Rag Quilts and Old Singer Sewing Machines

This summer has been a one of a kind summer.  The children are old enough to not require constant supervision and I actually have time to get things accomplished.

I decided to dig out the portable sewing machine that I purchased when my daughter was little.  It would be about 30 yrs old now.  Low mileage and still in good working order.

Now to the project.  Over the years, Ive dabbled with small things, a few summer dresses, etc.  But with an abundance of time this summer, I really wanted to tackle a quilt.  I really don't have the patience to crazy measure and be so precise so I opted for the very forgiving Rag Quilt as my first attempt at creating a functional blanket.

I had various yards of material, purchased throughout the years when I aspired to create something on the sewing machine.  I gathered all those together and then purchased a few more yards just to make sure I'd have enough.

A link though Pinterest (Thank you God for this site) sent me to what seemed like a simple enough Rag Quilt.
I loved the colors and the texture created with this method.  Whoa, 260 squares of material?  Whoa, 130 squares of batting?  I began cutting.

Now, I'm not blessed with an abundance of handy sewing tools but after my mom passed, I was fortunate enough to get her old pedal sewing machine.  In one of the drawers was a very stout pair of scissors.  So heavy were they that they could easily be a weapon.  These were my weapon, I mean scissors of choice.

I cut for days.  Measuring, cutting, stacking.  My hands hurt from cutting.  At this point, I decided, should I survive this ordeal, I would buy something to cut material that didn't leave me crippled for life.

Finally, the process advanced to actually using the sewing machine.  Oh what joy.  But wait, I can barely see the needle and threading it was taking a long long time.  My next trip to the store took me to the sewing section and there I secured a needle threader.  Problem solved.  I spent a good amount of time sewing an X across each layered square.

 

What fun this part was....who knew quilting could be so easy!  Before I knew it I had 130 puffy squares.

Next came creating strips of squares.  Oh my, too simple.  I was already envisioning in my head what this magnificent quilt would look like when finished.  Even my crippled by scissors hand was working steady and quick.  I found myself sewing til midnight, one o' clock, two o' clock in the morning.  This became my favorite time of day.  Working on the quilt while the world slept was nearly magical.  The strips multiplied.

 There they were, all the strips completed.  I laid them out on the bed to see which order I liked best.  Derby loved how soft they were and had to jump in the picture because he knew how photogenic he was and how he was only going to enhance the overall beauty of the quilt.  

The midnight sewing sessions continued.  I attached each strip and while the weight of the project grew and became more difficult to maneuver on the machine, I overcame the obstacles and managed to get them all joined.

There was a note to self about working on a quilt during the heat of summer.  Might be a Fall project from now on.

 Now I had spent little time agonizing over the order and patterns of my hodge podge of material squares.  I quickly abandoned that notion and reminded myself this was a quilt for me.  I didn't care that it wasn't perfect.  It mattered not that two blue squares might be touching.  I mean, seriously, its a quilt.  It's only purpose is to give warmth.  With those boundaries removed, I relaxed and just let the quilt have it's way.  I let it become what it was always meant to be.  I could have labored in the name of perfection, but to what end.  Its a quilt and as long as it does what it was meant to do, that being  to keep me warm this winter, I would be completely delighted.

 

And there she is.  My first quilt.  She has a border of my design using scrap pieces of material.  There is perfection in her imperfection.   She awaits the first cold night of the coming winter.  She will provide a cocoon around me to keep me warm on winter days.

My sewing journey did not end with my Rag Quilt.  I mentioned that I had my mom's old pedal sewing machine.  It is the machine I learned to sew upon.  I was sixteen years old that summer, the summer I learned how to thread a machine, load a bobbin, pedal with a steady rhythm and feel the magic of making something to wear or use.

After I finished the Rag Quilt, I decided to organize the drawers in that old Singer pedal machine.  I stumbled upon something quite special.  I opened a drawer, saw this and immediately knew it was old. 

 

Now Piggly Wiggly is hardly obsolete, but this little item was from a time long ago.  I opened the front to find this handly little case for storing sewing needles.  After some online research, I learned they were given out as customer gifts back in the 1950s.  

How cool was this....imagine a time when you walked into a store and they were so happy you were a customer they gave you something useful just for being there.  It reminded me of the time when you used to get a kitchen towel with your laundry detergent.  Thats when customers were special.  So were the corporations and stores that provided the goods.  Thats a time long past, isn't it?

I turned over this little gem and found this:

 

I remember S&H green stamps!  All those stamps, those books, all the licking of stamps, turning them in for something useful.  I loved that whole idea.  Again, an example of how much the customer was appreciated.

We need more of that in our world. 

Who knew the making of a quilt would yield so much.  I netted a great quilt made by my hands as well as time opening up drawers I used when I was a teenager some 40 yrs ago.  I can't imagine a better time or experience.

Oh, The Times They Are A Changing

I have lived half a century.  Half of 100 years and with any luck, I will be able to say that at this point, I had only lived half my life.  I've been thinking lately of just how much the world as I see it has changed.

In every direction, life has changed and while I know that should I look back into history, I would see that perhaps this is repetitive change.  We have probably been here before, racing towards progress only to eventually find ourselves throwing rocks at our potential dinner.

Being a child of the 1950s, I recall a world without a lot of television, cell phones and most advanced modern technologies.  If I wanted to write to my Uncle Bill, I had to actually get a pencil or pen, find some writing paper, actually write the letter with my hand, address an envelop, fold up the letter, put the letter in an envelop, lick the envelop to seal, go to the Post Office, buy a stamp (which was 10 cents), lick the stamp, attach the stamp to the envelop and finally place the letter in the Outgoing slot, just to tell Uncle Bill I loved him.  Back then calling long distance was a luxury we simply couldn't afford.

As kids, we spent all our time outside.  Rain, shine, hot or cold, we were outside.  We played football, baseball, kickball, we rode our bikes all over the neighborhoods, walked on hot streets in the summer, drank tons of water and enjoyed nickle candies.  Daddy worked the huge garden that supplied our dinner table with delicious bounty and Mom transformed a second hand dress into a dress for me for a special occasion.  Both tasks done with patience and by hand.

I learned to sew on an old Singer sewing machine with a foot pedal that made the whole thing work. I learned to type on a manual typewriter that more often than not, found me pulling my fingers out from between the keys.  It seemed we did more and knew less.  If we didn't know how to do something, we either had to find someone with the experience and time to teach us or we had to go to a library and check out a book on the topic.  We may not have had as much and maybe we didn't have the world at our fingertips, but we had a most carefree existence.  We ate food that was nutritious and made our Barbie dollhouses out of cardboard boxes and scraps of carpet.  Nothing was instant and nothing was easy.  And yet, in many ways, that life had great value.  It was a time of conquering our wants and needs with what God gave us, two hands, two eyes and a creative brain.  We used the daylight to finish what had to be done and slept well thanks to the fatigue of being busy and active all day.

Its as if I blinked my eyes and now my birthday cakes require more candles than it has room.  I have become my parents except, life is different.  We have so much and except for what is most important, we have want for nothing.  We all have cell phones and I do mean all of us, yet we can't make enough money to save for college for our children.  We have a dependable car but not enough money to go anywhere other than to work and school.  We have health insurance but not enough for the deductible that takes us to our Primary for care.  We have all the food we could want but the food does little to provide nutrition for our bodies.  Some of these are priority choices, others are facts of life. 

Today, social media has turned our lives into open books.  Privacy is minimized and while you might not participate in social medias, everyone else does so whatever they know is spread exponentially.  Social media is nothing more than fancy wildfire gossiping for which I have no need at all.  Truly, I prefer to mind my own business.

Today, we are one with our technology.  There is no doubt, these advances have made our world more productive, more convenient and in some cases, more enjoyable.  I don't think I could do a fair comparison of the two worlds I have known in my life.  I know there is value in each and for very different reasons.

Could I say which I prefer most?  No.  Could I quickly adapt to the world I knew as a child?  Most definitely.  We must have experienced something in order to feel comfortable with it when it comes round again.  Perhaps this is why I feel so compelled to talk to my son about the way the world used to be and how things used to be done.  Should the patterns repeat themselves in the form of our ways of life, he might just have that taste of familiarity and feel more at ease. 

Nothing lasts forever, not people, not technology, not privacy, not freedom.  What does last forever are our comfort zones and if you have enough of them, you can ease through all the changes that life brings.

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow.