Steampunk Time Travelling Machine

Steampunk Time Travelling Machine

Habitat for Humanity hosts an annual bird house auction to raise money for building homes. The bird houses are decorated by area artists.  This year my donation is this fun Steampunk Time Travelling Machine, created from radio gauges and watch parts with glass tiles and brass or copper other bits.  It is edged in copper flashing.  My collaborator for this project was Gene Carter, who helped me drill and set the gauges.  If one were to go about creating a time travelling machine, what would be the essential parts?  Plenty of dials so as to calibrate the dates and measure the travel, plus interesting-looking whirlygigs that could move fast.  There are few moving parts to this little endeavour, but it does look strangely wonderfully gadgety.  It will be available at the Habitat auction in May in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.  If you'd like to make an offer on purchasing it, call me at 918 797 5016 and I will relay your bid to the auction coordinators.

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.