Above is a picture of my maternal grandmother, Gertie. She lived on a farm in Pennsylvania and gave birth to 15 children; 13 of them lived to adulthood. She died when I was a baby and I have no memory of her, but I have a good idea of what her life was like. She would have tended a large garden, kept chickens, cooked and baked from scratch with a wood/coal range, canned hundreds of jars of tomatoes and fruits, helped with the butchering and made sausage, scrapple and cured bacon and hams, sewed clothing with a treadle machine, made quilts and comforters to keep her family warm, and done the washing and ironing and the general housekeeping, all while often pregnant and caring for children. She's in her sixties in this picture, and looks happy but worn out.
Her family had hard times during the depression, but on a fertile farm, with lots of hard work, frugality, determination and some luck, they got by. My mother said she and her brothers and sisters were always proud of the fact that when they packed their school lunch pails, they had sandwiches with bread and meat. They felt a bit superior to the really poor kids whose sandwiches were bread and ketchup, or bread and (shudder) lard.
I have a very few concrete objects from her life--a china plate, and a small stack of feedsacks. The feedsacks are just the plain white cotton kind, no prints. One of my aunts had them, and then they got passed on to me because I was a quilter and would be likely to use them.
I am using them; they are lovely to embroider on. I have a batch of blocks that I am embroidering dandelion leaves on; I've been working on them off and on for years, as a filler project when nothing else is pressing. Dandelions are unfairly maligned, in my opinion. They are bright and cheerful. I've eaten the young leaves in the spring, and made excellent wine from the blossoms, and it's a good bet my grandmother did too.
Here's one of the blocks in progress:
My life is much different than my grandmother's, although I have inherited her work ethic. I am grateful that I have the time and resources available that allow me to make art. And while these are challenging economic times, I am still a long way off from lard sandwiches, for which I am profoundly thankful.
I'm really busy in the studio right now, with a veritable round robin of projects underway. Most of them are still in the preliminary stages, where I'm making prints, picking colors and fabrics, and doing the initial design work. I've made some cyanotype prints for a Dandelion quilt or quilts that are in progress and they turned out very nice and crisp. These are huge leaves from a garden bed that is slightly neglected, so I got to pull "weeds" and make art all in one go.
