My Yellow School House Studio

Yesterday I finished the job that Jon and I started last fall, painting two sides of my School House Studio.  We’ll tackle the south side another weekend and leave the back, which was never painted, for last.

Ma, Zelda, Suzy, Socks and Tess in the back.

It’s shearing time again.  On Monday around noon, Jim McCrea will be here relieving the sheep of their wool coats.   The yarn will probably be ready sometime in  October.  I already have a nice list of people who want to buy it.  And I’ll have a bit more than I did the first time because I’ll be able to use Ma’s fleece too.

Florence’s old mower is spitting rocks  at my studio and I have to admit I’m a bit envious of Jon mowing the lawn.  Even though I love my work, on spring days like today, I really just want to be outside, gardening or mowing.

That’s the back of Jackie’s quilt hanging on the wall.  To make it I used pieces from two of Jackie’s husband’s shirts and her red and white checkered table cloth.  The flowers come from the collection of Laura Israel’s fabric (Vintage 1974).  The colors are just right and I like the juxtaposition of the flowers and grids.

The front of the quilt is laid out on the floor upside down.  I stitched a piece of white fabric over the area where the  woven scarf is because there were spaces in the weave big enough to see the batting.   Don’t want the batting coming through the front of the quilt.

This old Campbell’s soup can was one of the few things left  in my studio before we fixed it up.  It was filled with nails and I imagine it belonged to Harold, Florence’s husband who used the building as a workshop.

Tara left  this poem by Jane Kenyon on my comments.  It reminded her of the safety pin on the apron.  It’s just what I was trying to say.

Finding A Long Gray Hair

I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.

By Jane Kenyon

I heard a whining outside my studio.  When I looked out my open window Frieda was standing there, looking in.  “What is it,” I asked her.  She just gave me those eyes. I almost gave her a dog biscuit then quickly realized this was a sure way to get her to whine outside my window when ever she was outside and I was in my studio.

In one of the old houses where I lived, there was a bobby pin stuck in a door latch holding it open so the door couldn’t lock.  The latch and bobby pin were painted over so many times the latch was permanently open and the door permanently unlocked.

It made me think about how my mother used to put her hair in curlers every night.  She had a big coffee can covered in shelf paper, red with yellow flowers, that she kept her curlers and bobby pins in.  I hadn’t thought of that  red and yellow coffee can or the bobby pins, that were somehow always scattered around the house,  in years.  It seems unimportant, yet to me, that curler can was a constant in my childhood, almost a symbol of my mother during that time.  my own memory made me  wonder about the woman who the bobby pin belonged to  and how it came to be preserved beneath the paint, giving me a tiny clue about her life.

I only saw the safety pin when I was ironing the apron before sewing it into Jackie’s Quilt.   My first impulse was to remove it, but then I remembered the bobby pin.  There was a reason it was there, it served a purpose. I began to wonder what it was.

At  some point had Jackie’s mother or grandmother found the safety pin on the floor and stuck it to her apron for safe keeping, then forgot about it.  Was it something she intentionally pinned to her apron for later,  like a friend of mine,  who always seemed to have rubber bands around her wrist in case she needed one. Maybe sometimes she had five or six safety pins in a row down her pocket.  Or did it hold something else, something she pinned inside her pocket to keep it from falling out.

I left the safety pin, thinking Jackie might know, hoping it would jar a memory, maybe something she had once known so well, was so ordinary to her, that she had forgotten it.

Then, as I was picking up the fabric scraps from the floor I found a small  yellowing piece of paper folded in half.   Carefully written in pencil were the words:  This apron was made by R.A. Peterson.  It was a long apron, but Anna cut it off.  Between the e and r of Paterson, a tiny tear where a safety pin might once have been.

I don’t know who R.A. Paterson was or Anna, but I’m going to ask Jackie.   Whoever they are someone thought it important enough to write down what they did.  Maybe it won’t change the world, or be written about in history books.  But for me, these are the stories that have meaning.  That can connect us through time and  even death to one another.

The note from the apron

I’m useless after my yoga class, so I wanted to post this photo of Jackie’s quilt all pieced together, before I left.  I’m thinking about the idea of a quilt based around an apron and the potential meaning behind it.  But right now, I don’t have the time, don’t want to be late for yoga.

Around dinner time Minnie started hanging  out under my window.  Soon, Frieda and Minnie were in a stare off.  Minnie’s smart enough to know Frieda can’t get at her.  She was so confident, she started grooming herself, but never took her eyes off Frieda.

Ok, this is what I’ve decided on.  I don’t think I ever made a quilt so balanced.  I think that was what was throwing me off.  So I was trying to unbalance it by putting the plaid to the right.  But I think this quilt has more of an impact this way.  So I’m breaking my own rules.  Jackie said her husband was a fan of Jasper Johns, I wonder how he felt about symmetry.