New Skills

Norris had surgery on his right hand today to correct a trigger finger that has been bothering him for years.

Norris is busily trying to solve the daily Sudoku, using only his normally less adept left hand to write his notations in the edges of the tiny squares. So far so good -- but the local anesthesia still has his right hand pretty numb. That means he's feeling pretty lively, not yet on the strong pain medication prescribed.

He'll be wearing that thick bandage on his right arm until a week from today.

Addendum to post about heirloom hand weaving

After a brief search among the papers Cheryl has recently brought from Illinois, she found a typed list titled, "List of things that Faye W. has." The fifth item on this list reads in part:

"The old handwoven, hand spun bedspread was made by Polly Maynard. The white was linen and the dark blue is wool. Mother put the blue binding on it."

The list was probably typed by Cheryl's Aunt Alice. The naming of ancestors throughout the list as Grandfather or Great Grandfather is consistent with Aunt Alice's place on the family tree. That means "Mother" is Faye, and not her mother Carrie, and if the "about 1900" on the card is accurate, it means she would have sewn the blue wool binding on the coverlet well before she was married.

From Cheryl's Aunt Alice's book of family history, we learn that Polly Maynard was born Kendall in 1794 in Massachusetts. She was married in 1813, then moved to New York where she and her husband had 10 children. They moved to Southern Indiana probably about 1840. According to research by another descendant, shared with Cheryl's grandmother, Polly Maynard was "the Lady Herb Doctor." Polly died in 1865. Aunt Alice speculates "perhaps the herbs helped Polly live beyond the usual life expectancy of women at that time."

And that explains why the coverlet was saved for future generations.

Heirloom linens, part I

Among the many items the family has been going through at Cheryl's Dad's house was a box labeled by her Dad with her grandmother's initials, and the words "Old Linens." This piece is the largest of them, and most mysterious. Cheryl is posting these pictures mainly to show her friend Diane, who is a weaver, so she may help with any expertise on how we should treat this piece.

It looks like the kind of oxidation Cheryl and Norris cleaned up from a 1930's era quilt of his mother's. We gave that quilt a good soaking in the right kind of cleaner, which took out most of the brown spots and whitened up the light fabric.

In the box was this 3x5 card - not dated or further identified.

Cheryl has a piece of tatting her Aunt May framed and labeled for her so she thought this card might have been written by Aunt May-- Aunt May was a Cooperative Extension Services employee and very knowledgeable about textiles. But her printing does not really look much like the writing on the card above -

In the overall picture, the condition does not appear too bad but there are many worn areas - a closeup of the weaving, placed over a dark brown background -



Here you can see both the same type of hole as above (just left of center in the lower part of the photo), and areas where some of the wool yarns have worn partially away -

In this photo, there's a place where only the linen yarn remains.


The piece was probably woven in one very long piece, then cut in two and carefully seamed along the selvage - on one side the weaving matched up pretty well but....
by the time we get to the far side, the pattern seems to have shifted slightly.



Here is a closeup of the bound edge. Similar to a quilt, the edges always suffer the worst of the wearing.
This is the wool binding on the reverse side.