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The Midwestern Food Chain

2007-03-18T08:34:00.000-05:00

I’m going to jump right in on this topic and not bother with a warm-up. The title is self-explanatory in the Midwest, because a “food chain” here actually involves food.

When we first hear it, the food chain allegory may confuse the Midwesterner. We look a bit askance when we hear, “He’s obviously pretty low on the food chain.” What? Are they calling him an egg? …a calf? …a seedling? Is he a farmer? …a locker owner? …a milk hauler?

Midwesterners think of a food chain as the route food takes to get to our tables. Even in our metropolitan areas we know where food comes from. You can’t drive down I35 from Minneapolis to Kansas City and not catch a whiff of the obvious.

We start growing things from seeds, and sources of bull semen can be found in the yellow pages. People here are responsible for produce from planting to harvest, and for meat from the farrowing pen to the slaughterhouse. There’s a middle man in the food chain, too, and lots of people think that’s where food comes from. Midwesterners know the folks who think that aren’t even IN the food chain, let alone able to identify somebody’s position in it.

City folk naively think of farmers and the residents of any town with a population under 50,000, as low on the food chain. We shake our heads – man, if it weren’t for farmers, those guys wouldn’t have the strength to call us names. The food chain starts with farmers, for cryin’ in the night. As a matter of fact, the entire economy of Midwestern small towns revolves around the farmer, from whence the food chain originates. Duh.

Or, in the words of Napoleon Dynamite, “Gaaaaah!! You are such a dork!”

As an aside, quilters get this all the time. Not only do we suffer from the stereotype as people who don’t have enough significant work to keep themselves busy, there is also the perception that cutting up fabric and sewing it back together again, repeatedly, is only interesting to somebody pretty low on the food chain. Folks better think twice before they dis a quilter, because we are often at the highest level of the Midwestern food chain – we prepare the food just before you eat it. Aha! Chew on that for awhile!

The food chain in the corporate world refers to one entity being strong enough to consume a weaker entity. We learn all about that food chain in physical science in the ninth grade, starting with a tiny amoeba and working up to, say, a hippopotamus. A little minnow is eaten by a Northern Pike, a human feasts on a duck dinner, and a python snarfles up a bicyclist, unless the bicyclist rides a Mongoose™, purportedly the “best in performance bikes since 1974”. Clearly, the corporate food chain is a seek-and-destroy system, where if “you snooze, you lose", and somebody else gets to do a jig in the end zone.

That is the polar opposite of the Midwesterner’s food chain. There is no advantage to wishing ill-will on your fellow farmers, and the folks in town are as apt to help out a family who suffers a setback as the neighbors in that family’s township. We have Catholic Knights and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans waiting with matching funds, and many hands to pitch in when the call for help goes out. We bring combines, balers, hot dishes, babysitting help, and rides to dialysis. We put names on prayer chains and sign up for walkathons and dunk tanks. No matter where you are on the food chain, you’re important and your role is valued.

Some of that cutthroat, too-big-for-your-britches stuff happens here, too. The difference is, it really stands out in rural communities, and is usually not rewarded. It may be tolerated, but not rewarded. We believe there is room for improvement in everyone’s behavior, and hope those offenders will come to their senses someday.

Yes, the food chain here does involve food, but it involves people, too. Calmar, Iowa, has been recognizing farmers with an annual festival for the past 100 years. Being at the bottom of the food chain is a place of honor, noble and essential to life everywhere. Food for the body is planted and harvested here, but in the process we cultivate food for our souls.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns 2007

That Barn!

2006-12-10T15:33:00.000-06:00

That Barn! He always has a million ways to surprise us, or as I like to say, re-surprise us. Re-surprises are those gestures and words he repeats over and over, managing to find a way to surprise you again. It’s uncanny.

When we were growing up, neither The Barn or The Peg spoke the words “I love you” to us. Didn’t have to. They kept us in a warm home, they fed us nutritious food, they took us to church, and they scolded us and inflicted corporal punishment (now commonly referred to as “abuse” in circles where love is only shown by saying the words “I love you”). They spent their summers in a tent so we could see the country, and they forfeited their peaceful evenings to the practicing squawks of our musical instruments. They also made us go to bed on time, they refused to choose our friends for us, and they gave us regularly-scheduled chores.

We were Baby Boomers. All the kids on Quincy Avenue had similar home lives. We know, because their parents did the same things to them, right out in the open, just like The Barn and The Peg. Once Allen Chickering’s mom swatted his fanny with every step he took until he got into that house and took that garbage out like she had asked him to umpteen times since supper. Allen lumbered, unaffected by the token “whipping”, grumbling, “I know, I know…” all the way to the kitchen door. It was hilarious – always was when someone else was getting paddled.

Once we were grown, about half of us found the occasion to go into therapy. Remember, we are Baby Boomers, and there is a market out there identifying us as emotionally needy because our parents didn’t say “I love you.” When I did my stint, it struck me that while my parents never said “I love you”, I actually believed they did. My therapist struggled with that notion, not able to get me to understand that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Denial. That was the answer. I was in denial.

In their retirement, The Barn and The Peg had the extra time to tune into Oprah and discover the error of their ways. They had also been the focus of an “I love you” intervention, brought about by those of us who were enlightened and no longer in denial of the horrible upbringing we had. Whatever the cause, they “I love you-ed” us every time we spoke starting in the mid-‘80’s. They never, ever forgot, either. Every phone call, every visit was another chance to proclaim their love for us. It seemed to set them free.

But, old habits die hard with The Barn. He kept doing nice little things, whether we appreciated them or not, because he was accustomed to showing us he loved us, and it didn’t occur to him that he could replace actions with words. He got a Hallmark card program for his computer, and he created cards for every occasion – thank-you cards and birthday cards were his specialty. He sent us cards, he sent the grandchildren cards, he gave the mail carrier cards, his friends in the nursing home, the guys he used to teach with, everyone got cards. I don’t suppose he told all of them he loved them, though. They’d have to read that between the lines, like we once had to.

Christmas was always a time to be re-surprised. The Barn and The Peg wouldn’t buy just any presents; the presents they selected were given after a great deal of thought. Once, for Christmas, The Barn and The Peg gifted me with a lovely set of decorative covered mixing bowls and a matching Dutch oven. They were gorgeous, but impractical – I could tell that the minute I unwrapped the package. Who would use these enameled and flowered mixing bowls, or put that Dutch oven on the stovetop?! Uffda! I kept them in their boxes, slightly annoyed that The Barn and The Peg were so short-sighted, despite them telling me they thought I, whom they perceived as keeping a beautiful home, would enjoy them like no one else they knew.

The Barn is also known as The Breadman. He mastered the art of bread machines, and he spread the wealth of that knowledge. He gave bread to all of us, bread to the grandchildren, to the mail carrier, his friends in Assisted Living, the guys he used to teach with, everyone got bread. Whenever I visit him, lots of people at church tell me about the good bread they’ve received from him. He’ll even make them a second loaf if he thinks the first one didn’t come out just right.

The Barn and I had father-daughter outfits. I’d help him with whatever home improvement project he had going in his workshop, and we’d often need to pick up a part, or some screws, or whatever. We’d put on our khaki shorts, white t-shirts and white Keds, and off we’d go to O’Hara’s Hardware. He didn’t tell me once, not when we were in the workshop, or when we split up to change into our father-daughter outfits, or all the way to O’Hara’s and back that he loved me.

Right after The Peg died, I was visiting The Barn, and he told me his bread machine had broken down. We hopped onto the Information Highway and researched a proper replacement, then went on a hunt to find a Breadman brand bread machine. We didn’t wear matching outfits, but we checked out O’Hara’s, which had moved from the South Side in Ottumwa to down by the train depot. They had two left, and they were cheaper than the review on the Internet! We giggled as we hauled it home and unpacked it.

The next morning The Barn said he was going back to O’Hara’s to get me that last Breadman brand bread machine. He thought we should have father-daughter bread machines, and we could call each other and compare recipes and results. He fared better with The Heavenly Whole Wheat Bread than I. My favorite was The Peg’s Famous Swedish Rye Bread, which she had converted from an old family recipe for use in a bread machine. We had such fun baking bread together, and at the end of each phone call, he’d say, “I sure do love you, Honey.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

The Barn and The Peg never had a favorite among their five offspring. They didn’t say “I love you” to any of us. They also boasted they treated us all exactly the same. The Peg once told me she wished they had the childrearing books that our generation enjoyed. If they had, she said, they probably would have tried to individualize their treatment of us a little more. They only had the examples of the generations before them, and so they just wanted us to get perfect attendance in Sunday school and they spanked us when we were naughty. They also made sure we didn’t get everything we wanted, even if they could have afforded to, which they couldn’t.

The Barn got sick one Monday. He called the nurse over from Assisted Living, and she and Brenda from Independent Living called the ambulance. Brenda rode with The Barn, even though she wasn’t supposed to because she isn’t “family”. That held no truck with Brenda – she knew we depended on her. At the hospital, they discovered he’d had his first-ever heart attack and decided to airlift him to Iowa Methodist in Des Moines. My younger sister Mor-Lora (that name is a story for another day) and I dashed to meet him at the ER there.

They admitted him to the ICU/CCU, up on the Third Floor. It was after 6:00 p.m. by then, and we didn’t know how much damage had been done. They wanted someone from the family to stay at the hospital that night, and Mor-Lora needed to run home to get her classroom in order; the immediate future was uncertain. I had T-man with me, and we settled into the family quarters. The Barn, in his usual good spirits, was expressing sincere gratitude to his nurse for the excellent care she was giving him. “You had good training, but it’s more than good training. I can tell you love your job. I’m so lucky you’re my nurse.”

We were all concerned. We gathered in Des Moines from hither and yon – Neil and Judith from Boston, Jeanie from North Carolina, Paul and Carol from Chattanooga, The DeWolfs from Cedar Rapids, grandchildren from Chicago and Seattle. The Barn couldn’t have been more pleased! “Aren’t I lucky?” He sat up in his hospital bed and reveled in our presence. We fussed and cooed over him, and he held our hands and told us how special we were.

Pastor Kister came from First Lutheran in Ottumwa on Friday. He brought Pauline with him, and Harry and Jean Carter came in their own car. Together, twenty of us had communion with The Barn, including two of his great-grandchildren. “Ohhhhh…ohhhhh," he said as each of us entered his room, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with gusto.

Afterwards, he cupped his hands around his mouth and pointed his words in Paul’s direction. “You’re my favorite,” he mouthed. Then to Neil, in the same clandestine manner, “You’re my favorite.” Then to Jeanie, to me, and to Mor-Lora.

“You’re my favorite.”

“You’re my favorite.”

“You’re my favorite.”

Silly, but we were having fun.

By Saturday, we were all preparing to leave. The worst was behind us, and from the many consultations we had with the cardiologists during the week, it was determined that he would go back to Ottumwa to Vista Woods, the nursing home connected to The Barn’s independent living apartment.

“Now, Kari. You’ll have to come to Ottumwa and stay for three or four days, at least,” he said, jabbing his noontime fork in the air to emphasize the point. “I get awfully tired, so wear your watch and make sure no one stays too long.” Lots of visitors were expected after this near-miss.

“Okay. I’ll see you next week.”

“I sure do love you, Honey.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

Jeanie went back to North Carolina, Mor-Lora and I back to our homes in Iowa. The others were scheduled to leave in the next day or two, and what turned out to be a big party in Des Moines was over.

That night, at about 12:45 a.m. on Sunday morning, Carol called. She was sitting with The Barn, holding his hand.

“Kari, Barney just died.”

Why else would anyone call at that hour?

“Are you with him?”

“Yes. He was sleeping. He just put his hand up over his head, like he was greeting someone, and took his last breath.”

“Oh, how peaceful – how beautiful and kind.” He was, indeed, lucky.

“I have to go now and call the others.”

“Thank you, Carol. Thank you for telling me the story.”

The Barn re-surprised us, and he went home. He died on All Saints Day, his favorite day in the Christian calendar.

If you see me shed a tear, it’s because I feel so lucky, that my siblings and I are the lucky ones. The fact that we had such wonderful parents is taking hold of my heart. We weren’t perfect, but they didn’t expect us to be – they wanted us to be the best we could be. They weren’t perfect, yet sometimes we punished them for their imperfections. They loved us all the same, both by their actions and their words.

As for The Barn, we were all his favorite, and he will continue to re-surprise us for the rest of our lives.

That Barn!

Bernard Orius Onerheim, March 18, 1917 – November 5, 2006

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns December 2006

Her Quiltness and The Times-Picayune

2006-08-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

The Peg used to smile as she watched me work, and call me picayunish. I took it as a compliment, which is how it seemed she meant it at the time. Having outgrown the desire to get something done in a hurry, by the time I was out of grammar school I just wanted to do things right. I make functional things, and if they aren’t done right I don’t want to use them. That means I just have to look at my goof-ups over and over again, and I don’t really care to do that. Therefore, since it’s silly to swap my time for something useless, it only made sense to slow down and, you know, be picayunish.

“You’re picayunish,” The Peg would smile in my direction, and I’d beam with pride.

In junior high we had picayune as a vocabulary word. It means “of little value or importance; petty.” I still took it as a compliment, because (in my mind) I didn’t think many people would tend to the smallest of details, nor would many be aware that a whole project could become spoiled with just a few misplaced stitches or a crooked line. Besides, The Peg was always smiling when she called me picayunish. That made it a good thing.

In high school, when I heard there was a newspaper published in New Orleans called The Times-Picayune, I took it to mean that their reporters would ferret out the most integral details of a story so that the reader would be able to form his or her own opinion. As it turns out, they named it after a low-value Spanish coin once used in the South, only one of which was required to purchase a copy of the newspaper.

None of this clarifying information makes any difference to me. I stick with my first impression of just about anything, a condition I call Preconceived Notion Sickness. I proudly point out the “smallest of picayune details” in my work, giving each my full review as every project progresses. I love being picayunish.

A Preconceived Notion Sickness event took place when I was running a bath at The Dot’s this summer. It seemed to take forever to get the water to warm up, so I was forced to wake The Dot and asked if I had to run the “hot” for a long time before it complied. She mumbled something angry that sounded like a cross between “I’m sleeping!” and “Yes!”, so I returned to the bathroom. That water never did get warm, and I had to take a cold bath. I washed my hair, too, which made a mighty uncomfy start to the day.

When she became fully conscious, The Dot told me I had the handle pointed to “cold”. Oh. I was pointing the rounded top of the handle/dial to “hot” instead of the handle itself. I thought that was the way it worked. It never occurred to me that I could have been wrong, opting instead for the only logical explanation: “We’re out of hot water.” As I said, I took a cold bath. And washed my hair. In cold water.You trying being me for awhile. It’s not as easy as I make it look.

I can hold on for years, accepting erroneous “truths”. I still hem “backwards”, because that’s the way it looked to me when I watched The Peg do it. The garment gets hemmed, and since that was the starting goal, it works for me.

I have rewritten countless song lyrics from my youth. You probably remember the popular, Hey, Say Louise! by the Beatles. It goes, “Hey, say Louise! I luh-uh-uh-uh-uhve you! Hey, say Louise, is not enough to show I care!” I’m told some people call it Eight Days a Week. Whatever.

In time, Webster will see it my way, and I have no doubt we’ll see the amended definitions for “picayune” and “picayunish”. They will read:

Pic·a·yune (pĭk'ee-yūn') adj. Precisely and proficiently done. Something made with skill and expertise.
Picayunish (pĭk ee ·yūn'ish) adj. Taking great care and concern to see that something is done just right, and of a quality to endure and be admired for generations.

Time for me to go now. I have to pull the shades up. It’s cloudy today, and I want my houseplants to get some indirect sunlight…

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns August 2006

KEOB

2006-08-12T11:48:00.000-05:00

I bet I get twenty-five fill-out-this-survey-and-pass-it-on e-mails every year. I haven’t filled one out since 1997, when the first one hit my inbox, because, frankly, who the heck cares about all this stuff, anyway?

One came in today, and I decided to fill it out and send it on. The accompanying directions say that each person who receives this e-mail must send it on, and send it back to the person who sent it to them. I decided to comply. I wonder who, if anyone, will even read the dang thing, let alone fill it out and send it back to me. In case you’re wondering, here’s what I said:

1. First name? Kari.

2. Were you named after anyone? Kari Solem, a little old Norwegian-born lady who pronounced it “carry”.

3. When did you last cry? It’s hard to keep track – I’m a BIG crybaby.

4. Do you like your handwriting? Yes, when I take my time.

5. What is your favorite lunchmeat? Mesquite-roasted turkey, deli-style, but right now I’m on a hummus-and-pita-bread kick.

6. Kids? 2 – 3 if you count the baby, Hubba.

7. If you were another person, would you be friends with you? Absolutely! I’d be tempted to form a fan club of my admirers!

8. Do you have a journal? No, but I blog. I’m so 21st Century.

9. Do you use sarcasm a lot? I suppose what you really mean is, “Are you a snotty person?” Well, yeah. I suggest you put on the daddy pants and take it like an adult!

10. Do you still have your tonsils? No.

11. Would you bungee jump? I cannot think of a single scenario that would make me think bungee jumping is a good idea. (My sincere apologies to all of those who, before reading this, thought I would die for them.)

12. What is your favorite cereal? Raspberry granola from the Co-op.

13. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? Not always. Sometimes I have the servants do it for me.

15. What is your favorite ice cream? Peanut butter and dark chocolate.

16. Shoe size: 6-7.

17. What is your favorite color? Although I’m not consciously aware of it, it must be all shades of purple. My dang house is painted purple, for crying out loud.

18. What is your least favorite thing about yourself? When I don’t have enough energy to do all the things I want to do.

19. Who do you miss the most? Morgan & Tad (living), and my mommy (The Peg).

20. Do you want everyone to send this back to you? I’ll be amazed if anyone even reads this.

21. What color pants and shoes are you wearing right now? Very light tan shorts, black spangley flip-flops.

23. What are you listening to right now? The grandfather clock my dad (The Barn) made me, ticking away.

24. If you were a crayon, what color would you be pink/green? Pink – hot pink – with glitter.

25. Favorite smells? Cake baking.

26. Who was the last person you talked to on the phone? Hubba.

27. First thing you notice about people you are attracted to? Simultaneously, their senses of dignity and humor.

28. Do you like the person who sent this to you? Yes!

29. Favorite drink? Lately, it’s been fresh-squeezed limeade.

30. Favorite sport? Quilting.

31. Hair color? White/gray, hidden beneath a lovely blend of light, medium, and dark blonde.

32. Eye color? Hazel.

33. Do you wear contacts? I just started wearing them again more often, but not all the time.

34. Favorite food? Cake Buzz.

35. Last movie you watched? I have no idea, but it could have been ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou” with the Ormords. The Tootsie Chicks are having a film festival, though, so I'll be watching something!

36. What color of shirt are you wearing? Black.

37. Summer or winter? Summer, with the long daylight hours.

38. Hugs or Kisses? Hugs, because you can exchange those with everybody.

39. Favorite dessert? Same as #34.

40. Who is most likely to respond? I’m amazed I’M responding!

41. Least likely to respond? No pressure, gang. Don’t worry about it…

42. What books are you reading? An Ava Gardner biography and a book called What Jesus Meant (which sounds terribly presumptuous, but it turns out it isn’t – in fact, it seems to be exactly what I thought Jesus was saying, which was, among other things, love each other and stop thinking some of our sins make us unsuitable to be preachers and believers – dang hypocrites!).

43. What's on your mouse pad? I don't need to use one, but if I did, I have a nifty one my brother Neil made up for us with all our family’s names on it for our family reunion this summer!

44. What did you watch last night on TV? Court TV, “Power, Privilege, and Justice”. I know. I’m sick.

45. Favorite sounds? The ocean, party/restaurant noises, reggae/R & B/jazz/indie music, and the one I am waiting to hear, “You have just won $1,000,000,000!”

46. Rolling Stones or Beatles? Beatles, but really Ricky Nelson, who died before he had the chance to marry me. (Hubba is cool with this. He's had to live with it for 30 years.)

47. The furthest you have been from home? I don’t know, but I’ve never been off this continent.

48. Do you have a special talent? I make the world's most awesome cakes and quilts, and yet still bear the remarkably uncanny ability to be completely humble about doing both of them.

49. When and where were you born? December 27, 19-none-of-your-dang-business, at St. Joseph Hospital in Ottumwa, Iowa.

50. If you won a round trip ticket to anywhere in the world, where would you go? I don’t care, as long as Hubba can go with me. He is my favorite companion, and it’s never as much fun when he isn't with me.

I can be so wordy.

Copyright © Kari E.O.Burns, August 2006

Project Visionaries

2006-08-05T11:17:00.000-05:00

I fancy myself a project visionary. Sounds grand, doesn’t it?

Project visionaries are people who have more ideas inside their heads, bumping into each other, than they have time to finish them. Being a project visionary requires tools. Being a project visionary means you are never bored or without something to do. Being a project visionary means you have to find ways to separate each project from the other, so that when you stumble upon an unfinished one, you will have enough clues from what’s stored with it to remember the great vision that got it started. Being a project visionary requires dozens of bags and boxes.

My penchant for notions is legendary, but organizing the space around me brings even greater acclaim. I can find something where I left it when my workspace is messy, but I prefer to keep things tucked away in their proper places – notions and threads in little drawers, fabric by color in bigger drawers, stencils in low flat Rubbermaids®, acrylic rulers along a bookcase, and so forth.

When I get one project going, however, I like to keep that all together. If I buy fabric for a quilt, I will prepare it, and then store it in an appropriately-sized box, usually with clear sides, so I will know at a glance what is there. Once the project is started, it will stay in the box, in its various stages of completion, ready for the whim that brings me back to it.

Projects that are on my current to-do radar screen get special treatment. I will look through my assortment of little bags and big bags, and select those that fit the need. It’s fun! Notions go in one little bag, some threads in another, and the larger fabric pieces nestle together with them in the larger, project bag. I usually have three or four project bags sitting in a large basket in my dining room. If I’m on the run, I can grab one and have it along, ready for any free moment during the day.

Hubba has observed this over the years, and he gets it. He appears to have picked up my thready needs by osmosis. What could be interpreted as my quilt-thinking rubbing off on him means, I’ve discovered, that he’s just being thoughtful. He does thoughtful things, devoid of the need to pump up his ego by calling attention to them. If I never notice, he never mentions it, and when I do notice and mention it, he shrugs. I wish I could do that.

For instance, Hubba reads – voraciously. I don’t know how many book clubs he belongs to, but they often send book bags because he’s a member. He donates to the craziest things, too, like Colonial Williamsburg, and he’ll get a bag. Once he ordered some stuff from a website, and he got a bag. These, and other, bags haven’t all come at once, but rather, have appeared over the period of years I’ve been quilting. Funny. We didn’t get so many bags before that.

“I got this in Des Moines. It came with some cologne I got T-Man for Christmas. Can you use it?”

“Yeah! Thanks! It’s perfect!”

We were downtown once, at Ridiculous Days, and Hubba spotted a darling little set of three mesh bags, brightly colored, with zippers. “Could you use these?”

I looked his direction. “Uh, yeah! Are there any more?”

Another time, we were passing a stack of Rubbermaid® boxes. Pointing out a set of typical project-sized container, he asked, “Do these look handy to you?”

“Ohmygosh! I LOVE these!” He put several in the cart, as I speculated on what project would go inside.

Little bags, little boxes. Big bags, big boxes. Notions. Threads. Chatelaines. Knitting needles. Thimbles. Fabric. Clever fabrics, and beads, and buttons, and yarns. Project visionaries need an unlimited supply of places to put their tools, their motivations, their inspirations, their projects, their visions.

Project visionaries can get very full of themselves.

But Hubba is the real visionary, and I know one self-proclaimed project visionary who should recognize that it is love and support freeing up her vision. I wonder, Can I catch that by osmosis?

Thanks for making me your project for thirty years, Hubba. Happy Anniversary, you visionary, you!

Copyright © July 31, 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Summer in Town

2006-07-22T15:30:00.000-05:00

Back in the day, a group called The Lovin’ Spoonful recorded a tune called Summer in the City. I know all the words to the song, because summer is precious when you live where there is winter. The farther north you live in the Midwest, the more you appreciate summer.

In Southeast Iowa and Missouri there are four complete seasons every year. People there have fall and spring wardrobes, because there is enough time during the fall and the spring to actually wear them. In Northeast Iowa and Minnesota, we adjust by adding or removing a sweater on those days that feel either warmer or nippier in the afternoon than they were in the morning. The concept of heavy sweatshirts or sweaters worn with a pair of shorts demonstrates the schizophrenic temperature patterns unique to the Upper Midwest.

In the rural Midwest, things don’t get lazy in the summer. Unless one is a pre-schooler, the chances of grabbing a little kick-back time diminish rapidly, just before the switch to daylight savings time. By the time school lets out, country folk are in full swing. Things don’t let up for the 4-H-ers until after the county fair, and for some, not until after the state fair, an event which also heralds in another school year. We are talking about busy and happy summer memories. “Work” is a relative term, and productive work from the heart and soul explains a farmer’s smile.

Living in small rural communities gives townsfolk an enormous appreciation for all the smiley-work the farmers do. In fact, in 1909, the city of Calmar couldn’t contain itself, and they organized a day to honor the work of the local farmers, and the business people who worked overtime to keep them going. A few years ago, Calmar Farmers’ Days ran a momentary risk of disappearing, but a few Calmar residents recognized how important it was to continue this annual homage. Members of The Calmar Commercial Club breathed new life into the event, and it’s bigger than before. The danger of not celebrating 100 years of Farmers’ Days is behind them. Traditions like these are the glue in small towns. We don’t usually throw out our aging traditions; we re-glue and clamp them.

Summer is busy in town, too, but it’s a different kind of busy. Getting up early and being outdoors releases the soul from its winter hibernation. Cuddling up, which felt so homey and comforting a few months ago, is replaced with joining hands and running outside. Gardens take time, as do fix-up projects, volunteer work on festival committees and summer sports activities, and whatever else we see that needs a helping hand. A group of local artists recently offered a Fairy Home Tour to support PAW (People for Animal Welfare) develop an animal shelter in Winneshiek County. The artists were busy building homes for the diminutive home tour, the organizers getting the whole thing planned, and the supporters took time to be loyal patrons of small town efforts.

In our neighborhood, we look around at ways to share our outdoor freedom. At the fair I ran into one of my across-the-alley neighbors. “My wild flowers have gone, well, wild, this summer, and please come over and take whatever you want. There are plenty for all of us to enjoy.” The neighborhood picnic is coming up, and we’ll have a rare chance relax with familiar faces that usually only exchange a wave and a holler.

This summer has held one unexpected pleasure. It’s kind of a corny little evolution of events that developed mish-mashy, stemming from an unthinkable tragedy. In March, a beautiful 36-year-old wife and mother of four young children, Gloria Ormord, collapsed and died at home in the early morning hours. It was one of those community-stunning occurrences, a healing that takes years to accomplish, though it is never fully done. Both town and country have offered what can be offered. Replacing what has been lost isn’t possible.

I wanted to spend some time doing creative, fun things with Gloria’s daughters. They are lively and precious beyond words, and my empty nest needed some occupants. Coincidentally, another friend commented that she wished her daughter could spend some time with me, because she likes doing the things I do. My friend felt a bit out of water in my arena. Hmmmm. Her daughter is the same age as one of Gloria’s. This is beginning to sound like fun, my emotions told my brain. My brain said it was thinking the same thing.

Our first day resulted in all of us getting matching flip-flops with Tootsie Rolls® on them, and by the end of the day we were calling ourselves “The Tootsie Chicks”. We have grown in size some since that first day, adding a new full-time member and an extended Tootsie Family of six more. Hubba is our mascot – he’s such a good sport, and lets us do all sorts of humiliating Tootsie adornments of him in pink. Please don’t tell him I told you.

The Tootsie Chicks meet once a week. There are no rules. We figure if someone acts up too much, we just won’t pick her up the next time. So far, everyone’s been safe. We make crafts out of our Tootsie Rolls® wrappers, we try to do something nice for other people, and we even made a fairy house for the PAW fundraiser. It’s not all fun, you know. Sometimes it’s crazy fun!

The Lovin’ Spoonful’s song reprieves itself in my head again this year. The words don’t even hold true for rural summer lives, but I sing them anyway. Summer songs make us feel good, and when I get to the lines, “Come-on come-on and dance all night, Despite the heat it'll be alright”, I can delete my winter memories and paste in my summer ones. Summer in town, with the Tootsie Chicks.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns July 2006

Farmer's Tan

2006-07-15T06:06:00.000-05:00

An entire segment of society exists who understand the term “farmer’s tan”. Everyone in the Midwest has a mental picture of a father, uncle, grandfather, or even a favorite guy at church (they don’t wear their seed corn caps on Sunday morning) leap into the frontal lobe, triggering the smile reflex.

Field work begins early in the spring and ends late in the fall. Farm animals need tending year ‘round, and pert’ near everyone keeps their livestock outside and/or in a barn, away from the house. Sorry to sound condescending, Midwesterners, but you know how city folk are. They don’t have a clear picture of farming, and often wonder about things, like do we keep pigs and chickens in our actual homes, even when they aren’t sick.

People who farm are going to get tan, there’s no getting around it. They get tan because they’re outside working, and they don’t even notice. I’m not sure if they put on sun screen, but I bet some of them do now that we know too much sun can either kill us or age us prematurely. Right. Just like some dairy farmers have started drinking skim milk.

You don’t wear shorts and sandals to farm. I’ve seen some of the guys wearing tank tops, but there are no metrosexuals in the country. Farm workers are very, very tan people – tan in places, that is. Their arms are tan from about mid-bicep down, including their hands if they aren’t fencing or baling hay. Their necks are gorgeous copper browns, as are their faces, up to the eyebrows. From there, the Pioneer or John Deere cap protects the farm worker’s head from too much sun, and their eyes from too much glare. Some of them will wear sunglasses – Oakleys – but most of them depend on the brims of their caps.

We’d visit our farming uncles when I was a girl. Uncle Harry never had a full tan on his face. He’d come in every noon for dinner and every evening for lunch (the turned-around names for the town versions of lunch and dinner), get washed up, and leave his hat in the mudroom. His big ol’ white forehead sat right there on top of his eyebrows, as his brown arms reached for the rolls and mashed potatoes. When we’d visit my Uncle Dean, it was the same thing. Uncle Dean sold Pioneer Seed Corn for many years, but he still bore half a pale face.

Farmer’s tans are a staple of rural culture, an understood event that draws no attention. City folk don’t see so many farmer’s tans, so they have a tendency to stop and stare, wondering why those people don’t take their off hats and even out their faces, or their shirts so they can brown up their shoulders and backs a little.

Those of us who live in town, and who believe we are prematurely aging in our fifties, are beginning to make choices. From the mid-1980’s, some of us have used tanning beds to achieve the all-over tan we found irresistible. Do that and you’ll pay, said the dermatologists. Assuming they meant someone else, we carefully timed ourselves as we were “laying a base” in early April. Burns, we heard from the fashion experts, were what caused cancer. Tans just caused premature aging. There, you dermatologists. Harpers did a lot of research to bring us this good news, so what do you know? Besides, who thinks about aging when you aren’t old?

Buddy Pat and I have advanced together through our life stages. Our daughters were born one week apart, and for the first seven years of their lives, that was the only week they weren’t together. Running things past Buddy Pat became second nature to me. We both have plenty of other friends we cherish dearly, but Buddy Pat and I always seemed positioned for the big stuff together. It’s one of those soul-sisterhoods, easy and not at all demanding.

I was talking to Buddy Pat on the phone the other day. We always start out having a regular conversation, exchanging information and catching up. She’s throwing her niece a bridal shower, and she told me her daughter Katie is spending another year teaching in Taiwan. It’s the usual stuff, and with our schedules we don’t get to talk on the phone that often. Without fail, though, one of us says something that cracks the other one up. We don’t mean to, but one of the hallmarks of our friendship is how dang funny we think we are. As I was signing off, I said, “I gotta go now. I’m going to go Fake Bake.”

“Fake Bake? Are you going to a tanning bed at this hour?”

“Naw, it’s a sunless thing,” and I filled her in about how I get this stuff from Kathy at the beauty shop. It’s a sunless tanning product that (get this) doesn’t rub off on your clothes when you sweat. Move over, sliced bread.

“Oh,” says Buddy Pat, “I just use the regular moisturizing lotions that have the sunless tanning stuff in them.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t it rub off on your clothes, like when your neck sweats?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just throw some on my arms and a little on my legs and don’t think about it again.”

“Okay, so what you’re telling me is that you give yourself a farmer’s tan on purpose with your Neutrogena™?”

Time marches on. Instead of being horrified at the prospect of only having tan arms and legs, we find the ease of maintaining that rather attractive. Stick with the farmers, friends. They are way ahead of the rest of us when it comes to self-esteem and common sense.

I think I will put a little bronzer on my forehead, though.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns 2006

Catching Up To Summer

2006-07-08T11:29:00.000-05:00

It’s been a corker of a summer so far! Now that the Fourth of July is behind us, I find I have some major obligations out of the way. We had the Onerheim Family Reunion last weekend in Ottumwa, Iowa. The Barn gathered together his offspring and made us all sit quietly together in church. We ate loose meat sandwiches from the Canteen and looked at slides, just like the old days. One offsprung family couldn’t make it, and the hole they left around the table was felt. The next generation down, the grandchildren, only yielded one brave soul. His cousins owe him bigtime, and they should acknowledge his representation from the positions of their post-college careers.

The quilters are back at it in the church basement. It is a relaxed group, and we are comfortable enough this summer to come and go as we please. We have developed a way to get the key to the room back and forth to each other, and before long we’ll start working on putting together the donated quilt blocks into one of the most unique quilts ever to leave a church basement. There’s nothing ordinary about the way we’re going about this, and the final presentation will most likely stand our impressions of what a quilt looks like on its ear. At least I hope so.

I have a few written pieces in process, and I’ll add them here within the next few weeks. I’m on a roll with the Midwestern lifestyle, and I do manage to get some quilting time in every week. I’m not moving fast enough to suit me on my current major project, but I’m inching along and not letting any free moments evaporate. At the end of that is usually a quilt.

So, check back soon. I’ll still be here, quilting and watching, watching and quilting. I’ll tell you all about it.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns July 2006

Notions

2006-06-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

I must have started and stopped the opening to this piece a dozen times. My mistake was writing the title first. Usually I just start keyboarding, and then think of a title out of what develops, but this time I wanted to write about one of my favorite quilting topics – NOTIONS. Oddly, when that word appears before me in black and white, I can’t think straight, and I start to babble. I’m not convinced that what I just wrote makes sense, but if I don’t keep going, I’ll never get this written…

In the years before I started quilting, I would visit quilt shows and fantasize about how those pieces went together. I studied fabric, and what worked or what didn’t. I was mesmerized about the secrets between the seams and inside the quilt, wondering how the sum of the parts created the whole.

My own first attempt was a clumsy piece with only a few seams – 5/8” seams, I might add, because I only knew pre-serger garment construction. The next attempt was the result of trying to follow a simple quilt-in-a-day type publication, and I didn’t believe the part about the accuracy of the ¼” seam. Experience is an excellent professor.

Then came the first completed quilt, which I named “First Try”, because I was either a.) in denial about the 5/8” seams and the inaccurate ¼” seams in the first two, or b.) not about to own up to them. Either way, this was my point of no return. From that quilt on, I was a quilt maker and proud of it, which is code for, “Leave me alone. I’m quilting.” Little did I know the cross-addictive properties of the art. Until then, I’d only heard about fabriholics.

I didn’t particularly like having to lay out a small fortune for the huge ruler and cutting mat recommended by my first official quilting teacher, but whatcha gonna do? I had previously purchased a rotary cutter, so I didn’t have to reduce my fabric-buying kitty by another six bucks, and I had already sprung for a floor-model Q-Snap frame. I contently assumed that I had everything I needed, and my attitude at the time was, “Let’s go buy some fabric and get started!” I call what happened next “Quilter’s Crack”.

It started in the book sections of quilt shops. I bought one, then another book of how-tos and patterns, and before I knew what hit me I was mainlining Fons & Porter. I wasn’t surprised to learn there is a tome distributed by Main Street Publishing called The Big Book of Quilting. I was in the early stages of addiction, and didn’t think for a minute that I needed any Big Book, which most certainly carried with it the requirement of going to 12-step meetings.

Hand-quilting accoutrements were the next stage in my downward spiral. The thimble pushers were shameless. I had my sights set on the Holy Grail of thimbles, one that came in my ring size with the fingernail space cut out. On one outing, I made Hubba drive all over kingdom come until I found one, and he gasped at the price. College expenses were in our future, he reasoned, and should we really be investing in a thimble?

“Shut up and pay the woman,” I told him. “I know what I’m doing.”

Collecting marking tools and mylar templates was almost more than I could bear. Sometimes I’d go to the little quilt shop downtown – I had already bought one of everything there, but I could hope a new shipment had arrived in the intervening hours since the last time I checked. Mary Ann Kepler at Country Calico would let me check out quilt templates instead of buying them. I tried that, but I always bought them. Mary Ann could satiate that desire, but it was almost an hour’s drive to her shop.

Before long I stopped looking at fabric altogether. A good quilt shop for me means one that has lots of books and lots of notions. A great one has lots and lots and lots of books and notions. When I find one of those, I enter the name, address, and phone number into my PDA, so I can look at it when I need a fix. I’ll probably add a GPS before long, so I won’t have to waste so much time looking for shops. In general I don’t get along with machines, but I love techie stuff. My PDA keeps infinite amounts of quilting information and shop locations in a slim, sleek little gadget that fits in any purse. Techie stuff and quilting notions.

Some Columbian quilt-lord has shamelessly introduced the Quilter’s FabriCalc™ onto the market. Uh, oh: techie quilting notions. The Quilter’s FabriCalc™ promises to simplify my quilt making by doing quilt math, and will even figure out how much fabric I need for one of my designs. I’m saving up for one of these – even though no one, including me and the Quilter’s FabriCalc™, knows how much fabric I need for a quilt before I start making it. Yet, we’re talking about something that’s techie and a quilt notion, and I feel myself being drawn in.

Notions. All I can say is, they keep me out of the dance halls.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns June 2006

The One That Got Away

2006-05-27T15:54:00.000-05:00

Can you imagine Madonna living in the Midwest? Well, Madonna is from Michigan, and Michigan is in the Midwest. Unfortunately, being born into advantage didn’t work for her. The buzz about her new Confessions world tour went full hum recently after its May 22 opening. Rolling Stone magazine said she’s launching her tour with a “disco crucifixion”. How lovely. There’s nothing like a slam at Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, to set your toe to tapping. And how original – again.

Newsday said, “The production was so tightly choreographed, it left little room for spontaneity. Even when Madonna flipped the crowd the bird, it felt scripted, not subversive.” Gee, I don’t imagine anyone had ever thought of that shocker before, either.

It is the mock crucifixion on a mirrored cross, wearing a crown of thorns, that seems to have most people up-in-arms, however there is more to the story than what you see on the surface. One commentator reported, “No stranger to controversy, the 47-year-old singer claimed her latest on-stage antics, including simulating sex and acting like a dominatrix, were to raise awareness for AIDS orphans.”

Purportedly, Madonna told the New York Daily News, “I don't think Jesus would be mad at me and the message I'm trying to send" … "Jesus would not mind” … “Jesus taught that we should love thy neighbor.” Okay, I’m convinced! Madonna is channeling Jesus, and people will pay up to $350 a ticket to see her do it. You can’t charge that much to make a whole quilt in the rural Midwest.

This sort of reminds me of the worst adolescent behavior I see when I’m subbing. A little Johnny will come up behind a little Billy, laughingly cut loose with a very blue expletive, smack Billy on the back of the head while grabbing his book/writing utensil/whatever, and run off, mocking Billy. I say, sharply, “Johnny!”

Johnny looks up at me, with a total look of blank bewilderment, and say, “Wha-at?”

Our eyes meet and lock.

“What? I wasn’t doing anything!”

It’s the Midwest. This is the time of Johnny’s life that we have a little sit-down. We want to clear up any confusion he may have over acceptable public behavior. We don’t want him to grow up and pay $350 for some dumb ticket, for crying out loud.

We also explain the whole concept of artistic license to our young ‘uns. Artistic license, we believe, involves a clear responsibility to respect the intelligence of your audience. If they are going to be shocked at your message, at least make them intellectually work for it. Don’t just wave it in front of them like a smelly sock, saying, “Do you think this sock stinks? Well, you’re right! It does! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!” That just isn’t thought-provoking.

We know some of ‘em will dye their hair funny colors, and pierce places on their face that make them look sort of nauseating to the grown-ups. Mostly, we hope they are just stretching their brains. They want to express themselves without being robots, even when all the subgroups look and act the same. They’ll still probably get a sit-down every now and then, to be sure they know the difference between artistic license and just being flat-out rude.

You’d hope somebody in Madonna’s background would have had a sit-down with her once or twice. Maybe she slipped through the cracks, where the school people were hoping the home people would address their concerns, and the home people were counting on the church people to do it. She wound up one neglected child, eventually becoming one strange adult.

She’s what we’d call “attention-seeking”, don’t you think? For her, having a message is only useful after you get everyone to look at you, when it can be used as a first line of defense.

“Madonna, stop showing off.”

“Wha-at? I’m not! I’m helping AIDS orphans.”

“Madonna, you’re 47-years-old. How many times do we have to go over this?”

Around here, it doesn’t count if you use your brains just to benefit yourself. Besides, 47-year-old brains should work better than 17-year-old brains. Of course, there are those outside the rural Midwest who call her a creative giant, a shrewd and effective business woman. We’d call her a self-possessed, self-aggrandizing, potty mouth with little respect for anyone outside her own sphere. And spunky. We’d call her spunky.

The world would have done just fine without this Madonna. The real pity is that she could have actually helped AIDS orphans. One of her Confessions props reportedly cost $2 million. You’d think the super-evolved, intelligent, and caring Madonna could have figured that out.

Still, if the sit-downs would’ve took, she would’ve been pretty durned interesting. We always want the creative ones to turn out well. Sometimes all they manage to do is get rich.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns May 2006

The Clock is Ticking...

2006-05-12T22:36:00.000-05:00

Hold on – just give me another minute. I know I missed writing last week, too, but I only have until Monday at 1:00 to turn in my quilt for the challenge. I am presently reinventing the way to attach a binding. I want to add this little fringy stuff at the same time, and the whole process is messing with my mellow. I had to unsew a significant portion of binding, at exactly the place where the stitch length went wacko. As a result, I need the big lighted magnifying glass to even find the stitches to unsew. Yes, that’s the same big lighted magnifying glass that hangs around my neck, the sight of which causes Hubba to run shrieking from the room. If Victoria’s Secret made such a magnifying glass, I’m sure he would change his tune.

Stay tuned. I’ll give a report from Monday’s challenge unveiling, a veritable diamond mine of creativity. Life is good when there is lint in the air.

I Meant To Do That

2006-04-29T11:50:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite movies is Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. The Dot and T-man were kids when it came out, and we re-watched the video enough times to have some of the themes and lines committed to memory.

“What’s it like in the Big House, Mickey?” This is my metaphor for the naiveté it takes to get myself into another crazy situation. It’s not that I don’t think things through; it’s that I define success as taking the risk. The consequences are just part of being alive.

“I meant to do that.” Pee Wee had just been having fun doing his version of trick-riding on his bike, and a crowd of kids had taken note. The stunts ended when Pee Wee crashed over a curb along the street, tumbling several times onto the grass. As he got up and brushed himself off, he attempted to mask his embarrassment by saying, “I meant to do that.”

I am so there with that.

A recent evening with friends reminded me of a long-forgotten example of my design process. First and foremost, I don’t want to make what everyone else is making. I have always been like that. I don’t want to wear exactly what everybody else is wearing, I don’t want to decorate just like everybody else is decorating, and I don’t want to create like everybody else is creating. I'll take the class with everybody else and learn how to do something, because I don’t want what I’m doing to be unrecognizable. I just don’t want it to be just the same.

In our fourth grade art class at Wildwood Elementary, we had a unit on ceramics. I knew the minute Mr. Eels pulled out that clay that I was looking at a class of twenty-one ashtrays and one Kari original. Those ashtrays were going to start out as Grecian urns or soup tureens, no doubt, but by the time they got home, they would be good old 1960’s-style ashtrays, glazed in avocado green or burnt orange and covering one third of a coffee table. Ashtrays were objects d’art in 1960’s homes.

Since The Barn and The Peg were teachers, we spent most of our summers on marathon vacations, camping out to make them affordable, and by-passing expensive amusement parks. Instead, we visited museums and historic sites. We first visited Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, at some date in time before the death of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1960. The Peg started collecting Toby mug cream pitchers somewhere along the line, and it must have been during this summer excursion east. A few years later I was sitting in fourth-grade art.

I briefly considered making a Toby mug cream pitcher, but my confidence in ceramic art made me certain I was looking at an eventual ashtray. I rightly figured I should stay away from the vessel genre altogether. I did see lots of busts in the museums and historical homes we visited. Maybe my clay could be a bust, but not of some old, dusty Colonial guy. I wanted my bust to be happening and now, Baby. I chose Bob Hope.

I loved Bob Hope! Who didn’t? A nice bust of Bob Hope would look right at home on the coffee table next to the giant orange ashtray, and it would speak of our refinement. Busts, after all, were a cut above ashtrays.

I set to work on my sculpture, making a three-inch square base for it. I was appalled at how skimpy Mr. Eels was with the clay! Those mini-ashtrays the other kids were making weren’t going to make the splash they thought they would. Tea bag holders, maybe, but rather anemic for mid-century ashtrays. In a few years they could easily be converted to incense holders, but we didn’t know that at the time.

The largest part of my clay allotment was formed into a ball and balanced on the base. I held back a few smaller pieces, for the ears and that ski-jump nose in Mr. Hope’s famous profile. I wasn’t doing too badly. I felt the clay move against my touch, and it was easy to re-form errors as my vision for the piece made its trek from my mind to the work in front of me.

In the end, I just couldn’t capture the guy. It was my first sculpture, and I found it frustrating that I couldn’t make it look like Bob Hope. As I examined my options, I looked at the piece with a new eye. The guy did look like someone famous, but it wasn’t Bob Hope. Turned out, it was a dusty old Colonial guy after all. I stuck a pony tail at the nape of his neck, and proudly took credit for my interpretation of George Washington, the father of our country.

This set a pattern that I still follow. I start with an idea, but I don’t marry myself to it. As I go, I design and refine, and interpret the piece’s strength as it takes shape before me. I can usually do as I did with my nine-year-old attempt at bust sculpture, and turn my frustrations into a new line of thought, not completely unconnected to the original vision, but not a slave to it, either. It’s what makes original quilt design less of an onus and more of a free and confident step in fiber art.

Besides, I can always fall back on the best reasoning ever, thanks to Pee Wee.

I meant to do that.

Copyright © April 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

The Best Quilting Excuse Ever

2006-04-22T14:19:00.000-05:00

I decided to participate in the Piecemaker’s (Spring Grove, Minneosota) Quilt Guild challenge. We got a fat quarter of the challenge fabric at our March 20 meeting, and the show is the Syttende Mai Fest the weekend of May 19-21. Syttende Mai is translated as “The Seventeenth of May”, and is the Norwegian Independence Day. Since May 17 is on a Wednesday, the Syttende Mai Fest is held the following weekend. Thank heavens. The few extra days are needed, since we only have less than nine weeks to complete our challenge projects.

I told you about the “rules” of the challenge last week. In addition to the challenge fabric, which is limited to the fat quarter, we can use three other fabrics, no more, and the project must be quilted. I’ve been squeezing out as much time as I can from my schedule to work on it, but it is getting to be crunch time now – less than four weeks remain. Some people may feel the pressure at this point.

Are you kidding? A deadline? Nothing could be sweeter when it comes to quilting – a deadline means I must work on my quilt. Dust and shower scum no longer have a hold on me, and if we can’t order it as a carry-out, we don’t need to eat it. I manage to bake a cake every now and then, but the rest of the time is spent designing and sewing and embellishing and grinning.

I’ve been meaning to learn how to post pictures to this dang blog, and posting a shot of my challenge quilt may be the motivation. Right now, however, I need to use my fingers for something a little more linty than a computer keyboard. I must! I have a deadline! The sweet pressure of it all…

It’s the best quilting excuse ever.

Copyright © April 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Taking the Exam for a Creative License

2006-04-15T15:27:00.000-05:00

In dubbing myself a “free-range” quilter, I have developed my own parameters for linty behavior. It seems dichotomous to mention parameters when discussing free-range anything, but quilting and needlework are my metaphor for life. It’s more common to overuse sports metaphors, but sports-related topics always make me throw up a little in my mouth, so I don’t go there.

Being free is only interesting when I also consider the world around me. Philosophically, it’s a good place to be, too. The result of “if it feels good, do it” is all too often, “I thought it would feel good, but someone else got hurt, so now I feel worse than ever”. Having a choice doesn’t mean all choices result in circumstances of equal value. The first choice people have is the one that determines their own bottom line, and hopefully eliminates what goes against their core values.

Putting parameters around freedom allows us to stretch our brains into a bouquet of creative blooms. Take the whole concept of a challenge quilt. The quilter receives a fabric choice or two, and a set of rules. On the surface, the rules sound like they limit our creative flow, but the paradox is that they stimulate it. The last thing you want in a new crop of challenge quilts are projects that look alike. Observers should have to figure out what the common denominator is among the quilts, and then ponder what was going on in the fiber artists’ heads during their design stage.

I call my style “free-range” quilting. When The Dot and T-man were young, Hubba and I set the rules for acceptable behavior. In doing so, we found it was best to set as few rules as possible, but to make them count. No hitting, respect others, be kind. Similarly, my rules for free-range quilting are few but important – the quilt must have an original artistic concept and yet be used as a traditional quilt. I like quilts that do something, not just sit there. That’s Midwestern of me, dog-gone-it, and if a bed quilt can double as a wall-hanging or an original table covering, that’s fine.

Sort of. Most of the quilts I make fall within my “nap quilt” size guidelines. I prefer to adorn beds with my quilts, but they don’t have to be queen- or king-sized for that to work. About the size of the top of a queen-sized bed, nap quilts can decorate a bed on top of a neutral coverlet or bedspread, displayed flat or at a jaunty angle. If the sun shines in through a non-northern window and threatens to leach color from a 100% cotton creation, it can easily be folded up and moved out of harm’s way. If you take a nap under one of these quilts, it is large enough that it won’t be kicked it off, hence the name. Research, or experience, tells us that naps are more effective under a hand-made quilt.

I inwardly cringe when I see a hand-made, heirloom quilt hanging on a wall, unless it is a temporary display, such as in a quilt show or short-term public exhibition. Quilts are made of fabric, usually 100% cotton. They will attract dust and are prone to fading from the sun or fluorescent lighting, all of which will weaken the fibers and eventually render the quilt useless for any purpose. Hanging will distort the painstaking efforts of the quilt maker, who worked so hard to provide a piece of family history. That care goes unappreciated as the quilt deteriorates, and subsequent generations are denied the heritage that fiber artist had planned for them.

Next, my free-range quilts need to be constructed in a manner that will encourage careful but regular use. If appliqué is used, it needs to be sturdy enough to hold up to napping, and within reason, laundering. The same goes for embroidery or any other elements used to embellish a quilt. Decorative pillows are another way quilting can be used, and not sit there doing nothing. Ribbon embroidery and non-traditional quilting techniques may lose their integrity in a working quilt, but such fancy-schmancy elements work fine in a pillow. I am careful when using embellishments that may itch, stab, or create discomfort for the user. It’s hard to resist the temptation sometimes, but freedom with limits challenges me to consider the world around me.

I’m making a challenge quilt right now, as a member of the Piecemakers quilt guild of Spring Grove, Minnesota. We received one fat quarter of the challenge fabric, and instructed to use it and no more. We are allowed three more fabrics to complete our project, and although we can make anything we want, it must be quilted. Other than that, we can do whatever our brains and imaginations allow us create. If every single person added my guidelines and made a nap quilt, viewers would still have a time figuring out the common denominator – the challenge fabric. The limits don’t come from the rules in life. They come from within the person.

Go “free-range” with your quilting and your life. Give yourself the license to broaden your skills, widen the scope of what you believe about yourself, and conquer what seems impossible. It’s you, unique, principled, and a boundless joy to the world around you.

Amen. Cha-cha-cha.

Copyright © April 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Live From Caracas

2006-04-12T08:57:00.000-05:00

Just this week I contacted the Microsoft folks, via their website, about an issue I was having with my Pocket PC and my computer. Yeah, I’ve been using an electronic calendar and address book (not to mention my recipe file, grocery list, and task scheduler) for about five years now. Hopefully, my next cell phone will have both Pocket PC and Bluetooth capabilities, but I digress. Electronic gadgets and quilting notions hold a siren-level allure for me, however I must continue with my story.

In search of a solution to my problem, I went to the Microsoft website and located the entity that would provide an answer. I was brief, since I was allowed a limited number of words in the box provided on the website. I said:

My pocket PC and my computer (using Activesync) cease to synch when the device is in the cradle for a period of time, and the computer has gone to sleep. When I remove the device and reconnect it to the cradle, it still doesn't synch. There is no error message. It is as though the device was not in the cradle at all. How can I force a synch between the computer and the device?

TIA for your help.

Kari Burns

As promised, I heard back from Microsoft’s obedient employee named Naveen within 24 hours. He/she said:

Hello Kari,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Online Customer Service.

I understand that you are unable to synchronize your Pocket PC with your computer. I realize the importance of the issue.

However, from the information you have provided in your message, I found that you are located in Venezuela. If you have purchased the Microsoft product in Venezuela, your best resource for support is the Microsoft Venezuela subsidiary.

There are significant programming differences between North America and localized versions of software. You will be best assisted by the subsidiary that specializes in the version. You can locate contact information for the Venezuela subsidiary from the following web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/venezuela/

Also, you can contact the Venezuela subsidiary at: +58-212-2760500

Kari, I hope your issue gets resolved soon and appreciate your patience in this regard.

Thank you for using Microsoft products and services.

Naveen
Microsoft Online Customer Service Representative

Thank you, Naveen! This week commenced as many others, with more things to do than there is time available. A brief trip to Venezuela was something I hadn’t expected. It was so relaxing, and I appreciated the chance to get away for a few minutes. But, as the fly did with the spider, Naveen has stepped into my parlor, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to demonstrate a little good old-fashioned Midwest ribbing for him.

Dear Naveen,

As you can see from my signature, I live in Iowa. That’s in the United States, just below Minnesota and just above Missouri. These states are in what we call “The Midwest”. Perhaps you have heard them referred to as “flyover country”. Amazingly, we have computers and are hooked up with the internet, and everything! My 89-year-old father, who also resides in Iowa, has two computers. Can you believe it? I think the latest one was delivered four months ago by Dell via Wells Fargo Wagon, and he picked it up during the noon mail call at the town square.

It is my only hope that there are not significant programming differences between North America and The Midwest, but I think you can understand that I now believe anything is possible. If there is a distinct Midwest subsidiary that specializes in this version, could you please send me the link? I will keep the generator going on my computer until I hear back from you.

Just kidding! Thanks, Naveen, for letting me have some fun. Since I contacted you from the Microsoft website, I probably didn’t notice that I had to check the U.S. box, or whatever I needed to do to hep you to the fact that I am a US resident and so is my three-month-old HP media center computer. I hope you can help me with my problem, which is that the synchronization between my Pocket PC and my computer (using Activesync) disconnects when my computer goes to sleep. I cannot always get that synchronization to re-engage, even if I remove the device from the cradle and reboot my computer. I was wondering if there is some way I can force a synch between my computer and my device, or if there are some steps I can take to re-engage the synch between my device and computer.

Again, thanks for your quick reply and for letting me tease you a little. I hope you have a great day, and I look forward to hearing from you again!

Kari Burns

And then it was back to same ol’, same ol’. Perhaps I deserve it if Naveen doesn’t get back to me at all, and I’ll probably have to start over on the Microsoft website. I wouldn’t leave the Midwestern life for any other, though. Sitting under the shaded shelter of a maple tree and watching the Synchronized End Loader Team during one of our local parades is something one just cannot bear to trade.

Besides, in these cyber-days, a trip to Caracas is but a mouse click away. Thanks for the break, Naveen!

Copyright © April 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

A-OK

2006-04-01T15:36:00.000-06:00

Dear Friends,

I actually had a few e-mails this week wondering if everything was okay here in Northeast Iowa. The blog postings have shifted to a lower priority in the last few weeks, but we are all fine. If I don't show up here regularly in the next few weeks, fear not. Once I get my taxes done and the QUILT for the Piecemakers (Spring Grove, Minnesota) Quilt Guild under control, I'll be back putting fingers to keyboard - the techie version of pen to paper - and fill more cyberspace with my meanderings.

I did update the post about The Barn's birthday on March 18th, however. It follows.

Enjoy!
Her Quiltness, Kari

Our 89-Year-Old Barn

2006-03-18T11:05:00.000-06:00

The Barn always told me we had a lot of long livers in our family tree. I didn’t understand the how the measurement of a vital organ would bring him such pride, but by the monkeyshine in his eyes, I figured there must be some riddle in the remark. Once he had me hooked, he’d say, “Grandma Snorteland lived until she was ninety-two, Uncle Oscar was ninety-six, Uncle Christ was eighty-nine, and Aunt Laurensa was seventy-eight. We have a lot of long livers.”

It’s a homegrown version of a Barney Joke, those quips that have given him legendary status among his offspring and our peers. The definition of a Barney joke is one that, when the punchline is revealed, draws a deep groan from the listener, but which the listener will retell many times as the daffy cleverness of it cures and mellows in our humor centers. His own inventions are often the best.

Being grandparents and retired in their sixties, it was always fun to have The Barn and The Peg pop up from Southeast Iowa to visit our two contributions to their rogues gallery. One morning I emerged from our bedroom to find The Barn making breakfast for The Dot. Grandpa Barney told me he was making her breakfast, because she had “beat him up” that morning.

“What?!” Then I noticed the familiar monkeyshine eyes.

“Morgan was up at 6:00, and I didn’t get up until 6:15. She beat me up.”

If you hear yourself repeating this to others, you’ll have entered the land of Barney Jokes.

Barney Games are another trip to Huh?-ville. A music educator and father of five, and possessing a mind that doesn’t quit, his entertainment was way past musical chairs and into composing songs and thinking up word games. Our long summer family vacations bred all sorts of diversions. To this day I can’t look at a license plate without coming up with a slogan to match the scramble of numbers and letters inscribed there. To her horror, The Dot does it, too, but she’s learning like the rest of us to expect the bemused look on the faces of her friends.

One fabled game has spread out beyond the family and into the lives of casual acquaintances. While visiting The Barn a few years ago, he showed me a letter from the adult child of one of his friends. “I’ll never forget playing ‘Tree’. I taught it to my kids, and they’re teaching it to theirs.”

Get out. Tree?

Tree was the brainchild of The Barn on our long summer tours throughout the Upper 48, Canada, and Mexico. When getting from Point A to Point B, The Barn didn’t mess around. We’d easily cover 500 miles a day, back before Interstate highways were plentiful. Besides, getting off the main roads made the trip more interesting.

He made a “car kitchen” for the back seat, rendering the back door behind the driver’s seat useless for getting in and out of the station wagon. With this invention, he foreshadowed the minivan by nearly thirty years. The Peg sat next to the “car kitchen”, and dispensed water from the buttoned spout of the big Thermos jug that sat in its custom slot on the top shelf. There were shelves that held Tupperware containers full of things that were needed throughout the day, including Keen, a fruit-flavored powder that we could mix for our afternoon snack, and the cookies The Peg would pack each day.

Each day we would get a big bag of Scotsman’s® ice, and dump it into the ice chest that sat on the shelf across the seat of the “car kitchen”. Instead of buying soda pop or sugary/salty snacks, we’d get a cup of ice. It was fun, too! We’d have contests to see who could hold an ice cube in his or her mouth the longest. If a sibling ticked you off, you could always sit behind them and loudly crunch on ice cubes. That really burned ‘em, but they knew if they complained, the ice cruncher won, so a battle of the wills ensued.

It’s hard to mention the “car kitchen” and not be reminded of “the sleeve”. Each year, while on these long trips with hours on the road, The Barn would rest his arm out the driver’s side window. To prevent sunburn, The Peg fashioned a temporary full-length sleeve from one of his old shirts, retaining the collar and button closure.

“Where’s my sleeve? Oh, here it is. Has everyone gone to the restroom? We aren’t stopping again, you know. Peggy, do you have the coffee can?” We had that along “just in case”. “Once we get on the road, I’ll have a cup of Scotsman’s® ice, please.”

Keeping five growing kids cooped up in a station wagon all day, with one stop at noon for a picnic lunch and maybe an afternoon stretch, meant that those limbs needed some serious movement in the little amount of time we could afford. 500 miles was a haul in those days, but it didn’t get you as far when the roads were twisting and slowing for every little town. We couldn’t always find a park with playground equipment, either, so we had to work with what we had.

“All right, now everyone pay attention. When I say, ‘Tree,’ I want you all to run and find a tree. One tree apiece, and when you get there, just wait for my command. When I say, ‘Tree,’ again, each of you run for another tree. Remember, one tree apiece.”

So, like five little cramped-up zombies, we waited motionless until he exploded, “Tree!” We ran like the dickens to the first tree of our choice. I always ran for the least obvious tree, little sister Lora for the tree that needed the most comfort, Neil to the farthest tree (and he’d get there first, too, because he was the fastest runner), Paul, the oldest, would command the largest tree in the middle, and Jeanie would make a determined stride to the tree she deemed the most logical choice.

“Tree!”

Another scramble, and we’d choose Tree Number Two with less care, but with more energy than Tree Number One.

“Tree!”

The game continued, and we relished the relief of having some much-needed activity.

“Tree!”

Soon enough we’d start to giggle at how silly the whole thing was. There were no rules, no winners, no competition, and no skill required. We were all equals, blowing off steam in a crisscrossed, catawampus pattern of running and release.

Hubba and I are making the trek south from our nest in the bluffs of Northeast Iowa, through the stretches of soil-rich acres and the villages that bring commerce to farm families, and into the former coal mining center of Southeast Iowa. It’s a happy trip, one that ends in our celebrating The Barn’s 89th birthday. I’ll check to see how long his liver is getting, and groan when he tells me the joke I’ll hear myself repeating for the next week. Not everyone gets a father like The Barn, and we have another year of blessings to count with him.

Happy 89th Birthday, The Barn!

Copyright © March 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Unspeakable Misery

2006-03-10T19:39:00.000-06:00

It is nearly impossible to consider. The e-mail, shrouded in pain, said simply, “I thought you should know – Gloria Ormord died this morning.” In my horror, I deleted the e-mail for good. It just wasn’t right. A phone call supplied the verification that the words were real, but it still didn’t make sense.

Gloria and her husband Brian had recently transplanted their four children from the Twin Cities to the bucolic sweetness of our rural community. Gloria’s parents had come “home” years earlier, and the Ormords eventually followed, building their dream home and settling in.

We met Brian as a member of our ushering crew, and immediately liked his easy-going and open nature. My first conversation with Gloria was beyond flattering. She told me she noticed my name in the bulletin when here visiting her parents, and liked it so much she used it when naming their second daughter. That decision had nothing to do with me at all, but it was noteworthy that she would have mentioned it so kindly. Our quick and sporadic conversations held the promise of a budding friendship, and I counted on the opportunity to know her better.

Brian agreed to lead the 40 Days of Community program at our church last fall, and when he called to include Hubba and me on the planning committee, we jumped at the chance to get to know him better. We wanted to get to know him better. Everyone who meets him does.

With four school-aged children, getting to know Gloria would never advance beyond the gabbing we could fit in while sitting in the pew or greeting each other in the Narthex. She had lots of new friends, I learned, in the parents of her children’s classmates. She had the opportunity to cement those relationships in their mother’s bible study and on the sidelines of school events.

There is no sense to her death. She was here one minute, and gone the next. She was in church for Lenten service on Wednesday night, and collapsed early Thursday morning, before the kids were even off for school. And now what?

Heaven, that’s what. Gloria, her husband, her parents and brothers and sisters and extended family share the knowledge that there is an order in this chaos. There is a divine gift in the faith that comes with this knowledge. That faith gift doesn’t make those who survive her happy that she’s in heaven. No, everyone wants her here, where she is needed and loved and embraceable. Who could ever be ready to give her up, let alone with such cruel abruptness at an inopportune age, with young children and a husband who relies on her?

But Gloria is in Heaven. It does indeed bring comfort, but it’s comfort in the place of understanding. Those of us left behind want to believe that having her here is better than having her in Heaven. We understand very clearly that she is needed here, and those she left behind will suffer terribly because she isn’t. There is no way to translate the bereavement of her mother, her father, her husband, and most of all, her children, who will bear the loss the longest of all. We cannot understand, but we know she is in Heaven.

And what can we do? Pray. It’s another crazy notion, like the crazy-stupid comfort that Gloria is in Heaven. Brian and the children and her parents and her brothers and sisters and extended family need our prayers. They need our casseroles, our babysitting, our hands and hearts and embraces of sympathy. Though not the same coming from us, it’s what we can offer. Those are the concrete things that Gloria could give them, some of which any of us can provide.

Gloria wants us to pray for them, too. She lived that bidding. She wants us to keep praying, because she believed in prayer, learning it from her parents and teaching it to her children. She prayed with her husband and her brothers and sisters. She prayed with her friends.

We are in the continuum of belief with Gloria. She now knows what we believe and hope for, and at some point we’ll begin to feel her cheer us on through the pain to the promise. The healing will eventually begin, but the loss will never be understood.

Believing, praying, Heaven. The promise of the Father, the journey of the Son, and the gift of the Spirit, passed in love from generation to generation. It is what joins us all in Gloria, and brings strength to our sharing with her bereaved, pained family.

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for Gloria Hougen Ormord’s life. Her presence here was a blessing to those who knew her, and we will trust in Your will to provide comfort and aid for those she left here. Heal us, Father. The misery is unspeakable, so we will listen to the words You speak to us instead. Amen.

Copyright © 3/10/06 Kari E.O. Burns

Lyddie's Quilt

2006-03-04T12:37:00.000-06:00

Every now and then something you expected to be good turns out to be unexpectedly good. Being me, I like to describe what at first I find indescribable, so that it will emerge from the mists of my mind into something more tangible.

This is also an update about the group of home-schooled students I have been teaching to quilt. We have all learned something from this experience, and for me it is the realization that teaching children ranging in ages from five to ten to quilt, even in a group of four, is difficult. The younger the student, the more need there is to rely on the parents to see the project to completion. If the older children can work more independently, the younger children may berate themselves for their natural limitations. Fortunately, philosophical considerations are a part of this home school setting, and questions of self-worth can be properly positioned.

What’s more, each child in this specific home school setting has her or his individual talents recognized, and they don’t expect to be carbon copies of one another. Each student was clearly distinguishable from the first session I had with them, and I observed each one’s flair surface every time we met.

Lydia is one of the big kids. She has a natural interest in fiber things, as she already knew how to knit and sew before she came to try quilting. We took a long break over the holidays, and in that time Lydia had been pestering her mother to finish her quilt top. Since the class is using reclaimed and recycled fabrics, she had incorporated a nice array of fabrics gathered from a grandmother who sews garments. She instinctively recognized the properties of light and dark fabrics, along with the flexibility available with medium shades. A few patches were from clothing that was ready for recycling, and there were two notable swatches of fabric that had been used as a makeshift tourniquet-type dressing when Lydia had been hiking with her grown-up friend Kristen.

With input from her grandma, Lydia was able to arrange a pattern of light and dark, with the mediums serving as either a light or a dark, just to add interest. She had joined together four-patch units as a start, but had become unsure how to proceed beyond that. Her mother had spoken with me a few times since the first of the year, and I learned that Lydia had been pressing her to continue with classes so that she could produce the completed top.

After one of these conversations, I decided maybe it would be a good thing for Lydia and me to work together, quilting for a day and exploring her options, so that she would be confident in her choices. Though we had worked as a group before, Lydia’s intensity led me to understand that she would appreciate having the time to work with me alone. We met to review where she was on her project, and set a date for a good old-fashioned quilting bee for two.

I was looking forward to our day together. I flat out like Lydia to begin with, but her drive to work with fiber was quite familiar to me - I was doing similar things at her age, and I knew how important it was to chart my progress with a competent adult. Lucky for me, The Peg was under the same roof. I wanted to spend a day with Lydia to meet that same need in her.

We laid out the pieces, fussed and moved some about, and made a couple of corrective decisions to even out the look she was trying to achieve. It was then just a matter of getting the pieces joined. I pinned and Lydia sewed, making the progress methodical and measurable. By the time Hubba came home for lunch, we were down to attaching the last outer border. It was fun, but I knew it would be. I expected that.

The unexpected part came from Lydia and me growing our friendship. We communicated mutual respect from the start, focusing on her goal and considering each other’s suggestions. Lydia was in the driver’s seat, and took responsibility for making the quilt meet the vision of her mind’s eye. I was able to talk about technique, and help her discover ways to rotate choices. Everybody who has ever quilted knows how confusing the layout stage can be. The obvious can be hidden in a spectrum of fabric squares, and it helps to have someone say, “If you turn it this way, it will work.”

As the quilt grew, she became more and more energized. She would squeal every now and then, giggling and wiggling, and saying, “I can’t wait! This is getting so exciting!” Lint lovers understand each other.

We shared our histories and ideas we have about life, a process that people can’t plan out ahead of time. For some odd reason, I asked her if she had a nickname. She told me that some people call her “Lyd”, and that sometimes she is called “Lyddie”. Yes! I had heard her mother say that, but at the time it hadn’t registered as a nickname. It sounds so familiar to call her “Lyddie”, and that’s what I say in my head when I think about her now.

I told Lyddie that I name my quilts. I reminded her about “She Reposes Among Roses…” (she had seen a picture of that one) and “Neil’s Garden, Zinnias for Judith”. Lyddie told me she grows zinnias, the brightly-colored ones I first saw in my brother’s garden. She had the look, like the one I get when engaged in a naming puzzle, and I knew she would eventually solve that puzzle for her own. A little more time with her quilt will do the trick.

Hubba knew the drill. When he came home for lunch, he proceeded directly to where we had Lyddie's quilt laid out. He was complimentary, and genuinely impressed that a ten-year-old had the stick-to-itiveness to put together a project of this scale. Over our sandwiches, I mentioned naming the quilt again.

“Bill. I think you should name it Bill. Bill the Quilt,” Hubba proposed. Lyddie and I rolled our eyes, but we couldn’t help but snicker at the silly suggestion.

“We name our quilts like paintings, not like people.”

“Okay, but I still think 'Bill the Quilt' is a good name.”

After we cleaned up the kitchen, Lyddie and I attached the last of the border pieces. Then we smoothed the quilt out on the floor in front of the couch, and we sat there and looked at it for quite some time. We talked about the movement of the pattern, the interest brought by the double use of the mediums, sometimes acting as a light and sometimes as a dark. We remarked on the size of the finished top, and how it would be suitable to nap under when she was as grown as I.

Lyddie will discover the name of her quilt. Once it is sandwiched, and she starts quilting with perle cotton, it will come to her. As it turns out, though, it already has a nickname. For now we refer to Lyddie’s quilt as “Bill”.

I knew this day would be good – my friend Lydia were going to quilt. I just didn’t expect that it would end with my buddy Lyddie and me calling a conglomeration of fabrics she had gathered from family and friends “Bill”. It turned out to be better than good. I love when that happens.

Copyright © March 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Cutting Edge, Northeast Iowa Style

2006-02-25T11:00:00.000-06:00

Recycling is one Midwestern habit from which few have strayed. Those who did are coming back to their roots, and for reasons beyond the frugality that established the practice. We now add the “green advantage” when reusing products, or choosing not to use something if there isn’t a need.

Most people in Northeast Iowa recognize the importance of reducing what is in our landfills in order to protect our families, livestock, and fields from contamination. We understand how food gets to our tables, and the cycle that brought it there - nothing originated on the shelves of the M & M Family Market and Catering.

The Upper Iowa River Watershed (UIRW) is an area of “steep and rugged landscape”, a cover for the karst topography unique to our region. In a report from the Northeast Iowa RC&D, The Upper Iowa River Watershed Project states, “Karst topography is defined by land that is underlain by soluble bedrock, such as limestone, and characterized by depressions in the ground, or sinkholes, caves, and underground drainage. Because water can enter the subsurface easily through conduits and fractures in the soluble limestone bedrock, karst aquifers are highly susceptible to contamination.”

This description in the report sounds familiar to us: “Karst topography features in the watershed include; springs, streams that disappear into bedrock fissures, sinkholes, caves, and steep, highly erodible hillsides. These features facilitate direct mixing of surface and ground water. Karst experts typically measure the development of karst by the number of sinkholes, springs and known caves. The UIRW has thousands of sinkholes, hundreds of springs and dozens of known caves.”

Two sentences from a study released through the U.S. Geological Survey called Karst Topography – Teacher’s Guide and Paper Model explain it well. “Although karst processes sculpt beautiful landscapes, karst systems are very vulnerable to ground water pollution due to the relatively rapid rate of water flow and the lack of a natural filtration system. This puts local drinking water supplies at risk of being contaminated.”

Heck, we’ve known for quite awhile that our beautiful landscape is largely shaped by the dissolving action of water on carbonate bedrock, meaning our limestone bluffs are a mixed blessing. What we put into sinkholes and landfills, the chemicals we put onto our fields, and concentrated animal waste aren’t filtered naturally here. We run a greater risk of getting undesirable and harmful stuff in the water we drink.

The watershed data merely supports age-old practices. What it boiled down to in our household was The Great Depression. The Barn and The Peg would look with wide-eyed horror at the things my generation put curbside on garbage day.

“We went through the Depression, and we had to do without. We know better than to waste anything!”

The Peg purchased two sleeves of Styrofoam cups back in the early Sixties. She thought they would be handy to take on our summer vacations, long camping marathons that allowed a family of seven to economically tour the Upper 48. Handy, yet she washed and reused those white 8-ounce vessels, and still had at least a fourth of the original purchase when she moved into retirement living in 1996. Her offspring would commiserate, saying,

“She went through the Depression, you know.”

The Barn added a bathroom for my sister and me around the cement-block shower stall in the basement of 415 Quincy Avenue, Ottumwa, Iowa. He defined the “unfitted” look I later mimicked in my 2000 A.D. kitchen renovation. The two sinks, salvaged from who-knows-where, were both white, but the similarities ended there. He used odds ’n ends lumber to create a beautiful, enormous wall of cabinets, and painted the concrete walls and floor of the entire 150-square-foot space with a speckled pink, turquoise, and white waterproof finish, reminiscent of terrazzo. It was a labor of love and recycled good stuff. Our reaction?

“He went through the Depression, you know.”

The Peg designed and made the most imaginative clothes for my sisters and me, from what her Home Ec students at Charles D. Evans Junior High would toss into the trash. I possess one of those signature outfits, which she kept for some silly reason. The fabric was still good, so perhaps she planned to use it for something else. “Waste not, want not,” was her motto, and she repeated it …frequently.

“The Depression, you know.”

The Peg didn't like it when I left things unfinished. It's not that she nagged, but having been through the Depression, she didn't take investments in materials lightly. When, in my thirties, I finished and framed an embroidered linen sampler I began for her ten years earlier, she blurted out, “I didn't think I'd ever see this!”, enunciating a fear that I had squandered my purchase. I’m not positive there is a connection between her response and the state of the economy during her formative years, but a common justification of Baby Boomers when we don't understand our parents' behaviors is,

“They went through the Depression, you know.”

I teach people to quilt using reclaimed and recycled fabric. Like The Barn and The Peg, I relish the challenge of making something beautiful and useful from what had once been rubbish. Hubba and I know very few people who don’t recycle now, and know plenty who think throwing away perfectly good stuff makes no sense.

Our abilities to be creative, and pride in our beautiful Northeast Iowa landscapes have connected generations, spawned art and inventively useful items, and joined political debaters in common goals of healthy and inspired living. People elsewhere may not appreciate the multi-faceted advantages to recycling, but we do here. By the time others catch up to our innovations, we’ll be the masters of it. It seems we’re on the cutting edge of a movement, already there before it was a movement.

Oh, yeah. We’re hot.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns February 2006

Please Pass the Puffs

2006-02-11T13:52:00.000-06:00

A sap. I have always been one, and was forced to suffer the embarrassment of it for many years.

As a child I was aware how easily other people’s behaviors affected me. When a stranger smiled at me, I involuntarily smiled back. I observed some children stick up their noses and turn their heads, and wished I could do that. I would try, but the best I could muster was to hide my face and hope they hadn’t seen my weakness. If I sneaked a peek and they were still smiling, I was cooked.

Even today, sad movies make me cry. I’m really only interested in feel-good movies and chick flicks, and I complain insincerely when tear-jerkers send me over the edge. I kept this personality fault in the closet for all of junior high and most of high school, and in college I avoided situations that would trigger a reaction. As I said, it was embarrassing!

Eventually it was just me and other adults dealing with my over-sappism, and I benefited from their politeness. My peers blamed the cold season for my sniffling during the last ten minutes of any Movie of the Week, and I was grateful for their forgiving dispositions. It seemed that I was doomed to cry during sad movies, or when reading or even hearing a sappy story.

Being a mother added a new audience to this behavior. I thought I had a kindred spirit, observing The Dot at three-years-old watching a movie about a seal. In the end, the seal had to be put back into the ocean, and the little boy in the movie cried. There was plenty of violin music to emphasize the travail, and The Dot, my pride and joy, blubbered. Sis-tah!

The little traitor turned on me, though. In possession of some of Hubba’s stoic genes, she cultivated the ability to reach down inside and choke off the tear bulb. By the time she was eight, she had developed Mom-tear radar. Anytime a song on the radio, or (heaven forbid) something on the big screen down at The Viking Theater got a little hokey, The Dot would turn her chin-set, stubborn face towards me, bring it close, and all but dare me to whimper. Big deal, I thought. I am woman, hear me cry. Deal with it, Dot.

She refused to watch Beaches with me. She was uptight for years about the spectacle I’d made when The Viking screened My Girl. Unfortunately for her, the new elementary principal was sitting behind us, and I had pestered him for his spare popcorn napkin. To make matters worse, I honked into it while caterwauling, “This just isn’t fair! The only purpose of this movie is to make people cry! What abusive cruelty!”

The worm began to turn about five years ago. I had suggested The Dot keep an eye out for the old Bette Davis movie, Dark Victory, remembering it had a powerfully cleansing effect on me when I was her age. Something in her demeanor had led me to believe that she was more comfortable with her share of my DNA, and I wanted to test that. We finally found it on cable one day. Oh, yeah. She bawled like a newborn.

These days she is more comfortable with a spectrum of emotions. She isn’t embarrassed by my sappiness, because I think she gets it: openly expressing deep feelings is a double-dip into the vulnerable pot. Only those with whom we feel safe will witness a display.

The Dot and I spent significant time recently, talking about how we have each changed through the years. She had been home for awhile, preparing for a move to Chicago. What fun to reminisce about how funny I thought she was at age three, and how funny she thought I was when she was thirteen! It pleased us to speak of our family’s close ties, and we agreed that we don’t take it for granted. We mentally high-five each other every day, wherever we are. It’s cool. So cool.

One day before she left, I came into the kitchen and discovered my daughter weeping. Big fat tears, brimming from hazel eyes that appeared greener with each drop.

“What’s wrong?”

She tried to speak, but instead fanned her hands through the air as though to dry newly-polished nails. She turned her head, shaking it as though she could bring back common sense with the motion.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m excited about my move, but I’ve had such a good time being at home. This is like the feeling I had when summer camp was over.”

She wasn’t sad, she told me, she was grateful. She wasn’t upset, she was happy. There are times when adults just cry, and she had outgrown her need for protective, chin-setting denial. The world, you know, needs people who are tender-hearted.

Uh-huh. My work here is done. Please pass the Puffs.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns, February 2006

Separating and Pruning Our Roots

2006-02-04T11:44:00.000-06:00

Did you miss me? Last week, posting to Threadquarters became a victim to time poverty. We’ve talked about this before, almost to the point of whining, so there’s no need to dwell on it. Life is so blessedly full, and there are more things to do than there are hours in the day to do them. What confounds me is when I hear people say, “There’s nothing to do here.”

Huh? Are you kidding?!

I’ve come to the conclusion that being a Midwesterner isn’t a privilege of birth, after all. People move here from other regions of the country all the time, observing that this is the lifestyle they’ve been looking for. You can’t tell them from the real deal. They aren’t trying to change us into New Yorkers or San Diegans, and they slide effortlessly into our communities by rolling up their sleeves and helping alongside us. They aren’t trying to fix us, because they know we ain’t broke.

Conversely, there are those born here who desire a move to where the postman only rings once, if at all. We have to stipulate teenagers for the sake of this discussion, because one of their stage-of-life tasks is to establish independence, and “getting out of this godforsaken town” tops their lists. In time, many move back to smaller towns, or at least the cities of the Midwest. Permanent transplants quizzically look for that feeling of “home” by connecting with other transplants in The South, New England, or The Pacific Northwest.

Yet I have been baffled by the comment, “There’s nothing to do.” Perhaps what they really mean is, “I’m bored.” We can help children with this, but when an adult says, “I’m bored,” our first response is to sadly shake our heads.

I don’t know how others matured their way out of being bored, but I was lucky enough to have The Peg. As a young, young girl, I would approach her with the inability to entertain myself.

“Maa-maaa, I’m bored.”

My remembering ear tells me I used a high-pitched voice, and elongated my words into a childhood singsong of complaint.

“What can I dooooo, Maa-maaaa?”

The Peg would ignore the whine and commence directly to the remedy. She would read to me, or help me look for the color crayons, sewing cards, or paper dolls, or she would introduce a new project for me to work on. That way, if I’d get bored later, I’d have a way to entertain myself. I was lucky that The Peg was my mom.

The Peg developed my project mentality, and the projects she gave me usually involved needlework. For instance, she would take a scrap of sheet out of the rag bag and have me press it flat. Then she would hold it up to the light, against a pane in the window, and trace a figure from one of my coloring books: a rose, a dog, a baby doll, or maybe a cat, a house, a child at play. Then she would hand me a recycled fruitcake tin of colored thread and a big-eyed needle, and would tell me to sew colors on the lines. She didn’t show me embroidery stitches, she just let me invent.

I’m not sure how old I was when I started inventing and embellishing textiles, but I remember a Trick or Treat bag I fashioned for myself when I was home on the half of the day I didn’t have kindergarten. It started when The Peg traced a pumpkin onto a muslin rag. I know the concept of embroidering on sheets wasn’t new to me that day at the age of five. As I embroidered, it occurred to me that I could sew some more muslin pieces together to make the Trick or Treat bag. I went back to the rag bag and found some suitable material, but I didn’t use my finished product for its intended purpose. It turned out to be too small, and I was hoping for a lot more treats than it would hold.

A child being bored isn’t anything new. My college roommate told me that her little nephew once stated emphatically, “I’m bored as a duck.” That was at least thirty years ago, and Hubba and I still use the bored-as-a-duck standard to define the term.

Bored adults, however, are a new wrinkle in my thinking. Maybe when these adults were bored as youngsters, their parents always entertained them rather than teach them to entertain themselves. Perhaps they bought them out of boredom with a new toy, new clothes, or even new friends.

All along I’ve assumed that being a Midwesterner blessed me with the values that were rooted in my youth. Everyone in my sphere was from homes like mine, with parents like mine. I’ve since observed that some Midwestern roots are weak, maybe even diseased. They need separating and care to encourage them to thrive.

Now I am more aware of those who didn’t have as healthy a root system. I remember a frail-looking little girl named Debbie who went to Wildwood Elementary with me, and whose mom was oft-divorced. The woman ignored her little girl, and Debbie would follow me around with the hunger of a lost puppy. At our house, The Peg would give her projects to work on, and Debbie momentarily felt worthy of the effort. There was the ill-tempered Darcy, an only child with every toy imaginable at her disposal. With two working parents, Darcy was left alone until well after dark, in her house with all those toys. I went home with her after school one day, but we didn’t stay inside with her toys. We roamed around outside, while Darcy looked for attention from neighborhood adults. I was bored as a duck, and I never went home with her after school again.

“There’s nothing to do.” That could mean, “I’m bored,” a reminder that not all our Midwestern roots are common. We need to separate the strong ones, prune away the weak ones, and fertilize the young ones with attention and involvement.

All that those bored people need anyway is a project, and we certainly have plenty of those around here! We can help them establish a healthy root system by assuring them they’ve come to the right place.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns February 2006

Dag Nabbit!

2006-01-21T13:04:00.000-06:00

My brand new, dropped-down-the-chimney-by-Santa computer was ambushed this week by the soberworm virus. At least that’s what one of the first in a long string of tech support guys suspected. I thought perhaps Mr. Norton had been asleep at the switch, but my techie explained that the soberworm is like a thug on the corner, waiting for some unsuspecting download to assault.

Things are improving. I have been teetering between tears and shrieking madness at increasingly less frequent intervals, and I have restored some of the things I thought were lost forever. I am not a techie in the true sense of the word, but I have been able to teach myself most of what I need to know to become totally dependent on this machine for all my daily information needs. T-man and The Dot observe that I can’t make it through dinner without looking up something on the Internet, but they exaggerate a mite. Sometimes I wait until after the dessert course.

Hubba tries to give me helpful pointers. Next to him, I look like Bill Gates, but he’s in there plugging for me. It must make him mightily uncomfortable to hear the human noises that come from the library when I discover things like my computer and PDA won’t synch. He’s tenderhearted, and would do anything to help me fix the situation. His suggestions, in the form of, “Would it help if you….?” most often result in me explaining to him why that wouldn’t work, and go something like this:

“No, that’s not what this is about. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”

The meta-message, for you linguists in the room, is:

“Leave me alone. I have enough to deal with without giving a lesson in Computer for Dummies.”

Poor Hubba. And he was Santa this year. As soon as I figure out how to get my fonts back, I’m going to give him a hug.

So, this is life in the Midwest for me today. Computers, 800 numbers, tech people, and the Super Highway. There are times I wish we were as backward as the stereotype, when all these time-saving devices didn’t keep me from quilting!

I’ll see you next week – I need to go feed the cybergods now.

Copyright © 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Maybe Someday...

2006-01-13T22:47:00.000-06:00

We mean it this time. We won’t miss them a bit.

Deciding to get married and start a family is often accompanied by complicated discussions. Responsible parties want to be sure all issues are brought to the table, and that there are no major surprises when it comes to where each person stands.

Yeah, right. Like we even knew what we were talking about during those discussions. Hubba and I reviewed everything we could think of before getting married, and we thought we had the kid thing down to a science by the time we started having them. The Dot came first, and we spaced T-man’s arrival according to our master plan. What we couldn’t have understood before we saw them was how completely we would love them, and how important it was to pool our resources to give them the best lives we could.

With two preschoolers we were not hobby parenting, and we could no longer remember when it was just the two of us. We briefly considered a third addition, but a quick count had us realize that we had run out of parents. We were a contented family of four; a mom, a dad, a sister, and a brother.

Everything about family life multiplied as the years progressed. Each school year added new responsibilities. There were new friends and new ideas with which to horrify Mom and Dad, and talents none of us knew we had. Dreams were discussed, hearts were broken, awards awarded, and punishments rendered. School chums stopped in and stayed for dinner or the night, and we sat with other parents at the games and speech contests. It seemed so normal that we didn’t realize how effortlessly we adjusted into each new stage.

Then pffffffft! It was over! Huh? One big party with napkins in school colors, one last trip with the minivan loaded to the gills, and it was back to Hubba and me. No more daily doses of our offspring, no more of their friends, no more parents at school events. It was just plain over.

We recognized the shell-shocked looks on the faces of some of our fellow empty nesters, as we all shook our heads in disbelief.

“That sure didn’t take very long."

“I hear ya. How are you guys doing?”

“We’re thinking of starting over.”

“As a couple?”

“No, we’re thinking about having some more kids.”

The idea had some appeal, but the thought of having kids who could legitimately call us geezers diluted our zeal.

The college years provided many opportunities for the four of us to bond as adults. We were longtime holdouts as cell phone owners, but once everyone was scattered hither and yon, having instamatic phone contact was too good to pass up. For the first few years of the totally empty nest, The Dot and T-man only lived about twenty miles apart. That meant when we saw one, we usually saw both, and we bragged about having frequent family meals together.

There would be an occasional hug from a former classmate on the street, and increasingly meager social contact with some of the other parents, and so without really realizing it, we weaned ourselves from the family-of-four lifestyle within about three years. Hubba and I slowly regained our pre-parental interests, and we discovered our conversations included topics that hadn’t arisen since 1980.

The weaning process included a new phenomenon. We couldn’t identify it immediately, but when the kids were home, we’d get kind of annoyed with them. Hubba certainly thought I made some negative-sounding comments at times, and I heard the same from him. How could that be? Our children were the centers of our universe for so many years, yet now when they were around, they were sort of, well, in the way.

We certainly didn’t love them any less. We still talked about them every day, and when the phone rang, we always hoped it was one of them. I checked my e-mail regularly to see if there was something offspring-like in the inbox, and I kept clean sheets on their beds in case they found time to run home for an overnight. I grimaced at hearing some parents say they were always happy to see their adult children arrive for a visit, and equally happy to see them leave again. Ick. That wasn’t us. We hated to see them leave. It was baffling.

Then it occurred to me: it is difficult for adults to live together. Anyone who has ever been married can tell you how much more we expect of our adult relationships than we expect from our parent/child relationships. Preferences related to the position of the toilet seat, wet towels, dirty clothes, channel-surfing, bed times, and waking hours were now negotiable, not mandated.

The Dot and T-man have been home for a nice holiday visit. It will all end very soon, and they will return to their lives away from the nest. We’ve tried to be good hosts, and have enjoyed having them as guests. This time when they leave, it won’t be so sad. We won’t pine away for them as we did a few years ago, and we’ll adjust back to our empty nest lives without skipping a beat. We mean it this time. We won’t miss them a bit.

If we keep telling ourselves that, maybe someday…

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns January 2006

In Search of A Happy Medium

2006-01-07T10:08:00.000-06:00

Uh-oh.

I had a few minutes to myself yesterday, and even though I had plenty of other things to do, I pulled out a quilt and stitched on it.

I have been denying myself quilting time in recent weeks because I consider the time I spend quilting to be decadent. Subliminally I think it’s one of the ways I reward myself, as is a luscious piece of good cake or a fragrant, warm bath.

The quilt I stitched on isn’t anything artistically special, but it is special. It’s for T-man, and was originally slated to be his high school graduation quilt. I had two other graduation quilts that spring, one for a niece and another for a godson, so I put T’s last on the list. I had the fabric, in a pleasing combination of Coe College-inspired colors, which necessitated a two-color design. I settled on the “T” block, of course! When pieced, the “T” is visible in both the positive and the negative. The muted crimson “T” blocks stand out obviously enough, but on second glance, the soft golden “T’s” appear, slanted towards the other direction in the background. I was able to find some nice homespun fabric in these two colors, as homespun is manlier for a college baseball player.

Not long after we bid him farewell for his first year at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I took a job as the county tourism director. There was a lot to learn and a lot to do, and I kept myself focused on that task until I was recruited away to another position. That was another year of new stuff to learn, and the soft crimson- and golden-colored T-block fabric remained by the sewing machine, untouched. I took not a single stitch, nor even designed a simple wall-hanging, from September of 2002 to March of 2005. It was like having a limb removed.

I made the decision to release myself from the last position – it really wasn’t a good match for my interests or abilities. The hours were long and arduous, which wouldn’t deter me, but they consisted of activity that failed to enhance any part of my extended life. I was left too depleted to do anything other than work and veg.

I started blogging not long after I turned in my resignation, and I picked up a quilt. The quilt top was completed, and it just needed stitching. As I stitched, I got my “me” back, and I could feel the flow of inspiring relief course through my entire system. Of queen-sized proportions, that quilt took me several weeks to finish, and by the end of it, I was more aware than ever of my core need to keep creatively alive.

My next assignment was the T-block quilt. I played around with the design so the quilt wouldn’t have an “up” or a “down”. It is bordered in a large crimson and gold checkerboard, so I ran another trail of it horizontally, smack dab across the middle of the quilt. As a result, the “T’s” run in both directions on either side of that center checkerboard, which accomplished my mission.

As happens with me once the juices begin to flow, I designed another few quilts and completed one for a special high school graduate. This was closely followed by teaching quilting classes at church, and dealing with the flurry of lint that was stirred up there. A trip to the Pacific Northwest, the launching of my cake-baking business, substitute teaching, holidays, and so on and so on (and so on) left little time for quilting. I complained about there not being enough hours in the day, but I was using the hours I had in creative and fulfilling ways.

There just wasn’t any quilting.

I think I’ve figured out why. I have often said that learning to quilt ruined my life, and once I get started, I don’t want to do anything else! There isn’t a task related to quilting that I don’t enjoy. I love everything from washing the fabric to attaching and laying down the binding. It’s kind of sick, in a non-demented way. You see, I hesitate to start working on a quilt because I’m afraid I’ll never put it down again, and be lost to lint forever.

One of these days I’ll discover A Happy Medium. There must be some way I can schedule in a little quilting time, a little cooking time, a little laundry time, and a little writing time, all in the same day. I will mature out of the “if-a-little-is-good-a-lot-must-be-better” quilting mentality, and downgrade it to something similar to breathing, as opposed to something akin to compulsive gambling. Maybe the solution will dawn on me someday when I’m stitching away. Until then, just kindly leave me alone when I’m quilting, and don’t assume that I will do things like take bathroom breaks or answer the phone. I can’t do everything, you know!

Copyright © January 2006 Kari E.O. Burns

Celebrating at Twelve O'Clock Sharp

2005-12-31T21:33:00.000-06:00

I vowed to never sit at home on a weekend night. The Barn and The Peg were so boring, and I was not about to let that happen to me. It was pathetic: by the time they were in their forties, they would wave good-bye as we headed for basketball games at the gym or dances at the Coliseum. The Peg would read or sew, and The Barn would work in his office on one of his many ongoing projects – something for the church, usually. But, they sat at home, for crying out loud.

It never occurred to me that my friends’ parents were sitting at home, too. Offspring tend to be more hyper-sensitive to the weird habits their own begetters, while those of their friends get off fairly easy under the microscope. The father of one high school friend bowled on Friday nights, which is notable only because he wasn’t at home.

I was able to sustain my stand against boring lifestyles through college and into our early years of marriage. When The Dot made her appearance, I slowed down a little, still trying to keep my social calendar full. There was one fly in that ointment; I absolutely hated calling around for babysitters. By the time T-man was born, I was down to important community events and the pre-paid parties at the golf course where we were members. Other than that, forget it.

My bosom buddy Ann and I cooked up an excellent New Year’s Eve celebration that we adopted for a few years. We would gather together as families at alternating homes. The kids would play together, and we would entertain ourselves as they looked out for each other. No sitters to call in this plan, and the parents were just a scream away. Sometimes you just gotta be smarter than the status quo.

We spent several years at home alone with our own two, once they hit the double-digits. We would declare New Year’s Eve “Junk Food Night”, and lay in a disgusting supply of wasted calories. It sounded like a good idea, but we always over-bought and lost interest in the junk within a half-hour. Those are fond New Year’s Eve memories with just the four of us, watching videos and eating crap.

Somewhere in my forties, my idea of celebrating holidays by having fun on the town went kind of Barn-Peg wacko. Boring was redefined as “having a relaxing evening”. Scurrying was only done in daylight, and relaxing was for after sundown.

New Year’s Eve was my last holdout. I may have sat at home having a relaxing time on most nights of the year, but I usually got my groove back for New Year’s Eve. Eventually, I discovered I was forcing myself to have fun, when I could have been at home relaxing. I made the official switch from the New Year’s Eve reveler crowd to the New Year’s Day brunch crowd. We would invite a few friends in for a holiday hot dish, and we’d relax and gab for several hours.

This year I wanted New Year’s Eve to be special again, so Hubba and I bit the bullet and decided we’d compromise and entertain at home. We celebrated New Year’s Eve with a small group of family and friends by roasting a lovely pork loin stuffed with prunes, apricots, Swedish rye bread and red onion. One person brought a beautiful spinach salad, and another brought my favorite bread, which she bakes herself. I took the opportunity to test drive a new cake recipe and we kept at it until well past twelve o’clock. I don’t think everyone got out of here until nearly five o’clock!

We were able to do that because we celebrated at mid-day. The dishes were all done and the leaves were out of the table by six o’clock. P.M., that is. As I write this, I plan to be horizontal and unconscious at midnight, when the ball will fall and 2006 makes her debut. I am totally prepared to wake up in the morning and take down the old calendars, putting up the new ones that were special gifts to me from the Fund for Widows and Children of fill-in-the-blank. I am so okay with that. I am beyond being ready to pass the baton.

Happy 2006 to everyone! I hope you get to celebrate in your own special way, whether you ring in the New Year with a clang, or just tinkle it in with a gulp and a snore.

I need to go to bed now. If I don’t, I may accidentally be awake at midnight...

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns December 2005

The Peace of Christmas in 2005

2005-12-24T11:02:00.000-06:00

The miracle of a white Christmas has appeared in the upper Midwest. As a matter of fact, it seems the blessings of snow run down to the Bible belt portion of our region, meaning school-age children are ecstatically building snow forts while their parents search the ‘Net for driving tips.

Christmas Eve is a good time to hang up the hang-ups along with the stockings, and to declare peace on earth, good will towards all creatures. If you didn’t get the last of your shopping done, try to think beyond the power of the dollar and consider the power of the spirit. Write a few of your thoughts down for a loved one, and gift them with your sentiment, your love, and your wish for their fulfillment. It’s Christmas – give from the heart.

I woke up early today to get the annual 18-hour roast into the oven. I put some bread-making ingredients in the bread machine, set the table, and polished the flatware for this evening’s extended-family meal. Tomorrow we have a second meal for the blood relatives, another feast of one another’s company.

Christmas heralds in the season of people-to-people, and after the busy months of bidding farewell to milder temperatures and preparing for the holiday push, this time to be together, face-to-face and unavoidably aware of each other, is winter’s gift. The hoopla of the holidays only lasts for a few more days, then we hunker down, reach out and pull in cherished people, and we do our winter duties of rejuvenating our souls and our friendships.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The Barn and The Peg read the Christmas story to us each year from Luke, before we opened a single gift from under the tree. It’s not that we appreciated delaying the things that we believed held more promise, because we didn’t. We only wanted to know which of the five of us The Barn would assign to play Santa Claus, and if we could get all the unwrapping done before bedtime, so as not to delay the real Santa from making his stop. I always hoped just one year they would forget to drag out the Bible and read the dang story, but it never, ever happened.

Once the story got going, it was quite wonderful to hear the picture it painted. Poor little baby Jesus, in the cold of an uncomfortable stable. As the story unfolded, we learned of his doting and trusting parents, and the answer he brought to a world in search of peace. The Barn and The Peg knew that the gift of that story would see us through the cold and uncomfortable stops in our lives, and that there would be meaning for us in our lessons as we searched to regain our peace.

I hope everyone enjoys the smells, the sounds, the hugs, the tastes, the togetherness, and The Gift – our baby Christ child, here to make a way to peace for us.

Merry Christmas!

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns December 2005

The Bells of Christmas

2005-12-16T20:30:00.000-06:00

If it involves sleigh bells, silver bells, or cardboard bells, it’s probably a Midwestern Christmas. For those of us who are lucky enough to call the Midwest our home, living here is mostly like having Christmas all year ‘round. Therefore, the Christmas season itself crystallizes memories from one year to the next, and nostalgia about traditions takes hold almost immediately. It’s unique. Some “traditions” last only a year or two, but their legacies are long-remembered as an established pattern of celebrating together, for whatever the duration. We happily become our traditions.

Midwestern families don’t turn inward during the holidays. It’s completely normal to purchase and wrap gifts for people we don’t even know, and about whom we have the sketchiest of information. We will pick a tag off any number of trees found at many locations, and use the information provided as a starting point.

“Mom. Family # 23. Underwear, Size 9.” What we get her is Underwear, Size 9, a sweater, and a bottle of good-smelling body lotion.

“Boy, age 8. Family #14. Pajamas.” That package will probably hold the pajamas, a set of racing cars, and some Silly Putty.

We shop, we wrap, and we wish we could do more, so we pray and we give thanks.

Sharing the Spirit of Christmas is as expected as the bottomless cup of coffee at an Iowa restaurant. Churches are busy with Sunday School programs, and the public schools in our hometowns unabashedly spread Christmas cheer in halls decked with holly. People have always greeted one another in any number of ways, so we don’t get all bent out of shape about feeling happy and expressing it in what ever form it comes from our mouths.

“Merry Christmas!”

“Season’s Greetings!”

“Happy Holidays!”

In my hometown in Southeast Iowa, the season started when the city crews put up the decorations right after Thanksgiving. There were silver-tinseled garlands with plastic red, green, and yellow Season’s Greetings signs that spanned the center sections of the major downtown thoroughfares. The light posts were fitted with more garland-and-plastic forms – candy canes, wreaths, candles, all done in the weatherproof technology of the era – more plastic. I suppose the city budget allowed these public displays to be updated every twenty-five years or so. I don’t know when ours were new, but I can provide an eyewitness account for some of the fifties, all of the sixties, and most of the seventies. The plastic cases housed light bulbs, and they lit up to accelerate the unbearable anticipation of whatever requests had been made of the department store Santa.

My sister Lora and I were both allergic to evergreen trees. We were blissfully ignorant that an artificial tree was outside the norm until our early Christmases at Wildwood Elementary. The Peg told me years later that when I was in the first grade, I came home with my eyes nearly swollen shut in response to the classroom Christmas tree. Lora had a similar experience down the hall in Mrs. Carlson's kindergarten class. Every classroom had its own tree, and the one in Mrs. Opal Smith’s room had to be removed because of moi. The PTA sprang into action and bought two artificial silver Christmas trees, one for my classroom and one for my sister’s. You remember them. The ones with the revolving color wheel. How utterly embarrassing! They could have at least gotten the green ones, like we had at home, but silver stuff was space-age in the 1960’s, and the decorating committee of the Wildwood Elementary Parent Teacher Association had made their decision. The things followed us as we ascended the grades, and were finally put into moth balls after our 6th grade years. Junior high ended our December disgrace.

I was chatting with a Calmarite (a resident of Calmar, Iowa) recently, asking about some of the holiday traditions that dot the memories of past Calmar Christmases. There are too many to recount, because things would change from year to year and everyone expressed themselves differently. One group would do this, another would do that. Memories of activities tend to blend together, and the misty edges of Christmases remembered seem to include everyone.

At one time in the late ‘50’s or early ‘60’s, a few Calmar friends gathered to go Julebukken. Julebukken (pronounced "YEW-la-bokken" around here) is a Scandinavian Christmas tradition where children will dress up like the elves of St. Nicholas, and go about singing carols. Similar to Halloween here, in exchange for singing, the children are given candy for their effort. This is usually done between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

Julebukken has been Americanized somewhat, and it is mostly adults who carol each other through the night, accumulating more carolers at each stop as the evening progresses. Some residents may remember a time when several couples would julebukk, warming themselves with coffee or cocoa at each home, and ending the night with breakfast together at nearly 4:00 a.m. One event had nearly sixty people at an early morning call, and the last family made bacon and eggs for the entire crew.

Another Calmar memory came during a time of national mourning. The mood was glum during the Christmas season right after the Kennedy assassination, and it was hard to get into the spirit. A few friends were assessing the situation and decided everyone needed a little holiday cheering-up. They called Jim Huber, who had a hay wagon fitted with sleigh runners. Jim agreed to hook up his team to his hay wagon/sleigh, and he took around forty people on an impromptu hay/sleigh ride on the outskirts of Calmar. It was a family affair, and afterwards everyone gathered for chili and cocoa. It did the trick, and that holiday had one bright spot in an otherwise emotionally barren season.

Outdoor Christmas decorations were made, not bought, in Calmar Christmases past. There was one word for it: cardboard. The competition for large chunks of cardboard was keen, as imaginations went wild with what could be made from the booty behind the hardware store. Once the forms were cut from the cardboard, out came the tin foil, glue, and glitter. Apparently the craze for things silver at Christmas was regional during this time in history. Encasing just about any shape in tin foil created The Look, and sprinkling glitter over glue gave the final piece the detail it needed. One home had a beautiful display of a musical page, and the words and notes of “Silent Night” were done in blue glitter on a backdrop of Reynolds Wrap. A light shone on the simple message for all to contemplate, because the focus of the season then was obvious. For children, Calmar Christmases always revolved around the Christmas story; the angels outnumbered the Santas in those days.

Precious memories will be made again this year. People come home to Calmar during Christmas, whether in person or in spirit, and the tenacity of local retailers allows residents to shop locally for hometown treasures and foodstuffs to share. Calmar-made cookies will no doubt be eaten by our service men and women. Digital videos of St. Al’s students will most likely be cyber-shared from one coast to the other, because being Midwestern doesn’t mean being backwards. It means quality. It means memories worth retelling. It’s the Silent Night, Holy Night of our Midwestern hearts.

So, let the sleigh bells jing-a-ling, the silver bells ting-a-ling, and remember those cardboard-and-glitter bells when you stick that white-lighted deer in your front yard. White lights, after all, are this millennium’s answer to the silver tinseled everything of another era, and the basis for your children’s memories-in-the-making. Believe me, it’ll be a fair trade.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns December 2005

Winery Weekend

2005-12-09T18:28:00.000-06:00

I am being kept away from the keyboard this weekend by another of my lives. There is a beautiful fledgling winery in northern Winneshiek County, and they are having an open house on Saturday, December 10, from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. They have invited me, in my Cake Mistress incarnation, to be there serving samples of two of my cakes and selling slices to the interested. The Winneshiek Wildberry Winery is owned by Ken and Yvonne Barnes, and along with the talents of daughters Darla Jones and Beth Barnes-Guzman, they will soon be known as one of the Midwest's premiere wineries. It will be exciting to see them grow and expand their operation, and always interesting to be on the periphery of the development of the continual progress promised by such an endeavor.

Besides the winery hullabaloo, Hubba and I got a new computer, so I'm in the process of moving all our stuff over from the old one -- and I do mean old. It was about one degree up from writing on cave walls, but it got us to where we are now, and we're giving it a peaceful retirement. By next week I hope to have everything moved over, she said with all the hope of the Christmas season. If anyone wants to put me on a prayer chain, it would probably help.

Enjoy! Keep warm if you're in the Midwest or the Northeastern U.S. For the rest of you, no sneering. We like winter -- refer to last week's post.

A Patchwork of Winter People

2005-12-04T19:47:00.000-06:00

Between the months of November and April, Upper Midwesterners fall into one of two camps -- we either like winter or we hate it. These early season, snow-packed days are filled with conversation that distinguishes which line we'll stand in when we register for camp membership.

Camp Rosy Cheeks is inhabited by those who love to be outdoors doing things, especially things that involve snow and/or ice. There are skiers (both cross-country and downhill), snow shoe enthusiasts, ice skaters, hockey players, horseback riders, snow fort builders, ice sculpture artists, sledders, ice fishing zealots, and the list goes on. Even the motorized set has organized to maximize their enjoyment of the winter's snow -- snow mobile traffic signs dot the ditches along many state highways and county roads.

Camp Rosy Cheekers look askance at any notion that life would slow down for the mere lack of a warm day. They wait all year to get out into nature, into the hushed cover and muffled sounds of a snowy day. Animal lovers delight in seeing our fellow creatures sustain themselves happily, and without summer's green to camouflage their movements, our furry and feathered friends can be observed searching for food and playing together against nature's white mat.

Camp Cuddle Up is where the indoor winter people gather. Inhabitants of Camp Cuddle Up prefer to stay out of the cold as much as possible, but aren't ready to go so far as to move to a warmer climate. They figure cold and snow is a fair trade for spring and autumn. They love to look out their windows at the snowy beauty draping their views – crystal icicles and sequined snow clinging to branches and bushes, geometric tracks of bunnies and deer, the “smoke” of warm air escaping from chimneys, and the crunch of snow beneath tires on a cold, sunny January day.

Activities at Camp Cuddle Up include reading, snuggling with a pet/offspring/spouse, quilting, nesting, reading, baking, quilting, knitting, making paper, reading, quilting, and reading. And looking out the window. As opposed to snow suits, Cuddle Uppers wear indoor fleece, oftentimes fleece that has been altered with fabric to look less like fleece and more like clothes. Some just stay in their jammies when they're inside.

Believe it or not, this system is totally free from political fallout. There is no implication of evildoing, regardless which of these two factions one aligns oneself with, and I have yet to hear anyone be criticized from the other camp for their preferences. It's so refreshing! No one is blaming America for having winter and not doing anything about it, or calling someone a racist because they like to play in the snow. Rosy Cheekers are as apt to enjoy a blazing fire on a cold winter's night as a Cuddle Upper will enjoy a day of snowman building with the kids or grandkids. These aren't warring camps.

I should probably interview a member of Camp Rosy Cheeks, just to be fair. I am the head counselor at Camp Cuddle Up. Winter. Ick. But I mean that in a good way. I don't really like to be cold, but once I get bundled up, it isn't too bad. Some days I get cold and can't warm up on my own, so I run a hot bath in our old cast iron clawfoot tub. The cast iron keeps the water warm for a long time, and I can soak until I am pink and warm. Of course, then I pass the suffering on to my skin, and if I don't slather myself in lotions, it gets all itchy and dry. Once I apply the lotions, wouldn't you know, they make my skin cool, and I get cold again. But, it's winter. Whatcha gonna do about it? Some people love it, and they're entitled to their fun, too.

It is beautiful, but I wouldn't mind if it only lasted a month. I'd be happy if it did nothing but snow for that duration, with temps hovering around zero. That's a huge concession on my part. I'm fine with temps down to 25° Fahrenheit, as long as the sun is out and the wind isn't blowing. If the thermometer gets any lower, and with any breeze at all, I find it best to stay in my own camp and commiserate with my homies there. I don't really want to debate the obvious: it is cold. Either you like it or you don't, but cold is cold.

Yet, where would I be without the cold weather to naturally round out my life? In “my” weather, I happily flit to and fro, awhirl in activity and complaining about there not being enough time. I don't fro as much when it's cold, and flitting is a seasonal term. I cuddle up -- this is when I spend real time with friends and loved ones. I establish almost all of my close ties with people in the coldest part of the year. It's a time to lavish attention on each other, accidentally exploring how we fit into each other's lives, and consequentially strengthening the bridges that connect us.

Last year I had a couple of coffees at my house, one in January and one in February. There was third, a neighborhood morning set aside to welcome a new neighbor. It was great to get together with some of the people we usually see outside. The other two coffees were with women I have always wanted to have coffee with, but never had the opportunity. There are literally hundreds of women like that in my Iowa town, women I just want to spend a little more time with. That's what winter is for.

I don't know if I invited Cuddle Uppers or Rosy Cheekers to my coffee times, but it didn't really matter. These women all wanted to spend time connecting with other women, too, and no one cared who else was invited. None of them questioned, “Who else is coming?”, because whomever they met here would warm their winter. It's cliqueless -- independent women don't ask who else is coming. Some of them even bring along a friend of their own to add to the mix. It's winter! That's what we do!

Sometimes an afternoon with a new friend is called for. Hubba and I spend one every now and then with some of our younger friends. We've adopted a couple of transplants from Oklahoma, who left both sets of grandparents behind. They only have one aunt, so Hubba I do a hybrid aunt/uncle/really young grandparents with them. It's my kind of winter blast -- we fake them into thinking we're cool, then we let them do whatever they want. When we send them back to their parents, all four of us are looking forward to another mutual winter reprieve. The transplanted Oklahoman parents need it, too, now that the real family is far away. I think they call that a win-win, or in this case, a win-win-win.

I'm planning a new set of winter gatherings for 2006. I will host some old-fashioned Midwestern think tanks, huddling with women of all ages, maybe in transition, who own their lives and are reluctant to concede control of them to other forces. These are women who bring value to their families and community, and who know it, and who are willing to flaunt it. It's exciting to be on the cusp of a new adventure, perhaps addressing a nagging itch beyond the reach of a satisfying scratch. Together we can search out the source of the itch, and discuss its treatment. Maybe it needs a cooling lotion, a deep massage, or a devoted kiss. We'll think-tank about it.

I will fit the think tanks in among a few coffee coffees, the chat-a-thons that heated my home last year. They are the best after the busy Christmas season, after the New Year relaxes us into looking for each other. Planning them brings peace to the season of peace, joy to the season of joy, rebirth to the season of birth. It's the Happy of a Happy New Year.

Ah, winter. Personally, I hate it, but I'm so ecstatically glad it's here.

Copyright © December 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Bijou-ism and Other Myths

2005-11-29T13:07:00.000-06:00

I don't know if it was Petticoat Junction or Green Acres that did it, or if it rests on the fact that there isn't an ocean within a day's drive, but we Midwesterners have learned to accept our yokel status. Some of us have even learned to enjoy it!

My very favorite part of being labeled a yokel is what I call “Bijou-ism”. If you remember, Sam Drucker's General Store and the Shadey Rest Hotel often hosted discussions about whatever Clara Bow or Wallace Reid movie was playing at The Bijou, while the rest of the country was exploring the sexual mores of the 60's with Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Franco Zeffirelli's bawdy depiction of Romeo and Juliet. Land o' Joshin', those high fallutin', ankle-showin', painted-faced floozies of the silent era were enough to give a good girl from Hooterville the vapors, even though Billie Jo's, Bobbie Jo's, and Betty Jo's hooters were the reason half of their viewers tuned in weekly.

Relocated Midwesterners are similar to reformed smokers. Reformed smokers are frequently more sensitive to the smell and health hazards of secondhand smoke than folks who never smoked at all. The remoteness of past smoking habits causes them to transpose their sensitivity into insensitivity of the smoking rights of others. Yin/Yang on that one, as far as I'm concerned. A reformed smoker having an insensitivity contest with a smoker borders on entertainment.

Relocated Midwesterners, over time, develop Stockholm Syndrome in their non-Midwestern neighborhoods. They begin to adopt the attitudes and stereotypical non sequiturs that have misled residents in other parts of the country for years. Here's an example of a conversation between a non-Midwesterner and me.

(Circa 1995) “Are you on the Internet?”

It's hard to resist milking these situations.

“The what?”

“The Internet. It's a big system where you can connect to other people by electronic mail, and look for information on just about any subject.”

“Get out. What's this called again?”

“The In-ter-net. I-n-t-e-r-n-e-t. Tell your friends about it. You'll probably hear more about it in your area in a few years.”

“How much hay can you fit into the In-ter-net?”

“Very funny.”

“I know. You're funny, too. I was calling because I wanted your e-mail addy. I've done a little cyber-research and have a few things to forward to you.”

You can Google “Bijou”, you know. It comes up as a University of Iowa site that has served as a source for independent, art house, foreign, and classic films since 1972. Of course.

It's sort of eerie, but transplanted Midwesterners and others believe there are special editions of Vogue and Time for Midwesterners. They think we get the ones featuring the latest in pantaloons and gee-gaws, and details of how the Tennessee Valley Authority promises new hope to our remote rural areas. Following this train of thought, we get grainy black and white installments of World News Tonight, with anchors like Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntly keeping us up-to-date on starving children in China and how to stock a fallout shelter. Thank heavens for The Bijou, where for ten cents we can escape the pressures of The Cold War.

When we learned the happy news that The Dot would be added to our nest, we called to tell Hubba's sister Jan the good news. Jan had been living in L.A. for several years by then, and no, we didn't have to yell into the phone like an old Jimmy Stewart movie.

“H-h-h-hello...? Can..can...you hear me?”

We shared our information, breathlessly happy over the event only eight months hence. As she and I exchanged pregnancy symptoms (her daughter was under two at the time), she asked, “Would you like me to send you any books about being pregnant? I can get all sorts of them here.”

“Gee, Jan. Let me check.” (turning away from the phone) “Hubba? When does that Wells Fargo Wagon come through again?”

I didn't need any help with that, anyway. My parents signed the card and put it back in the plain white envelope so I could see the movies they showed in the fourth grade. The ones in high school were a little more explicit. Finger-snapping boys were gathered around a juke box, while the voice-over warned good girls of the possibilities of being picked up by a “hood”. It was Bijou-quality, I tell you.

One of my favorite Bijou-isms occurred during a phone conversation with my own sister, now living in North Carolina. We were discussing possible Christmas gifts for The Barn and The Peg. Being quaint Midwesterners, and with The Barn's Norwegian heritage to boot, she had a no-brainer gift idea for them. Perhaps they would enjoy a copy of Lake Wobegon, and apparently, she felt that needed some 'splainin'.

“Have you ever heard of The..Prarie...Home...Companion?”

They always slow down their speech, elementarizing their enlightenment for the benefit of the inbreeds back home. It was as if Garrison Keillor didn't broadcast from the Midwest, at the former World Theater (now the renovated Fitzgerald Theater), just a three-hour drive from my house. Even some Midwesterners get caught up in the stereotype. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul have been called “The Manhattan of the Midwest.” Pathetic. I sure hope that wasn't Garrison's fault. He briefly lived in New York, and everyone there thought he was, well, hip. Go figure.

On one visit to Decorah, my sister actually asked that we venture into the country so she could photograph pigs and take the photographs back to her friends. I think she was living in Boston at that time. No pigs in Massachusetts, you know. Gotta show 'em how funny it is that the yokels have them in Iowa. Arnold Ziffel would have been embarrassed. It turns out you can Google Arnold Ziffel, too, which brings us back to Hooterville. There is an urban legend that the cast of Green Acres actually roasted Arnold up to celebrate the last episode of the series.

Which reminds me...

Decorah is one fabulous place to eat. Hubba and I prefer foods cooked from fresh, and we have many fresh foods available to us for home preparation. There are numerous organic and good ol' country gardeners who keep us well-stocked, not to mention the size of our local frying hens, the marbled leanness of our angus beef, the juiciness of our pork-the-other-white-meat, the youngness of our veal, and the tenderness of our lamb. We also eat (get this) tofu. Uh-huh. We do.

We have four chef-staffed kitchens in Decorah, where the food is cooked from fresh. There are no stomach aches after one of those meals, and the proportions belie the fact that there's plenty more where that came from. My brother from the Pacific Northwest was here over Thanksgiving, and we took him to La Rana for dinner. La Rana, a chef-staffed Mediterranean bistro, serving up small plates of quality fresh ingredients at decent prices. If he would have been able to stay longer, we would have had lunch at Hart's Tea & Tarts or The Dayton House, and another dinner at The Victorian Rose in The Hotel Winneshiek (http://www.hotelwinn.com/). Yum E.

My brother didn't have any incredulous quotes to add to my list, but he conceded that none of the diners there were concerned with the volume of hay we could fit into La Rana.

At the table next to us sat Ellen Dolan, the soap opera actress who plays Margo Hughes on As The World Turns. Ellen was visiting her hometown of Decorah for the Thanksgiving holiday with her husband and daughter. Her brother Kerry moved back here about ten years ago and married his high school sweetheart (and my bosom buddy) Pat. I betcha Ellen could haul 'em in down at the local Bijou, as she did in New York when she appeared in Graceland while simultaneously bringing Margo to life on the small screen.

We could just as well have eaten at Ruby's Country Kitchen or The Family Table Restaurant. Both of them specialize in the comfort foods of the Midwest, which usually means mashed potatoes and gravy and, of course, pie. I know how to guarantee that The Barn will say, “Yes”. All I do is ask him:

“Do you want ice cream or whipped cream on your pie?”

"Yes."

See? Some yokel behaviors serve us well. They are the habits of our region, and they distinguish us as being level-headed and unconcerned with putting on airs. Even those Midwesterners who put on airs are accepted in spite their foolishness -- everyone sees them sneak in for a piece of pie at The Family Table, anyway. They may think the Joneses are judging them for their less than down-home habits, so we pretend not to notice their clandestine behavior. We don't want to embarrass them if they ever come to their senses. After all, everyone here stands in the same line down at The Bijou.

Capturing Zen

2005-11-19T18:06:00.000-06:00

Ah. Sweet relief.

There is a beveled excitement in life, so many things to try, to learn, to be about. And yet, I maintain the odd belief that I can fit more into a day than the clock allows. Though the absurdness of this is proven daily, I can't seem to learn the simple lesson of the boundaries of time.

Every morning is a misty map of possibilities, dawning into focus. I hit the deck at five bells and proceed directly to an hour of exercise. I seldom repeat the calisthenic routine; “rut” and “Kari” do not dwell in compatible universes.

My brain is wide awake in the early hours of the day, and exercising allows me to flexicate both mind and body. I frame the order in which the day will evolve. I get the general outline right, but quickly slip into a variation of preconceived notion-sickness, something akin to magic thinking.

For instance, ignoring any limitation, I envision cutting out a quilt before lunch. In my mind's eye everything is all set up, ready to go. The fabrics in my fantasy are without wrinkles or folds. What a marvelous think-way to start the day! I seriously like where I am, both mentally and physically, between five and six in the morning.

Then the phone rings and one of my schools needs a sub. I need to put away the pile of stuff on top of the sewing machine. My PDA alarm warns me of an appointment. Oops! I'd better get out of these workout clothes and into the tub. Whatever the interruption, I'm either not geographically located near a sewing machine or a quilt, or I am tending to other duties as they arise before me. It's noon, and I didn't get the quilt cut out.

The beauty of this system is, I can fantasize the whole, peaceful, spirit-renewing scene like clockwork. The five a.m. folly. When the day actually produces some quilting time, I am all the more appreciative of it. My heart rate, breathing, mental acuity, and spiritual strength are in synch. Enlightened. Intuitive. Meditative. Zen.

I recently anointed and knighted myself The Cake Mistress. As most people around me know, cake is my favorite food, and I don't even think it's officially a food. The ingredients in cake are certainly related to food, but the combination that makes them cake tends to remove them from the realm of sustenance and into the realm of near licentiousness. Well, not all cakes can make that claim, but The Cake Mistress's cakes can!

I don't dawdle in false modesty when it comes to my cakes. I'm a picky cake eater, so if I think it's good, it's good. Crowning myself The Cake Mistress seemed obvious to me. I created The Cake Mistress as a vehicle by which I can coo over and compliment the chef, that being me, whenever I get a taste of one of my own really, really good cakes. Admittedly, this braggadocio is a little awkward for the initiate.

Cake Taster: OoooOoo! MmmmMMM! That is soooooo good!

Me: I know.

Cake Taster: Wow, I think that's the best cake I've ever tasted!

Me: The Cake Mistress knows what she's doing.

Cake Taster: The Cake Mistress? Where is she?

Me: You're talking to her.

The history of The Cake Mistress comes from my authentic need to occasionally eat a piece of divinely good cake. About fifteen years ago, I acquired a nagging urge for a dark chocolate cake with dark chocolate icing, and I was often disappointed by what I found in my regional cake-world. I didn't want to have to leave the Midwest over cake.

But I'm just being silly. We have the cakes of my dreams in the Midwest, but they're usually in big cities. Potluck cakes often come from The Cake Doctor cookbook. Lots of times they're fabulous fakes, like some of my diamond-wink-wink jewelry. I wanted real-food, made-from-scratch cakes at my disposal. Guess I'll just have to make 'em myself, I reasoned.

I went in search of a recipe for chocolate cake. I found one, and after I made it several times and toyed with the balance, I got it right. Rich, moist, dense, it was my first stop on a trip to paradise.

The next rich, moist, dense cake was a winner the first time around. I found a recipe for carrot cake from a very reliable source. I tried it out on friends we'd invited for dinner, and the smacking sounds around the table when dessert was served bordered on the grotesque. I've never had to alter that recipe one iota, and with the dark chocolate cake and the carrot cake successes, I had uncovered the heretofore undocumented cake-baking gene.

I began voraciously reading cake recipes. I've always been partial to non-fiction anyway, so I wasn't alarmed. I would try some of the recipes, and found a pattern in the ones that weren't just good, they were stupid-good. Stupid-good is my description for how perfect some cakes can be. Rich, moist, dense. Stupid-good.

This sort of surprised me. I am a child of the 60's cartoons and television shows, where the virtues of light, airy cakes were extolled. Beaver or Opie could get into big heck if they slammed a door at the wrong time near June's or Aunt Bea's ovens. There went another 60's sitcom falsehood to wad up and trash. My cakes aren't light. In fact, the recipes I've tried for cakes that are light are boring, boring, boring. Why would you waste your cake calories on some light and airy impostor?

Self-taught and tutored by The Peg, I can now scan a recipe and decide whether it's a keeper or a bore. Most of the time, that is. I recently had a cake-tasting session for a lemon cake I was auditioning, and it wasn't up to snuff.

So, as my repertoire of rich, moist, dense cakes grew, so did my need to unload a few of the leftovers on friends. No one complained, like, ever. I soon discovered I didn't want a whole cake around the house, I just wanted to eat one good piece of cake a couple of times a month. A routine developed where I would make birthday cakes for whomever told me they had a birthday coming up. I figured if I gave them a cake, they'd feel obligated to give me just one piece. All I really wanted was one piece, or maybe two, so Hubba could have one. I kept getting better and better. Again, pardon the lack of modesty, but we've covered that ground already.

Someone, and I truly don't remember who, suggested I sell my cakes. Really? I mean, I know they're good, but I have no desire to start decorating cakes, which may be what people would expect. I don't even have a desire to eat decorated cakes. Rich, moist, dense is my idea of cake, and I don't require buttercream roses or carrots, unless they're on top of a rich, moist, dense cake.

I tested the concept. I picked out a few people and events and made cakes. I fed cake to the unsuspecting, and before they had a chance to compliment the cake (which they would do for the presence of the fat and calories alone), I asked them if they would buy a cake like that. I got a unanimous, euphoric thumbs-up. I told them the cakes are labor intensive and the ingredients are expensive, so would they pay extra for that in a cake? It's not like people can't get cake around here. They just couldn't get one of these. The usual response was, “I just want to know I can get one of these when I get a nagging urge for one.”

Déjà VU, Baby! I feel that pain!

I thought about it. I researched the market for good cakes made by home bakers. I talked to Shirley, the local cheesecake guru, who has been selling cheesecakes for a number of years. She was encouraging, and we agreed we'd cooperate and send each other business. If someone asks me for cheesecake, I give them Shirley's number, Shirley does likewise with requests to her for layer cakes.

The next step into this madness was finding a supplier for Hollywood bakery boxes. You know the boxes, the pink bakery boxes for “The Hollywood Touch”. I scu-reamed in delight, and the decision was made. I would sell cakes.

More specifically, The Cake Mistress decided to sell cakes. I have no idea where I came up with the name of my alter ego, but when I was writing a brochure with cake flavors and descriptions in it, I got all third-person and bashful. When I say braggy things about my cakes, they just come from my mouth and float invisibly in the air. When I get them out of my head and into black and white (or in the case of my brochures, black and pink), it's different. It's better to just blame The Cake Mistress.

So, here I go again. I now have a state-licensed, cake-baking kitchen. I'm getting busier, baking and subbing and doing all the other fun stuff I think I can do. I hope to get it narrowed down to baking cakes and quilting, which means I'll get to quilt -- the cake baking is just the icing, so to speak. A life of rich, moist, dense cakes, and vibrant, provocative, functional quilts. Zen.

Even this busy life presents moments to capture Zen. When I'm handing out samples of cake at the Co-op, sharing the little treats is a bonus to seeing friends work together, or meet there for Kristin's noon-time special. I capture Zen. When the home schoolers ring my doorbell, bringing in a whirl of lint, laughter, and learning, I capture Zen. This evening, a quiet time to work on T-man's quilt, will envelope me in my Zen, where my soul rejoices and I give thanks for my busy life. The memory of flute choir rehearsals and children's singing voices will accompany my reverie, and I'll thank God for the blessings this busy life brings.

Ah. Sweet relief.

Copyright © November 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

How Many Quilters Does It Take To Screw In A Lightbulb?

2005-11-12T09:33:00.000-06:00

Q: How many quilters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. We like to press on (in) the dark side.

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Quilt humor. Okay, so I admit it is weak quilt humor, but it's intended to remind us that quilting isn't a solitary experience. We even drag non-quilters into the mix, and we benefit from their naive wisdom.

“This needs something. Any suggestions?”

“I need you to pick out the backing fabric. I'm stuck among these choices.”

“Can you draw a cricket for me? I need one for this quilt.”

As I consider the number of times I have asked Hubba or the offspring for help when making a quilt, I am reminded how much nicer the outcome is when a quilt has bits and pieces of my family in it. The poor souls who live with me certainly have a lot of lint shoved in their faces, and perhaps osmosis shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. They seem to understand the task when I ask for help.

It was Hubba's unsuspecting comment, “Oh, a bee for Burns,” that brought about the embroidered bees on all succeeding quilts. Now, the first thing recipients of my quilts look for is the bee. In fact, when I show a quilt I made to just about anyone, they say, “Now to find the bee -- I know it's here someplace!”

The Peg wasn't a quilter, but she was wonderfully creative with the garments she made. What's more, she guided us to creative functions, and my sisters and I designed most of the clothes we wore from a fairly early age. The challenge was before us with every garment; we had yards and yards of fabric to choose from, and boxes and boxes of different patterns.

“Can you get a vest and a skirt out of this fabric. I'd like the vest from this pattern here only longer, but please make the neckline from this pattern, not the rounded one on the the first vest pattern. And I'd like the skirt to have gores, not an A-line. This gore skirt pattern is too small for me now. Can you make it work?”

She could. Her results taught us how many possibilities there are in the world of design, and how ordinary people like the Onerheims at 415 Quincy Avenue could make our own ideas into something beautiful.

What's more, it was fun! The Peg always seemed up for the task. When simple shifts and “tent” dresses were in vogue, she could make us something new to wear in one evening.

“Kari, if you make dinner and do the dishes, I'll make you a dress for school tomorrow.”

Once she made me a psychedelic mini-dress in a loosely woven, hopsack-type fabric that bore a large geometric pattern in carrot orange, grape juice purple, and lime green. That same evening, I made meat loaf, baked potatoes, and a green bean casserole, and loaded the dishwasher after dinner. We joked about that dress for the rest of her life, saying it as the first time she put a green zipper in a purple dress with orange thread.

My sister Jeanie was voted “Best Dressed” in high school. Small wonder. She created very stylized designs, and The Peg and she would sew them up together. For instance, the movie Bonnie and Clyde was released about this time, and she designed an outfit inspired from the film. In a twist, it was a Clyde-like outfit – a vest and skirt in navy pin-stripe, a dark blood-red blouse, and a necktie made from the same pin-striped fabric. They pulled it off flawlessly. Jeanie always looked impeccable, tall and slender, hair down to her waist, and dressed to the nines.

When I got carried away with one of my prom dresses, The Peg told me she wouldn't work that hard on another dress until it was my wedding dress. Yes, I did design my wedding dress, and the The Peg made it. I intend to make a quilt out of it someday.

The group of home schooled children I'm teaching are learning similar lessons of design and quilting. They are making quilts from recycled and reclaimed fabric, and gathering that fabric was a design challenge in itself. Lydia's mom has sewed in the past, so the two of them went through her mother's stash and selected a few whole pieces of cloth for consideration in her quilt. Lydia has a very good eye, and understanding scale and color is instinctive with her. She appears able to see the big picture, even as a ten-year-old, as she comprehends how once piece relates to another, and that the finished quilt will be a composite of how each piece functions within the scheme. At our last meeting, Lydia had her pieces all cut out and numbered into rows, ready for sewing. In doing so, she spontaneously incorporated her own personality into the process. She clearly grasps the concept of being an important part of the whole scheme of life.

I called Lydia's house one day, and her paternal grandma was there with her. Lydia's mom was gone for a few days to help her own mother recover from an accident, and when I called, Lydia and her grandma were working on arranging her cut squares. They were moving them around, finding the pattern they found pleasing, and sharing quilt and fabric thoughts with one another. I flashed back to the times The Peg and I spent together on similar pursuits, and I mentally thanked her soul in heaven for teaching me.

Boy Aidan has an eye for detail, and he likes big, splashy prints with lots of contrast between dark and bright colors. Boy Aidan brought some of the most luscious, textured fabrics along with him the day we shared fabric choices. It seems Boy Aidan's mother is a bit of a closet fabriholic herself, and she will buy used clothing at The Depot (Decorah's version of Good Will or The Salvation Army) strictly for the sensuousness of the cloth. In our fabric-sharing session, Boy Aidan unfurled the most divine blue velvet choir robe, and everyone in the room gasped! It was just his size, and many children his age would have hoarded that piece for a Harry Potter costume. Boy Aidan saw it differently – it was perfect for a quilt to nap under, keeping precious spots of this heavenly softness within arm's reach, to comfort the user from a demanding world.

When we started cutting out fabric, we dug through a very large collection of fabric, still in the incarnation of clothing, to see what was useful there. Chris from The Depot had donated these items for the home schoolers, and our children were more than delighted with what they found. I encouraged them not to overlook the elements unique to the fabric source. For example, you can't buy fabric off the bolt that has buttons or collars or pockets, any of which would make marvelous, creative additions to a quilt. Boy Aidan got it. He was as eager to look for buttons and embroidered or appliquéd treasures as he was for the more obvious explosions of colorful fabrics. Each find was a new treasure, but as he did with the Harry Potter/choir robe, he didn't hoard them. Gentle Aidan shared his finds with the others, negotiating and distributing this bounty as he saw fit by the lights in the eyes of his friends. The tranquilness I observed as he rationed his precious discoveries was contagious.

Girl Aidan and Anna came to the fabric-sharing session with an intergenerational collection of fabrics that gave me goosebumps. They had clothing from grandparents and mom, and even a darling baby outfit from their little brother Kai. Girl Aidan knows herself, and she tempers her choices for joy rather than conflict. She is guided by an inner unselfishness that allows her to see the beauty in the meaning of things, not just in the surface design. When she was examining Kai's baby outfit for a place in her quilt, she chose an area with a small figure that she hoped he'd eventually recognize as being from his infancy. Elsewhere she found a clever little pocket that looked about blocksize for her quilt, and together we carefully measured and cut it out. When she showed Anna there were two pockets, we repeated the process for her little sister.

Girl Aidan and Lydia share an awareness of their own awakening strengths. They both recognize that they are capable of making the quilt they are working on, and they want to be responsible for its completion. Their families respect their claim to the process, and jump in where they are needed and stand back when they aren't. The Quilt Dance, we could call it. And while they're dancing, they are also singing. Both of them have powerful voices, strong and true, and they sing while they work, entertaining themselves and the rest of us with melodies they find pleasing to repeat.

Anna is amid it all. If her middle name isn't Lark, it should be. Or maybe her nickname could be The Starling, as described in the book King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Z. Lorenz. The starling is a happy and gentle bird that will follow wherever a loving soul leads. Anna isn't so much a follower as she is trusting, and to borrow a saying from a plaque at a craft show, she will bloom where she is planted. The next time we meet, I'm going to spend most of my time with Anna. She is a bud in the spring, a cocoon in the fall. She is definitely Anna, and she is percolating her personality, waiting for the blend to become distinct. She knows she will have a quilt when she's done with the group. She will work on it and learn new things, and I predict the importance of her quilt project will fade in and out for a few years, until she can appreciate her efforts. Then, it will change from a showpiece to a descriptor of Anna, and she will wonder how she ever made it happen. When that moment occurs, she will know if she wants to make another, and if she does, it will be spectacular.

Some experiences and emotions are difficult to relate. It's much easier to repeat a humorous exchange of conversation, and then editorialize on its key points. But what word can I use to describe a learning atmosphere filled with peace and excitement, rambunctious serenity and satisfied bewilderment? It's the sum of members of a family, of a community of shared dreams, of a place where everybody matters. That's where I teach people to make quilts.

Q: How many quilters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: At least one family, but it's open to anyone who wants to share the light.

Copyright © November 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Where Quilt Ideas Come From

2005-11-05T17:38:00.000-06:00

I was born a dork. When I was growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, Allen Chickering down the block didn't only call me a dork, he added a last name.

“Hey, Dork McFork! What's new?”

Sometimes he'd come out of his house, look up the block, see me, and call out, “Doooo-rk McFoooooo-rk!” In the case of Allen Chickering, it was clearly an it-takes-one-to-know-one situation. I'm sure I earned the nickname as a result of the Clubhouse Incident.

We neighborhood kids were building a clubhouse in the Chickering's back yard. The Crick was only a block away, and occasionally people would dump stuff there. The Crick is actually a creek, but for some Southeast Iowa twangy reason, we had a different pronunciation of the word.

We'd hear the grown-ups talking about how disgusting it was that some people would dump things in The Crick, but we never really understood their beef. We thought most of what we found to be quite useful. It took us some time, but we were able to retrieve a supply of discarded boards, with nails already in them, and stacked them behind the bushes (that's booshes to the natives) near the alley at the back of the Chickering property. We had nail removal sessions, when we would carefully whack and pull the nails out the way they went in, and save them in a Velveeta® box for our own future use.

We acquired some roofing shingles, but I doubt those came from The Crick. They were nice and new, and not a dumpable commodity in the 1960's. We probably just stole those from someone's garage. Most of us had parents who had been through The Depression, so discarding perfectly good things was unheard of. The Peg re-used “tin foil” many times over, and would wash out the baggies she used for the half-sandwich lunch she brought when she taught Home Ec at Charles D. Evans Junior High. Today's recycling efforts have nothing over The Barn and The Peg.

The clubhouse idea wasn't a front burner issue. We would fit it in between whiffle ball games in the street in front of the Chickering house; or, the massive, hours-long, multi-block Hide 'n Seek team events; or, our “spying”, which meant running around after dark, hiding in booshes, and creating a world of intrigue from looking into the windows of our neighbors, as they sat, unsuspecting, in their living rooms watching TV or reading. You have no idea the number of murdered bodies we surmised had been hidden under front porches or in The Crick, as part of either a JFK assasination conspiracy, or a KGB plot to determine the location of all the Fallout Shelters within the city limits.

We didn't have a club anyway. We just wanted a clubhouse because some of the kids our ages on TV had them. We'd organized a few neighborhood General Stores whenever someone got a new refrigerator and we had the big box. We sold candy to each other from inside, after we laid it down longwise and cut a service window into one “wall” of it. That was fun, but cardboard couldn't withstand the wear and tear of the Quincy Avenue neighborhood kids. It got hot in there, too, which melted the Popsicles and the Hershey bars. A well-built clubhouse was the only way to go. Maybe we'd even air condition it, we dreamed.

This was during the years when Jimmy Carter was peanut farming in Georgia, and was perhaps gearing up for a run for the governor's office. I don't think Habitat for Humanity was even a twinkle in his eye. Our marathon clubhouse building sessions, and others like it all over Baby Boom America, no doubt prepared the country for contributing our rudimentary carpentry skills for the common good.

The final design of our clubhouse was impressive. It had two single-file rooms and a front porch, and would sit six kids comfortably. I say “sit” because we couldn't stand in it. There was at least one open, glassless window, possibly designed for potential use as a General Store. We built the whole thing ourselves, but the process was not without pitfalls.

I was up on top of the clubhouse roofing when I hollered out my need for more shingles, or boards, or nails, or whatever I needed. Everyone was occupied, so I jumped down from the roof to fetch what I needed.

EEEEEEE-YYOOOOOOOWW! The pain shot through me like a knife, which makes sense, because I landed on a nail, a long old rusty nail that had been overlooked during Phase One of the operation. It had been sticking out of a board, pointing up, until I covered it with my right white gym shoe, which had been converted to “street shoes” now that the school year was over. When I picked up my foot, the whole board was attached to the bottom of it, like a horrible farcical snowshoe of torment. All the other dorks were too shocked to know what to do, but someone finally yanked it out, and then everyone helped me limp home, as I wailed in pain and fear.

The Barn called the doctor, and we immediately went to the emergency room to have it checked out. They cleaned it up and bandaged it, but said we'd better keep an eye on it for awhile. The Barn must have been worried, because his sister Margarette had suffered a fate that lasted a lifetime when a bicycle ran over her toe. Within days the pain worsened, which necessitated a return visit to the doctor. Most of the bones in my right leg had become infected, which was what the doctor had hoped to avoid.

They admitted me to St. Joseph's Hospital, where I stayed for a week. They wrapped my right foot in endless gauze bandages, then covered it with two hot water bottles, and wrapped several towels around that to keep in the heat. They changed these bandages three or four times a day, which was a lengthy process. Because of the weight of this dressing, I couldn't move very much on my bed, but the pain in my left hip from the recent tetanus shot kept me still, too. The shots I got in my other hip each morning weren't fun, either, but didn't have the pain of that tetanus bomb.

After four or five days, the hot water bottles came off and I was allowed to explore the pediatric floor in a wheel chair. I hung out with another kid who was in for a broken leg, and we got yelled out by the nuns for having wheel chair races in the halls and leaving skid marks. Since I was Lutheran, I didn't understand the level of sin to which I had sunk, but my opponent was Catholic, and he advised me to do some concentrated praying over the matter. The fact that his dad was one of our doctors didn't seem to have earned him any indulgences. I had incorrectly assumed both his religious and genealogical heritages would have some pull when he talked me into the lark.

As far as Allen Chickering and the Dork McFork moniker, it was a traveling trophy. We returned it to Allen right after he got the headphones for his new stereo. Headphones were new to the home entertainment world in the 1960's, and we were all up in Allen's room trying them out. You could wear them while the music blared for everyone else in the room, or you could listen to music without bothering others. I'm sure Allen's mom had insisted on purchasing them the minute they came out. We were passing them around while the music blared, enjoying how far technology had come.

When it was Allen's turn, we turned off the sound in the room and let him sing loudly while air-guitaring and head banging, 1968-style, to Joe Cocker singing, “A Little Help From My Friends”. We pretended to be enthusiastically enjoying the music along with Allen, but Mark Weatherstone was secretly recording the spectacle on a hidden cassette recorder for our future entertainment. It was hilarious. Dork McFork, at the pinnacle of bufoonery. What was even dorkier was all of us little McFork wannabes replaying it for months, laughing uproariously. We were one big neighborhood of dorks, but not just any kind of dorks. We were dorks with a last name.

I haven't made a quilt to commemorate any of these events. There is no clubhouse quilt, no hospital quilt, no spying quilt. There is no Dork McFork quilt, or Allen Chickering quilt, or Crick quilt. It's only because I haven't made them, not because they aren't good ideas for quilts. These stories tell a personal history to my descendants who may never travel to Ottumwa, Iowa, but they also tell the story of what life was like at that point in history, in the Midwest, perhaps all over the country.

Stories such as these that can inspire quilts. Quilts themselves are stories, and I encourage you to think of your personal stories when you plan your designs. They are worth the telling, and the chance to be told and retold for many lifetimes.

Copyright © November 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

A Quilting Primer

2005-10-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

My word processing program does not recognize the word “quiltmaker”. I think this belittles quiltmakers everywhere, so as I did with Hubba, I trained it to be a little more respectful of our talents. “Quiltmaker” is now added to my word processing program's dictionary, and hopefully we won't have that problem anymore.

My Number One lint peeve is people calling quilts blankets – the sound of it makes my hair curl. Since I already have curly hair, I wind up with a real case of the frizzies. Interesting... when I typed in “frizzies”, I discovered my word processing program doesn't recognize that word, either. Great -- quiltmakers are relegated to the same category as having the dang frizzies. Does that blow, or what?

My word processor has no problem at all with blanket. I mean no disrespect to blankets. We own a major Amana wool blanket, a treasured gift from The Barn and The Peg. In the early years of our marriage, they made a special trip to the Amana Colonies (www.amanacolonies.com) to purchase it for us. My parents shop for quality first, but getting a good price runs a very close second. They always kept a running list of needs, and when they found something on the needs list at a fabulous price, their feelings of good luck and cleverness only enhanced the joy of their reward.

You can't get much more Midwestern than having an Amana wool blanket. Made at the Amana Woolen Mill (www.amanawoolenmill.com), they are of superior quality in material, design, and construction. Ours is huge and warm, and if I didn't already sleep with a furnace (one of Hubba's countless talents), I would most likely use it on all of our Northeast Iowa winter nights. We have used it often, though. Our whole family could cuddle under it during impromptu film festivals in the family room.

The Amana Colonies are a good source of both blankets and quilts. Heritage Designs Needlework and Quilting Supplies is a great place to start. It's in Amana, which is also called Main Amana. The Amana Colonies include Amana, South Amana, East Amana, West Amana, Middle Amana, High Amana, and Homestead. Homestead didn't stand a chance when it came to naming the Amana Colonies – they were probably just glad to be included at all.

At Heritage Designs, quiltmakers may stop in to buy fabric, but once inside they get a bonus jolt of inspiration. The fabric choices there say, “See for yourself what you can do with me.” Even if you stopped in for something specific, you may wind up buying several yards of unique fabric or fat quarters. The other needlework supplies available there will take you out of blind fabric mode, and challenge you to do more with your abilities and possibilities. Places like Heritage Designs are the reason so many quilters have over-developed purchase justification skills.

Other places in the Amanas interest the fabric junkie, too. A trip to the Woolen Mill throws in an appreciation of wool and their weaving process. I own a knitting machine, and once attended a knitting machine conference in the Amana Colonies. Quilts are a focus of decorating at Fern Hill Gifts and Quilts in South Amana, where non-quilters have an opportunity to buy handmade quilts by Iowa quiltmakers. The Amanas is one of the few sources where the consumer can buy highly crafted quilts, made from start to finish by one quiltmaker, at bargain basement prices. Some of the quilts there, and at other handmade quilt retail locations, might have been made by a group of people, so I recommend you ask about the history and making of the handmade quilts you purchase if you're interested in a quilt made by one quiltmaker.

Amish Quilts, with both the “A” and the “Q” capitalized, denotes a quilting style dating back to the the Amish in the 1870's, the earliest we can be sure the Amish were quilting. They used very rudimentary styles, usually whole cloth quilts in brown, blue, or black, and they stitched designs on them. Eventually, they added more solid colored fabric to their pieces, in simple designs that create a simultaneous effect of regimented simplicity and free-flowing form.

Amish quilts, with only the “A” in Amish capitalized, applies to quilts made by Amish people. They aren't necessarily Amish Quilts, made of solid colored fabrics, but sometimes they are. Because of the assumption that the Amish do things the old-fashioned way, their handwork is greatly sought by non-threadies. A little more information may help the unmercerized to better understand what they are getting.

It has been said that just because you are Amish doesn't mean you can quilt worth a hoot. Many of the Amish-made quilts for sale are practice sessions for youngsters learning how to stitch (which is wonderful), or they are stitched together by groups of quilters, not by just one quiltmaker. Again, this is wonderful, and buyers should ask for this kind of information when purchasing a quilt. The buyer should also be aware that many Amish quiltmakers use fabric that is a cotton-polyester blend, rather than 100% cotton, and they frequently use polyester batting. These quilts are warm, and fabric with polyester in it doesn't fade as fast as 100% cotton, but polyester is plastic, and that affects the ability of the quilt to breathe when one sleeps under it. It can get a little uncomfortable sleeping under a piece of plastic.

Cotton-polyester blend fabric and polyester batting are less expensive to purchase than their 100% cotton counterparts. A quilter's eye can tell if there is polyester in the fabric or the batting, but there is also a test to determine the same. If you light a match and burn a raw edge of fabric, the cotton-polyester blends will melt, and the 100% fabric will leave an ash. Obviously, you can't do the burn test on quilts in a quilt shop, so it is best to ask for verification and/or a guarantee of the fabric contents if you want to avoid polyester.

As for stitching, I don't believe that tiny stitches alone are the mark of a fabulous quilter. I take tiny stitches because I like that look for its rarity and uniqueness in some of my quilts. Taking tiny stitches also requires very dense quilting, and quilts that employ tiny stitches also have lots of stitches in them. Not everyone chooses to take that amount of time on every quilt, and I will occasionally opt for using perle cotton and larger stitches. It is equally impressive when quilts have less stitching, the stitches are a bit larger, and the stitching is noticeably even. Even stitches are the mark of an experienced and skillful quilter, not merely tiny ones. Avid hand stitchers frequently make Amish Quilts, because the solid colored fabrics are an excellent canvas to demonstrate stitching skills, whether the stitches are small and even, or a little larger and even.

Let's journey back to the Amana Colonies. I know a woman here in Northeast Iowa who makes quilts to sell there. Believe me, buyers of her quilts are getting a deal. The hours and expertise involved in making them are barely reimbursed, which must limit how many quiltmakers of her caliber will sell their creations at the relatively low return on their investment of time, proficiency and materials. Most likely buyers look at the price of their Amana Woolen Mill blanket and consider the quilts' sticker prices are exorbitant in comparison. These quiltmakers have the same number of hours in a day as the rest of us, and if it takes 200 hours to make a quilt that brings $600, the quiltmaker earns $3 an hour. 200 hours is five forty-hour weeks of work. Divide $600 by five, and the quiltmaker earns $120 a week. That income drops considerably when you remove material costs, which can easily be $100-150 per queen-sized quilt. I've even heard quilt piecers say they paid a “pretty penny” to have their quilt tops hand stitched. If it takes 150 hours to hand stitch a quilt, and they pay the “pretty penny” of $200, the hourly rate is $1.33, or $53.20 for a forty-hour week. A hidden sacrifice for the quiltmaker is the time that could have been spent on his or her own designs.

The woman I know who sells her quilts in the Amanas has at least twenty-five years of quilting experience. She is a stylish blond with a trim figure, great posture, and a real eye for fabric combinations. She only uses the best of fabric, most often bought in our area quilt shops in order to support the local quilting economy. She employs all kinds of quilting techniques, including machine- and hand-appliqué, and she pieces slowly and accurately by machine. She hand stitches her quilts, and her work is precise and even. Self-critical, she will re-do things until she gets them right. To say it takes her 200 hours to make a queen-sized quilt is an understatement, not an exaggeration.

Amana wool blankets also use the best materials and the best construction methods. Let's estimate on the long side that it takes about forty-five minutes to make an entire blanket on the machine-looms they use to weave them, but we'll stretch the whole process out to four full hours per blanket in order to amortize the cost of the big loom. A queen-sized blanket of merino wool is $159.95. You do the math. Once the amortization schedule on the loom passes, the profits are even greater. We quiltmakers don't bother to amortize our quilting betweens.

Just when I think I have my distaste for hearing quilts called blankets under control, someone will look at a quilt and say something like, “That's pretty, but I have a real nice Hudson Bay blanket. Do you want to see it?” It starts all over again. My back stiffens, my peripheral vision darkens, and my hair begins to frizz. I don't mean to invite class warfare, but you'd hope what a quiltmaker does was appreciated by living, breathing people more than it is by a word processing program. In the same vein, insurance companies will only insure or reimburse against the cost of the materials, making a beautiful handmade quilt, made from start to finish by one quiltmaker, equal to a good blanket, like an Amana wool. I suppose if you bought a handmade quilt for $600 and kept the receipt, a homeowner's policy would reimburse for the purchase price, less depreciation. I'm afraid the one I made as a gift for The Barn and The Peg is probably only worth $100, or less, today. I'd get more for my Amana wool, without a doubt.

I encourage you to take a trip to the Amana Colonies and check out the Amana Woolen Mill. You'll love their blankets – they're the best money can buy. If you get to one of the shops that sells real handmade quilts by Iowa quiltmakers, ask about the people who made them. There is something more Midwestern than having an Amana wool blanket. A handmade Midwestern quilt is hard to top.

Copyright © October 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Richard Nixon Lived Here, Too

2005-10-22T09:11:00.000-05:00

Can you name Radar O’Reilly’s hometown? That’s a little Iowa trivia that doesn’t escape the natives, and for those who hail from Ottumwa, it is our most common identifier.

“Where are you from?”

“Ottumwa.”

“Ottumwa? Oh, yeah! Radar O’Reilly’s hometown!”

Once people find out there really is an Ottumwa, they naturally assume there really is a Radar O’Reilly. I haven’t found a graceful way to answer the questions, “Did you know him?”, and “Does any of his family still live there?” without sounding condescending.

“Well, see, Radar O’Reilly isn’t a real person. He was a character from M*A*S*H, and they randomly chose Ottumwa as his hometown. Maybe it’s because we have a former naval airbase here, which is home to the world’s largest swimming pool. Hey now, there’s a piece of history for you. Do you know why we have the world's larg…”

“Radar really was from Ottumwa, though. It's right at the beginning of the book. Didn’t he become a congressman, or something?”

“That was Fred Grandy. He played Gopher on The Love Boat.”

“Oh. What happened to Radar, then?” And they call us yokels. The swimming pool story is a lot more interesting.

I grew up in Ottumwa, in the southeast quadrant of the state. We aren’t that far from the Missouri border, close enough for the locals to have adopted the southern twang that colors Missourian vowels, especially the “ou”, the “ow”, and the “aw” sounds, along with the short “u”. When we go downtown, we go daaown-taaown. We worsh our clothes, and as a part of our lawn care routines, we occasionally trim the boooshes when they get shaggy.

While limestone gravel awaits its harvest below the surface in my northeast Iowa home of Decorah, the coal has already been mined around my southeast Iowa roots of Ottumwa. In our history classes at Wildwood Elementary, we studied the great Coal Palace that once graced our community, a shrine to and of the black rock that, for a time, was our economic mainstay.

The Mondanaro’s house burned down in the mid-60’s, and the fire was blamed on their coal furnace. Marian, my best friend in high school, said it was her brother Jim’s job to shovel the coal into the furnace before bedtime in the winter, and when she would touch the wall that abutted her bed, it felt hot.

Marian’s Italian father, Joe Mondanaro, was originally from Jersey City, New Jersey, which he pronounced “Joisey City, New Joisey”. It was our naval airbase that brought him to Ottumwa -- he trained scuba divers in the gi-gundo swimming pool there. Once he was here, Joe became an active and colorful member of the community, with a houseful of kids by his Irish wife Phyllis; Jane, Peggy, Jim, Marian, Steve, Gina, Chris, and John. He must have loved living in the Midwest, and remained here until his untimely death from cancer in 2003.

Joe never did switch from his Joisey accent to the Missouri twang, though. In the fall of the year they moved to our neighborhood, he was observing the migrating birds that rested in our treetops as they made their ways from the north to their winter homes. The trees would be thick with them, and it was fun to clap two boards together and watch them scatter en masse from the maple trees.

“Hey, goils!" he hollered to Marian and me from the front porch. “Come out here and look at these boids!”

No, you wouldn’t have heard him saying, “Our new haaouse is on the Saaouth Side.”

The Ottumwa Courier featured the story of the blaze that destroyed their home, and the unusual living arrangements for the surviving family of ten. Right after the fire, the Mondanaros found refuge at The Heights, a Roman Catholic junior college for women. They closed off an entire floor of the residence hall, and moved all ten of them in there. Before long, they found a house to rent on the South Side, on Quincy Avenue, just two doors down from us, and Marian and I became solid buddies. We have one of those talk-every-decade-or-so-but-still-have-fun kind of soul-sisterhoods. I know there were times in high school when we laughed so hard we just about wet ourselves. It set the tone for a lifetime.

Ralph and Pauline Kirkland lived just a few blocks east of Quincy Avenue, on Appanoose. Across the street from them were Harold and Stephie Johnson. Harold and the three kids went to First Lutheran, the same as the Kirklands and we Onerheims. Stephie went to mass at St. Pat’s, but we all thought she was still pretty nice. Harold had a tenor voice that turned heads when he sang hymns during the 8:30 service at First Lutheran. "Ricky" is the only one if their kids I see anymore – I don’t even know for sure where the other two are, but Rick’s in Ottumwa.

We were having the Ottumwa showing of The Clausen Quilts this weekend at Pennsylvania Place on the North Side. It’s a retirement community, and The Barn and The Peg moved into their independent living unit ten years ago, when it was brand new. Pauline moved there about a year ago, just after Ralph died. Rick Johnson gave his eulogy, I played my flute, and my sister Jeanie did the readings. Our two families considered ourselves the “Kirkland Kids” -- they had quite a passel of us! Thelma Johnson, Pauline’s sister, has lived there several years, too, so I usually get to see both Thelma and Pauline when I visit Ottumwa. Thelma entrusted me with a large collection of Mrs. Clausen’s hand embroidered pillowcases and dresser scarves several years ago. It’s an awesome responsibility – they are like gold to all of us.

I heard a voice, booming from the foyer of Pennsylvania Place. “You went to Pickwick? I went to Wildwood, so that means we both went to Evans Junior High.”

Huh? Who went to Wildwood? I went to Wildwood… and I scurried to peer over the quilt-draped railing to the foyer below.

“Oh, it’s Ricky! Hi, Rick!”

“Hi, Kari. I was just telling Lea Ann [Mercer nee' Joseph, who went to Pickwick] here about how well Polly could sew.”

The Johnsons always called Pauline, “Polly”. It’s their special thing.

“I tell you, she could sew suits that looked like they came right out of Vogue. She sewed everything she wore, and she looked like a million bucks every day. I don’t know if Thelma could sew, but Polly could. I don’t know if Polly could quilt, but she could sew just about anything to wear.”

I love to listen to Rick talk. He threads ideas and observations together into a verbal quilt.

“But Polly’s mom, well, everyone knew Polly’s mom could sew quilts and clothes, and she sewed those quilts by hand, every little tiny stitch.” Rick advanced from the foyer to elevator, where he pooshed the button for the first floor and headed for the boardroom, where the rest of the quilts were set up for showing. We had a fine talk, sharing memories about the quilts, and catching up on bits and pieces of the last thirty years since we lived on Quincy Avenue and Appanoose.

Behind our house, across the alley in a house facing Hackworth Avenue, was where Debbie Stubbs lived. One day The Peg was cleaning up after lunch when she told me a new little girl had moved into the neighborhood, and she was just my age. “After I finish with these dishes, we’ll go over and meet her.” I was a pre-schooler, and it took a long time for her to finish those dishes.

Debbie was inside the house with her mother Doris, who was unpacking. There were boxes and furniture strewn about, so she and Debbie came outside for our introduction. The Peg and Doris talked right along, and I remember Doris saying Debbie was shy. I didn’t know what a shy was, but if Debbie was one, I wanted to be one, too. Obviously, the shy thing never took hold with me.

I loved my new friend instantly, and we spent most of our time together for the next five years. We were best friends, a relationship that defined the term for me. To this day, you are my best friend if I love you as much as I love Debbie Stubbs.

We started kindergarten together, and have the first-day-of-school pictures to prove it, both of us in plaid school dresses with hoop slips underneath, holding those manila envelopes that held construction paper and a new box of eight fat crayons.

One spring The Peg made us fancy matching red and white organza dresses, with big red organza “butterfly bows” that tied in the back. In appreciation, Doris bought us matching red and white shorts outfits. Since The Peg made all of our clothes, this was the first store bought outfit I remember owning. I went with Debbie and her mom when we bought them. It was all very foreign to me, shopping for clothes in a store in daaown-taaown Ottumwa.

Debbie moved a couple of miles away when we were in the second grade. She didn’t go to Wildwood anymore; now she lived across the street from Pickwick. I got a flute for my birthday right after Debbie left, and I started learning to play. The regular kids, whose dads weren’t the band director, had to wait until the summer after fourth grade to get their instruments. Not me. I took lessons from Cindy Cline, who didn’t live all that far from Debbie’s new house. Later, in the fourth grade, Debbie chose to play the flute, too, and we were in band together until we graduated from high school in nineteen-none-of-your-dang-business.

Debbie helped out at my wedding reception, and then I never saw her again. She got married, I didn’t know her last name, her dad died, her mom got sick, and we lost track of each other. She was probably too shy to look for me. It was a slipped-through-the cracks problem, where the stars were never in the right alignment to connect with her. I could never forget her, because she was my first best friend.

Dorothy Benson lives across the hall from The Barn at Pennsylvania Place. Dorothy taught kindergarten at Anne G. Wilson Elementary, on the North Side. Pickwick and Wildwood are both on the South Side. Marian Mondanaro had Mrs. Benson for kindergarten, and their house that burned down was a short walk from Anne G. Wilson. When I was writing this blog entry, there were some details I wanted to check out about the fire, and the living arrangements afterwards. Did the Mondanaros live at Walsh, the Catholic high school, or was it the Heights, the Catholic college? I thought Dorothy might remember, so I walked across the hall to ask. She didn’t remember the story, but she had a treasure to share with me – an address book of dear old OHS alumni. Marian had moved since the book was printed, and I didn’t have her new phone number, but I found some siblings I could try calling. I figured I’d find some Mondanaro and get the answers to my questions. I copied down a few numbers, went back to The Barn’s apartment, and hit the hay.

In the morning, I was planning when I could call a Mondanaro when it hit me -- the book! Debbie Stubbs could be in the book! I decided it was worth it to bother Dorothy again, and she was as gracious as ever. Sure enough, Debbie Stubbs was now Debbie Richmond, and there was her phone number. I called and left a message, hoping she hadn’t gone away for the weekend.

In a few hours, my cell phone rang. “This is Debbie.” I told her as politely as I could to get herself over to my dad's, and within a half hour we were sitting down together for the first time since July of 1976. She really hadn't changed a bit. It was fun being in the same room with her, and after she left The Barn remarked that nothing had changed: I still jabbered and gestured away, and Debbie sat quietly, shy and patient, waiting to get a word in edgewise. As we parted, she said she'd come visit me in Decorah. We still have a lot of years to catch up on.

I talked to Marian today, too. She was the second best friend of my life, and I love her with my whole heart, too, just like I love Debbie Stubbs. I did manage to get the details of the fire and their stay at the Heights right, and then we spent another ninety minutes catching up since our last gabfest in 2002. Sadly, Marian's parents are both gone in that short time. Debbie's dad died suddenly of a heart attack when he was barely sixty-five, and her mom has been quite ill since the late nineties. Debbie's own husband, whom I never met, passed away from cancer suddenly in December of 2004. The Peg has been gone for three years now, and that seems like a lot to have piled up when it is shared in the span of a few days. We are learning to adjust to the reality of these changes.

All anybody asks about when they hear I'm from Ottumwa is Radar O'Reilly. The people I know from Ottumwa aren't fiction. They are real and warm and wonderful, and they helped create who I am. Yes, Tom Arnold is from Ottumwa, and yes, I sort of remember the family. I don't remember knowing Tom: who could have forgotten that voice? Richard Nixon lived there during WWII, they tell me, in the Tisdale Apartments, but he was no Debbie Stubbs or Marian Mondanaro. There aren't The Barns, or Thelma Johnsons, or Pauline Kirklands, or Ricky Johnsons, or Dorothy Bensons anywhere else on the planet.

They are the great people from Ottumwa, the ones I come home to.

Copyright © October 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

You CAN Nap Under a Matisse, You Know

2005-10-15T11:25:00.000-05:00

Is it form over function, or function over form? That's the chicken/egg dilemma over which I never struggle. I am a functional art quilter -- I prefer to make quilts that are unique, interesting, and used for napping. I'm not real nuts about seeing them hanging on a wall, but I don't mind tempting the urge.

Art quilting often competes with quilting as way to keep warm and feel the love. The functional art of choosing interesting fabric, cutting and sewing it accurately, and finishing it expertly is a thing of beauty in itself. Not everyone can do it well, even with today's rotary cutters, self-healing mats, mix 'n match fabric lines, and the rabble of books and classes. Today's methods increase the success rate of quilting, which encourages newbies to repeat the process, and with each successive piece, the quiltmaker improves in skill and confidence.

You rarely see a quiltmaker repeat an entire quilt verbatim, no matter how much pleasure that one quilt brought. The inner designer prompts us to move on to the next engagement. Some of us visualize and expand the possibilities of the lint before us. As we manipulate the fabric into our basic quilts, the fabric in turn manipulates our imaginations. “What if I...”, “I wonder how it would work if...”, “What this piece needs is...”

I love to learn new techniques, but seldom want to use one technique to make an entire quilt. I will use one to make a whole quilt, as I did with T-man's Civil War quilt and the Square in a Square Ruler® (“Measure Twice, Cut Once”). It's the best way to familiarize myself with what I can extract from one technique to infuse into another location. Once I acquaint myself with the newfound skill, I maneuver it into my subconscious and it shows up in my design process.

For example, I haven't taught myself Stack 'N Whack yet, but there are times I'd like to finagle that concept into something a little less predictable than the who-knows-what-you'll-get process of using large prints. I know, I know, that sounds confusing, because the whole Stack 'N Whack schtick is it's unpredictability. But if you think about it, we actually do expect something similar each time, we just don't know precisely how it will turn out. I won't know the possibilities myself until I bite the bullet and make a dang quilt that way. It will probably take a whole quilt to get it figured out, too.

The challenge of learning new techniques can be baffling and frustrating. That alone is what excites many quiltmakers, and I have to admire the drive to be technically exact. As with many art forms, there are as many different motivations to improve as there are people who are motivated. We have some true masters right here in Northeast Iowa, quiltmakers who win award after award, and are consistently recognized in quilting circles as being at the top of their craft. Learning and mastering these techniques can be tedious, but the tenacity of these crackerjacks is rewarded in their amazing results. It is nothing short of a phenomenon.

My good quilting friend Susan always comes to mind when I think of a quilting master and artist. She isn't motivated by winning ribbons or getting her picture in the paper, though I believe that would be inevitable if she chose that route. Instead, she uses what she knows to rouse others. She's a natural inspirer, and her comments throw open new windows of possibilities. Susan is the one who prompted me to enter the Thimbleberries® challenge while I was still in my novitiate. I don't spend enough time with her, even though she and Cindy and Linda meet fairly regularly on Monday nights to work together on their projects, sharing their time and observations. When I can go, I am always most pleased by Susan's insights, and with how long I carry them inside of me. She's that good.

Among her many talents, Susan can paper piece. In fact, she is a virtuoso, and passionate about what she can do with it, where it leads her. She once paper pieced a tulip that is only visible under a microscope – a wonderment! For some reason, I can look at and admire her paper pieced blocks for longer than it took her to make them. She will find square frames with little square cutouts to showcase her tiny blocks. Sometimes the frames themselves are bulky, and you'd think they would overpower whatever one put in the display opening, even when the opening appears to be an afterthought to the frame itself. Yet, she will place a delicate, tiny paper pieced creation there, and the effect is like finding a crocus in the snow in early spring.

I love this about Decorah, the pockets of creativity and the artists everywhere. We have come to expect them in the bluff country and pastures that surround us, aware of those who have abandoned themselves to their art, living by it and from it. But there is the unexpected layer of artmakers among the office personnel at Luther College, behind the stylist's chair at the beauty shop, or in the milking parlor at the dairy farm. There are stay-at-home-moms and dads who write, sew, sculpt, saw, and paint between loads of laundry and during nap time. They are members of every congregation, from the Lutherans to the Quakers, the Catholics and the Unitarians, and there are also those bearing fruit in their studios on Sunday mornings. They may be waiting to retire, so they can do art all the time, but what is remarkable is that they aren't not doing it now while they wait it out. They do work for money, and do art for play.

It makes no difference whether it's form over function or function over form. In the Midwest, we value both, and we find a way to make the most functional of our needs artistic, and still make art to answer the need for enjoyment. I will make the most artsy of my thoughts into something that will keep someone warm. I'm not there full-time yet, so I'm taking my spot among other hidden artists in Northeast Iowa, letting my creativity sustain me. I know where I'm going, and I battle my own impatience as I allot each precious hour of the day to the reality of what must be done now. I am wise to practice the techniques that will broaden the scope of my imagination, to make function a part of my form. Or, is it the other way around?

I just inspired myself to go work on a quilt. Several years ago, one of the emeritus art professors in town got me going by asking about working on a Matisse-inspired splash of a quilt that... gotta go...

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns October 2005

Lydia, Anna, Boy Aidan and Girl Aidan

2005-10-08T08:37:00.000-05:00

“Tell me something you really like to do.” I was getting acquainted with some new friends. They range in age from five to ten, and they came to my house to learn how to quilt.

“Well, what I really like is learning something new every day.”

“Me, too, Anna! High five!” Anna may be the youngest of the group, and she has already figured out what makes a good day.

This is a new experience for me. I am from a family of public school educators, and I married into a family of public school educators. Home schooling was not an option in my day, and when our children were young, there was no network connecting home schoolers. Our own two were socially quite happy in elementary school, and they had ready access to me as a stay-at-home parent -- we did lots of home learning.

Thirty years ago, home schooling was illegal in Iowa, and our mandatory education laws prohibited public school personnel from ignoring “truancy”, as it was viewed at the time. Hubba's father was the superintendent of schools here, at a time when this law was being challenged in Decorah. Now the school works closely with the home schooling community, offering options to families who prefer this route, for whatever reasons the family sees proper.

A friend of mine home schools, and I asked her if any of the home school kids would like to learn to quilt. She broadcast my offer through her home school network, and I had four takers. They are Lydia, Anna and her older sister Aidan, and another Aidan, who is a boy.

“We have the same name, and we spell it the same way,” said Aidan.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Aidan.

“So how will you know which Aidan I'm talking to?”

“You can just say 'Boy Aidan' or 'Girl Aidan'. Or you can use 'Aidan B' and 'Aidan G'.

You know, I probably could have figured that one out myself. It brings to mind one of The Barn's stories, the one about the man who had two horses. He didn't know how to tell them apart, so he measured them carefully. It was then he discovered that the white horse was six inches taller than the black horse. I'm glad Boy Aidan and Girl Aidan could help me unravel this quandry.

This is the way I recapped my first meeting with these students to their parents:

(I sneak-previewed Anna's remarks in the opening of today's post.) When asked what she liked to do, Anna said, "I like to learn something new every day!" Let me tell you, she said it with passion. We high-fived. Cool. Upbeat = Anna.

Boy Aidan is one of the most sharing children I have known. At age 7, he shared all of his snacks with the class, and when he took fabric home, he said he wanted to make a quilt for his Beanie Baby. He also wanted to share his fabric with Anna, and she and he traded swatches eagerly.

Girl Aidan, I found out, is a Renaissance woman. She either does, or appreciates, art, music, and literature. I think she's into geometry, too, because she liked finding quilt shapes. She followed the "Quilt Soup" story intently, and when I played a Native American lullaby on my flute, she fell asleep. Well, she fake-fell asleep, but you get the idea about the appreciation angle.

Lydia is gentle and deep. I have the impression that she chooses her words carefully, and helping others and her family is among her strong values. It seems the care she takes in the way she treats others isn't motivated by how she will be perceived, but by how her actions will impact them.

As we sat at my dining room table, I pondered the wonderful task ahead of us. Imagine what their preconceived notions are about the quilts they will make! These are remarkable children, positive and forward-thinking. I told them about different projects they could make – table runners, wall hangings, and other smaller projects. They had already set their goals.

“I want to make a quilt to cover me up.”

“Yeah, I want to make a blanket.” I'm going to have to work on the vocabulary a bit.

We read a story I wrote called “Quilt Soup”. In the story, a little girl named Pearl and her grandmother work on a quilt together. Pearl is only eight years old, but in the end, she and Grandma make a nice little quilt for Pearl to snuggle under. I made the quilt I wrote about in “Quilt Soup”, and I have it in my house. After reading the story, we took a field trip upstairs to look at it.

“Yeah, like this one. I want a quilt this size.”

“Me, too. I want this size.”

Midwesterners have a strong tradition of helping neighbors, and we know the importance of instilling our youngsters with this spirit. Neighbors are defined as residents of the world, not exclusively within our own sphere of acquaintances. Within a month of Saigon falling, southeast Asian families were finding homes in northeast Iowa. At one time we had well over six hundred refugees from five or six regions, including Viet Nam, Laos (both Hmong and Lao), and Cambodia, living here in Decorah. Eastern bloc refugees and other ethnic groups populate quite a chunk of Postville, Iowa, just down the road, and a new radio station with the call letters KPVL, offers programming throughout the day for at least seven ethnicities and languages that make up that community.

Boy Aidan's grandmother is a Mississippi victim of Katrina, specifically Bay St. Louis. Within hours of the news of this devastation, “Decorah Cares” sprang into action. Supplies for clean-up and after-care were contributed and collected, and a semi was donated to make the run. Boy Aidan's mom and dad have been back and forth to his grandma's house, updating Decorahans on the reconstruction. There are other lives intertwined with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, but none more personal to these children.

“Can we make another one to sell, and then give the money away?” Local lemonade sellers had already earned some money to use for hurricane relief. Perhaps they were thinking of a way to add to that amount. Assuming this was on their minds, I asked them how they would use the money.

“Our family sponsors a little girl in India, but there are lots of people who need it.”

See? We do the value-thing right in the Midwest. A nine-year-old girl has layers of experience with making a difference on the planet. This is normal for all the children in this class, for the children we reared, for the children at our church and others, and happily for the children of the families who were helped by Northeast Iowans in the past. Normal, not a big thing to be done with lots of fanfare. It's a regular, normal part of our lives.

We are using recycled and reclaimed fabric for our quilts. This week the children will gather fabric. There may be a stained shirt or dress that still has plenty wear in the fabric, or a favorite baby item. They may have relatives who will contribute some of their things, and I know there will be lots of sharing back and forth. I have a special piece of fabric to share with them, so that each quilt will have a matched memory of their quiting time together.

Thursday afternoon was about hope and the future, and pieces of the past. We ate cake and drank juice. I dragged out my flute and played it for them. Girl Aidan sang a little for us as she carried dirty dishes to the kitchen. Lydia read aloud for us in a strong, clear voice. Boy Aidan and Anna, good and fast buddies, romped happily with streamers of fabric, the pieces they eventually split and shared with each other. Lydia and Girl Aidan sat on the couch with me, and we talked about our lives. I wish you could hear Girl Aidan's expressive voice and observe Lydia's esoteric, watchful eyes.

Too soon for me, the dads came to pick up the quilt students. The next several Thursdays will be a joy. You won't want to miss them, either, because we will all be learning something new.

Copyright © 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

A Quilting "B"

2005-10-01T07:30:00.000-05:00

Quilts have stories and traditions, and it's the duty of the quilt maker to pass them on along with the quilt. In last week's entry, I told you about the corn patch that goes into the quilts I make for folks who reside outside of Iowa. If you recall, I mentioned using corn fabric in the label of my quilt that went to Ireland.

I didn't start doing the corn-patch thing right off the bat. It developed quite by accident -- I found some fabric with ears of corn on it on a sale table. The idea just shot through me -- chaa-ah, let's remember that we are from the Tall Corn State, for crying in the night, so a new tradition was born. I have since found several fabrics that have ears of corn printed on them, and I will add a yard to my collection when I see a new print.

Quilt people are precious earthlings. The word must have gotten around about my corn fabric fetish, and one day a very sweet fellow guild member called to say she had a surprise for me. Discovering I was at home, she dropped by with a yard of fabric she had found while shop-hopping – a black and cream tablecloth check with little yellow ears of corn scattered throughout in the appropriate places. “For me? Thank you, Joyce!”

How cool is that?

A quilt is not just a blanket (Did you say blank-et!?), it is a story. I can sit down with every single quilt I've ever made and tell the saga I have stitched into every square inch of the dang thing. The corn-patch example makes my point, and illustrates why the things get so crowded with not only facts, but with artifacts, as well. The details will most likely disappear when I am no longer on earth to authenticate them, but until then, they qualify what makes one quilt special from another.

I mentioned “Dorotha's Bounty” in an earlier story. I made that quilt for a Thimbleberries® challenge very early in my quilting career, as a tribute to my grandmother, Dorotha Beal Ott. It is one of the few quilts that I still have, and it's very special to me because my mom and two of her brothers used it in their homes for awhile -- Dorotha's children are a part of the history of our quilt. In that story I mentioned I began another tradition while stitching our quilt, and I said I'd save that story for another time. Now is that time. (You can read more about my escapades with making “Dorotha's Bounty” in “The Eldorado Store”, found in the index on this page.)

I do itty-bitty tiny stitching, but I am not bragging. That's the result of being behind a needle for many years doing a raft of other needle arts – stitching quilts, therefore, came “naturally” for me. It is a true story when I told you that, as a novice quilt maker, I took out the little stitches I was making, and replaced them with bigger ones. I thought I must not be doing it right if I was getting little stitches right off the bat. For some preconceived-notion reason, I didn't think you were supposed to do little bitty stitches until at least your third, or perhaps tenth, quilt. Hey, before you say anything, you try being me for awhile. It's like those people who have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, only I have a blond on one shoulder and a brunette on the other. So don't judge me -- it's not an easy burden to bear.

Where was I? Itty-bitty... okay, now I remember...

I had part of “Dorotha's Bounty” stitched by my friend Mary Anne on her long arm, and she left parts of it for me to hand stitch. There were bleached and unbleached muslin spaces, one on each end of the quilt, so I got all elaborate with those “canvases”. On one end I stitched in some packets of seeds with the word “Seeds” above them. On the other end, I stitched some bum-ugly weeds, and likewise stitched in “Weeds” above them. The weeds were sort of a nod to The Peg, who wore her purple thumb with a bashful, resigned pride.

Somewhere in the quilt, in more than one place, I stitched some bees buzzing around, as if to gather nectar from the fabric blooms. They were subtle, but the natural quilting thread stood out on the dark patterned fabric blocks. They could be seen with a little looking, an activity that makes lingering visually with a quilt entertaining.

Still waters run deep, which is an apt way to describe Hubba's tolerance when it comes to my quilting. If it weren't for his frequent wise cracks about my obsession with lint and fiber, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun, not to mention permissible, for me to continue on my fabric rampage. He gives me just enough guff about what I do to knock out any sense of guilt I have about spending so much time quilting, or talking about quilting, or teaching quilting, or writing about quilting, or dreaming of quilts, or designing quilts, or huffing lint, or mainlining lint, or making lint brownies...

There I go again... still waters... okay, I'm back...

Hubba will examine my designs with an I'm-interested-and-paying-attention gaze. Sometimes he'll reach out his index finger, and tap or trace a few of the angles. He has graceful hands for a boy, and the combination of the hands of my true love smoothing my patchwork is breathtaking. He's thinking, he's looking, and he contributes reflective comments and artistic impressions. Hubba has an active inner-designer and artist that unleashes itself when stimulated. It is genuinely offered from his heart, and I tap into quite often.

When I made The Dot's college quilt, she wanted me to quilt in some lilies, which were her favorite flowers at the time. I asked Hubba if he'd draw a lily to use as my template, which he did. In one of the lily-squares, he wrote “Love, Dad” with Perma-pen, indelibly sending that sentiment off to college with her, too.

“Dorotha's Bounty” lay stretched out on the bed before us. Hubba had on his special quilt-gaze, and his hands and eyes were searching. When he saw the almost hidden bees, he chuckled sweetly.

“Look. It's a “bee”. For Burns. You should put a bee on all your quilts.”

And so I have. At first I quilted them into the motif, as I did with the Dorotha quilt. I even drew-slash-stenciled one as part of the label on the back of Clare's quilt. It has evolved, so that now it is my habit to embroider a bee somewhere on the front of each quilt. It's not always in an obvious place, but hidden, like on the Dorotha quilt. The owner, usually someone who knows the quilt-me and has been buttering me up for some time, knows about the bee and will hunt for it. After all, it's a tradition, and it's always found in one of my Morgan Thomas Quilts.

Everybody should have their own quilting “bees”, something that makes every new creation of your needle a kissing cousin to its ancestors. The unabridged stories of my quilts will be lost when I am no longer around to tell them, but the bees and the corn patches will link them together. Someday, a seventy-five year old great-grandchild of ours will pass on one of the heirlooms, telling the story...

“...and she put this bee here, because their last name was Burns. It was your great-great-grandfather's idea, the “bee” for Burns, and because they were very devoted to each other, she made it a tradition.”

“I love that story. Tell it again.”

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns October 2005

Blissful Oblivion

2005-09-25T18:04:00.000-05:00

I stopped counting at thirty. I don't think I've gotten up to a hundred yet, but sometimes I say “about a hundred”. That's because “a hundred” represents “a lot”. I say “a lot” when a quilter asks me, and I say “about a hundred” when a non-quilter tries to pin me down.

You see, I truly don't remember how many quilts I have made. I simply can't. It's like trying to remember the names of all seven of Snow White's dwarfs, without the aid of a memory association technique. Every now and then another one will streak through my head, and I think to myself, “Okay, so I won't forget that one again.” Well...

You'd think of all people, I would have been writing this stuff down. I was always going to, but then I'd be itching to get to the next quilt and never get the job done. The reason I can't remember most of them is because they don't live with me, but have been carefully placed in loving homes. My specialty is making quilts for specific people, then giving them to those people. After all, in my mind the quilt is perfect for that person.

I experimented with writing things down when I was working on Neil and Judith's quilt. I was using a journal and longhand then, and my hand simply got tired. I didn't know how to use the word processing program on my computer, and for some reason I didn't see myself dragging out the Smith Corona – too lofty-Hemingway for little old Midwestern me. Have I told you how I pigeon-hole life events according to my preconceived notions? Yeah, I thought I had.

The other snag was the emphasis it put on my UFOs. Before I knew that everybody who quilts has UFOs, I just figured I was disorganized and unable to see projects through to fruition. I have since reframed the issue under the belief that the sign of a true quilter is having as many designs waiting for attention as there are completed quilts who-knows-where out there. I'm taking it one step further. The sign of a passionate quilter is not remembering how many UFOs are tucked away, let alone how many quilts have been completed and distributed.

Here are the quilts I've told you about or mentioned so far: 1.) “First Try”, 2.) “Pinwheels and Cartwheels: Two Lives Together”, 3.) “Neil's Garden, Zinnias for Judith”, 4.) “She Reposes Among Roses, His Music Surrounds Her”, 5.) Tad's little comforter quilt I made him for Christmas, 6.) Jim's Log Cabin quilt, which I call “Uncle Jim's Cabin”, 7.) Leslie's quilt, and I can't remember what I named it, 8.) Chelseys' quilt, “Hello Drama Queen”, 9.) Lynn's graduation quilt “Roots and Wings”, 10.) “Dorotha's Bounty”, which I made for the Thimbleberries challenge, 11.) the never-to-be-completed “James Burns, Esquire, Saturday Morning”, 12.) Kathy's nosegay and grandmother's flower garden quilt, another name that has escaped me, 13.) “Quilt Soup” (Did I tell you about Quilt Soup? I don't remember.), 14.)Tad's Civil War Revolving Star quilt (made with the aid of the Square in a Square Ruler®), 15.) Tad's Christmas quilt/comforter.

Sheesh. That's the best my rememberer will let me do. Upon review, I noticed I named Tad's little Christmas comforter twice, but I didn't fix it so you will know firsthand what I'm battling here. I have at least fifteen more out there that I know about, and today's post is a pledge that I will do my best to write about each of them, as they emerge from the misty gloom of my middle-aged mind and into the beam of the Ott Lite.

Let me start with two recollections that have been stirred up and brought forth, while I can still say, “I won't forget those again.” They come to mind because T-man is studying in Ireland for a few months, and they both (the quilts) live there. They are in the same family, but not in the same household.

The first of these quilts was made when our Irish daughter, Clare Hunt, made a return visit to the United States to visit us in Iowa. We first met Clare when she was twenty-one years old and a counselor with the Ulster Project. For several years, a group of middle-school-aged kids from Northern Ireland would spend a month of their summers in selected communities in the United States. Half of the students were Catholic, and the other half, Protestant. The Catholic kids would stay in the homes of American Catholic kids their ages, and the Protestants did likewise. They were then able to see how effortlessly and happily Catholics and Protestants live together in other parts of the world. We hoped the wheels would start turning for them.

The Dot was the right age to participate in the Ulster Project the summer after her eighth grade year, but she was out for softball, and we didn't think its sporadic schedule would make her a very good hostess. Reluctantly, we made the decision to sit it out.

We got a call one day from the director of the program in Decorah. She said she understood our decision not to host a student, but wondered if we would be interested in having the female counselor. The program had one male and one female counselor from Northern Ireland, and one each from here in Decorah. We jumped at the chance to host this young woman, and the bonus was that The Dot got to participate in all the Ulster Program activities that she could squeeze in. Lucky us; we were assigned Clare.

All these young people hail from one community in Northern Ireland, County Londondeery, called Limavady. Clare had been a student in the program herself as an early teen, and her group lived in a community in Tennesee. I asked her if the Ulster Project had any effect on the attitudes of her peers, as they were now the ages of the combatants. She said it definitely did have an impact on their ability and desire to relate to one another, and that things were slowly changing for the positive as a result. In fact, her own brother was in a mixed marriage -- a term that is quickly fading into the history books here in the U.S. We hope for the same in Northern Ireland.

We all fell in love with each other that summer, and extending our family by another person was fine all around. Although Clare missed her “mum”, for which there is never a replacement, she happily gained a little sister. Morgan's dream, being the oldest and only female, was to have an older sister. Clare, being the youngest and only female in her family, found having a younger sister to her liking, as well. “Clare, my Irish sister” and “Clare, our Irish daughter” remain a staple in our vocabularies, even for T-man. He was enraptured with her.

The day the Ulster Project ended, The Dot started her Ireland Trip slush fund. She got a job in the catering department at Luther College, and started socking away her paycheck. Whenever there was a gift-giving occasion, she asked us to forgo anything we'd spend on a gift, and just turn over the cash. She did it. By the time she started her junior year of high school, The Dot had sent herself to Ireland and back. It is our understanding that she was happily adopted over there, so the family grew.

When Clare contacted us that she was coming to her American home during the summer of 1998, there was only one way to prepare.

“Hey, Bobo,” which was T-man's baby-talk name for her, “I need to make Clare a quilt. Do you want to see the fabric I'm going to use?”

“Sure. Looks good. Bye.”

It's always been difficult getting those kids into my zone when it comes to lint. She probably had a mountain to climb, or a hip-hop workshop in La Crosse, or play practice. Quilts. Zzzzzz.

Who needed her, anyway? I had a really wild seer-sucker looking hank of fabric in hot pink, olive green, and a rich golden-yellow plaid. I paired it with a softer butter yellow floral that had some tiny hot-pink flowers, and added a chambray blue solid. I wanted to make Clare a bouquet of Wild Irish Roses. I used these fabrics, and some other odds and ends, to fashion a medallion center of Rose of Sharon flowers that were gathered together into a bouquet, and tied with a bow.

With all that hand appliqué, I had to be quick about piecing the rest of the quilt, so I did a rail fence. I just wanted to get the fabric cut apart and put back together again before her plane landed. She would be here long enough for me to quilt it up.

Of course, our Irish daughter wasn't so blasé when she found out someone was making a quilt for her. She reacted just as I would expect any caring, loving, child of mine would (hint, hint to the other two scalawags). I hadn't sandwiched it when she saw it, so I asked her if she wanted to go with me to pick out the backing fabric. I was thrilled when she honored the crazy blend of her Wild Irish Rose quilt, and chose a chambray-backgrounded fabric splashed with HUGE, bold yellow sunflowers! I laughed out loud, delighted that she could outdo my own feral instincts, revealing a true Irishwoman of spark and pluck.

I called Clare's quilt “Wild 'I's – Ireland to Iowa”, and got it quilted and bound before her return trip. But I had something else in mind by then. We had been encouraging Clare to make it clear to her parents that they were welcome to visit us, since we all shared a daughter or two. Clare has an aunt and uncle living in Canada, and we aren't that far from Canada. After all, it's practically in the neighborhood! I just needed to send a proper invitation.

That winter, I took a class from Candace Arp, a quilt teacher of some renown in our region. She had developed a very clever way to make a nosegay block, using simple bias-square triangles instead of having to set in all those seams, La Moyne Star-fashion. I hadn't tried any of the '20's and '30's reproduction fabrics yet, so I decided to make my nosegays using those. Darlene, down at the quilt shop, had some of that lovely Depression-era yellow, and I used that as my background fabric. I had taken an English paper piecing class and learned to make Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks, so I added some of those, appliqué-style, to the alternating squares.

Since Iowa is dubbed “The Tall Corn State”, I always include a patch of corn fabric to quilts that are going to live outside of Iowa, so that the quilt will remember its roots. On the back of this quilt, in place of a label, I made an envelope out of corn fabric and lined in muslin. Upon unsnapping the flap, the envelope opens to reveal the name of the quilt: The Invitation. I wrote out an invitation to Clare's parents to come visit us whenever they had the chance, and to always feel as though they had a home in America.

Two quilts live in Ireland. I forget about the quilts every now and then, but we never forget about Clare. We hope her parents will remember that The Invitation is good for a lifetime, and that someday the road will rise up to meet us, and we will all put our feet under the same table and toast our lives intertwined.

Writing this has jogged free a few more quilts from my memory. I'm not up to “a hundred” yet, but I'm well past fifty. I really must write about these quilts. If I say that enough, maybe a little more of them will spill over onto the pages here. One sure thing, it will be hard not to write about my current projects. Let's see. Am I starting with number 50? 51? 52...?

Copyright © September 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

One Quilt Story, and I'm Gone

2005-09-24T08:53:00.000-05:00

Hello, Fellow Lintheads! Where on the range are you today? We're heading west this morning, to visit our sister in Clear Lake, Iowa. That's where the Surf Ballroom is located, the last venue of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. Google it, or rent The Buddy Holly Story or La Bamba.

While working to get today's post up, I noticed some weird cyber-stuff happening, making my word processing program as slow as molasses in January. I rebooted, which didn't do the trick, so now I'm running another virus scan. The whole process means I won't get today's installment posted before we leave.

I don't want to mention any names, but someone, not from my generation who is inhabiting our domicile, is uber-surfing as she job-hunts and researches potential employment opportunities. I find her work fascinating, if not exhaustive. She is one focused babe, and when she gets on a roll, she gets on a roll, baby. "Tenacious" covers it fairly well. She discusses the process as she is making her strides, and it's fun to be a part of it. We happily trade off a little slowness on the computer to have her with us. Besides, it sharpens my self-taught computer skills as I try to figure out the remedy.

So, if any of you want to add some comments about your latest projects and curiosities, this is your chance to pop in and do some writing. Part of what I want to encourage is your own writing about your quilting adventures. In fact, today's post deals with that very subject. My new post is named, "Blissful Oblivion", so look for it,probably on Sunday.

I do want to add one quilting story from this week. Pat, my very close and dear friend, was here working on the quilt for the Hauge Church on Tuesday. As we were nearing the completion of assembling the embroidered blocks, I said, "Ooooo, this is getting exciting!!" I thought Pat would fall off her chair laughing. Make that, Pat fell off her chair laughing. This is exciting?? Let's have a round of Geritol to celebrate!

On Thursday, Pat was back over here for the evening class I taught on hand piecing quilt blocks. No lie, as she was approaching completion of one quarter of her pieced block, she said, (with great passion, I might add), "Oh, I'm about done! This is so exciting!!"

Ding, ding! I won that round. Or did I? Maybe I'm just dragging poor Pat down with me.

See you later!

Love,
Kari

Denise Austin, Eat Your Heart Out!

2005-09-17T12:07:00.000-05:00

The Dot is home for a few weeks, and it has been a buh-last hanging out with her! She has done nothing but work for the past three years, getting herself through the last of her undergraduate program, and completing a year of real-world toil as a manager at the university's performing arts center. She was poised to start a graduate film program this fall, but at the last minute decided to scout the underbrush for her career path. We're helping out by inviting her here for free room and board, and some R & R time to get the synapses back into synch. It's sort of a poor man's version of a graduation trip to Europe.

I'm spending the next few months crawling out of the chubby hole, so The Dot has been helping me get my flexibility and stamina back. Mind you, she is a dancer, a runner, does Pilates regularly, and lifts weights. In comparison, I neck-move to “Let's Hear it For the Boy”, try to remember to hold my tummy in when I carry the laundry basket upstairs, sweat with Richard in the VCR, and alternate lifting my thighs as I ascend the five risers from the garage with fifteen pounds of groceries dangling from each hand. She's ahead of me in the fitness gig, but I'm making headway.

Which brings me to today's thought. People tend to think of quilting as a sedentary activity. Cha-ah! I don't think so! As an example, let's take a look at the whole quilting-in-the-church-basement thing from this summer.

We quilters got the day going at dawn, and after arranging our appearances to the safe side of scary, we started loading our vehicles. There was the machine, the cutting mat, the bag of supplies, fabric, and for some, a light lunch. I always had my Nalgene along, adding another thirty-two awkward ounces of gear to haul. When we pulled up to the east doors of the church, we prayed for parking within a half a block of the entrance. Once inside, there was the trip across the lobby, down one flight of stairs, turn the corner, down another half flight, turn at the landing, down again, take the short walk through the Upper Youth Room, then down the last flight of dang stairs with no railing, and, finally, into the Lower Youth Room. You couldn't usually get all your stuff down in one trip, either, wouldn't you know. Brother.

Plugging in the machine involved crawling on the floor in search of the extension cord or the outlet, and setting up our workspaces afforded us the opportunity to bend from our knees. We were stretching and reaching to cut over the mat, bending to pick up lost pins, running to and from the ironing boards, racing off to the bathroom every twenty minutes (thanks to the Nalgene), and making the trip back up all those stairs and across the foyer to the Education Building, in order to use the copy machine. The experience did not exactly spell s-i-t-t-i-n-g o-n y-o-u-r f-a-n-n-y. No sir, it was cardio, I'm telling you, cardio!

I was reminded of this today when Val, from the summer class, called to see if I had a few minutes to help sandwich her quilt. As you may recall, I use Sulllivans® Quilt Basting Sp-raaaaay, and the “spray” part is said like a “ta-daaaaaaa”! Sulllivans® Quilt Basting Sp-raaaaay is the best invention known to quiltkind, and as far as I'm concerned, there's a right way and a wrong way to use it. Actually, there are probably several right and wrong ways to use it, but I know one of the right ways, and I'm willing to share the wealth. You don't want to pull a muscle and be out of commission for weeks. Quilter's can't afford that kind of down time – there is just too much fabric out there demanding our attention.

Having a hands-on demonstration facilitates the learning process, and Val was ready for a 1:1. As we commenced with the sandwiching, phrases from my work-out videos kept running through my head. Using Sulllivans® Quilt Basting Sp-raaaaay is not only very aerobic, it's good for toning, too. In the first step, the newspapers have to be unfolded and laid around the perimeter of the quilt.

“Now we're ready to do a few squats to warm up a little. Doing squats is one of the best ways to engage the large muscles groups of the body, and if you build that muscle, it will burn your fat for you! Be careful not to extend your knees over your toes.”

Since laying out newspapers isn't one of the fun parts of quilting, rushing through it tends to get the heart rate up.

“I know you can feel yourself getting warmer now. Just a little longer. There, that wasn't so bad, and I guarantee it will get easier the more you do it.”

We unfurled the batting, and then it was down onto the floor to get the creases and lumps under control.

“Lift your chest up to a Modified Cobra Pose, soft belly, soft throat. Come back down. Raise up to Downward Dog, then move one leg forward to a lunge.”

By then, we were breathing harder...

“...stre-etch and hold, stre-etch and hold...strrrrrre-etchh just a little more....and release.”

Once the batting was smoothed, we returned to an Upright Mountain Position, and whipped out the backing. Each taking a short side, we positioned it carefully over the batting, and slowly lowered ourselves back down onto the floor.

“This is really good for the Powerhouse, which can be found in the area between your shoulders on the upper end, and between your hips on the lower end. Let's test that. As you exhale, keep your belly button pressed into your spine. Remember to keep the ribcage folded in. Tha-at's it. Even if you do the modified version like Dagne is showing you, you will still strengthen your Powerhouse.”

With our backsides tucked under and our spines in a C-curve, we smoothed the backing over the batting, then carefully pulled it towards us, sprayed the batting, and smoothed the backing over the surface again to bond it.

“Squeeze those cheeks in, and don't lower your back. Tha-at's the way. Goo-ood! Now, move from side to side in a gentle rocking motion, keeping your shoulders and hips aligned, and maintaining control of your Powerhouse.”

We continued on in similar fashion, flipping the sandwich over, and laying out the quilt top. I have discovered that careful smoothing of the quilt top, in order to prevent distortion of the pieced design, is a great way to cool down.

“Remember, we have a natural filtration system in our noses. Breathe in through the nose, and out through the nose. In through the nose, out through the nose...”

It was difficult to remember to keep my abs tight as we picked up and repositioned the top in order to smooth out the wrinkles. I kept wanting to let my back lower and release my mid-section.

“Your abs are nature's back brace. Concentrate on keeping them tight and strong.”

Oops. That one came from my physical therapist.

By sticking with it and getting through the entire routine, we finished our workout in twenty-eight minutes of running time. We extended ourselves back up to our beginning positions, reached out, folded the sandwich, and released all the air from our lungs one final time. Inwardly at least, we were doing the Proud Warrior.

“Good for you! I am soooo proud of you. You did a great job, and you deserve to feel healthy and have a shapely body. Only you can bring health and happiness to your life. You can do it. I know you can!”

I am already beginning to feel the benefits of Mari Windsor and Rodney Yee's personal attention at five o'clock each morning. Once again, I am able to turn in my car seat to back out of the garage without pain. Shortly, I'll be noticing the promised return of tone to my mid-section, and the bathroom scales won't fall over laughing when I step on them at my weekly weigh-in. As soon as I am cheerful enough about the whole process, I'll pop in Denise Austin in the morning, do a little salsa and cha-cha-cha, confident that my endurance level will allow me to continue quilting for hours at a time.

I only hope the Dot will be able to keep up with me.

Copyright © September 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Home on the Range: A Day in the Life...

2005-09-10T10:37:00.000-05:00

Since last week's post, I have been doing a little self-assessing and mulling-over. The self-assessment centered around the question, “How am I able to fall behind in the very activity I would prefer to lose myself in?” The mulling-over focused on how to incorporate some measurable quilting segments into my weekly schedule and stick with it. I know people who work for The Man full-time, and they put in more time behind the needle than I do.

I started out looking for my lost shaker of lint, and ended up in a process of awareness that would bring Freud to his knees. I am ever grateful to my studies and years as a counselor, as those skills frequently help me untangle some of life's mysteries. I chose to go the route of cognitive behavioral therapy, a nod to Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, and reality therapy, from the halls of William Glasser. I began to peel back the layers of the onion, looking for my inner child. Ah, I love all that counseling mumbo-jumbo. It helps normalize my situation.

My problem stems from the perception of the value of work; the Christian work ethic, my friend Ann calls it. I learned about it as the Puritan work ethic in my American history classes, with its emphasis on the value of being a useful and contributing member of society. Value was tied to the concept of work within the community. The work ethic system is what kept the industrial age moving along. It is the stick in the corporate world, while advancement, recognition, and an increasing paycheck are the carrot.

Somewhere along the line, the work itself wasn't valued, but work that was connected to a paycheck was. As I was coming of age, what was once known as “women's work” was scorned, basically because the salary stank and there were no benefits. The working world of the traditional man was what we valued. Instead of adding choices, which must have been the original intent, the women's movement of the 60's and 70's reduced them by at least two; being a wife and a mother was no longer worthy. Bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan was the way to go. We wanted it all.

When Hubba and I started reproducing, we decided I'd stay home with the critters. I could always go pick up some kind of meaningful work with a paycheck once they were in school, and get myself back on a career path. Besides, from what I was led to believe, being a SAHM would be a nice break from teaching all day, and then spending my evenings in graduate classes or advising the school newspaper staff. My school days usually started around 6:30 a.m., and if I was home by 6:30 p.m., it was a short day for me. As usual, we make all decisions with incomplete data. The stay-at-home route wasn't the respite of my preconceived notion. The women's movement had lied.

I was swamped! I worked days and nights, and I didn't get lunch and dinner off, either. Once we got The Dot under control, we went ahead and had T-man, and it started all over again. There were days I envied those women who could drop off the progeny for the day and not have to quad-task 1.) first aid, 2.) kitchen cleanliness, 3.) crying jags (and sometimes it was even the kids), and 4.) relationship skills between siblings, all on four hours of sleep. I always did the night shift, because Hubba had the job, and I could "rest" during the day. Ri-i-ight.

I bumped into a former teaching cohort who asked me, “Are you working now?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Her face brightened. “Really? Where?”

“I'm at home.”

“Oh, I meant, do you have a job?”

Sheesh. Women's movement, schwomen's movement.

Another acquaintance asked why I wasn't teaching anymore. “You're just wasting your education!” she scolded.

Hmmm. Let's evaluate that situation. At the time, the local daycare center had been running employment ads for child care workers, the only requirement then being a GED. That doesn't mean people with GEDs aren't fabulous with children, but the stated educational requirement was a GED. So, if we are on the subject of me wasting my education, it would follow that I would leave my children with someone with a GED, go off to a teaching job, and let other people's children have the benefit of my education. The trip from Point A to Point B did not seem all that circuitous to me. I decided to waste my education on my children.

There I was. I found myself working crappy hours, pouring my heart into work that needed a diaper change every thirty minutes, and my peers were dissing me because I didn't have a job.

I went to the church basement. The ladies down there were confused by the new system, too. A generation before, they had married, started their families, and when the kids got in school, they took over from the older ladies who served the funerals, polished the brass, and were officers in their circles. Now the younger women were at work, even before the kids started school. I filled in as best as I could, but they were adapting quickly, and soon figured out how to cover the loss. It was a Catch 22 for me there, too. They no longer provided child care for circle, because there weren't enough SAHMs with kids to make it worth the effort. I couldn't go.

The stay-at-home choice is a lifestyle choice, and the division of labor became obvious: Hubba brought in the paycheck, paid the bills, and mowed the lawn, and I did the rest. I am not bemoaning this situation, mind you. I saw my status as bringing a great deal of value to our family. I could get the homemaking tasks out of the way, and when we had time to be together, we could do something entertaining and educational. I didn't discover a glitch in the system until the first day I started back to graduate school for mental health counseling, and the sitter came in.

“Oh, yeah. Erica, can you show the kids how to make their beds? I never did get around to that.” It hadn't occurred to me that doing chores was “being together”, too, and arguing about who would do what was as useful as arguing about politics and religion over dinner.

I did the counseling career for a few years and loved it, but situations change and that came to an end. I didn't make any substantial money in my counseling practice, but I was passionate and confident about the services we provided, and in our ability to perform them well. The community saw me as “working”, and the kids could say their mom “had a job”.

In reality, though, the only thing that changed for my family was -- nothing! I still did the laundry, kept the house in order, and did all the shopping. We ate out more, which I hated, but something had to give. I helped with homework, ran the kids to practices and rehearsals, and made the weekly trip to La Crosse for The Dot's 5-hour dance-class marathon. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back. It's another clue as to how I got where I am today. I did a lot of meaningful work, I contributed to my family and community in a positive way, and I felt valued.

Then the little traitors both graduated from high school and went off to college. I figured the only thing I could do to bring value to them now was to find a job and make money for their expenses. I needed to go to work. I tried a couple of more-than-full-time jobs and wound up hating my life. By then I figured it's not work unless you hate it. Otherwise, they'd call it fun! The worst part was that I didn't believe I brought anything significant to the plus column, and it was depleting me as a person. I applied for different jobs, as I had off and on over the years, and got nowhere with that. Clearly my skills were not needed in the work world. That is gratifying, she said sarcastically. It didn't make me want to rush right out and apply again.

I quit the last job that was heading nowhere in January. When I hung up the phone that day, I walked straight to my quilting basket and picked up the piece that I had put down two-and-a-half years earlier. As I shook it out, the dust literally flew into the air, but that wasn't what caused the tear in my eye. That quilt and I sat down in a chair, and we began to think. As I stitched, the quilt unwound the coils in my befuddled mind. If the only way I had come to see myself as a valued member of my community was by the size of my paycheck, I had somehow bought into a system that I had steadfastly rejected for decades. When did that happen? No wonder I was perplexed.

Awareness, as they say, is the first step. It didn't hit me until just this week why I'm not constantly quilting, even though I'm not “working” and really do have some time to devote to it. Instead, I have been running around trying to justify my existence since last January. If quilting is fun, I shouldn't be doing it. I should be working.

The truth of the matter is, I am not going to find a job that will make any significant financial impact for the better on our lives at 406 Center Avenue. If one exists within driving distance, the chances are I'm not in line for it. Yet, I am lucky enough to have been prepared to do other kinds of work, to find other ways to bring value to my community, and I am ecstatic that I have the privilege.

I do need to earn some money -- there are always things that need to be paid for or donated to. And there's fabric, too, of course. But, if I teach a few classes and do a decent job of it, other people may want to take a class from me. If I bake a few cakes, and people find them really yummy, they may order one or recommend them to their friends. If one of my favorite school districts calls, I'll go sub and keep up with middle school pop culture.

And, when I'm not doing those things, I'm going to gather my things together, and do a little free range quilting. It's valuable work, and I love it.

Copyright © September 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Eenie, Meanie, Miney, SLOW

2005-09-03T10:31:00.000-05:00

Dag-nabbit! Sometimes I just can't seem to get ahead. It's my own fault, of course, because there are so many interesting things to do in a day, and sometimes I forget I can't do them all. The problem with having so many choices is that the situation results in slow progress for the larger projects. I keep thinking I'll have large blocks of time to complete my major undertakings, yet these interesting distractions slow me down. Furthermore, I'm at a total loss to explain how I manage to add more assignments to the list.

I have three heavy-duty quilt objectives clearing their throats right now. “Do me!" "No, do me!” "Yoo-hoo, I'm over here!" They are all alluring projects, and they have roughly the same deadline. I am working on my priority chart this weekend, and lining them up looks something like this:

Priority # 1. Just mere weeks ago, this was priority #3. I live in an area that proudly boasts several old, rural congregations. In the upper Midwest, rural churches were fashioned to be centrally located among several farms, and the families who worshiped there were often large and intergenerational. I grew up in a what passes for a city in Iowa, and instead of being dependent on the farm economy, we were more dependent on local factories, industry, and, earlier on, coal mining. The coal mining was mostly gone by the time I was born, but like Loretta Lynn's peers, our townfolk “worked hard” and at night “they were tar'd”. You don't expect me to forgo the opportunity to bring up those memorably rhyming song lyrics, do you?

Anyway, rural congregations weren't a part of my awareness as a “city” dweller, even though The Barn's dad spent a lifetime in them as a pastor. When I moved to Decorah, I joined a town church, and still didn't really pay much attention to the country congregations meeting faithfully and regularly, even as their numbers declined. Decorah Lutheran absorbed some of the early closings, prior to 1976 when we joined, and I don't want to see more of them fade away. I wish I could join seven or eight of them and help them with the struggle. Since I can't, I like to participate in some of their activities, if I can.

One of my favorite congregations is Hauge Lutheran Church, out on Middle Hesper Road. It was featured in Midwest Living a few Christmases ago, an example of bucolic beauty that has drawn people to worship in gratitude for generations. It is the family church of the Larson family, and Pat-neé-Larson, one of my closest friends, works loyally to keep the doors open. The president of the congregation, Darlene, is a woman whose stamina I covet. When Darlene asks for help with her duties, it is truly because she cannot do it herself. If she could have, it would have already been done last Thursday. When I saw her in July, her eyes lit up.

“Kari, I've got a question for you.”

“Fire away.”

“We have some quilt blocks one of our members embroidered for our bazaar this fall. If I get some fabric, can you help think of a way to put them together?”

“Sure. What do you have in mind?”

“I don't know. I'm not a quilter, but we just need them to be put together so they look nice.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think it's something you can help with?”

Of course. Do you know any Hauge members who would like to work on this with me?”

“Well, there aren't really any of us who can do those kinds of things anymore. The one lady who used to do this for us is in The Home now.” Younger folks aren't filling in when the older ones drop out. The old plan isn't working in this century.

“Darlene, why don't you just bring them over, and I'll figure out something. We have all sorts of time, since the bazaar isn't until October, and...”

“Good. That's what I was hoping you'd say. I'll drop them off this week.”

All kinds of time is now about six weeks away. I think this project has shifted to the top. I'll have to give Pat a buzz and see if she wants to help with the piecing. I see a long-arm job in the future, as well.

Priority #2. I just got back from my two weeks in the Seattle area. I walked in the house at the stroke of Tuesday/Wednesday midnight, and got to bed very early Wednesday morning. Determined to get myself back on Iowa time, I rose at my usual five a.m. I'm not going to apologize for that quirk in my personality, because I like being up at that time of day. Of course, last Wednesday, that meant it was three a.m., Pacific time. Yee-aawwnnn.

I exercised, had breakfast, put some laundry in, and saw to my e-mail and phone messages. By the time I was ready to take my bath, the morning was disappearing, yet it was only about 9:00 in Seattle. I thought I heard the doorbell ring, but couldn't get there, figuring whomever was pushing it would get back to me. Little did I know that the purpose of that contact would bring me full bore back into a quilting priority.

Before long, the phone rang. It was Pastor Vik, our visitation pastor at Decorah Lutheran. Earlier, I had insisted that all the pastors make a block for the organ quilt we're making. This quilt was the goal of the two classes held at church this summer, and we wanted it to be a memorial, one-of-a-kind achievement. Pastor Vik, as it turns out, is a pretty artistic guy. He wanted to do an eagle. Nothing like starting small, huh, Pastor? I looked at some online clip art, but soon realized he was going to have to decide what kind of eagle he held in his mind's eye. Was it an eagle in flight? Sitting in a tree? Posed with its wings spread? A cartoony eagle? I found pages of eagles on the clip art websites, and yet only Pastor Vik would know which one worked. He was calling to say he'd found it.

“I stopped by earlier, but no one answered the bell. I have an eagle, and I need to come by and get some fabric.”

“Oh, sure! When would work for you?”

“I'll be here at church for the rest of the morning, but this afternoon would work.”

“Is 1:30 okay?”

“I'll see you then.”

The church quilt. We were able to gather over twenty blocks of varying sizes from members of the classes this summer, and even a few non-class members were moved to contribute a block. I still have two staff members and one pastor to corner near a machine, and then we can put all these individual efforts together in whatever arrangement we think best. I can't wait! Of course, before we can raffle the thing off, we need to file our papers with the gaming commission. That's about the funniest thing that's come out of our church basement in awhile.

Pastor Vik and I spent a few hours together that afternoon, working on his eagle block. He chose to use the fusible web method to appliqué three eagles onto his block, and I'm more of a needle turn appliqué kind of girl. He tolerated my need to stumble through this process, and in the end, he had the eagles ready to finish on his own, according to his plan.

We promised the congregation we'd have a quilt for them to see, and they'll be looking for it before the snow flies. I'd better make a few phone calls and send out some e-mails, and reconvene the troops. We'll make ourselves a quilt top out of all these beautiful and individual blocks.

Priority #3. I started the summer with one quilting goal certain in my mind – Lynn and Jeff's wedding quilt. Yeah, I'm talking about the Lynn and Jeff that were married August 21st in Seattle. I sort of undershot my goal, but I knew this was a possibility, and had the sense to warn them ahead of time. I was hoping I could work on their quilt during the day-long workshops in the church basement, but instead I was busy with the beginners. Man, was that fun! They had intelligent questions, were eager and focused, and they made rapid progress towards becoming full-fledged lintaholics. I love to turn the unsuspecting into my people! Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly!

It came to pass that I chose to leave all my quilting things down in the church basement for the entire summer, as there was always a sprinkling of lintheads wandering in and out during the week. Since the newbies were just starting to collect quilting gear of their own, I wanted to make my stuff available for them to use or try before they made their own purchases. As a result, I didn't work on the wedding quilt at home, either, and that slowed the progress to a crawl. Uffda. I think I made some sawtooth blocks for an inner border, and that was about it for June, July, and August.

Lynn and Jeff's quilt is a rose-themed quilt, all the blocks being fashioned into some type of rose configuration, either by piecing or appliqué. The Peg loved roses, as regular readers may remember, and that was my inspiration. Coincidentally, Lynn and her attendants carried roses, so I hope that makes their quilt even more meaningful. As a private little bonus for me, I was presented a rose to wear as I played my flute during the ceremony. I suppose if we want to get crazy about this theme thing, the congregation rose as Lynn came down the aisle with her parents. Nyuk, nyuk. Sometimes I crack myself up...

I really need to get Priorities #1 and #2 under control and done, and I'm going to love every minute of it. I have some new linty friends, and these projects will make a difference, one for a small rural congregation and one for a big town church.

When they are buttoned up and put to bed, however, I'm going to bask in the memories of the two weeks we spent in Seattle. I'm going to make “slow” a good thing. As I stitch away this winter, I will be warmed, remembering the family time some of us were able to spend together. Unfortunately, our sisters Jean and Lora, and their families, couldn't make it, as they were bound to the dates by the beginning of their school years. We kept them in our hearts, and hoped for a time when we can all join together as a family: aunts and uncles; nieces and nephews; cousins, and now cousins-in-law; and, of course, Grandpa The Barn.

I know! We can make a family quilt together! Each of us could choose a fabric, and we can...

Copyright © September 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

(Pauly) Ocean Shores

2005-08-27T12:42:00.000-05:00

Well, it’s over. The first of the next generation has joined the ranks of the newly married. Sunrise, sunset, and all that jazz. My brother Paul, the FOTB, was uncharacteristically without control of the situation. He didn’t seem concerned, and appeared to accept that pacing about and smiling were his only duties. Hmmm. That sounds roughly reminiscent of what he did when the bride entered the world twenty-five years ago. I have tried to link a sample of the song to which the FOTB and Lynn, the bride, danced at the reception: Roger and Jessica Whittaker singing “Perfect Day”, but it didn't work. Brother. The sap had to choose something that produced more salt water than Puget Sound (which, incidentally, laps the bulkhead a few yards outside their beach home on Whidbey Island). It made a person forget she was sitting amid the Ghosts of Nudists Past.

Have you ever heard the story about the woman who lay in her casket, a fork in her hand? As the story goes, she was a potluck supper aficionado, as are many of us with discriminating gourmet tastes in Midwestern church basements. When the kitchen committee comes to clear the table, they remind people to keep their forks for the dessert buffet. Our deceased friend said that in keeping her fork, she knew that the best was yet to come. Therefore, as she was leaving this earth, she was preparing herself for Paradise. The best was yet to come.

Paul should have been handing out forks as we left the reception.

The invitation arrived early in the summer. After the wedding, my brother was proposing to host family and significant friends for a few days at Ocean Shores, about two hours down the coast from Seattle. The event included two banquets, all recreation, the hotel room and any other meals we may choose during our stay. Remember the part the day before when Paul had little control of the situation? He had taken it outside – to Ocean Shores.

To make everything even more memorable, the bride and groom were postponing their honeymoon for a few days so they could join in the celebratory fun. These nieces of ours, the Seattle girls, inherited their gracious class from their mother Carol. We Onerheims are responsible for their boisterous senses of humor and the uncontrollable urge to smack a sibling before and during adolescence. Carol gets the credit for taming the Onerheim-ness in them to a palatable social acceptance. How else could we have expected the wedding to be so beautiful? It was Carol, Lynn, and sometimes Lisa, teaming up for an understated, elegant affair. We can’t get enough of these Seattle Onerheim girls, and they seem to bid a sincere return of the sentiment. As for the Ocean Shores trip, Jeff, the groom, was coming, and who could resist the chance to break him in? It’s never too late for that, especially with the vows firmly in place.

Once everyone had responded to the invitation to Ocean Shores, Paul went to work. Before long I got the next e-mail, and then a call from The Sound.

“Hey, Kari?”

"Hi! Hey, I got your e-mail! I couldn’t put it down!”

“It made sense to you then?”

We Scandinavians always put “then” on the end of our sentences. “Are you coming with me then?” is a popular turn of phrase.

“Yeah! I love it! There is one thing I must confess to noticing, however, and it pains me to bring it up. You have me down for two massages. Either that means I get two to everybody else’s one, or you left someone out.”

“Oh. Okay. I didn’t notice that, but thanks for telling me. Do you think this is something I can go ahead and send to everyone, and they’ll find it helpful?”

“Absolutely!”

I will now attempt to put Tome de Paul into a nutshell. This thing is a showstopper, and only someone who didn’t have to plan one second of a wedding could put this much energy into an itinerary. Being an Onerheim myself, and a bit prone to making a major project out of signing up for cell phone service, I was into every nuance, blip, and flow of this document.

Page 1 of 5 starts off with “Driving Directions and Carpools”. Map Quest is a poser when it compares to Paul getting people from Point A to Point B. Make that Point P. The carpool spreadsheet was a particular comfort to me, being from out-of-town, out-of-state, out-of-region, and out-of-touch, in general. Entitled “Ocean Shores Carpools”, it listed the Driver in one column, To Ocean Shores Passengers in the next, followed by From Ocean Shores Passengers. The last column was reserved for “Comments”. Wisely, Paul provided the comments, which included things like who was to be dropped at the airport and who was going to Oregon or Canada after the holiday. It would have been really stupid for him to leave the “Comments” column up for grabs and not expect Neil and me to toy with. I derived my comfort from knowing I was expected to be in someone’s car in each direction, which reduced my chances of getting left somewhere by several degrees.

“Check-in, Check-out Time” came next. Paul anticipated all questions that could have arisen at the front desk during either of these moments in time, and provided instructions on how they could be dealt with. The Room Assignments were in this section, too. I thought it was a particularly good call that Lynn and Jeff were rooming together. This sharing-your-honeymoon-with-the-fam thing could only be expected to go so far. Lisa’s boyfriend Ryan got to bunk with The Barn. Now that I think about it, it’s never too early to break ‘em in with the Onerheims, either! All hotel amenities were listed in this section. They didn’t joke around with the amenities at this place, either. We stayed in suites.

Article III, Section 1a begins the massage missive. This was my favorite chapter of the whole book. Paul scouted out the local massage therapist in Ocean Shores and told her how many one-hour massages he was planning to book. As he put it, “Ocean Shores isn’t the largest town in Washington, so we’ve pretty much cleaned out the supply of massage therapists for the time we’re in the hotel!” Apparently, they had to scrounge for extra LMTs in neighboring burgs. Massages started at 3:00 p..m. on the day of our arrival, continuing through 4:30 p.m. of the second day of our stay, and were being performed non-stop in no less than three separate locations. Don’t tell Neil, but I think Paul is my favorite brother. Oh, yeah. As it turned out, the person Paul forgot to book for a massage was Carol. It’s a good thing I said something. By this point, she was the most deserving.

The next two sections included lists of things to do in Ocean Shores, which are more generous than I can recount here. We had some takers on the horseback riding and the mopeds, but no kite-flyers or mini-golfers were among us.

There was shopping. Ta-daaaaaaa! Ocean Shores has a combination quilt-knitting shop. Glory be! I got to schmooze with Pacific Northwestern needle-ites, and learned whether or not they had had knitting needles confiscated on the plane as dangerous weapons. The Dot had picked out some mohair for a scarf she wanted to knit, and was hoping this would make the return-trip to the Midwest more enjoyable. We got the go-ahead from the babes in the yarn line, made our purchase, and chalked one up in the lint column for the trip.

In the last section, Paul was able to do what U.S. Cellular, Cingular, and Verizon have not. We carried with us a complete cell phone directory of all the numbers of our party. Yowza. I’m having mine laminated.

We joke around a lot as a group, and it’s not hard to relate the fun we have together. Swapping wisecracks and one-liners can be a kick, and I come from a good bloodline for it. I have been able to further hone my skills over the years by being married to Hubba. What is harder to put down in black-and-white is the soft Monet tone of these wedding and post-wedding moments. I was just the aunt of the bride, so what do I know, but Carol and her daughters surely made the wedding day one of leisurely bliss and pleasant memories. Today Carol remarked that the wedding itself seemed to happen in slow motion. I agree, because I never felt any tension or strain. It was a palatable joy to see this marriage unfold, and to unify with loved ones to send our deepest heart-wishes for many years of togetherness for this shining young couple. It was like they knew everyone in the sanctuary was beaming tidings of strength and love to them. The day was about more than the dress or flowers or even a reception at a nudist colony. It was about the people who gathered in devotion and exultation, and the God that allows us appreciate it.

Ocean Shores? All kidding aside, it was the icing on the wedding cake. Thanks, Paul. I’m glad I brought my fork.

©Copyright August 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Vacating the Nest in the Pacific Northwest

2005-08-18T23:52:00.000-05:00

Note from the author: I am in Washington State, deep in pre-wedding activities, and won't be posting as usual on Saturday. I am just closing down after my first day here, where I've walked in the middle of Puget Sound during low tide, and gone crabbing for tomorrow night's dinner. This seems like a good time to put up Saturday's post, and get it off my plate so that more immediate squeaks can be oiled. I'll be here next Saturday, too, so it's anyone's guess what I'll have to report then. Enjoy!
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We headed out this week, The Barn, The Dot, and I. The eldest of the next generation of Onerheims is getting hitched, and we wanted to have a first-person account of the family passage. Festivities are in the Pacific Northwest, and I like it here. It is kind of like Decorah, only with an ocean and one mondo airplane hangar. There are lots of resettled Scandihoovians in the region, so they have incorporated words like “lefse” and “rommegrot” into their lexicons. They can pronounce Dale of Norway without calling it “Dale” -- it's “dolly”, and they make those fabulous Norwegian sweaters you see. The really fabulous ones.

My brother Paul and his wife Carol offsprung two, both girls. Lora and I each have one boy and one girl, and Jeanie has two boys. That evens out the count of eight total, four boys and four girls.

Neil and Judith opted to become world travelers. The nieces and nephews benefit greatly by their choice, as it is life enriching to have an exotic aunt and uncle who talk about their Sherpa guide, or heading for Europe to catch an opera. At one family reunion, Uncle Neil passed out tissue-wrapped packages, one to each niece and nephew. He seemed particular about who got which package, though each bundle appeared identical. Lynn got hers first, followed by Morgan, then Lisa, Leslie, Tad, Colin, Bert, and Curtis. Inside were navy blue ball caps, each bearing one white letter. Shoulder shrug – I don't get it... Following his instructions, they lined up in birth order, and the plot was revealed. O-N-E-R-H-E-I-M was spelled out down a stairstep grade of heads – an even number of grandchildren for the name to be spelled exactly. It brought tears to my eyes. Neil is so like that.

Our bride Lynn was the first to receive a nine-patch quilt, my gift for this generation's high school graduations. Her design was called a shaded nine-patch, and I used the most current fabrics I could find – mostly Modas -- to give it a muted, college-girl look. Its name is “Roots and Wings, an Olson-Onerheim Original”, and a sailboat is appliquéd on the back as a label. It suited my vision of those girls growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and I hoped the patch of corn fabric I included would remind her of her father's roots in Iowa. Her wedding quilt, which isn't done yet, of course, is a sampler-style medley of rose-themed blocks, sort of a tribute to Grandma Onerheim. Both she and Lynn's Grandpa Olson have really good seats for the wedding, gazing down from heaven.

Weddings are a big deal anymore. It's not just the marriage part, but the fun so many people have planning the glorious event. For awhile I sneered at such extravaganzas, but I've since understood that lots of people really like making their wedding days special, to share their seemingly endless joy with cherished family and friends.

In our case, The Dot could hardly bring herself to wear a jumper and tights, let alone pine for a fantasy wedding dress. She refused invitations to the prom early in her high school career, because she flat-out hated the clothes. Eventually, she decided she really should attend her Junior-Senior Proms, on the off chance that she'd regret it later if she didn't. Once she got rolling, she began to enjoy the lark, and was glad to have done it.

My brother and his family are pragmatists, but a wedding is a wedding. You're going to need a dress, a cake, some music, and a place to hold the reception. There's hair, so you may as well throw in the nails. And a pedicure. Taste-testing cakes can be rewarding, and they assure me they found something I won't spit out in disgust. Ha! Like that would ever happen!

About six weeks into the process, I was talking to Paul on the phone. He said the wedding plans were going fine. He was in charge of check writing, and nobody had complained about his role yet. Not much slips by Paul, so I figured he knew a lot more than he was letting on. After years of being the only male occupant, I assumed he had learned when to offer his support, and when to shut up and write the dang check. It didn't mean he couldn't be entertained by the events as they unfolded, however.

In Decorah, there isn’t the same array of options for wedding receptions as there are in Big Cities. I prefer the church basement, but that is less and less common. People these days seem to party elsewhere after the wedding. Hubba and I had our reception in “the church parlors”, as it was called at First Lutheran in Ottumwa, Iowa. I thought it sounded elegant when put that way, “the church parlors”. Things were rather dignified, which turns out to be polite, Bible-belt code for “boring”.

When I moved to northeast Iowa, I was shocked to discover wedding dances. Are you kidding? People go out and drink and dance after a church wedding? Criminy, the priest showed up and had a highball with the parents of the bride! It took some real getting used-to.

Hubba and I joined a golf course, which is referred to as a country club in our region. It's in the country, so I guess that counts. We have been to lots of wedding receptions at the clubhouse there, but it's not The Ritz. Neither are the other golf courses in the area. We had Matter's Ballroom, but it burned down. Nob Hill Supper Club has been taking most of the overflow caused by that tragedy, along with Jewell's Skate Country, the local roller rink. We also have a century-old converted dairy barn on the local private hunting preserve, Chase the Adventure. It's real down-home hunting lodgey. The Cliff House is now The Bluffs Inn. Cliffs, bluffs, whatever trips your trigger, but they still hold receptions there in the restaurant, now called The Oaks Steakhouse. I could continue to name places, but it tends to be a second-verse-same-as-the-first exercise. We make do quite well, and places like the Elks Club and the historically registered KC Hall in Ossian have a lot more color than a hotel ballroom off the Interstate.

For elegance on a par with any Big City digs, we have The Hotel Winneshiek. A wedding reception there would dazzle anybody, anywhere. It's like not being in Decorah at all, really, but its unexpected-ness is a large part of its charm.

Choosing a place to hold a wedding reception in Greater Seattleland can be unnerving. Where to start? The list to choose from is daunting, and you never know just what you're missing if you don't check around. Understandably, you develop a new awareness of the skyline, as you drive, scan it, and plan a wedding gala.

Carol and Lynn had passed a club several times as they gadded about, putting together Wedding Numero Uno. It was a seriously gorgeous place, worthy of the honor of hosting the first-of-the-next generation wedding reception, but it was a private club.

“Maybe you could join that club, and then we could have the reception there.”

“Naw, your father and I just moved out to the Island. We don't really want to join a club over here.”

“I wonder if you have to be a member just to have a reception there.”

“Now there's a thought. We could at least ask.”

They made a phone call, and found out that this particular club did book events with non-members. They could have a Sunday reception there, and the price was darn good! Once they were able to see it firsthand, they knew they had found the place. It was perfect in size, and was attractively affordable. They knew Paul would be pleased that they were able to secure such a handsome facility at a decent price.

“We booked the reception, Dad.”

“Yes! We found a place that's handy, and very lovely. We knew it was a private club, but when we checked, it all worked out like it was meant to be. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

"Where is this Nirvana?” Pacific Northwesterners still use the term “Nirvana” frequently.

They told him, and he asked a few more clarifying questions.

“You know where we're talking about, don't you?”

“Yes, I do. Did you go see the place?”

“Of course. It was perfect. It is a very charming space at a reasonable rate.”

“Did they tell you anything else about the club?”

“No. They aren't making us join it, or anything. It's a private club, and we're just using it for one party.”

“Well, ladies, it might interest you to know that you're holding the wedding reception at a nudist camp.”

“A wha...?”

“Well, maybe it's not a nudist camp anymore. Current rumor is that a group of swingers bought out the nudists. The Lord sure works in mysterious ways, doesn't He? Now, who do I make the check out to?”

“Very funny.”

This has to be good. I'm looking forward to my first wedding reception in a nudist colony, but I'm bringing along some Clorox® wipes to pass out at the reception. Some of us may want to swab down our seats before we sit down.

You know, the roller rink/wedding reception combo looks better all the time.

©Copyright August 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

The Varied Industries Building

2005-08-13T09:55:00.000-05:00

“What do you suppose she was thinking?”

“I don't know, but it looks like she was in a good mood.”

“I agree. I love the whole effect, and the simpleness of the overall design.”

“Look at the appliqué on this one over here. I bet she got giggly about that choice.”

“No doubt. I love it!”

My quilty friend Ann and I were two-in-a-million at the Iowa State Fair. The Iowa State Fair attracts over a million “fun-lovers” from around the world, and before the wise-cracks begin to swirl in and amongst your gray matter, nothing less than The New York Times listed our annual event in their best-selling thriller, 1000 Places to See Before You Die. The Times folks are talking world-wide, continent-by-continent places to pack in before you meet your Maker. Uh-huh. We have butter sculpture here. It's almost as engaging as the synchronized end-loader team that performed in Ossian Fest parade last week. They gave the Shriner clowns a run for their money. How can you not want to live here?

We walked among an impressive array of things to eat on a stick, and made our way to the Varied Industries Building. This is the place that exhibits quilts and other hand-made pieces of functional art. They once showed these items in kind of a dusty, hot, out-of-the way building, but a couple of years ago they erected a much nicer home for showing the blue ribbon winners and their lowly companions. Right. Lowly. We know what we're doing out here in fly-over country. You don't hear anybody in this exhibit hall saying, “You could get the same thing at Walmart for a lot less bother.”

People who make crafts for craft fairs talk about their experiences as exhibitors, and their collective observations are an echo. They speak of a betrayal, that their talents are belied as merely mass-producing articles with little cost of time or money. “I get so annoyed when people look over what I have and say, 'I can make that!' They don't seem to appreciate that it takes time and patience, not just the knowledge of how to construct an item.” If I find something I like at a craft fair, I'll buy it. I could never find anything similar in a store that would be made to most crafter's exacting standards.

No such belittling comments are heard in the Iowa State Fair Varied Industries Building. We honed in on the second floor, where the hand-made, art-to-use pieces were on display. Observers are always rewarded with the perfection of each year's harvest. Viewers in this exhibition hall speculate and discuss how something was made, admire the talent required, compliment the effort, and appreciate what they see. They wish for more hours in a day so they could learn to make it all themselves.

Looking at this year's crop of winners, I found myself conflicted. When we were at the knitting exhibits, I wanted to run home and pull out my needles. They have knitting machine specimens, as well as hand-knitted pieces. I have a knitting machine, but you know what I say, in my most disrespectful grammar: Me and machines don't get along. Garments! When was the last time I designed and made anything to wear? And hookers! I just cannot go there – there is no room in my life for hooking, too, though I would love to include it fully into my repertoire. Waaaaaah. I want to be a hooker!

Now the quilts – I can go there. I observe more than the finished quilt, and try to figure out how those quilts got from a bolt in a quilt shop to a berth at the Iowa State Fair. My distinct lack of competitiveness keeps me from aspiring to a fair ribbon, but not from looking at each years' winners. You can bet there are some who are dumbfounded that they won. Yes, we do have quilt snobs in the Midwest, but we have a heartier dose of modest quiltmakers who make quilts for the people they love, not for public recognition. They themselves are perplexed that more than one person would treasure what their needles wrought.

Machine quilting is becoming more and more common. I have tried it, and it is hard. You may want to refer to my previous ungrammatical observation about me and machines. If I can do something by hand, I'll do it that way, mainly to avoid a showdown with a dang bobbin of thread. That being said, we are seeing fewer and fewer quilts made entirely by one quiltmaker. The turn-of-the-century quilts from early in this millennium will hold a subset of rare hand-stitched phenoms. Make no mistake about it, the specimens of machine-quilted quilts we saw in Des Moines were pleasing, innovative, and done with great expertise. They were also plenteous. Hand-quilted quilts were few and far-between, and I could only hope that the person who pieced them was also the person who stitched them. We are talking a whole different category of quilts, by the way, which doesn't include friendship quilts constructed by many different hands as lintloving shows of appreciation and support.

This is not an attempt to discourage anyone from making quilts however they prefer, and in a way that gives them their best results. I don't want to leave the impression that hand-quilted quilts are always better than machine-quilted quilts. One trip to the Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fair would discredit that notion completely. My point is not to dissuade quilters from designing and creating according to their medium. We need all those quilts! It's an awareness thing.

My crusade is to raise awareness among quilters, and quilt-observers, of the need to appreciate and make more of these kinds of quilts from this point in history. Happily, some of my beginners are sitting with quilts on their laps and needles in their bethimbled hands. They ask questions about marking methods, and advance into the design concepts of quilting motifs that will best embellish their pieced originals. They are starting off their quilt careers knowing the value of their trouble, and that they will leave behind a prize from our era.

There is no “us” and “they” to this crusade. I have had quilts machine-quilted by very able machine-quilters, and admire the many techniques their procedure requires. This is an encouragement for more people to hand-stitch at least some of their quilts. It is worth your time and effort in history to do so. If you want to learn to quilt in an easy and unobtrusive way, I can show you. Other hand-quilters can show you, too. You don't have to be perfect in what you do, but you will most likely grow more satisfied with your results by the end of your first quilt. Your children, grandchildren, and beyond will see and touch your stitches, and be grateful for the connection.

Coincidentally, on they way home from Des Moines, I stopped in on my sister Lora. She returned a borrowed red wool jumper I'd made for The Dot when she was ten-years-old. I embroidered her monogram on the front of it in green and white, and it was our compromise Christmas dress of 1990. Morgan hated dresses, so I had her design one she could stomach to wear for the Christmas program at church that year, and then I made it up for her. The question that arose when I was in the Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fair 2005, was answered. It has been nearly fifteen years since I made a garment. It brought back a craving that for now I will redirect into quilting, and dream of a little grandchild that I can someday clothe in a fabric embrace.

©Copyright August 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

What Do You Get When You Cross A...

2005-08-06T13:13:00.000-05:00

I have been with a group of quilters this summer, those in the church basement who are “Dancing on the Head of a Pin”. Recently Val, one of the newbies, and I discussed how quickly and blindly some of us fall in love with quilting. You can see it in a beginning class – some of them can't dump their flat points and misshapen blocks into the dust bin and get out of there fast enough. Others latch onto quilting like none other, and are planning their next forty-eleven quilts as they patiently and meticulously pin their current project. A group of very intelligent newbie-threadheads, they could choose among a limitless number of pastime activities. I asked some of them why they chose quilting.

It challenges one's reasoning capabilities to hash this out. For some, the attachment takes minutes, not days. “Shop hop”, an unheard-of term for these people in June, is now replacing the desire to be on time for work. I also hear the word “retire” conjugated in various ways:

“When I retire, I will quilt all the time.”

“I waited until I retired to start quilting, because I wanted to devote lots of my time to it.”

“I don't feel like retiring in the evening until I have worked on something linty.”

Okay, I admit the last one was mine, but it uses a form of the verb “to retire”, and indicates the level of obsession we feel about our passion. Perhaps it's the level of passion we feel about our obsession. Whichever suits your fancy, “to retire” and “to quilt” are frequently used in the same sentence.

Bev joined up. She lives across the street from Marie, one of the better quilters in northeast Iowa. Bev had somehow acquired a table runner project. I'm not sure if she bought it as a kit, or if she and Marie found the pattern and the fabric to get her started. Bev had cut out her table runner, then stopped. I got the impression that she didn't have the guts to continue, and joined this beginning class to finish it up. The fabrics are pastel and pleasing, their patterns forgettable, yet utile in their ability to melt the pallet into the whole. There were lots of comments on how pretty her fabric choices were, even before anyone knew how they were going to be used. Bev had been consulting with Marie about quilty things, and had obviously absorbed a lot of pertinent information from their discussions. Her table runner and this class were her opportunity to put thesis into practice.

She finished that table runner in a matter of weeks. Finished! Not only pieced, but quilted and bound, too. She quilted a motif – dragonflies – into some of the blocks, thus not restricting herself to stitching in the ditch or a quarter-inch away from the seam. She bound it up, too, and can tell you what she has learned in the process. And about her plans for the next quilt. And she asks about the next class. Bev was among the quilters I schlepped up to The Piecemakers quilt guild meeting in July, and she signed up on the spot.

Bev told me she always loved to sew, and had made her wedding dress. Living across the street from Marie for years, she was always looking at those quilts and wondering how Marie made them happen. As an experienced garment maker, Bev didn't think she could really grasp what she was looking at until she tried it herself. She wanted to demystify the process. She has been downsizing her life in these very early retirement years, but wanted to make one quilt, one puny little table runner, so she could appreciate Marie's better. When I told the class about having fabric stashes, she tuned me out with disinterest. She didn't want more stuff to put away.

I need to call Bev to apologize. I didn't mean to interfere with her plans for an orderly retirement. She is already burning out of control. She recently bought a new machine, and has two more quilts on deck right now. She was just commenting to Marie this week that she needs to run out and get some more fabric.

Tamie has quilters in her family. Her sewing machine was her high school graduation present, so you know she has been a threadhead for awhile. It was fun to see her daughter Tina come to church in the frilly and lacy dresses Tamie made for her when Tina was a youngster. I like the fact that Tina and her brother Nathan saw their mother sewing, since their generation were given “Consumer Science” where there had once been “Home Ec”. Tamie had already tried her hand at quilting, and is a better-than-respectable piecer. Her comment? “I want to learn to do it right.” She understands how long it takes to make a quilt, if you do it yourself from start to finish, and she didn't want to be looking at some foolish mistake for years to come. Though a serious student, she is also good-natured and playful. Her choice for the quilt class was a wisely-chosen project that allowed her to master basic techniques, yet give her the confidence to know she could continue on her own. What she really wanted to know was how to stitch the thing up, as she was already doing well with the piecing. We jokingly call her project “Cut Big, Piece Fast”. She has the quilt on her lap right now, stitching away. I can tell she's in no hurry, that she is loving what she is learning and basking in the amount of Tamie she is adding to her quilt with each stitch.

Renee only has one child left at home. He's sort of a trail-er, and the older two have been gone for a few years. After having three to run after, having just one is sort of like hobby-parenting to Renee and her husband Mike. Now she has time to try quilting. Read my lips -- she is good. She chose a log cabin quilt -- it has lots 'n lots of log cabin blocks in it, in one-inch finished strips. All of Renee's log cabin blocks are square. I think this speaks for itself – it's her first quilt, and all her log cabin blocks are square. The blocks are joined by sashing, and some of the sashing uses rail-fence-and-nine-patch, and some of it is sashing-and-cornerstones. The latter requires that she make connector squares in one corner of each of four log cabin blocks. It is picky and time-consuming, and she's doing it perfectly. Uh, Renee will be teaching the next class.

Renee told me she knew before she took the class that she would love quilting. She had been biding her time until the kids were gone, she was retired, and she could clean out one of the bedrooms for her own lint-filled pursuits. Always assuming that “retire” meant “quilting”, she was thankful to get her start five years prior to her projected goal date. “Otherwise I would have wasted five years when I could have been quilting!”

Carrie is the teacher's pet. Being an elementary teacher herself, she orders the learning process into segments, and completes each segment once she understands what she just learned. She's my pet because she made an Amish quilt, a 36” x 36” square with nine-patch blocks set on point, alternating with plain squares. Whenever she came to class, I would stalk her until I got to see her quilt. Amish quilts are my first-loves. She learned a little more about how important one's color choices are when designing an Amish quilt, and is quilting it up as I write this. I asked if she loved the feel of the quilt, now that it's sandwiched and she can feel the dimension her stitches add to it. You know they're hooked when they answer with their eyes before they even open their mouths.

Ranell has a determination that serves every new quilter well, with no unnecessary ego attached to what she is learning. When she discovered her quarter-inch marking was off after she had a block nearly completed, she took apart her Jacob's Ladder and put it all back together again so that it was a perfect square. On top of that, she let me use her experience as a teaching tool for the rest of the class. How god-fearing is that? Ranell had two more quilts started before she got her first, a Bear's Paw, all pieced. I guess you could say we performed a fabric-baptism on her.

Other beginners are Garnita, June, Les, Elaine, Janice, Jeri, Becky, Dawn, and Kathy. I won't be able to resist writing more about some of them another time. They all have sewing in their backgrounds, and I've seen what some of them (like Kathy) can do. Among them are a couple of natural designers (like Jeri) who have certainly knocked my socks off! We also have one multi-media artist, a full-time potter, who shall remain nameless. Let's just say her name starts with “D”, as in “Dawn”. Another broad hint is that we call her project “Dawn's Five-Minute Wall Hanging”. It turned out great – I am still shaking my head.

We have some excellent experienced quilters in the group: Kristen, Shirley, Sigrid, Hazel, and Ruth. Hazel is fervent in a very don't-brag-about-yourself Lutheran way. I love to see what she's made. It is always good and there's a story involved, in spite of the fact that she acknowledges her talent with a wave of the hand. Maybe she just doesn't know how good she is! Kristen is making slow and steady progress on a two color Ohio Star quilt for their bed. It's Amish-y, in black and a mottled royal blue. Two-color quilts are so striking, and one needs the assurance of their final wow-appeal to keep stitching. Quilters think ahead like that. What may appear boring isn't boring if you understand quilting. I wish I could go on about everyone today. They all bring their individual aims and ambitions to the whole.

A few would-be quilters signed up. They quickly found out there wasn't time for it right now, once they determined how involved it can get. My favorite was Laurel, who told me she discovered she didn't have time to buy the fabric for her project, let alone make a whole quilt. Someday, huh, Laurel?

Some have started projects, but their lives are such that they can't be in the zone right now, no matter how much they want to quilt. We're fine with that; quilting will be here whenever they come looking for it. We know how it is.

But I want to come back to Val. She and I were having the discussion to start with. Val, who never made a move towards quilting before June of this year, is now near-crazed with it. She is the single mother of one very active little boy. Val teaches at the community college during the regular school year, and takes the summers to be with Bjergen, her son. Aware that single moms need to find something of their own to counter-balance the constant demand of putting the child first, she thought she'd try quilting. The class happened to fall on the day of the week she had set aside to take care of herself. I tend to think Val knows who she is. You would, too, if you met her.

She selected a “medium” in the scale of difficulty for her first project. It's not that the blocks were impossible to construct, but there are several pieces in each, which ups the variables that could lead to frustration. She asked me questions when she was in the cutting stage, and drew boundaries -- make that clear boundaries -- about the order in which she could comprehend the answer and fit in with her own thought-out pattern. She designs in a similar fashion as I – for the person who will use the quilt. The need to add personal significance is as important as the uniformness of her seam allowances. Same here.

The result has been nearly flawless. Of course, no quilt is flawless, but every now and then you find a newbie that will go the extra mile to defeat as many bugaboos as possible. Way to go, Val. She had a vision for the outside border, and how it would relate to the binding. She dogged me until we figured out a way to make it work for her. She explored off the beaten path with backing choices, and even cell-phoned me from the street in front of my house, beckoning me out to tell her what I thought of the ultra-suede she was hoping to use. Don't worry, I got her back on track. Last week in class, she was trying to figure out how to make a pieced backing with a design that would perfectly coordinate with the quilt top. Sigh. I remember when I did that. She's starting to accept some of the limits of what you can do with a quilt, and perhaps understands better how those limits in themselves are exciting.

Val and I agreed that quilting allows us to be wildly creative and spontaneous, while at the same time doing things in a confident, neat, and orderly way. It's too subtle to explain unless you find yourself knee-deep in cut-up pieces of fabric. You will never know it's possible unless you quilt, and then you can't describe it. The closest we came was:

What do you get when you cross a hippie love-child with an anal-retentive wonk?

A quilter.

Copyright © August 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Squeezing a Quilt Story Out of a Trip to South Dakota

2005-07-29T21:06:00.000-05:00

Note from the author: We are having the 39th Annual Nordic Fest in Decorah this weekend. Go to http://www.nordicfest.com/2005.asp and see for yourself. I am working at the Information Tent from 8:00a-noon tomorrow morning, so I'm posting tomorrow's entry tonight (Friday), lest it get lost in the weekend festivities.

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I haven't forgotten my promise to log back in with a few words about our Second Annual Traditional Summer Trip to Somewhere (“Ties That Bind”, June 2005). If you remember, in June of this year my sister Lora and I accompanied our dad, The Barn, to his grandparent's farm in South Dakota. I only had one angle on how to relate this report to quilting, and also thought I'd throw in the story that had Lora and me laughing our heads off the Sunday morning of the trip. We were getting ready to meet Al and Signe Anderson for the 8:30 service at First Lutheran in Brookings, South Dakota. This glove-fit our plans to leave before lunch and head back to Iowa, and we were all relaxed and happy after our Saturday journey. The more laid back we get, the funnier everything seems to be.

Saturday was relaxing because we started out spending the day in the middle of nowhere, and ended up in the late 1920's and the 1930's. That Friday on the way north, up I29 from Sioux Falls, we stopped briefly to check in with Al and Signe. My dad's parents, The Rev. and Mrs. L.O. Onerheim, and their daughter Margarette moved to Brookings as a result of Grandpa's last call to First Lutheran Church there, and they are buried in The Lutheran Cemetery. The Barn knows people from among their friends in Brookings, and Art and Signe were quite special to Aunt Margarette. We had hotel reservations in Brookings the next evening, but the Friday night lay over was to be in Watertown. In making our travel arrangements, The Barn had called Triple A to see about a place in Langford, South Dakota, our destination. The nice Triple A lady couldn't find anything in Langford, so she asked him for the name of another town nearby. He said, “Pierpont”.

“What's that near?”

“Roslyn.” He knew he had her.

“What's that near?”

“Grenville. Andover and Bristol are in the same neighborhood.”

“Listen, will you be anywhere near Aberdeen?”

“If we get to Aberdeen, we've gone too far.”

“Watertown? Would Watertown work?”

“If that's the closest we can get, that will be fine.” Twinkles in eyes don't transmit over the phone lines.

I think people with any connection at all to South Dakota love to yank chains. Having a working knowledge of prairie geography gives them a leg up on folks who couldn't point to South Dakota on a map. I do pretty well with eastern Iowa, but there's no match for The Barn when it comes to southwest Minnesota and most of the Dakotas. He and I had a hearty chuckle over his conversation with the Triple A lady. Chances are, he and Lora did, too.

Al Anderson hepped us to a good place to eat not far from our inn, and once we got settled in Watertown, we bellied up to the all-you-can-eat-buffet he recommended. We had a fine view of the Terry Redlin Art Center there, right off the Interstate. Terry grew up around Watertown, and his son designed the building as Terry's GIFT to South Dakota. They refer to it that way on their website: Terry's GIFT. An imposing structure, you can read more about it at www.redlinart.com. It's a lot of building, and you don't see its kind very often in the Midwest, especially rising from the prairie. The photo on the website doesn't do justice to the scale of the real thing. Those flagpoles are deceiving – they are not the usual flagpole-size you'd find, say, in a town square. These are monstrous flagpoles, as large as a navy pier. You don't see a lot of navy piers in South Dakota, either, so it really is a unique GIFT from Terry Redlin to the folks of South Dakota. As an added incentive, admission to the gallery is likewise FREE!

We sacked out early for the big day. As a child, I always found it confusing when The Barn would talk about working on the farm. I knew he was a PK, and that it was The Peg who grew up on a farm. She never talked about doing farm work, but The Barn was always relating his experiences with baling, getting the cattle home, and so forth. As it turns out, he used to spend summers at his grandparent's farm in Langford. Oh-hhh. Okay... Now I get it.

The Barn had a cousin, Bertil. He always talked about Bertil, and we had the chance to meet him in the '60's, when we were in Pennsylvania on a family vacation. He still lived with his mother, Aunt Marie. The Barn corrected my spelling of Aunt Marie's name. Her name was pronounced “Mary”, but was spelled “Marie”. Norwegians. Uffda.

When we decided this would be our summer trip together, The Barn wrote to Bertil asking for a good set of directions to the Snorteland farm in rural Langford. Bertil carefully wrote them out, and laid the letter on the kitchen table to mail back to his cousin in Iowa. Then, he died. His sister Thelma discovered him after she had been unable to reach him for several days. She noticed the letter on the table, and mailed it to my dad. The Barn got it sometime after he knew Bertil had passed on, and needless to say, it gave him a jolt. I love being in a family like this – loyal, and mindful of seeing our responsibilities through. We may have to mature into this, but eventually we all do.

Unfortunately, The Barn forgot to bring the letter. Glitch. Oh, well, on the trip up from Watertown, he was remarkable in his memory of the road, and of the landmarks he retained after the many sojourns of his youth.

“We're coming up to the 'Beer Lakes'. That's what we always called them, because they had foam around the edges.” Sure enough, the Beer Lakes lapped the shore with the predicted white froth.

“Can you imagine riding from Madison out here, eight people in a Model T? Most of these roads were dirt, but some were gravel. It took us all day, a trip that takes a few hours now.” We were speeding along at a good clip, which makes the contemporary traveler more dependent on maps, and less so on things like the Beer Lakes.

This is slough country, just like is found around Madison. The expanse of cropland would be broken by patches of wetland, and farmers are accustomed to working this terrain. These were the vistas that drove us into Langford. Once there, we toured the town. The Barn could remember quite a few places in a town which had clearly changed in the last 20 years, let alone the forty since his most recent significant visit.

He knew which road to take out of town, so even without Bertil's instructions, we were confident in our onward trek. These farm roads are much different than Iowa gravels. They ribbon forth in stretches beyond the eye, and are narrow enough to assume a certain degree of navigating should you meet a neighbor coming from the other direction. As in other Midwestern rural areas, there was evidence of acreage being bought up and consolidated, and old farmhouses abandoned. This is the flip side of the congested reality of American cities, and one wonders if those who live there have any appreciation for the welcoming hugeness of our country.

The Barn headed us out of Langford in the right direction. We were jovial, and looking forward to a first-hand account of our immigrant roots. Great Grandpa Ole Michael Snorteland settled here when he came from Norway, building a two-room house. In typical immigrant fashion, as he began to prosper he didn't build a bigger house, he added on to the one he had. Another room, a room or two upstairs -- whatever fitted the need. To make it all the more interesting, architects didn't take up residence in places like Langford, South Dakota. At the Snorteland place, there are two separate upstairs-es, accessible by two different staircases. Norwegian immigrants were fascinating people.

As we traveled away from Langford, we drove up and down the graveled one-laner. Upon each ridge, we could see the distance to the next rise, and the process seemed without end. After several miles, we crested a hill and before us lay the access to our goal -- underwater. Recent rains had swollen the slough, making the road impassable. We were choked in disappointment. Speechless at our misfortune, we slowly maneuvered our car back into the direction of Langford, no small feat on that narrow road with the deep ditches.

I sat in the backseat. Lora was driving, and she and The Barn were trying to cheer each other up. Our feelings were complicated, and it even seemed like we let Bertil down. It was a sad end to such high hopes.

“There's no way we could have known that road would be underwater. It's common in slough country.”

“At least we tried. I'm just lucky to travel the road my great-grandparent's must have been on, though, Dad. I feel like I belong here.”

I wanted to throw in my own two-cents of distraction-slash-cheering-up.

“Look at that pretty little church off in the distance. I didn't even notice it on the way out.”

“Yah, yah. That's the Swedish Church, and it's... Wait...” We were nearing a rare intersection. Lora slowed the car a bit to let The Barn get his bearings.

“Lora, stop here.” Pause. “Turn left.”

Obediently, Lora complied. I didn't know why we were turning left. He seemed interested in the Swedish Church, and it was off to the right. Lora snail's-paced it down this next road about 500 feet.

“Go really slow... Now, stop.”

Huh? Go slow – stop? There wasn't anything there but an old farm lane that disappeared into some bushes. It looked like the outbuildings were being used, but I couldn't see a house or anything. If one was there, it was most likely empty.

“Pull in here.” Okay, Barney. Whatever.

Mesmerized, and not really speaking in full sentences, The Barn said he wanted to get out and look through the bushes. There was a path through them, so Lora went along to accommodate his urge. I sat in the car, scoping out what had once been a large and active farmyard. It was a bit overgrown now, but you could tell there was activity in the remnants of its former life.

Both Lora and The Barn were beside themselves as they emerged from their scouting trip. “This is it! The house is through those bushes, and the place where we laid Grandpas' coffin after he died is right here! The orchard where my parents were married is just over there.” The Barn gestured animatedly, a thirteen-year-old Norwegian lad in an 88-year-old sheath.

“We knocked on the door, but no one answered. I would have liked to have you see the inside of the house, but we can at least look around out here. Let's go to the orchard, this way.

As I was exiting the car, a man came through the bushes. “I'm sorry we didn't get to the door quickly enough. I was helping my mother.”

Introductions were made, and he turned out to be David Hoines. His ninety-something mother Anna was inside. It was Anna and her husband who bought the place from my dad's family in the 1940's. They had farmed it and raised their family there, so this became David's homeplace, too. He had since bought it from his mom, and they lived there together so he could see to her needs, making it possible for her to stay in her home.

David invited us inside. “Bertil and I played checkers on this staircase all the time. We had our baths in a tub right here in the kitchen, and, Kari, that furniture in your library sat right here in this parlor.” I had somehow luckily inherited the Snorteland good furniture. My dad wasn't allowed to sit on that furniture when it graced this home. It had been purchased to spruce the place up when his parents were married in the orchard in 1906. Memories flooded the room, and David and Anna added their recollections, as well.

Anna remembered quite a bit about the Snortelands who lived there, and how everyone was impressed with their orchard. She was happy to have acquired it when they bought the place, but subsequently some kind of blight had destroyed all but a one apple tree of the many fruits that once stood. David said one of the Snorteland cousins, Myron, had scratched his name into the wood of the barn, and he grew up seeing that name there. He scooted ahead of our outdoor tour to find it for us.

Anna looked about for a picture she had of Grandma Onerheim as a young school teacher, posing with her students right around the turn of the century. Her name then was Marte Elene Snorteland. After her orchard wedding, she was thereafter referred to as Mrs. L.O. Onerheim, which must have been customary of the time and culture. I have met several people of my dad's generation who now live in Decorah, and they knew my grandparents. Many of them referred to her that way, and those very familiar with her called her Martha. Anna didn't have any luck finding the school picture, and we parted having made a good friend in our common pasts.

As promised, David found Myron's nail-etched signature, which would outlive him by a shot. It was on the barn my dad had helped shingle in the late 1920's. The short hike to the orchard wasn't as disappointing as one might think. Its mildly remote position from the farmyard and the house indicated it was a shaded and cool retreat from the bustle of a busy farm, and a splendid setting for nuptials. It was bittersweet to say our goodbyes to David. He pointed The Barn towards the place down the road where he could find to the cow path. We stopped there long enough for us to snap Dad's picture, as though he were bringing the cows home.

From there, we visited the Falness and Skudesnes Lutheran Churches. The Snortelands are buried in the Falness cemetery, with a few shirttail kinfolk in the Skudesnes cemetery. Skudesnes was the area of Norway from which our family, and many area families, hailed. At the Falness Church, David surprised us once again. Anna had found the picture she was looking for, and wanted us to have it. To keep. Lora, the twenty-five-year, first-grade teaching veteran was humbled by the gesture. The 8x10 photo was in mint condition, and it was decided that she would keep it. This generosity on the part of Anna and David Hoines will be long-remembered.

It was a really good day.

We were done. We came and saw what we'd been planning to do for our Second Annual Traditional Summer Trip to Somewhere. We were content, relaxed, and headed back to Brookings. Lora and I knew better now who we are.

I called Lora this week to ask her if she remembered what we were laughing about that Sunday morning in Brookings. Like me, she remembered we were laughing beyond the ability to breathe effectively, but neither of us can remember what was so dang funny. Clearly, it wasn't important. Instead, it was an indicator of how content we were, how easy it was to have fun, and how lucky we felt to spend this time with each other and The Barn.

Oh, yeah. Signe Anderson showed us a quilt she and some of the other women of First Lutheran had done up for the auction. It was lovely. They should get big bucks for it.

See? I can squeeze a quilt story out of a trip to South Dakota. I hope you enjoyed it. And if I ever think of what was so side-splitting, I'll get back to you.

Copyright © July 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Eldorado Store

2005-07-23T08:47:00.000-05:00

I could not believe what she was saying. My quilting buddy Susan was suggesting I enter a national quilting challenge. Though I had only been quilting for about a year, she thought I was getting good results and improving all the time, and was therefore trying to talk me into taking the plunge.

At the time we were having this discussion, I was attempting to spread out into printed fabric. Finding it hard to disengage from my favored solids, I had been studying fabric collections in the quilt shops. I didn't want to get stuck in a rut of my own making, so I allowed myself to be impressionable as I explored.

“You are as good a quilter as anybody else. I'd enter myself if I had the time. I like Lynette Jensen's Thimbleberries® fabric, and Mike carries the whole line. Let's just go look at what he has.” Hmmm. I recognized that Susan was using what appeared to be the incremental approach.

Mike Woodson had once been in the retail world, working for the Dayton-Hudson Corporation. He must have come by it naturally, because his family owned the general store and post office in Eldorado, Iowa. On a visit home, Mike learned they were going to close the store because his grandmother, who wanted to sell it and retire, couldn't find a buyer. He had many fond childhood memories of the store, buying penny candy, and visiting with people who had stopped in to shop, or to pick up their mail. Not wanting the place to close for good, Mike packed up and came home to run The Eldorado Store. That's El-doh-RAY-doh, by the way. Not El-doh-RAH-doh.

Mike and his grandma became good companions, and in her retirement she would make quilts. Once, when she was under the weather, she sat at the machine and stitched while Mike would cut and press for her. He starting getting into it. On the way to a quilt shop one day, Grandma commented to Mike that it was too bad they had to drive so far to buy fabric. That's how the idea for the quilt section of the store was hatched. Now shoppers could get a box of Jell-O® for a potluck salad, pick up their mail, and buy fabric, all in one trip. Life was good.

Susan and I chatted animatedly on the way to Eldorado. Quilters are always animated on the way to buy fabric. On the way back, we are frequently more subdued, plotting how we are going to justify new yardage if challenged at home. Sometimes we even daze ourselves at the apparent lack of self-control. Many a scheme has been hatched on those trips home that involved keeping fabric hidden for months, in the trunk of the car or under the bed. When discovered, the guilty threadhead would remark, “Oh, tha-at? Why, I've had that for ages.

I mentioned to Susan that Mike would be the worst husband for a quilter, because he'd overheard all of these tricks from his women patrons, and could easily debunk them. Of course, Susan's take on the situation was that Mike would be the perfect spouse, since he already has all the fabric.

Eldorado is so picturesque that without witnessing it firsthand, it defies belief. Nestled in the valley of the Turkey River, there are around fifty houses in town, though the unpaved streets are marked by big-city signs. St. Peter Lutheran Church stands boldly, it's uppermost portions viewed white among a bed of treetops. The sight of its steeple and roof is a treasured reward for northeast Iowans, as we round the curve at Goeken Park and descend the “Eldorado Hill”, five miles north of West Union on Highway 150. There is no sign to beckon quilters – you just have to know to turn east at the Eldorado sign, go all the way to the end of the street, turn left, and drive a block or so north to the store. Don't worry. You can't get lost.

Once there, parking isn't a problem, but shoppers are required to ascend an incline from the street, and a few steps up into the old general store. There is a double-doored airlock, a godsend during bitter northeast Iowa winters. You always have to figure out which side of the double door to open, and likewise, which way the heavy plate glass and wooden door to the store will open – in or out. By then, my nostrils are flaring, and I'm not in the mood to experiment. Pull/push, whichever works. No wonder I never remember. My eyes are fixed on the prize.

“Here they ah-ahre!” Susan swooned melodically. “Oh, these new ones are nice.”

“Uh-huh. The colors are subdued; pleasant, even.”

“These would be great for the Thimbleberries® Pieces of the Past challenge. Why don't you at least send away for the guidelines? Maybe you won't even like the challenge, but you can't know until you see it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If it doesn't interest you, what have you lost? If you think you want to do it, though, you'd better request the guidelines soon. The entry deadline is coming right up.”

“Oh.”

The muted colors of the patterned fabric did look old-fashioned. Pieces of the Past. I could do something with this. Maybe.

Susan went about making her purchases, chatting with Mike about quilting in general, and discussing the fact that he had made the personal acquaintance of Miss Lynette Jensen, herself, creator of Thimbleberries®. My little newbie-self was agog over such a happenstance. This was before I fully appreciated how talented a merchant Mike is, and how connected members of the quilting world are with one another. I felt all homey and good about Thimbleberries® by the time I left the Eldorado Store. The bell rang on Round One.

Round Two.

“Did you get the challenge guidelines?” I had dialed Susan's number when the manila envelope arrived.

“Yes. There are several appliqué blocks. I love appliqué, you know."

“I know you do. And...?”

“Well, I can use plain muslin, bleached or unbleached, so I'm treating that as a solid. Let's go back to Mike's and take another look at the fabric.”

“I'm already there.” Within a matter of minutes, we were making a second animated trip to The Eldorado Store and Mike's collection of Thimbleberries®. I had taken a good look at the challenge blocks, thinking about how they fit into my past... my family's past... pieces of our past.

I was down for the count by the end of Round Two. I didn't even hear the bell. I was already taking some of the challenge blocks, sorting through the bolts of Thimbleberries®, and boarding the bandwagon of my first national challenge.

Among the appliqué blocks were cherries, Rose of Sharon, and a Grandmother's Fan. Garden? Did my grandparents garden? I hadn't heard either The Barn or the Peg talk about choring in the family garden, and The Peg was known for her purple thumb. The Barn's parents were married in an orchard in South Dakota, on my great-grandparent-Snorteland's farm. A cherry orchard seemed fitting.

These garden blocks were to be fabric, not rooted in soil. The Peg spoke expansively about her own mother's sewing skills. I never knew her – she died when my mother was only nineteen. She had sown seeds of interest in all things fabric in her daughter, who in turn scattered them through my days.

When Grandmother Dorotha Beal Ott was only four years and eleven months old, her picture was taken as she gazed into a mirror. The mirror reflected her tiny-featured face, and her long, naturally curly hair was turned towards the camera. When I was the exact same age, my mother saw me when she looked at that photograph of her mother, and had my picture taken in the same pose. I had always been told I look like my mother, and she in turn thought I resembled her mother. Those companion photographs were imprinted into my mind from a very young age, and when The Dot was four years and eleven months old, her photo was taken to match. Only my mother's missing image broke this chain.

The Peg was seventy-three-years-old when the book she wrote about growing up on an Iowa farm during the 1920's and '30's was accepted for publication. The Iowa State University Press added it to their Iowa Heritage Series. She fittingly named it Threads of Memory, and in the epilogue my mother wrote that she “put down my needle and took up my pen” to write it. On the cover was the childhood photo of her mother, gazing into the mirror.

On a visit to see us in Decorah, I took my mother to the photography studio and had her picture taken. She sat in a chair, holding the book she wrote with her mother's mirror-picture on the cover. Her chair was positioned so that she faced a mirror, and the gap had been closed. Now all four generations of look-alikes were joined in black and white by that pose.

Dorotha planted a fabric garden, and her descendants reap its bounty. Beyond Dorotha, beyond The Peg, beyond me. Our entry in the Thimbleberries® Pieces of the Past national quilt challenge would be a garden-themed quilt called “Dorotha's Bounty”.

Ta-daaaaa.

With the histrionics were out of the way, I needed to design the dang quilt and get the dad-blame thing made up.

I collected the cherry blocks together for an “orchard”, and decorated a “path” around them with my Grandmother's Fan blocks. The Rose of Sharon brightened the outside of this pieced section in four places, and I added a rail fence. The white muslin rails were stitched with a “picket” on one end, to signify the fence that encompassed the fabric garden. For the border, I chose a series of garden path blocks, and I left a few plain unbleached muslin spaces for quilting-stitched packets of seeds and sprouting weeds.

Time was closing in on me. I had taken longer than I should have to join the challenge. I discussed my dilemma with Mary Ann Keppler at her shop in rural St. Olaf, Iowa, and she agreed to use her long arm machine to stitch part of my quilt, and leave a few places untouched for my needle. She patiently guided her machine to make my requested “cobblestones” on the Grandmother's-Fan-come-garden-path blocks. She cross-hatched some of the background, and stitched around the border where it would have taken me too long.

When it was my turn, I put my own little stitches into the plain muslin squares. I began a tradition when stitching on that quilt, a story that I will save for another time. I designed a label to draw directly onto the muslin backing. Considering the harvest of Dorotha's Bounty, I sketched some imaginary wild flowers into a remembered blue and white vase.

The vase represented a pair of blue and white vases that were a piece of Beal family lore. I learned about these vases years earlier on a trip to the Northeast. Family in Dover Foxcroft, Maine, displayed the vases on the mantelpiece in the living room of their enormous Victorian house. That day my mother related to us that those vases had been held on the lap of the Beal ancestor, carried from the civilized East to the wilds of the Midwest by a pioneering family member, and returned the same way as a gift many years later. I retrieved one from my memory to put on the label.

But one stem, it's bloom in contrast to the coneflower and the gerber daisy, held a spool of thread where the flower could have been. It bends slightly forward. Into a mirror. And it reflected back another treasured memory. Of Dorotha, of The Peg, of me, and The Dot, joining us in fabric through “Dorotha's Bounty”.

End of Round Three.

Susan's husband Chip has a photography studio here, and she talked him into taking the slides I needed to send into the challenge. I mailed them, hoping for the best, but I'd come to love my grandmother-y quilt. I had arranged to have my mom and both her brothers use the quilt for awhile. When I got it back, I wanted it to be used by Dorotha's children. It became moot to me how it would do in the national Thimbleberries® challenge.

Good thing, too. It totally flopped.

I stopped by The Eldorado Store a few weeks ago. I had been lost to other pursuits for a few years, and I saw that things had changed there again. The post office is under a different roof, still attached to the main store. The general store itself seems to have been given over completely to the quilt shop, and a sign on the door says, “Open Saturdays and by Appointment”. Mike has been teaching business at the community college, and life has evolved into this new arrangement. I called and asked him about this modification, and we chatted for awhile. I look forward to meeting him again in Eldorado.

“Dorotha's Bounty” is planted on the bed in The Dot's room. It's technically the guest room, but you know how that goes. I continue to make many quilts with solids, and I've never used only one fabric collection in any one quilt again. It's good Susan talked me into doing a national quilt challenge, though – so I could find the pieces of my past.

And the winner is -- Kari Burns!

Smack down.

Copyright © July 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall

2005-07-16T07:18:00.000-05:00

It is a well-known fact that quilters like to spend time on Greyhound buses. Age is not an indicator here – really young lint-chicks like bus trips as much as the more seasoned rider. It's not the funky bus songs that draw us, either. It's the opportunity to spend a day with other quilters, work on hand projects, and stop at predetermined quilt shops for fabric. Multiply the enthusiasm by fifty, and that's a lot of lint to inhale in one small, enclosed space.

We've tackled this subject before, in “In Defense of Quilting as Excitement, Part 2: Paducah or Bust”. As you recall, that incident just about brought Hubba to his knees: he didn't consider the thought of me on a Greyhound very sexy. Brother. Stereotyper.

The Piecemakers, a quilt guild headquartered in Spring Grove, Minnesota, owned the day on July 11, 2005. We were in the thick of Midwestern quilting culture; on a bus, for the entire day, and cutting loose. Oh, bay-bee.

We began to gather at about 7:30. That's a.m. In the morning. No problem. Early birds were reminded to make a pit stop and have along a few snacks, a bottle of water, etc. because we weren't stopping again until lunchtime. Yee-haw! Quilt shops, here we come! We left Spring Grove with the first-to-board at 8:00 a.m. Sharp. Barb Solum was our hostess and planner for the day. I have always loved Barb – now, sit down, Barb, and let's get this bus moving!

We stopped at the next burg, Caledonia, Minnesota, and picked up a few more threadies in the parking lot of the Kwik Trip. They were identifiable by the pool of drool around them, which reflected the sun, low in the eastern sky. I think I heard someone admonish the bus driver to just open the door and slow down – they could run alongside and jump on. Yee-haw! Quilt shops, here we come!

One last boarding stop was made in Hokah, Minnesota. We only picked up two threadheads there, and rest assured that had we failed to stop for them, we could have expected national headlines. Hurricane Dennis would have looked like an interloper. Door opens, in b-o-u-n-c-e the last two, and it's Yee-haw! Quilt shops, here we come!

I brought along my cathedral window quilt project. I always bring it. Goal date for completion of my cathedral window quilt? May, 2038, but I'm thinking of moving that back a few months. Some quilters were knitting, some were embroidering, and several were reviewing patterns and discussing the fabric choices they had in their mind's eyes. Some were periodically breathing into paper bags.

We were headed for Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, home to (count 'em) three quilt shops. AND we were making one more thread stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, before heading home. Could you please hand me that paper bag?

Our first stop was Diana's, the tea room and confectionery in Sun Prairie that Barb had lined up for lunch. Oh, yeah. They had cake. Nothing like getting a good cake buzz on before fabric shopping. As we waited to disembark at Diana's, Barb got on the loud speaker and gave us the proximity of the three shops in Sun Prairie. You could have heard a pin drop.

As soon as we were done with lunch, several of us hoofed it to Itchin' to Stitch, only a few blocks from Diana's. There is nothing like the sight of fifty or so quilters of all ages, sizes, attire, and desire as they swoop in on their prey. I'd never been to Itchin' to Stitch before, but I'd heard about it. Let's put it this way -- the Itchin' to Stitch people had seen our kind before. Someone met us at the door with a whistle.

Bl-weeeet!

“Ten-hut! Here are the rules! We don't sell fat quarters here. If you want a fat quarter, find a buddy a split a half yard yourselves. Line up to cut your yardage here, and then form a second line to pay over there. The bathroom is at the back of the store. If someone's in it, you have to wait to use it. Batiks are on your left, and the books are near the front window. Okay, people. Shop! Fall out!”

Bl-weeeet!

I found the bathroom rule particularly troubling. Not the rule, but the occurrence that required them to make the rule. I can't allow my mind to dwell on it for long.

When we were done there, the next stop was JJ Stitches, a few more blocks away than most of the group wanted to walk. Not me! Bus? What bus? I was too jerked up on cake and airborne lint to sit on a bus. I grabbed my buddy Maxine and we simulatneouly walked off some of our energy and beat a path to JJ's. Bus? Too slow.

JJ Stitches has a whole room devoted to 20's and 30's repros, and one reserved for penny rug inspirations. I actually needed to come up for air, so after a quick tour of the store, I ducked out to an antique shop as an aperitif. Of course, quilt trip radar led me to a little Featherweight, deep in the bowels of the basement of the shop. There was only the machine, the cord, and the foot control. No case, no instructions, not even a ratty old spool of thread. Nothing. $350. Hubba?? Did I get a deal on mine in Paducah, or what?

Then it hit me. Paducah. A bus. Hubba. Something seemed odd. Hubba... Hubba? I reviewed the conversation we had in the wee hours of this very day.

I had totally forgotten to tell him about the bus trip. That's the consequence of our life's pace these days, and details get sorta smudgy. Details like, I'll be gone for thirteen and a half hours. I'll be in another state, with strangers, spending down the cash flow.

I had fallen awake at about four o'clock that morning, and remembered I was going on a bus trip with the Piecemakers. Strangely, Hubba had come to at about the same time. Noticing he was awake, I said, “Hey. I just remembered I have this bus trip to Sun Prairie today. I forgot to tell you.”

“Oh. Okay. I'll figure out something for lunch. When do you think you'll be back?”

“Don't remember. But it'll be after supper, because I know they talked about stopping someplace to eat on the way back.”

“'Uhkay. When are you leaving?”

“Seven. Can you give me a ride to the Curves parking lot so I don't have to leave my car there all day? Mary Beth, Darlene, and I are riding up to Spring Grove together to catch the bus.”

“Sure. Now let me sleep for a couple more hours.”

“Thanks. Love you, Hubba.”

“Love you, too, Sweetie.”

That's what is was! Hubba's reaction! He didn't say a thing. Not a single wisecrack. I said the word “bus”, and everything. Zip. Not one eye-rolling – make that, not one instance of eye-rolling. If he had rolled just one eye, I would have devoted an entire post to the topic.

He was calm and accepting. He acted like this was normal. I found his lack of response disquieting..

The thought of this stayed with me throughout the next two shops. Prairie Quiltworks, another shop in downtown Sun Prairie, is a quilt shop on one side, and a yarn shop on the other. Quilting Passion, meet Knitting Passion.

Knitting Passion: “She's mine!”

Quilting Passion: “No, she isn't! She's mine!”

Knitting Passion: “Ha! Did you see her buy those patterns for felting purses? I've won her back! Bwa-ha-ha-haw!”

Quilting Passion: “Nooooo! I'm mel-ting...mel-ting...”

Beading Passion: “I'm waiting in the quilt shop in Waunakee. You guys are toast.”

The Hubba thoughts even broke through a mind occupied with fiber-blather. Something just seemed unsettling to me. It was like adjusting to the offspring being grown and gone. Or dealing with the loss when the Yorkies were adopted out, and then passed on. But Hubba? Hubba, are you changing, too?

We boarded the coach for the next leg of our journey. The din inside was party-atmosphere bright. Bags of fabric and books with patterns and techniques were flying back and forth. Someone thought to pass the hat to tip our bus driver, which was timely since the mood was high and over-tipping was more likely. And there I was, forlornly looking out the window as the cars and time passed by, both too quickly. Hubba, where are you?

Our last shop of the day was Mill House Quilts in Waunakee, Wisconsin. As promised, Beading Passion got a lick in on Knitting Passion, siding with Quilting Passion to win the day. Incorporating beads into functional quilts has me chomping.

Troubled as I was, I decided to live in the present. I sat with a new friend, Helen Williams, and had a great time getting to know her. Somehow she's managed to get through life up to this point without me, and we plotted how to get together again in the future. Her quilt guild is called The Mabel Q.T. They meet in the basement of the telephone office in Mabel, Minnesota, the first Monday of every month for Q.T., or Quilt Therapy. Sounds reasonable to me. I think I'll join 'em. Therapy...

It worked. Once my mind was relaxed, I had a better handle on what was happening at home. Hubba is becoming a quilt husband. How boring. I suppose now he's going to sit and uh-huh as I “drone on and on about quilting”. Sigh. That's what he used to say, back in the good old days. I expect he'll meet my quilt students at the door and say, “You kids have a good time today. I know how much quilting means to you.” This goes beyond being a good sport about it, like he once was. He's teetering on the edge, but with any luck he hasn't gone over it yet.

Don't worry. I'll have a talk with him and do what I can to break through his denial. It's not too late. The condition still young enough for effective intervention. I won't let him become a quilt husband. Not my Hubba.

Reversing the quilt-husband stereotype? Yee-haw! Tattoo parlor, here we come!

Copyright © July 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

How I Became The Best Quiltmaker in the World

2005-07-09T08:35:00.000-05:00

I'm not one to beat around the bush. My motto: Get to the point and state what's on your mind. Well, that's what I say in my head. In real life, I'm a little less casual about being antisocial-blunt. Most of the time.

I didn't start quilting until the offspring were older. I tried sewing garments when the kids were itty-bitty, but it was too much to expect them to keep away from sharp objects. I didn't have a set-up where I could shut the door on my creating and attend to my mothering. The fabric I had purchased in 1980 for a quilt was left untouched. I didn't know a thing about quilting then, but the desire to learn had been brewing. Funny thing about those fabrics -- I bought all solids. Bright ones.

My time away from the machine was spent on other forms of needlecraft. I had learned to knit as a nine-year-old Girl Scout, and after many adolescent years of split stitches and uneven tension, I let that simmer until I picked it up again in college. In my typical overeager fashion, the first thing I made was a sweater in a reindeer-and-snowflake motif. It wasn't the greatest on the reverse side, but it looked pretty decent when worn right-side out. During the surge of births at the twenty-something stage-of-life, I designed and knit all sorts of babywear and afghans. As I recall, I flinched as I read a thank-you-for-the-blanket from one uninformed recipient. I could usually gauge who would appreciate a handmade gift as well as I could gauge my stitch size, and didn't squander my productions on the unappreciative.

Counted cross stitch was making the rounds in the '80's. That appealed to my sense of detail and order. I never made any big counted cross stitch pieces, but dabbled in plenty of fingertip towels and bell pulls. I taught myself Klostersom, a Norwegian needlepoint, and Blackwork. My neighbor and friend Esther Miller is a master rug hooker, and she taught me how to hook. The desire to be a really good hooker is on a low boil, just beneath the surface. I have been trying to resist both that and Hardanger stitchery, a heavy Norwegian lace fabric technique made from stitching and cutting cloth. I haven't time for more passion in my life, and I feel the potential with both of those.

I did some weaving, too. Loved it. Of course. Thankfully that comes with the need for a large loom, which effectively quelled my desire to get crazy about it. Spinning, however... I have done crewel, needlepoint, embroidery, candlewicking, crocheting, trapunto, and the list goes on. I taught knitting in the public school and in my home, and inadvertently launched interest for some of these passtimes in friends who were curious about what I was doing.

When I started quilting, I found it much easier to put on the blinders when other needlecraft would pass my way. By my third quilt, I was getting pretty good. In fact, I was really good! I was certain this was obvious to others. Outwardly, I was perfunctory about it, but inside I was ecstatic that I could perform so well as a novice.

I joined the Northeast Iowa Quilt Guild. I have mentioned this group before, and they are truly amazing. They are incorporated as a non-profit, and their mission statement reads:

“The guild will be non-profit with the purpose of encouraging and promoting high standards in the practice and knowledge of quilting, conducting educational programs and providing for the interchange of information.”

In truth, they step beyond the confines of that mission statement. They welcome new quilters with eagerness and warmth, and openly applaud the work of each member. The process of critiquing and instruction is intoxicating for the newbie. I was soaking-in their expertise and rookie-reveling in their praise.

I was thirsty. I wanted more. For some unknown reason, I wasn't getting this praise and interest at home from the fam. I found that confusing.

T-man had a little friend who spent quite a bit of time at our house. Blake Livingood; we called him Blakey. He was like having another child, but one who was very polite, obedient, and respectful of his parents. “Tad, why don't you call Blakey and see if he can come over?” Those were cherished times. He and T are friends for life, surviving the natural separation in middle and high school, when Tad went out for basketball and Blake went out for wrestling. I miss little Blakey like I miss my own little children. Offspring adulthood has its own rewards, but my memory sparkles with the gems of their childhoods.

One day, while I was quilting, Blakey observed what I was doing and actually asked me some questions about how to make a quilt. Have I emphasized firmly enough how much I loved that kid? Not only did he ask, he listened while I answered, touched the quilt, and before he and Tad ran off to play in the woods, he told me he thought it was a very nice quilt. This happened on more than one occasion. It may have only been twice, but Blake became my favorite child. He appreciated the skill my own family had taken for granted. He was my link to the cooing of the Northeast Iowa Quilt Guild that I needed at home. Eventually, I had a favor to ask of him.

“Blakey?”

“Yeah?”

“When you come over, would you always ask me about my quilting, please?”

Bashful and charming smile, a bit askance, yet attentive and abiding. “Yeah. Okay.”

“And, since you can see that I'm the best quiltmaker in the world, would you please mention that after I show you want I'm working on?”

Laugh. Oops! Aborted laugh. He could see how needy I was. “Uh-huh. Okay.”

“Thank you, Blakey.”

“It's okay, Kari.”

Sometimes you have to ask for what you need. It's as simple as knowing the right person to ask.

From then on, the door would slam and the boys would run through the house. Maybe they'd stop in the kitchen for a drink, or rush downstairs for Leggos or the computer. My Golden Boy never forgot.

“Hi, Blakey!”

“Hi, Kari! You're the best quiltmaker in the world!”

Thanks, Blakey. I love you, too!”

Now I'm a better judge of my own skills, and I don't look as far afield for acceptance of my designs -- I know if I like them or not. I'm not so hungry for praise, but am grateful for those who understand what I'm doing. There is one comment I still love to hear, even though it's rare these days. Blake, as an adult, remembers to ask me about my quilting, and he always remembers to say, “Kari, you are the best quiltmaker in the world!”

Copyright © July 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Karen and I Plan to Die on Tuesday

2005-07-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

So my spelling is a little off – this is my way of taking a really boring-sounding activity and giving it a little panache. Karen Fitton and I had planned to dye fabric on Tuesday. Nyuk, nyuk. There are those of you who are thready enough to see through my deliberate spelling ruse, and knew what I meant to begin with. I am training myself to say “dye fabric” instead of just “dye”.

When Karen and I decided to start dyeing together, we would plan our dye dates and get all gleeful about dyeing. It never occurred to either of us that when this was overheard at Magpie Coffeehouse, concern for public safety became imminent. Little did they know that if they sent the white coats, we'd most likely divest them of their attire, throw those coats in a vat, and stir them with a stick. Only the presence of polyester would save them from being re-named “the men in the blue wisteria coats”.

This is the summer of color love. We are experimenting and playing, and dreaming of other ways to create quilts – nurturing various cottons into a palette of usable yardages. Karen is the art quilter who wants her quilts to be perform a sort of functional service. I'm the functional quilter, who wants to add art to the quilts we use. I love what she comes up with, but want to spend my time making something dimensional and snuggly. She appreciates my parameters, but is drawn to more sculptural and multi-media presentations. It is a good match for both of us. We call ourselves “free range quilters”, and now we are working with our “free range fibers”.

So far we've been playing with dye recipes and low immersion dyeing. Karen, the biology major, is an egghead about measuring and mixing, and writing down recipes in rubber-gloved penmanship. I tell myself right now that I'm only interested in having scads of one-of-a-kind colors, the result of random mixing. Good thing I have Karen. I produced one really luscious neutral a few weeks ago that I want more of, but my plan afforded me one fat quarter and no recipe.

I hope we try vat dyeing next week. Not only is it a less labor-intensive way to accumulate yardage, it will give us the time to explore gradations, and the tinting and shading of color families. I can see a blue day, a purple day, a neutral day, and so forth. I gear up in learning mode almost as much as I do in design mode. The only problem with the whole subject, as far as I can tell, is that it makes really, really boring fodder for my Saturday posts. So, to zip it up a little this week, I'll tell you briefly about my adventures with The Dot.

She called Tuesday morning to check on my shoulder's availability. She wanted to know if she could use it to lean on and grow through her new status as "evicted tenant". The approach she used was interesting.

“Mom, I'm in big trouble. Really Big Trouble.”

I'm thinking, drug muling? Vehicular homicide? Pregnancy? I come from the tail end of the era when unwed pregnancy was called “being in trouble”, so that's why that one ran through my mind.

“Ohmygosh. What happened?” I didn't want to hear the answer, simultaneously wanting her to get to the point faster.

“I got evicted.”

Oh, that. I was pretty sure I could deal with that one. “Why?”

“Cats.”

“Uh, cats?”

“We aren't supposed to have them here, and I was keeping them for someone. I thought it would be okay, since everyone else in this building has cats. The eviction notice said I have three days to get out, and when I called them, they said they're going to sue me for another year's rent. I just want to talk to you so I'll feel better.”

“Well, Bobo, (we've called her Bobo since she was four, when one-year-old Tad pronounced her name that way) you're talking to the wrong parent. I'd suggest you go to the one with the law degree. He can give you the skinny on what to do in this situation, which will probably make you feel better than anything I have to say.”

After a chat with Hubba, she called me back with the news that she no longer needed my shoulder, but was wondering if she could borrow my back for a day or so -- she was thick with moving plans. Hubba had the legals well-in-hand, and The Dot had already lined up a living situation to see her through July, plenty of time to go about finding a new place for herself and her stuff come August 1st. Remarkably, everything seemed manageable, considering the suddenness of the predicament.

Tad met us at her apartment on Thursday, and it only took a few hours to sort her stuff into piles of boxes designated for various destinations. I had to marvel at her common sense when it comes to accumulating lots of junk. She is returning to the student life, as she plans to study film in graduate school, and is excellent at keeping her possessions to a minimum. It only took a few trips to the storage bin to clear her things out of the apartment. I could write a whole post about how great Tad was, joking and funning. He was unfazed when it came to lifting boxes into the van at the apartment, and out of the van at the storage bin. We were sorry to see him leave for his paying job late in the afternoon.

By then, The Dot was ready to run a couple of errands to return borrowed items, and had enlisted the help of a few muscled buddies to augment her own brute strength. They quickly emptied the place of her furniture. By nine o'clock that evening, we were done moving, it was the end of the month, and the future looked a lot brighter than the past few days would have predicted.

Karen and I plan to dye on Tuesday, and maybe Thursday, of next week. This time I'll pay better attention to Karen's rubber-gloved and masked work in the luh-BORE-uh-tory. After dealing with the picayune crisis of this week, it sounds invitingly boring to me. And, in the end we have fabric! Why did I ever doubt myself?

Copyright © July 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

A Quilt Turning

2005-06-25T10:05:00.000-05:00

The Clausen Quilts

This has been a red letter week. It has also been a pink polka dot week, a yellow kitten week, and a blue tulip week. On Wednesday evening, Pauline (our “other mother”) arrived with six of her mother's quilts. For you new readers, her mother was Gertrude Clausen, and these are the Clausen Quilts! In my house! I almost had the fire marshal come inspect the place before I let them stay overnight here – the quilts, that is. The rest of us are probably more replaceable.

(Before I go on, let me share another cute thing my younger sister Lora said when she was little. She and my dad were driving home from buying milk at Williams Dairy one day, and they had to stop when they saw Mrs. Clausen, to let her cross the street. Mrs. Clausen didn't see them, and The Barn said to little Lora, “We have to be careful. We don't want to run over Mrs. Clausen.”

“Oh, no, we don't want to do that! I'd rather run over Pauline than run over Mrs. Clausen!”

I can't get enough of those little Lora-isms. But back to the quilts...)

Pauline's dear friend Ellen Kinsinger chauffeured her to my house. When Ellen married in the '70's, she moved onto the farm across the road from “Gertie” Clausen, and she has been close to the family ever since. Ellen's daughter Emily is Pauline's god-daughter, and Pauline gave Emily one of her mother's quilts. It is a Rob Peter To Pay Paul quilt, done in pink and white. Pauline says she remembers her mother working on that one when Pauline herself was just a grade school girl.

Though I knew it was practically impossible, I was sorry that Pauline's sister Thelma wasn't able to come for the quilt turning at my house. It occurred to me that she would miss out on all the fun, so we hastily put together a little memory book. Just about everyone who viewed the quilts signed the book. It was the only thing I could think of for Pauline to take back to Thelma to include her in the fun.

We tucked ourselves into bed Wednesday evening in preparation for The Big Day on Thursday, and awoke early enough to eat a leisurely breakfast and set out the cookies and lemonade. At 9:00 a.m., the appointed hour the quilt turning was to begin, the doorbell rang. By 9:30, there were five women in the house, and we had the quilts spread out in layers over the elongated dining room table. It only took once through the quilts for Pauline and me to get into a rhythm. We noticed we could fold them all, one by one, back towards the north side of the table for about three rounds, then we'd have to fold them similarly towards the south side of the table to equalize the shift in fabric. This technique prevented the quilts from scooting floorward on one side, instead centering them on the table as best we could.

Some of the viewers stayed for an hour or more, remaining through several turnings. We had a lull during the noon hour and the supper hour of about thirty minutes each, but other than that, Pauline and I showed those quilts from 9:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Neither Pauline nor I were bored. We were tired, but we weren't bored.

I didn't know until this viewing that Mrs. Clausen hand-stitched every bit of the quilts, including piecing the muslin on the backs, and the sashing between the blocks on one quilt (Dresden Plate). She even attached the bias binding by hand – yes, you heard me – attached the binding by hand – then by hand again, she laid it down on the back of the quilt. Unreal.

These quilts are rare for many reasons. In the first place, they are made entirely by hand by one quiltmaker. This is a current concern of mine – we aren't making very many quilts from start to finish by one quiltmaker. Quilts from our era of quilting made this way will be rare, too, even if they are machine pieced and/or machine quilted.

Secondly, the six quilts displayed at this turning were all made in the 1970's and 1980's, and for the most part contained fabrics from the 1960's through the early 1980's. There are a few feed sacks in there, but no reproduction fabrics -- they are all original runs. I swear, one of those prints was worn by Lulu in “To Sir With Love”. Her last quilt, the Dresden Plate, was made in 1986 at age 89. Mrs. Clausen lived to be 93-years-old.

At the point in history when these quilts were made, there began a falling away from traditional quilting, and a coming of age of modern quilting. More people were beginning to buy fabric just for the purpose of making a quilt. Calicoes were popular, and big, fluffy polyester batting psyched some into thinking nostalgically of feather beds. For a period, flatter, more traditional batting, was used less often.

None of the fabrics that were used to make the designs in these quilts were bought for the purpose of making a quilt. These fabrics were used in garments, aprons, curtains, pajamas, whatever. Pauline was always sewing and giving her mother fabric. The Peg gave her scraps left over from the Home Ec classes she taught at Charles D. Evans Junior High, and from the garments we made at home. Mrs. Clausen would swap fabric with her neighbors in rural Hedrick, Iowa. By whatever means she collected them, she collected them, then used them artistically in her quilts. Mrs. Clausen did purchase white muslin for the background and alternating blocks, as well as the backing.

Thirdly, these quilts are technically impeccable. Every point is sharp (I kid you not), and the quilts have no waving borders, no bunched-up blocks, no detectable error to the human eye. The potential for error is multiplied by the number of pieces in each block, and the number of blocks and set-in pieces needed to make each queen-sized quilt.

Fourth is the notable design sense of the quiltmaker. Mrs. Clausen would fussy-cut, so that, for instance, the whole pink elephant would be in the Grandmother's Fan “petal”, repeated twice according to her exacting pattern. A butterfly block would have a whole daisy centered into two little one-inch patches, where it fit the pattern of the Butterfly Quilt. 1 1/4" patches in the Postage Stamp quilt contained the words and phrases of their fabric: Hug Me, Kiss, Cool It, Life. The unifying centers of the Dahlia Quilt repeat meticulously throughout the quilt top, though each single dahlia was completed in the same fabric, and the fabric of each isn't repeated again anywhere in the quilt. She integrated dimensional quilting into the Dahlia Quilt, and she didn't appliqué her Grandmother's Fans – they were pieced in background fabric to the end of the block. She added black embroidered antennae onto the butterfly blocks, equi-distance apart so that she could handquilt a flower motif in the background three times; once on either side of the antennae and once between the antennae.

I can watch a fire for hours, flames dancing seductively across my unwaivering gaze, popping noises heard yet going unnoticed. Oceans and lake waters soothe me. I watch them journey in and out, back and forth, sensing both a free motion and a mission. These quilts do the same thing – I looked at them non-stop, all day, repeatedly, and they changed, they danced, they popped, they journeyed. I became an honorary Clausen. It was pure joy.

Plans are in the works to make these quilts available for more viewings. I will post here when they will be shown again, and when Pauline and Thelma will be at the showing. We won't put them through the exhausting day Pauline had here on June 23, 2005, but if you come to the viewing, you will get to meet them, see their mother's quilts, and feel like an honorary Clausen, too.

Thank you, Pauline, the Onerheim Other Mother whom we all love dearly, for sharing your mother's quilts. And next time, we'll be sure Thelma is there, too.

Ties That Bind

2005-06-16T08:33:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the cliché title. It's the best I could do under the circumstances, and it's my hope that it will fake you into thinking there might be some quilty content, like tying a quilt or attaching a binding. The real situation is that I'll be on the road this weekend, so I have to sacrifice my usual Saturday post. I'm trying to fit in a word or two between quilting classes at church (two sections of “Dancing on the Head of a Pin...” started today/Wednesday) and baking a cake for my flute choir. I'll slap this up sometime before I leave on Friday morning at 6:00 a.m.

We silver flute tooters are playing our last gig of the season Thursday evening, and plan to pig out on some uber-chocolate cake as a reward. I may or may not have told you, but cake is my favorite food, though I don't even think it is officially a food. Regardless, while I'm at church anyway with the dang quilters, I may as well discuss eating the cake with one of the pastors. I may need some sort of pre-absolution. I have an “in” with one of them, because I baked this cake for his last birthday, and he didn't bat an eye as he glommed it down. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Hubba visibly relaxed and enjoyed his piece after assessing Pastor Bryan's reaction. Up until then, I think Hubba assumed I was walking on the edge. Making and eating this particular cake rates quite high on the sin-o-meter.

The road trip is a new tradition my younger sister Lora and I cooked up with The Barn. Last summer we accompanied him to Madison, Minnesota, for the 125th anniversary of Minnesota Valley Lutheran Church. In 1997, he and I traveled alone back to Madison for the same celebration at Borgund Lutheran Church. Both churches are situated among the prairie farms outside of Madison proper, in southwest Minnesota. Grandpa and Grandma Onerheim moved to Madison from Big Timber, Montana, when The Barn (known in those days as "Bun") was three-years-old, and they lived there until he was well out of the family nest. Grandpa had both of these congregations, and they are served by one pastor yet today. These were Norwegian Synod churches (Norwegian Lutheran Church of America), and Grandpa presided there when the decision was made to discontinue singing the hymns in Norwegian. Those were dicey times.

A picture on the wall of our library was taken at “The 2nd Extraordinary Convention. Norwegian Lutheran Church of American (sic), Minneapolis, June 1922.” My dad would have been five-years-old at the time. This is one of those yard-long panoramic photos, and there must be as least 500 people who posed for it. When I finally located him in the photograph, Grandpa Onerheim is in the dead center. Figures.

Madison provides the setting for a great deal of Onerheim lore. Like the time my Aunt Ruth asked to perform for the congregation a new poem she had learned. “Yah, shoor, let's hear what Ruthie has memorized.” She bounded to the steps that lead up to the altar, in the front of the white-frame church, before every attentive and eager Nordic eye, Reverend Onerheim's precocious blond daughter.

“I am a little Dutchman and I like to drink beer
'til my belly sticks clear out to here!”

Uh, okay, you can sit down now, Ruthie... I don't think you were even supposed to say “belly” in the Norwegian Synod.

This is also where my dad remembers playing under the quilt frame in the parlor, as I mentioned before. I've seen the house, with the room upstairs where the widowed Grandma Snorteland would come to spend winters with my dad's family. Grandpa Onerheim fixed up a bedroom for her, and even put a little mock kitchen in it so she felt as though she had a place of her own. The six kids made do with the other bedrooms somehow, and whenever The Barn has related the story, he never indicates that anyone felt put out with the arrangement. To the contrary.

Aunt Margarette's misfortune happened in Madison. She became “an invalid”. A bicycle ran over her toe, and she contracted osteomyelitis. The Barn told us that if it happened today (today being when we were young), a shot of penicillin would probably have taken care of the whole problem. Instead, Aunt Margarette spent most of her life battling the effects of this minor incident. One leg stopped growing altogether, and she always wore a built-up shoe that my dad had the prisoners in Fort Madison, Iowa, make. Her hip joints and the elbow on her right arm froze, and she was never able to bend them again. She walked slightly bent over, and when she sat, her legs jutted out from the long skirts she wore to mask her condition. She taught piano lessons for years, but as she played, she needed to bend into the piano on her right side to accommodate her resistant arm.

One day I was looking through some old family photographs. I found one with about ten or a dozen young people. They were all dressed fashionably for the day, the girls with the requisite monster bow on whichever side of their heads was opposite the parts in their hair. Some of the kids were reclining, and I noticed some were sitting in what, at second look, were wheelchairs. As I studied this curious picture, I noticed a young Aunt Margarette on a bed. When I asked my dad what this picture was, he said, “Oh, that's Margarette's confirmation class. She was confirmed at the Home for Hopelessly Crippled Children.” The moment that comment was made is indelible in my memory, and my respect remains for the courage of my maiden aunt, as she negotiated through the years of society's shame. Aunt Margarette died when she was in her mid-eighties, and I joined The Barn for her funeral in Brookings, South Dakota. It was the first time in my life I saw him cry, another permanent imprint for my mind's eye.

Lora and I are the two offspring to remain in Iowa. We just like it here. You'd think we would hang out together all the time, considering we are two hours apart, and the other three siblings are in Boston, North Carolina, and Seattle. Alas, our schedules and the schedules of our own offspring have almost always prevented it. Last summer, when the three of us had so much fun on the Madison trip, we made a pact to take a summer jaunt together as long as we could.

The youngest two, Lora and I grew up under the diminutive dual moniker of “the little girls”. Honestly. There are all of eight years between my oldest brother Paul and my younger sister Lora. "The little girls”, indeed. Big whoop. When Paul introduced us to his girlfriend-now-wife Carol, she was dumbfounded. We were teenagers to Paul's twenty-oneness. “I thought you said they were little!”

Lora was awful cute. Still is, but when she was little, she was precious-cute. There were the blond braids held in place with the aid of “Suave”. I didn't know what “Suave” was, but it came in a bottle, and when The Peg or Mrs. Lester would put it in Lora's hair, her braids didn't fall apart so fast. Braids, with little short bangs fringing high on her forehead. I felt very protective of her, and my heart broke 180 times when I was in the first grade. I had to leave her every day outside the kindergartner's door at Wildwood Elementary, to fend without me. That pang of duty remains.

The Peg always did things to make each of us feel special. She and Lora would play “The Crazies”. Lora was devoted to our mother from the earliest age until Mom's unexpected death in 2002. As a youngster, she wanted to be physically close to her mama, as well, and she needed The Peg to engage with her on every level. She and our mother would embrace, and they would roll over and over onto the bouncy bed, singing and laughing together, “We are The Crazies, we are The Crazies!” Joyful memories, happy sounds heard from another room.

Lora was learning cause and effect relationships, probably around age five or six. Being the youngest, she didn't have the opportunity to think for herself very often. As I hearken back on this, she must have found it quite annoying to have two brothers and two sisters make so many decisions for her. It was such a profound aggravation, I think she steels herself against it even now. She wanted to figure things out for herself, but that was pretty tough when somebody not even a head taller than she provided solutions without solicitation. Sometimes she just kept things to herself; that way, she could go from start to finish and figure out how and why something happened. For me, it could be knee-slapping hilarious, if not some of the cutest stuff I'd ever heard!

“Mama, my stomach hurts. Do you think it's because I licked all the frost off the windows?”

Tummy aches were often the cause of her pondering. My personal favorite was:

“Mama, my stomach hurts. Do you think it's because I sucked on those tea bags in the sink?”

These days, Lora purposely cracks me up. She has a delightful sense of humor, and a take on life that is distinctly her own.

Early this Friday morning I'll meet my sister and The Barn in Hampton, and we'll head north on I35, picking up I90 once we're inside Minnesota. We're skipping Madison this year. Instead, we're going to our great-grandparent's farm, spending the first night of our second-year traditional escape in Watertown, South Dakota. We Onerheims don't mess around when it comes to getting from Point A to Point B. Seven straight hours on the road is child's play.

We'll scope out the entire area, where ever the farm is, and get more memories from The Barn about his generation. Our lodgings Saturday night are in Brookings. The First Lutheran Church there was Grandpa Onerheim's last call, and Aunt Margarette lived in Brookings her remaining years. We will go to church there on Sunday morning, and later visit the final resting places of The Reverend and Mrs. L.O. Onerheim and their daughter Margarette, the piano teacher. Aunt Margarette, whose simple life bore the pain and courage of the cross she had to bear, and on whose back we eventually learned compassion and appreciation for our own simple lives.

So, off we go. I'll do my best to remember some of The Barn's stories. They are always so rich. I'll keep my eyes open for anything fabric, and perhaps next week I'll provide a real Threadquarters report, one that actually mentions something quilt-related.

I got you with the stupid title, though, didn't I?

Copyright © June 2005 Kari E.O. Burns

Paving the Road to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks: Dancing and The Bad Words

2005-06-11T08:05:00.000-05:00

I recently mentioned that I did a “jubilant lint dance” (Look Ma, No Hoop). At about the same time I wrote that, my pastor and I had been in cahoots to get a quilting group going at our church, Decorah Lutheran. We are a fairly large congregation for a small community, and there are actually members who don't know each other. Before I lived in a small town, I found that an impossibility, but Decorah is just above the break even point for that particular preconceived notion. I used to teach school at Turkey Valley, Jackson Junction, Iowa, population around twenty-five, give or take. I'm pretty sure they all know each other. (As an aside, one of my favorite things about teaching at Turkey Valley was being asked, “Where do you teach?” and I'd say, “Turkey Valley.” I loved that.)

The current trend in larger churches is to organize small groups, so that members feel more connected within the congregation. Hubba and I have been involved in the small group process at our church, and we absolutely love the experience. Neither of us are shrinking violets – far from it – but up until the whole small group thing started, our church involvement included things like teaching Sunday school and confirmation, or serving on the church council. We kept busy, but we weren't really connected to our fellow, as in fellowship, Decorah Lutherans. Drinking coffee between services works for some, but that usually happened while we were busy with other things.

We have had a great group of women quilters for years, or at least ever since Sarah Anderson and her husband retired to Decorah, and she organized them. They make quilts for Lutheran World Relief. These women meet religiously (get it?) every Tuesday from September through May for “Do Day”, working the whole day and stopping only for a brief potluck luncheon. They gather fabric that hasn't been used for other things, and sew it together in various utile configurations, making a top and a back. Batting is donated, the fabric sandwiches are pinned and tied, and each year they make around 205 quilts to send to whomever needs them, worldwide, via Lutheran World Relief. In addition to that, they send lots of quilts to many other worthy causes locally. It is a wonderment to see them put their loving, caring hearts into action.

The new quilting group is designed for those who desire learning traditional quilting techniques and skills. Our first “class” will commence this summer, and we're calling it “Organic Cotton”. We aren't using organic cotton, but the group is going to design and make a quilt that will be sold for the benefit of our organ fund. Nyuk, nyuk. Fabric humor. Pastor Glesne asked me to come up with a logo and a name for the group, and the first thing that popped into my head was “Dancing on the Head of a Pin”. Quilting makes me feel like dancing, a revelation that only compounds my dork status with The Dot. Who wouldn't want to be one of the angels “Dancing on the Head of a Pin”?

Once I got the name out of the way, it was time to work on the logo. Hmmmm. That would require some ability to draw, and stick people are a specialty of mine. They're perfect when you want to be genderless, so I decided to make a dancing stick person. I couldn't bring myself to do that little ballerina twirl-thingie kind of look. That is so predictable, which is what many of us quilters struggle with in the first place. Predictable, boring, colorless, stodgy -- you know the story. This stick person would be dancing on the head of a pin, but it didn't have to reach for the heavens. How redundant. It goes without saying that we all thank heaven from the very cores of our quilty beings.

Then I got to thinking, Richard Gere played King David in the movie, King David (clever title). When King David came into the city, he d-a-n-c-e-d. Richard's King David boogied down so seriously that I still remember how much fun he appeared to be having. In the movie Footloose, Kevin Bacon's character included the passage from the Bible of David's dancing in his plea for the senior class to hold a (horrors) prom. Richard came in looking for all the world like one of the Jets from West Side Story.

“When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way...”

Crouched down, knees bent just so, feet moving to the music, arms down and fingers snapping. Coo-ool. I had our logo. Add a wing on the back of my bent-over, finger-snapping stick person, and the Lint Dance was born. You may note that it comes with a whole raft of justifications from the movie industry. Perhaps that's where my preconceived-notion-sickness originates.

We quilters can only hope to battle the stereotype of being a little too randy. The dancing bit helps. So what if we have to earn that one in the church basement? It makes it all the more in-your-face liberating! There was a point in history when the Lutheran church didn't allow (horrors) dancing. Members were discouraged from that wickedness altogether, and doing it in a church basement was completely off the table. I'm sure there are still some who find us on the edge of a very slippery slope.

“When you can quilt, you can quilt all the way...”

There remains one more bawdy fruit of the sect to address -- quilter language. I always wondered why I knew certain words, and then I started quilting. Setting in pieces, like an Attic Window, or a Carolina Lily, or La Moyne Star, was when I made this discovery -- I actually need those words! They come in quite handy, and it's a test of character not to use them. Seriously, when you have less than a fat quarter left of your inspiration fabric, and you discovered you measured wrong after you cut, what do you say? “Gee good golly” doesn't exactly leap off your tongue, and what escapes often results in a quick scan of your ear-shot space to see who heard it, followed by a repentant, “Sorry, God.”

Now that we will be “dancing” in the church basement, perhaps I can get some help for this frailty of the flesh. Confession is good for the soul, and I will be within spitting distance of the sanctuary. I find I do meditate while quilting, and the chance to commiserate with other experienced quilters, along with being an example to the newbies, may encourage me, and lead me back to the light. I will be fortified in my effort to replace the words I shouldn't know in the first place, and the road to you-know-where may take a detour. I'm already well practiced in “dang” and “dag-nabbit”, two of my favorite, if not overused, replacements.

Quilting is good for the spirit and good for the soul. Dancing is no longer a sin, and there is room in the church basement for the redemption of quilter language. I'll bring along the book Bad Girls of the Bible so we can all compare notes with what chicks did back in the day. I hope we'll learn that grace means God will not abandon those who dance on the head of a pin.

Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns June 2005