long and slow without a rigorous process.  Or it can be done quickly over a boil with stirring for more of a vat-dyed outcome (even coloration).  I suspect that temperature influences color intensity, as do the amount of water mixed with the hulls and the age of the hulls.  Green hulls would give a silvery champagne tone and oozy black hulls would give darker tones.  Basket reed dyers will attest to the fact that different natural fibers, whether it be fabric or reed, wood or wool, will take the dye differently.  Some fibers such as silk will be hard to color without using some technique to grab and bite the color.  Silk is just hard to dye sometimes.

I think this quilt was commercially quilted by Wavalene at Living Designs in Tahlequah and it is probably lo-loft batted with a pantogram design perhaps that Wavalene has created.

I was experimenting with pintucking when I worked on this quilt.  I had seen a beautiful dress of Rachel Martin in a Cherokee art book.  I think it is in a museum in Tennessee.  Rachel Martin was a distant relative and of a notable Cherokee family in history, and her spectacular dress had a lot of pintucking and pleats.  Here's a detail view showing the informal pintucking on the header and footer borders of this quilt:
Doesn't the marbling from walnut dye and the funky pintucking make for an elegant and complex visual experience?  This quilt is sort of plain but it has interesting visual and tactile textures.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

What's So Remarkable About This Raggedy Bit?

What's So Remarkable About This Raggedy Bit?

When my cousin had a garage sale, I bought a couple of quilts.  One was a glittery fifties heavy cabin quilt that had been made out of tufted fifties upholstery fabric with the metallic thread loops.  And the other one was a dark, rough hand quilted quilt that had been made from mens twill pants and dark wool pants.  I'm guestimating that it was quite old... maybe from the 1930s or so.  It looked like this:


When I washed it, the heavy old dark thing sort of came apart in a few places, and it became apparent that inside was an even older quilt that had been used as the batting.  Carefully, I removed a few of the shells of quilting that had held the layers together.  This revealed a remarkable mystery--- an even older quilt that was SOOO old that the colors had almost faded away.  Inside, it was all hand quilted still yet, and I could make out a quilted pattern.  Squares were about nine inches, and some squares had charm strip piecing pointed inward, so four squares together looked like arrows pointing in with  > < the tails pointing out.  The fabrics were diverse.  There was a red dotted swiss that looked like it had been flocked.  There were teensy tiny blue gingham wove checks and the same in pink or what may have once been red.  The back of the inner quilt was wholecloth of  the same blue gingham.  I noticed some silk pieces.  And a kind of fabric that is textured in squares with gauze or thin cotton between thicker cotton weave.  One of the solid squares is today yellow, and it may have been either yellow or green originally.

If you are interestedin helping to establish the history of this quilt, please contact me.  I think it is very very old, like more than a hundred years old.  The only provenance is that was a heavy winter quilt in my uncle's cabin back in the 1960sand was later owned by my cousin Cathy Burns Carter, so we don't know if has been in the family for longer than that.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Pop Art Vintage Footballs Quilt

Pop Art Vintage Footballs Quilt

Does anyone have a clue what this pattern is called?  This is a magic quilt.  It appeared in my collection and I have totally forgotten how it got there.  It contains those great 1960s or 1970s  cottons, although some of the fabrics may date back to an earlier time.  Here you find those difficult curved lines and points that have all but disappeared from contemporary quilts, because they are not so easy to execute on a sewing machine as by hand... and what woman today has the zillions of hours it takes to hand-sew a quilt top?

This one is hand-pieced, and hand quilted in shells with a thin soft cotton batt.  The binding is a half-inch self binding, but one end has a flat crisp 1 1/2 " binding with no batting inside of it.  I'm guessing that its function was to help the bed maker to find the top of the quilt because it is different there.

I'm so grateful for the women of our past who were quilters and left us these big soft wrinkley warm huggy pieces of art, all vibrant and complex.  This one is especially 'woofy' and it doesn't lay flat.  It gets a new surface of puffiness every time it is smoothed one way or the other.  Some quilts are too fragile for use because they might never survive the washing.  But they can be stabilized if they are batted and backed with new fabric and machine quilted with plenty of stitches to nail down the remaining surface fibers so they cannot shred.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Cherokee Star Pieced Quilt

Cherokee Star Pieced Quilt

A favorite in my collection of quilts by other women, is this Cherokee Star Pieced Quilt.  I think I bought it at a garage sale and the sellers didn't know who made it.  Most seven-point star quilts are actually appliqued, but this one is the only authentic fully-pieced 7-point star quilt that I have seen in person, except in recent years at the Cherokee National Holiday Quilt Show.  This one is pieced in sometimes-now-ragged prints that appear to be from the 1950s, on a plain white background and it has a white back also.  It is stained in places, faded in other spots, and threadbare too.

The batting is thin white all cotton batt, and the back was pure white cotton fabric.  It is fully hand-quilted and has a petite half-inch folded-over binding.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Propellers Quilt Top


Propellers Quilt Top

Here's a quilt top in my collection. Its a mystery.  I suppose the good thing about forgetting where something came from, is in being delighted to pull it out and see just how lovely and delicate it looks.  I'm supposing that this might be a quilt from the 1960s because it is geometric and has some pop-art qualities.  You could get an entirely different look if there were no red dots and looked at the green diamonds as being within a leaf.  I'm wowwed when I see curvy lines perfectly set on point, because its *real* hard to get that right.

This photo hardly shows that the quilter ran out of her Christmas-themed green and the edges are casually substituted in a blue print with peach-colored calico middles in some places.  The top is unfinished at the edges.  It is entirely constructed by hand and was either a family quilt or purchased in or around Cherokee County Oklahoma.  It is made in 6-sided hexagons which are then joined to the main body of the work, in cotton.

If anyone knows the name of this pattern, it might assist us in determining when it was made, so feel free to post a comment.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Adair County Foundation Pieced Crazy Quilt

Adair County Foundation Pieced Crazy Quilt

See how old silk neckties were splayed out to make some of the strips on this quilt?  Fabrics are summerweight, such as silk, taffeta, crepe and cotton.  Some of the strips are edged in crow's feet embroidery.  I'm guessing that the ties in this quilt are from the peachy days of the 1940s or 1950s.  Some of the pieces have stamping or tags on them.  This quilt was purchased from an antique store at downtown Stilwell in the 1990s. 

Look carefully, and you'll see that there are actually blocks, about 16 inches square, containing the stripped pieces.  On a solid piece of cloth about 17 inches square, the strips or angles of silk and satin were sewn.  The seamstress would sew down one strip facing the previous strip (sides together) then flip the newly added row down and keep adding rows from corner to corner.  Then the block could be squared-up and sewn together.  Women could make lovely lightweight summer bed toppers this way--- and this is such a bed topper.

If someone would like to help me date the fabrics, I'll post detailed pics.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Diamond Four Patch Postage Stamp Quilt

Diamond Four-Patch Postage Stamp Quilt

This quilt probably has a different name.  A classic Trip Around The World pattern is like this, but without the large diamonds.  I lost my notes about its provenance.  See how, over time, the black squares have shredded with wear and tear?  

In guestimating the age of a quilt, textile historians look at a couple of different factors.  This quilt was originally done all by hand and then finished or mended by machine.  When did women have time to do such intricate work?  We know that in the early 1940s,  World War II caused more women to enter the work force.  The checked calico bolt cloth is typical of those wonderful aprons and dresses of the 1930s and 1940s.    I'd tend to think that this was from the Depression Era, because I've compared it to Depression-Era quilts found on the internet.  You can research the quilts of a particular time by looking in Google Images. 

This quilt is lined not with cotton batting but rather with cotton flannel.  The back is plain muslin.  The binding is half-inch blue machine-sewn cotton fabric or binding tape which is cut on the bias for a smooth fold.  The quilting is in a 3-inch grid of double rows.  And even the filling has been hand-stitched together.  Use of consistent fabrics around the border tend to suggest that the quilter maker bought the border fabrics specifically for this quilt.

If some quilt historian would like to help me to refine the date of its construction, I would be happy to post up some pics of the details. 

Friday, March 19, 2010

Moon Cherokee Star Quilt

Moon Cherokee Star Quilt

I am fascinated by seven-point stars, because they're very difficult to execute.  So when I ran across this wonderful kitschy Cherokee Star quilt for sale, I wanted to get it.  It was made by Bob Moon's mother-- I don't know her first name.  I acquired it in the 1990s.  It is made in typical 1970's polyester of seafoam green and coral.  (The photo flash sort of washed out the colors.)  The central 8-point star is a classic common pattern.  But it is studded with these nice pieced  Cherokee stars which have been appliqued onto the surface of the quilt.  It is quilted on a commercial long-arm machine.  Here the quilt is modelled by Gracie Piddlewhiskers, who thinks it is her role to get on every quilt for the picture.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Navajo Diamond Quilt Top

Navajo Diamond Quilt Top
In my collection of quilts, I have this simple quilt top that I purchased on eBay.  So often, those who sell quilt tops are descendants of the woman who made the top.  That was probably the case with this top.  I loved its bright simple lines and wanted to see how the quilter had executed the points.  It is a huge top--- Queen or King sized like a bedspread.  It is made from some bias-woven cotton in clear distinct monochrome-dyed colors of commercial fabric.  It was made probably within the last ten to fifteen years.

Because I have so many quilts and so little space, I would like to sell it as a quilt top ($150) or finished quilt ($450) and would work with the buyer on selection of backing, batting and machine quilting design.  I'd suggest a plain solid back matching any of these colors or an Indian print with a one-inch wrapped binding, with a low-loft or 80/20 cotton poly batting in white or black (or a wool batting if the purchaser lives some place cold for most of the year).  This image was retouched because the top was wrinkled from storage.  I can send detailed pics if requested.


Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Invitation - Tibbits & McCracken

Each First Saturday night of the month, Dennis Tibbits and I along with Leonard McCracken are the 3-person band playing at KTK Steakhouse in Tahlequah.  You are invited to mark your calendar for Saturday April 3rd.  KTK Steakhouse has delicious gourmet food, and local steaks.  Try the horseradish maple sauce and the creme brulee!  We're there playing from about 5:30 to about 9:00 so come any time it suits you.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Chenille Crazy Quilt Sampler

Chenille Crazy Quilt Sampler

Quilts made with leftover pieces of fabric are called charm quilts, and this one is just that.  It is made from a lot of my early hand-dyed fabrics.  The fuscia, turquoise and smoky-colored paralellagram was created using a shibori wrap dye technique.  In the lower righthand corner is a postage stamp rectangle of squares, about an inch or two inches big.  I see some red stripes that evoke an abstract flag idea.

You may be familiar with foundation pieceing... it is where you start with a muslin square and build the surface layer by sewing pieces in strips across it.  This is sort of one big huge foundation piece on a scruffy old acrylic fleece $10 used nubby blanket that had worn out beyond being comfortable.  I started piecing pieces onto it because it was scratchy.  As the pieces were added, and sometimes later, I added commercial chenille yarn between and across the fabrics to give it a windowpane or stained glass effect.  This was kinda cool-looking, but it also served a purpose of bonding the surface to the underblanket where there were wide expanses that would have otherwise hung loose.

This is the back of the Blue Quilt featured here some time last month.  It is quite different from the calm, soothing and elegant opposite side.  I usually use it with the blue side up.  I am not particularly fond of this side of the quilt as a favorite... it just happened to have been made at a time when I was less selective about which quilts I keep and which quilts I give away or sell.  It breaks my almost-rule of never working with the color red.  Early on, I did a few quilts with red in them but found it to be unsettling or unattractive as a quilt color and have stopped using red as a personal design color.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Chenille Snake Doctor Quilt


Chenille Snake Doctor Quilt

Here's a wonderful old favorite quilt I made, a long time ago in about 2002.  It is called "Snake Doctor Quilt."  When I was little we had a local name for dragonflies--- Snake Doctor.  I thought Snake Doctors were magic, and that they would land on things (snakes, plants, etc.) and heal them.

I'd made some quilts for my children and grandchildren to each have a quilt expressing his or her personality, and had a few colorful scraps left over.  I'd just become acquainted with Seminole Patchwork, having bought a seminole patchwork skirt at Cherokee Holiday.  I was wanting to learn the Seminole way of strip piecing on the bias, so I practiced with just whatever scraps I had left over.  When this one was finished being quilted, it made me so happy to see that the black formed a matrix background and the colors seemed to jump forward.

Another fun thing about this quilt is that the Snake Doctor is made of primitive hand-made chenille.  I sewed down several layers of inch-wide strips and cut open any folds into the snake doctor pattern.  Actually, it sort of accidentally ended up being a snake doctor and at first I was just playing with the idea of sewing down chenille that I made myself.

Over the years I lost my good seam ripper used for ripping chenille.  But recently I did get a new one and look forward to using this technique some more.   I can't remember where, but I did show this quilt one time, because I remember that Debbie Duvall liked it.  Maybe it was at the Cherokee Heritage Center.

I made this quilt for utility before I started selling quilts, and it is one that has lasted 8 years or so, and is washed frequently.  It gets hard wear.  Because it has great body and is thin yet flat, I speculate that I used an all-cotton batt in black, or a wool batting.  It was mchine freehand quilted by Wavalene Winkler at Living Designs, and she used a dense thumbprint stipple which is very nice. 

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Civil War Replica Quilt

Civil War Replica
Here is a fun quilt that I'm making possibly for inclusion at a Cherokee Nation facility.  Legislation passed into the Cherokee Nation Code states that when buildings are constructed, a percentage of the budget is for Cherokee art. 

I'm a Cherokee history buff.  This quilt is interesting because I've utilized replica fabrics which existed during the Civil War era.  See how the colors of red are turkey red?  See how there are two shades of blue... conrflower blue and indigo?  See how the green is more of a bronze color?  Greens back then were made in a two-stage process where indigo was overdyed with something producing a yellow.  Greens were transient colors, and if you ever look inside the seam of an old quilt, you can see what the original color more closely resembled.

The cream "blank" squares are natural unbleached muslin, but I then overdyed them with a camel color to sadden the fabric and give an aged appearance.  A quilt from the 1860s, now 150 years old, would not remain this bright.  Beth Herrington has a quilt from this time period, which was once featured in a Thompson House quilt show about 15 years ago.  It was a quilt that a soldier had carried with him in the war.

This one consists of four four-patches grouped together.  And while I have never seen a 16-patch, it is typical because it is geometric, pieced, contains squares of about four inches.  The sewing machine was invented or sold about 1824 or so--- it is a contemporary of photography and the industrial revolution in England.  But very few homes had treadle machines and almost all sewing was by hand.  This one was machine pieced (and when quilted, it will be machine quilted).  Unlike quilts from the 1860s, this one is retrospective.  The squares contain images (such as quilt block patterns) from the Civil War era, and also facts and information about the Cherokee condition in the Civil War.  Most of the facts were gleaned from Emmet Starr's History of the Cherokee Indians.  You would find the last names of some of the soldiers who fought together; some names of battles in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory; information about impacts of the war; and some quotations; treaties; casualty summaries, and the like.

When I made this quilt before I added the war data, it seemed too new to be authentic and didn't tell much of a story except via colors.  Now with the fact squares, it 'speaks' about its historical context.  I'll be posting more Cherokee art quilts of this nature in the future from time to time.

I am seeking a Cherokee hand-quilter who would like to collaborate on this project, but my time frame is short.  If you would be interested in hand-quilting it (or know of someone who does that), then I would be delighted to hear from you.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Got Plans?

On Sunday March 7th, join us for a fundraiser for Dave Holbrook.  For years at Kooter Brown's Music Tavern at Caney Ridge (Barber), Dave hosted fundraisers for every cause and every person in need.  When Granny Sowers needed a truck, Kooters hosted a bikers' event.  When STIR needed a place to host a 3-day Songwriters' Earth Day Weekend Jam, Dave kindly offered Kooters--- and organized a Poker Run too.

A week ago, Kooter's new location in Tahlequah caught fire and much of the restaurant and bar were destroyed.  This fire also took the life of Jewely Herrington next door who owned Jewely's Pet Grooming.  Dave claims he had some hand in naming Jewely's business.  (She had intended to call it Jewely's Doggy Styles but Dave pointed out the ambiguity in that business brand.)   Jewely was a sweet and beautiful woman, and she will be missed very much.

So tomorrow, we're going to try and balance the scale of Karma just a little bit, by raising some money to help Dave with whatever is next for him in his life-- whether it be to start over or just walk away from his business and his baby that he had just opened on New Years' Eve or thereabouts.

Sometimes in life we seem to have our path in front of us in a clear way, only to discover that fate has moved the foot path.  But when it happens we can find the best in everything and not let fear of changes be an added obstacle. Our ability to cope is directly related to our ability to cope.  In other words, the sooner that we accept facts and look to the future, the sooner we can move on and adapt.

Sunday, come to Scooter Music Tavern at SH51 and the Bypass for great music, free food and some of the best folks you could ever call friends.  There, you can get a sense of  the kind of friendship that pulls people thru tragedies.  Dave and I both lost a parent within the last 5 weeks, and   we know first-hand how much we're loved by the people we love too.  There will be some good musical jam.  Hours are 3 pm to 1 am Sunday at Scooters.  Bring an auction item, or bring money to buy some cool stuff from the auction table.  Dennis Tibbits will be the auctioneer.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Invitation

We're debuting a new 3-man combo on Saturday March 6th at KTK Steakhouse in Tahlequah, about 6:30 to 9:30.  The food is excellent there.  I recommend the filet mignon and cream brulee, sweet potatoes and french onion soup.

Dennis Tibbits, Leonard McCracken and me, Fluffy, will be playing.  Leonard jams with us often at Scooters and elsewhere, so we think we'll have a wide reportoire of songs that listeners request as well as some local originals that are pretty popular.

When we play, someone always requests, "Chicken Poop."  I hesitate to even put those words in a blog because internet filters may hide my blogs.  But last week a bus driver told us that all 30 of his bus kids sing that song as they toodle down the dirt roads.  I have this wonderful mental picture of kids growing up to help clean up water pollution to the river because they've heard the simple compelling story in a song.



Eric Clapton & Roger Daltry

No nice photo this time.  Friedrick and I attended the Eric Clapton Tour concert in Tulsa this week.  I'd consider it a lifetime achievement to finally listen to this music in a concert hall.  The acoustics were superb.  And there were a few small embellishments and changes but basically these songs were just as recorded in the past.

Eric Clapton is a contemplative stage musician.  I expected showmanship, but actually he looked just like every former stage appearance I've seen on TV or video.  Very auditory.  Connected to the music.

From early about high school and definitely when I was out on my own for the first time in 1974 Eric Clapton has been an emotional connection to music--- songs like Layla are just visceral to everyone who has ever listened to music uninterrupted and focused, with its crescendos and pianissimos and fortes.  Clapton's compositions/executions seem easy but are quite complex.  Dennis says the notes are sometimes hard, ie in Tears in Heaven.

I was sort of afraid he'd play Tears in Heaven, because my mother passed away a month ago, and that's probably the very song that would send me into grief.  But, he only played a measure and then performed Beautiful Tonight.  Fine with me!

I'd be remiss not to credit Roger Daltry.  Quadrophenia is the first art movie I ever saw, in Boulder in Summer 1980 after a week of backpacking in the San Juan Mountains.  I wished to hear Reign On Me but he didn't play that.  Then in law school about 1982 I saw Kids Are Alright, The Who movie and loved all the music. The Who's best stuff, I think, was before Tommy.  Although, most people know those later songs the best.  Won't Get Fooled Again stands out as just one of the paradigmatic Youth Movement songs of my generation, like My Generation also.

My friend Sean predicted that Roger Daltry would kick Eric Clapton's, um, stardom, but I have to say that I found myself tearing up a couple of times during Clapton... not because of the lyrics but because of the acoustical rendition.  Yes, the music was THAT good!  Roger Daltry was a fiery entertainer with a lot of punk still to spend.  Overall, it was an enchanting evening that I'll never forget.

Because tickets were pricey, Friedrick and I gave each other this adventure as our 5th Anniversary gift.  We couldn't get away to go to the Carribean this year.  It was a wonderful concert.  I recommend it if you are near any part of the country where this tour will be going.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

IllinoisRiver Slime


I usually look for aesthetic objects to blog about.  And I'm running the risk of being untimely, since this blog is being written before the ruling in the Big Chicken lawsuit.  But on February 19, I took this pic coming down Highway Ten between Jay and Tahlequah.  Its slime.  It is river slime from a bar ditch that will be running right to the river.  I also photographed a chicken feather just two feet away. 

The Illinois River in Northeastern Oklahoma runs thru the heart of the Cherokee Nation.  I've played on that river since I was a little bitty kid, either fishing, camping, or just going to the water to play music or have a picnic.  It didn't use to ensnarl one's feet in slimy green ooze.  But the economics are such that huge monoposonistic poultry companies in Arkansas consider this watershed "out the back door" and establish contracts with growers urging them to expand this direction, thus keeping the White River Basin pristine for the companies' executives playground.

What to do?  In Tulsa, there may yet be a lawsuit as yet unruled upon, where AG Drew Edmondson has found attorneys taking it on a contingent fee, to enforce the laws which are aimed at preventing this type of collusive and individual corporate irresponsibility.  One law says you can't dump solid waste in this manner.  That would apply to the solid waste these farms spread on the land.  One law says you can't pollute the waters of Oklahoma--- regardless of whether it is ooze, protein, liquid manure, beneficial fertilizer that gets away.  Another law says that when activity within a company's control results in a nuisance to another person's use of the public arena it is actionable.  There are other laws too-- the Clean Water Act and its subsequent Safe Drinking Water Act.  The SDWA says you can't pollute so much that downstream water treatment plants give people cancer because of all the disinfection by products used.  They have a magic number saying what risk is acceptable--- and what risk is more than downstream water users ought not have to put up with.  And when the consequence of pollution is measured in number of deaths, that's a pretty tough hardship.

Why on Earth would a neighbor do this to downstreamers?  Money.  Pure and simple.  See, it costs fuel and time to move poultry litter from over-concentrated areas to needy areas elsewhere in other watersheds where every bit of nutrient is captured by a hungry plant before it can dissolve and slide into the water to feed algae.  IRW plants are overfed, and can't eat another bite of the stuff... or else there is so much water that drains.  Pick a flat, dry watershed, and you'd have the perfect place to apply poultry litter to the surface where it can be used as a fertilizer instead of as a waste disposal sham.

No matter how Judge Frizzell rules, the loser will appeal for about a dozen years and we may not see anything but foot-dragging for as long as Big Chicken can pay lawyers to hold off the changes.  When you think about an infinite number of years that waste would have to be trucked away, you can see the logic of foot-dragging.  These companies are looking at the long-long perspective and spending money up-front to forestall the day they will have to do right by the river, because it will change their economics.

The first day I sat in on the trials in Tulsa, I was stunned at the contrast.  Big Chicken had about 35 lawyers on its side of the case.  Oklahoma had seven lawyers and 3 support personnel on its side.  Big Chicken made very imaginable objection and tried to twist the Judge's logic.  At one point they obtained rulings that vastly changes the possible outcomes, by applying a definition so restrictively.  The Judge was ruling that some routine governmental reports were inadmissible, and that really slowed down the State making it very hard and tedious to prove the case.  Last time I counted in December, the record was about 16,000 pages of testimony and there were thousands of exhibits.  Another trick was to agree to certain documents and then later Big Chicken's attorneys would argue that the documents were not admissible.  That crippled Oklahoma by whittling away the evidence.  It was, in my opinion, underhanded fraud by the Defendants in the case because they used timing to keep Oklahoma from admitting certain evidentiary facts.

But the outcome is unavoidable.  Poultry waste leaves their land in water, which runs into the river and is like vitamin water for algae to grow super-well.  The algae changes the habitat for stream biota until it dies, and then it takes the oxygen out of the water making it lifeless for fish and other life forms.  Some algae is toxic when it dies.  And cities have to bleach the water to make it drinkable... and that bleaching process adds poisons too.  To be safe, cities limit their disinfection to a certain level, but sometimes they can't make safe water because the bacteria, dead algae and bleach are too high--- its so polluted that it can't be brought back to safe drinkability.

That's just a thumbnail overview.  These companies are very powerful and will tell you that they want to sell cheap chicken so poor people won't starve.  To that I say, "Eaters should pay the price, not those who have the misfortune to be a neighbor to these colonizers."  The language of conquest applies even today. 


Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Happy Lunch Sack



I was feeling guilty about using paper sacks for my daily lunch,.  So I made a tree-free lunch sack with some mojo of its own.  I started with a plain muslin duck cloth commercial lunch bag, then made it "Fluffy-ized" with tiedye colors of fuschia and turquoise, chartreuse and cherry and lemon.  Then I added a batik soy resist hemp peace sign, also hand-dyed.  I beaded the seams with commercial bead fringe and a few scraps, then embrioidered a ribbing along both edges, adding ribbons to make it funky... and beads across the top.  Ooh-la-la.  It makes any food wonderful.  And yes, I do toss it into warm water and hand-wash it, but don't run it thru a rigorous machine cycle.

For many art things that I make, I don't even try to sell.  That is because the hours involved would make the cost so high that no one could afford them.  So I just make and keep some pretty things for myself and to enhance our home.  Or it gift it to family members.

*****

Friedrick and I are going to see Eric Clapton in concert on Tuesday March 12th, so stand by for a real-time review on Wednesday.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Frame Baby Quilt Top

Today's post is a baby quilt top, made with the most joyous fabrics which were left over from a big quilt that I made.  In making the big quilt, I picked out the materials to use, and bought them for that purpose.  For this quilt, my goal was to clean up the scraps off of the floor by my sewing machine.

I don't think this quilt pattern has a name.  In the 1700s on this continent, quilts were sometimes framed in a single border of chintz.  But it is more like the log cabin patterns of the mid 1800s to strip-piece a quilt "in the round" or framing a center.  It differs, because the log cabin pattern repeats in smaller multiple blocks.

So, this top is for sale, $50 in baby bed size.  Or add $200 and it can be batted, backed and machine quilted by me.  It will be listed for sale at Oklahoma Food Cooperative soon, or on etsy at Island Retreat.