Tag Archive for family textiles

Fabrics Through My Time

Apron I made for my Grandmother's "newspaper route" at her nursing homeIt turns out that my fascination with fabrics over the years has not just been with art quilts. As my mother has been getting older, my brother, sister, and I have been helping to clean out her home of 50 years. As we sift through all of the things she’s been acquiring, (and we left behind as we moved out of the house), I’ve uncovered a number of textile pieces that I’ve been involved with that have meaning for me. It’s been a sort of personal archeology of my past, digging into the corners of the attic and excavating the backs of drawers and closets.

The photo on the left is of an apron that I made for my grandmother’s “paper route” at the Methodist Home where she spent her last days. The administration tried to give the residents meaningful tasks, and my grandmother’s job was to roll up each subscriber’s newspaper, rubber band it, and put their name on it. She complained about how the print ink stained her clothes, and so I made her some protective coverings. I got two carpenter’s aprons from a hardware store, and covered the pockets with sturdy, striped canvas. Along the top of the apron, I machine embroidered the name of the local newspaper. She was quite proud of her “uniforms”, and sauntered around in them them with obvious pride. I was pleased to see that my mother had the two still stashed in a drawer, and so I kept them.

Embroidered canvas, 1972, by Nancy SmeltzerMy mother is the type that always gushed over whatever her children made for her, (including bouquets of dandelions or goldenrod) and this small piece of hand embroidery made of yarn and canvas, (10.5″ x 8.5″ or 26.75cm x 21.5cm) hung on the wall of the family den for a number of years. It was made by me in 1972, and I imagine that it was a Christmas present that I made when I didn’t have a lot of money to buy something. The image is rather crude, but does speak to my fascination, even then, with textures, as there are a lot of French knots on the piece. (I had just finished my undergrad degree and was exploring textiles as an art form.) Some of the heavier yarns have been couched down with thinner floss and to emphasize the joining of some of the intersecting lines. The colors have weathered the years well and not faded very much, but then they weren’t in sunlight.

Unfinished potholder on a frameHere is a photo of something that would not have meant probably anything to anybody else except to me. This small potholder frame, (7.25″ sq or 19 cm square), constructed a lifetime’s worth of potholders when I was about 9 years old. I learned to make them at the local playground during the summers, and for some reason, I found them fascinating. There was something very comforting about weaving the horizontal weft loops under and over the vertical warp loops. I quickly learned that there were other combinations  besides over one, under one, and when I learned to finger crochet the edges to secure them, I was sure that I had arrived at the height of textile dexterity. I’m not quite sure why there was only one green loop at the bottom of this unfinished piece, but I surely smiled when I brought it out into the daylight again from the drawer in which it had been hidden for over 50 years.

As I’ve been going through what’s in my mother’s house, I’ve also learned that what has meaning to you will quite possibly be just useless junk to someone else and if left to others, will be thrown out. I encourage you to write down your family stories and mark on the back of objects who they belonged to, and how they were used. That way, others who are helping with a clean-up will know of the importance of something to you, and it won’t be thrown out.

What memories do you have of creating art when you were little? What are some of your favorite tools and media that you used? Were you a finger painter or did you make mud pies out of your mother’s salt cellars like I did?

Why not leave a comment as to your thoughts on this posting. Please take a minute, fill out the form by clicking on the “comments/no comments link” at the top of the posting, and then share your ideas with the rest of us. We all grow when we share our thoughts and impressions, so why not join our growing community of those who appreciate art quilts and textile arts. We’d love to hear from you!

You can see more of my art work on my web site at www.fiberfantasies.com

To find out how to buy my art work, please check out “How to Buy my Art Work” in the “Pages” section to the right of this blog.