Family Topper Quilt for a Man

I'm working on a series of five quilts for the grandchildren of my mother, Bertie Carter.  We ended up with a huge stack of odd fabrics, so I've brought them to my house and blended them with a few pieces I already had.  My inspiration was a quilt Dennis owns, made by his grandmother in the 1960s or 1970s, with a Log Cabin variation called Sunshine and Shadows where the lights are all on one half and the darks are all on the other half of a block built with strips "going around". 

So, Nana had five grandchildren-- My sister's three girls and my girl and boy.  So we needed one quilt that would look a bit more masculine.  And this is it.  It has darker colors, less floral print, and more geometrics. 

These quilts will be toppers--- quilts just the right size to lay on top of a full bed, adding color and weight.  Any more size than that, and I wouldn't have had the tenacity to make a set of 5 quilts that are all similar.  I'd be too bored.  This is just a top and it has not yet been quilted.

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.

50's Style Ultimate Kitschen Apron

 

Here's a length of extra skirting that is similar to something I featured in my blog before.  Check out the wonderful stripey waistline piece that extends a bit into the ties.  It is long enough in back to make a bow.  This apron features a convenient left-hand pocket, banked to the inside, because if you've really got a pocket full of snow peas from the garden, you don't want them tumbling out when you bend and stretch.  Its an old physics trick that I learned from trial and error.

When I was a child, my grandmothers were big on aprons.  One grandmother wore an apron as the top layer of her clothes whenever she was at home.  She wore full aprons of the top and bottom kind, usually, and would take them off when going to the store.  They were handy for popping grease as she fried morning bacon and made gravy.  They had big huge pockets for holding lots of clothespins for hanging laundry on the line to dry in the outdoor sun.

My other grandmother wore aprons also.  She wore frilly aprons for serving lovely vanilla sugar cookies.  These cookies were usually pressed out by a granddaughter and sprinkled with white sugar, then served with coffee or milk.  

Both of my grandmothers sewed.  My maternal grandmother, Bigmom, had a dry cleaners and tailoring service.  She had the most amazing interesting things she made from fabric scraps.  She had woolen quilts made from pant-legs of the mens wool suit pants that had been cut off.  She had raggedy towels sewn together in layers to make pads the size of a fat quarter.  These were little footstool or ottoman pads, or to step out onto from the bathtub, or for wiping feet inside the back door, or for babydoll blankets.  When my daughter was a little baby, this grandmother is the one who made me promise not to use disposable diapers, saying they were gross and miserable for babies.  When she passed away, I inherited a wonderful twin sateen quilt top that she had made in pastel blocks in mint, pink, dreamsicle orange, baby blue and lemon yellow.  In her aprons, she looked like Lucy Ricardo... perky and frilly.

My grandmothers' aprons are my inspiration for making fun aprons.  I've taken quite a few to the stomp grounds for kitchen use there.  This style of mixed calicos and pinch-pleats is new.  In old times, our corn dance was performed with the women wearing aprons of simple thin 60-thread or 100-thread count plain white cotton.  These aprons were scant and tailored, and they reminded me of when I was a little girl and my mother would put a bowl of  starch (and sometimes the whites to be starched and ironed) in the fridge.  (Starch and bluing.  Do people even know what that is today?)

There is something practical about an apron.  You drag in from a tough mind-numbingly cerebral day at the office sitting in a chair for eight hours.  You're hungry for something delicious, but still in a black or navy colored suit.  If you cook in it, you'll have more work ahead at laundry time, making sure there isn't any gravy on the tummy.  So, throw on an apron to break the serious mood.  Voila!  You're Samantha, making perfect barbeque sauce from scratch and whipping up something divine in quick time.  Remember... when you are too tired to fix dinner, a magic apron will give you the strength and energy to cook up some strength and energy.

I'm listing a few new things in my online shops, so this apron will be showing up in one of my etsy storefronts for $18 or you can email me if its the perfect match for your cooking and entertaining adventures.

Nancy Newton Carter

Here's a wonderful old picture of my great-grandmother, Nancy Newton Carter.  Her husband, Enoch Carter is in the background.

She was born, if I recall, at Rabbit Trap in Adair County.  A lot of her ancestors are buried at Hope Cemetery North of Westville.

She lived her adult life in Carter community.  In the 1950s when Lake Tenkiller was built, part of that land was changed by the lake.  Today it is called Carter's Landing.  There was, long ago, a Carter Schoolhouse.  There was a post office at Carter community, named after the postmaster Bud Chronister.  The mail came to Chronister, Oklahoma and some of the old birth certificates of babies such as my father show the birthplace as Chronister, Oklahoma.

I published a family history of the Carter women's side of the family in 1995.  Today it is out of print, but I plan to publish it for sale online soon.  Leave a comment with your email address if you wish to be notified about how to purchase this book. 

It contains a story passed down in our family from the Civil War about Nancy's mother, Laura Newton when she was a teen.  She lived back East in the Cherokee homeland of Tennessee.  Raiders came to the home.  They took anything and everything, at gunpoint.  She pleaded with them to let her keep her wedding dress, and they left without taking it.  Another time, she went down the road to a neighbor's homestead to borrow a cup of sugar or flour.  But as she was walking along, she saw a man or men hanged from a tree in their yard.  War must have a terrible toll on the psyches of the people who live thru them.  Laura Newton, all of her life, recounted vivid and chilling stories of these events and she never got over it.