there's a pillow that we have on our couch here at home that has been with me for a long, long time. before it was just a regular old couch-pillow (it's the only one i really can stand to put my face against, all the others having knitted covers), it was a display vehicle for all my badges - from all the concerts and goings-on of my teen years. thompson twins buttons, madness buttons, orchestral manouvres in the dark buttons. the best ones were the local ones (like zipperhead buttons, and the one for i-92 "rock of the eighties!" when that wasn't a retro thing). i gave all the badges to my sister at some point, and freed the pillow up for the couch.
before it was the little time capsule of badges, the pillow had spent over a decade in some kind of stasis, or flux, beyond my memory. i have recollections of sifting through my toybox for something or other, on the porch of the house we lived in until i was ten or so, and flinging the pillow aside - it was always in there, always standing between me and an actual toy. but it did seem to be "my" pillow, and all i knew about it was that my cousin elizabeth had made it.
i remember being young enough to be impressed by this. a handmade gift was never really an unusual thing in my family, and beth was only a couple of years older than me. i think i was impressed that she'd been allowed to use a sewing machine to stitch the pillow, which makes me think i was really, really young indeed.
now, i look with amazement at the small stretch along the side of the pillow where beth's handstitching closed up the little gap after stuffing. these little stitches are well over thirty years old. the pillow itself is comfortable, but squeezing and mashing it for investigative purposes suggests that whatever used to be in there - maybe a square of foam - has long since turned into something else.
this photo of beth and me is also a good "family textiles" image: i remember the dresses being made for us by my mother and aunts. the occasion was a "remarriage" ceremony for my grandparents. they weren't like elizabeth taylor and richard burton, they had never become "unmarried", so i think perhaps this was a big anniversary in which they renewed their vows. my mother's writing on the back of the photo says that it's from their "25th anniversary", which makes no sense; my father was 25 at the time of my birth, and was the third child born to his parents, and here, i'm clearly at least four. 35th anniversary, maybe. but it was definitely mock-wedding in style, and beth and i were "flower girls" of some sort, and the dresses, as often were in our family, were handmade. it was on this occasion that i learned the word "periwinkle" - my dress was periwinkle, and that's actual periwinkle in my hands. beth had the red dress and some tulips, which, when i saw how they drooped, i was surprised did not strike her as disappointing.
i remember being particularly excited about the sandals. we had the exact same sandals to wear, and i think this was fascinating to me because beth lived in ohio and i lived in pennsylvania and it was just more amazing than anything i had ever previously conceived, that i would get to ohio and there would be sandals waiting for me and they would look exactly like beth's.
when i saw this photo shortly after having these pictures developed, having come home from ohio, i looked at our feet next to one another - how hers were flat on the ground, how i was standing funny on the outsides of mine, and i thought that's the difference between us. even then - seeing this image no more than a week or two after it had been made, even at that age - i saw those tilted feet as some sign of, if not outright weakness, at least lack of control on my part. i felt, even then, that i was expressing emotion that other people were able to keep in when i was not. i had thought a lot about this "wedding" and the special dresses and i think i wanted to be transformed, elegant; i know i felt disappointed when i saw my feet in the photo, giving away how excited i was.
last i heard, beth was in sudan doing humanitarian work.
i am interrupting my own textile-blog "holiday" to make this post, which is as good an indicator as any that i really still like doing this. see to the left -- a rather well-worn little patchwork apron. that is my little apron, made for me by a woman named orpha post.
orpha was a friend of the family -- specifically i believe a friend of my grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt alice. orpha, like my aunt alice, never married and never had children, but apparently, circa 1974, her fingers were itching to make a little something for a little somebody.
this is me -- pre-breast reduction, as you can plainly tell -- in orpha's apron. on my head, one of my dad's handkerchiefs, affixed with bobby pin and silk flower. lord knows what i was trying to evoke here but i remember being pretty specific about wanting it all this way.
this is orpha. it's hard to say if this photo was taken around the time the one above was taken -- i think it's possible that it was some years later.
i have noted long, long ago here (a full THREE digital cameras back! and it shows) about the process of framing some of one of my maternal great-grandmother's needlework. mattings and framings combining photos and textiles are a challenge (and headache) to the framer (hi richard), and are very costly. orpha's apron, the photo of me, and the photo of orpha -- behind UV protective glass -- i expect it to be between five and six hundred bucks, when i finally get around to it.
anyway, it's no surprise to discover that orpha is no longer living. when one of my grandparents died -- probably my grandfather -- my dad and his sibs went to empty out the house, and dad came home with volumes upon volumes of orpha's diaries.
i've had her 1937 diary for a couple years now and really ought to move onto other volumes. i have been using this to work on a short story. here are two entries that i particularly like -- may 1937 was a pretty big month.
"A terrible disaster tonight. The dirigible Hindenburg, caught fire and crashed at Lakehurst Airport. At first it was feared that no one was saved but later reports are not so bad. "
"The great day – Coronation of George VI. Awake before 4 + up before 5 in order to hear all the broadcast. I found it most thrilling, + interesting. Centuries old pageantry and modern radio. The rustling of people, slight coughings and all could be heard as tho one was there. The neighing and champing of the horses was as clear as the bells of the churches.
Later went to town and the hairdressers – then to work for rest of day. "
mentioning nudie suits in yesterday's post reminded me of this shirt i have sitting in a closet. i know my mother and father each had one of these -- so did i believe many of my aunts and uncles -- each a little different. this one, i believe, was my mom's version. as you see, it is not a handmade shirt, as it has been fully sanforized by the fine fruit of the loom company. but the embroidery was done by my grandmother margaret, my dad's mom.
again, if memory serves, everybody had different versions of these shirts, each personalized to the members of their family. this? is not jesus. this is my dad, jogging. it was the seventies, and everybody jogged their skeletons loose for health.
the german cross? no fucking clue.
this is my mom and megan and me (i think i am the one on the left), and our little house at 1219 rising sun avenue.
i am not sure how to best keep this shirt. clearly time is doing something to it that sanforization cannot protect against. either that or street people have been sneaking in and wearing it nights. but i don't think it's that. i wish i knew what to do!
here is a little paper envelope of oplatki, which is the special christmastime host wafer eaten by many eastern europeans on christmas eve. (see the little spinning wheel in the corner?)
i am half sicilian, but next up, i am a quarter slovak. christmas eve dinner for slovaks is sautéed pierogies (potato and prune), bean soup, and, occasionally in my childhood, a little piece of oplatke with honey on it.
the next morning, christmas morning, you eat refried pierogies, with kielbasa and scrambled eggs.
certain convents manufacture the hosts for christmas -- i think the poor claires are one of them. they were always sort of an afterthought for us -- i think maybe my grandparents mailed them to us -- it was all more about the pierogies.
these days, since the refried pierogies on christmas morning were always what everybody REALLY wanted, not so much the ones the night before, we just do them christmas morning now, and skip the whole bean soup dinner. we get our kielbasi at the krakaus market in northern liberties. ben has had nooooo problem getting into the spirit of kielbasa and eggs and pierogies on christmas morning.
i had my ex-husband for long enough to completely indoctrinate him to pierogies, and he was better with the dough than i was. furthermore, he got the pasta maker in the divorce, and that is what he used to make it so good. so, these last three or four christmases since we have been unmarried, we make the pierogies together anyway.
but, back to the oplatki. this is them. apparently, the white ones are for humans, and the pink one is for pets!
i found these online and ordered envelopes of them for my dad to send to his siblings. i hope they get a kick out of it.
ya know, if i can do this when i'm in my nineties, i can't wait to get there. it's amazing to me how much this old italian tatter looks like my own sicilian tatting great-grandmother:
...seen here with my mom, who is pictured smugly flaunting physical attributes she never gave to me (although i occasionally dance around the apartment in that veil.)
i have posted entries about my great grandmother's tatting a couple of times. maybe more. (please remind me to get a better picture of that pillowcase when we are fully moved into the new place.)
UPDATE: having showcased my sicilian side, here's what's possibly zipping around in my slovak DNA. thank you, michelle. your knitting blog has always been one of the best.
i didn't grow up in a religious family. we had the soundtracks to both jesus christ superstar and godspell, but that is where i got most if not all of my information about christianity. now, my dad is quite the athiest, and my mother, in recent years, has introduced
ben
to her "grandmother" at the dinner table, while pointing emphatically to a gravy boat.
whether or not there is a god, or souls may be transfered to the gravy boats of their one-time owners, is a different knitting project entirely. but not to get off topic. we didn't have a lot of religion in my house, but at christmastime, we had this:
i don't know where it came from or that it was significant to anybody except myself. i really loved it. i loved that little baby. in that lizard-mind that you have when you're a kid, where everything you admire must be YOURS, i used to surreptitiously (i thought) try to pry this baby out of the manger with my finger. i wanted to hold him. my mom would always catch me and tell me to stop.
i put this little manger out at christmastime now, but i have always wanted a nativity set of my own. i am always fascinated by how different they can be, and how they reflect the tastes of their owners.
it's important for me to say first -- and get the jump on any well-meaning whistleblowers -- that this was hardly an original project. in fact i copied it out of something i saw for sale in a catalog last year.
that crèche was wooden, not knitted, but numerous elements have carried over to mine: the genderless, faceless nature of the figures; the traditional blue "garb" of the virgin mother; the lack of crowns or other trappings of status on the wise men; the ambivalent classification of the "animals". i didn't want an angel in my nativity, so i don't have one -- now it's complete in its secular humanism.
and i have only one animal. it's a very bottom-heavy sort of loch-ness-llama.
i also made three wise men, and they are bearing gifts.
ben and i were a little mystified to see how the joseph and mary figures appear to be leaning into one another lovingly, and in fact looking down at where the baby will be. totally unplanned, but rather uncanny.
some people put their baby jesus out when they put their whole set out. some wait until christmas morning. i like waiting until christmas morning. that's what my dad (the athiest) does with his (very nice carved wooden) nativity set -- he always waits. so we're going to wait too.
check back on christmas day!
i am filing this primarily under "family textiles" (a rather chilling post-halloween suggestion, really), but it is the living, pulsing, arm and shoulder of my oldest friend, rai. (sometimes ray.)
rai has a lot of birds in her house. cats and dogs too, but she really likes birds.
and she really likes tattoos. she's had quite a few done on her over the years. it seems lately she is picking up speed (both she and her partner carole are, actually.) she's getting these feathers done currently, and from what i can tell, there isn't an end in sight.
tattoos. as with anything else, it really depends on the person who has them, how seriously they need to be taken. there was a discussion at the office about this last week: a young woman was rather painting herself into a corner by insinuating that people who didn't want to get tattooed must not have anything in life that they feel strongly enough about. if they didn't want it drawn on their flesh, they must not be committed to it -- be it a partner, family member, hammerhead shark, or whatever.
luckily, someone (not me!) responded to this young woman's challenge with the calm assertion that it might in fact be the tattooed folk who were less sure of their own devotion -- otherwise, why did they have to try so hard to advertise it to the world? what was the matter with privately and quietly re-asserting that particular loyalty, to person or shark or sports team or whatever, in one's own mind, day by day? and for that matter, this person also said, they had never seen a tattoo that made a person look better anyway.
this wasn't a long dialogue, thankfully, but it was nice to hear two sides of it.
where would rai fit into this dialogue? first of all, she'd probably be bottlefeeding a tiny macaw hatchling in her pocket and wouldn't be listening. rai is on the extreme end of the tattooing spectrum, but she means it. rai has the courage of her convictions.
those convictions were put to the test for me when she got the "tank girl" tattoo. i thought, oh god, why are you doing that? why not just get an "urkel" tattoo? but rai still loves her tank girl tattoo. and that is why it is cool.
and the feathers -- the feathers are just cool because they are cool. because now she has feathers.
i have known rai since i was fifteen, and i worked washing dishes in the kitchen of the boarding school she attended. rather romantic! she was my maid of honor in my wedding, and whatnot. (that was, in fact, nine years ago... today!) rai's been happy with some of her tattoos longer than i was happy being married. "tank girl", "holy matrimony"... can't say one's more important than the other in this house, can we?
hey, did you notice that i did not title this entry "becoming papagena"? i didn't, did i? i've mentioned, haven't i, how i hate those verb(ing ending) + proper noun titles for things. they are rampant. in the few minutes before i fall asleep at night, i tell
ben
stories about how i want to cultivate microbes that eat all the useless things in the world, like the dead skin on one's feet, and books and movies with verb(ing ending)+ proper noun titles. when will it ever, ever stop?
on the back of this picture, in my mom's writing, it says "halloween 1974". that means i had just begun kindergarten, and would turn five the following february.
my previously featured scarecrow costume must have been from '73. i have that photo, but not the costume itself. my first halloween must have been '72, at age two and a half, when i was a witch. i have the witch costume, but no pictures of me in it.
the skeleton costume of '74 is the only case in which i have both the costume and a photo of me in it. i would like to get the two framed together, but i think the costumes i have might get another wearer before they go into frames.
during the christmastime after i wore this costume, i requested a "book about skeletons" from santa claus. tireless, i tell you. i'm trying to remember what i was picturing in my mind when asking for this. probably just pages and pages of cavorting skeletons. what i got was a book called "the human body" which had chapters not only on skeletal structures but muscles, digestion, and fetal development (which quickly superceded my fascination with skeletons.) it proved very satisfying.
note in the photo, i have a homemade costume, but a store-bought mask. this was a concession that had to be made. i was the only kid in the neighbhorhood getting these fabulous handmade costumes, but at the same time, i felt left out of the whole buying-masks-at-woolworth's process. my mom worked the costumes out so that i could always go get a store-bought mask to augment them. and she made whatever i asked her to. i never had to be a ladybug or some crap. the bones of this costume are drawn in marker on interfacing, then cut out and stitched onto the black one-piece.
29 years later, it must be clear, that my interest in skeletons is not to be taken lightly.
i just moved this into the bedroom. it is a lace collar crocheted by my great-grandmother lucia albanese. framed along with it is a picture of me with "grandma lucy", with my mom off to the side. my mom is sporting her long cher-hair, which was my security blanket for the first year or so of my life.
grandma lucy only really spoke sicilian by the time i was born, but she strongly believed that i resembled my father, which she would express by gesturing madly back and forth between us, and then informing my dad, "she take-a you face."
ah, but nimble. even in that snapshot, the table behind us has a crocheted tablecloth on it of the scope that is usually only documented in fairytales. grandma lucy made it, as well. her posture was a testament to her avocation. please pass the milk.
autumn doesn't begin for a week yet, but i will be ready. half of me rushes the season, half of me waits until it is really, officially, in the air.
i don't think this costume is around anymore, but i have this one picture of it. it is perhaps from my second halloween (i think i only began trick-or-treating when i was three, and this looks like me at four.) my expression in this picture, not to mention the way i am holding my arms, serves as a reminder of what it felt like to wear this -- it was itchy. it was burlap. it was also a damn sight better than just having a sheet over you, or a flammable costume from woolworth's, and i knew it. my mom made it.
recently a trail of comments on another knitting blog led me to think about my old golliwog doll, tucked away somewhere in my father's house with some of my other favorite toys.
doing some research online about folks who really liked golliwogs, made me want to go grab mine and bring him to philly.
golly is like raggedy ann in that he was a licensed figure, featured in manufactured books and toys and as a mascot for products (robertson's "golden shred" marmalade). but, also like raggedy ann, golly was reproduced commonly by hand, and in the home. my golly is not homemade -- he has a tatter of a tag on him yet. he was given to me by my uncle eric, who is from yorkshire, england.
some people find gollies "racist". i do not think golly is any more a "black person" than ronald mc donald is a "white person". and my white uncle, who gave me the doll, is the father of a black daughter. my official position on gollisensitivity is "whatever". you're a kid, somebody gives you a decent doll, it's soft, it's smiling, go with it. my golly reminds me of good times.
as i am always impressed by a good collection, well presented, a very nice golly collector with whom i chatted a bit upon rediscovering my golly has said she would like to see mine. so, liz, here he is. thank you for helping me bring him home!
my dad found two nightgowns in his attic. they are handmade (no tags), out of a crunchy yellow flannel, and both have handmade embellishments. they are about the size a ten year old girl would wear. this says to us that they probably were made, and worn by, my mother's father's mother -- my great grandmother lucia (lucy).
i seem to remember tim doing the bulk of the work with these strings of tapdancing guys. we made them to celebrate the year 2000, and got the fancy papers from kate's papierie in soho. i put this strand up for new year's this year; it's not been taken down yet, and i'm not sure it will be.
my dad's house is a place full of... artifacts. it's really a lovely house, but peeling paint just comes with big old houses sometimes. here are the stockings that my mom made megan and i as kids, hanging by the wood burning stove.
here's a great idea that i heard on the public address system at superfresh one year during the holidays. have your guests sign the tablecloth, and then stitch over it for posterity! i started one of these years ago, but tim inherited it. this one, i started when we had a brunch in april. unfortunately, no one had signed in washer-safe marker, so for three weeks or so i carried a crabmeat mousse-splattered tablecloth to the office to embroider between phone calls. it paid off though -- and we pulled it out for thanksgiving and hanukkah.
here is a table runner and set of cloth napkins i have had for some time. made either by my mother or my father's sister, leah, the little handsewn hems on each item are amazing to me. so perfect. i love novelty fabrics, and particularly novelty fabrics of the past. sometimes as kids my cousins and i had shirts, pants, even dresses made of the stuff, in halloween-printed cottons.
unless someone corrects me i will attribute the ABC pillow to my aunt la donna and the doll to my aunt laurel.
the openwork on this pillowcase was done by my great-grandmother, but i believe she bought the pillowcase itself.