Thank you, Tiffany!

The words embroidered on the top and bottom inner borders of the quilt I just finished say:

“You have proven that the actions of a single person can make a profound difference in the lives of others. Thank you!”

I pieced the quilt and embroidered those words during the 27 days that my mother was in hospice last year.

This quilt is a gift for the young woman who took such very good care of my mother at the Alzheimer’s facility where she lived for the last three years of her life.

Tiffany cared for my mother amidst very trying circumstances, with kindness, compassion and devotion. It was Tiffany who “brought her back to life” on more than one occasion, getting Mom to eat, and to move again after falls that would have surely ended her life hed Tiffany not have been there.

Tiffany stayed at Mom’s bedside after Jennie and I were summoned from Houston, so she wouldn’t be alone until we got there. She did this on her own time after her shift had ended, off the clock, as a friend.

The names of  18 of the residents who lived with Mom are inked on the wrong side of 2″ x 6″ purple fabric in the middle of Tiffany’s Quilt. They are sashed and bordered with fabric that my mother hand dyed. I used the pillowcase from her bed as the backing. The embroidery floss was my grandmother’s and great grandmother’s.

I quilted funky feathers in the outside border, hanging hearts in the sashing, and various meandering stitches among the names.

I gave Tiffany the quilt top after Mom died and, in typical quilter fashion, told her I had to have it back to finish it. Embarrassingly, that was more than a year ago!

It is finally finished and I get to give Tiffany her quilt today!

Between the piecing and the quilting, Tiffany now works  part-time for me at Mallery Press, is a volunteer for the AAQI, and a caregiver for a gentleman with Alzheimer’s. In her spare time she goes to college, races cars , and works at Ba Doy Ow! I am honored to have her as a friend.

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February 8th is “Miso Soup Monday”

I’m predicting that Monday, February 8th is going to be cold and miserable. I think I’ll want soup for lunch, just to warm me up.

I’ve already made plans to go to Ba Doy Ow, my favorite Taiwanese restaurant in Flint to have miso soup.  Actually, it’s the ONLY Taiwanese restaurant in Flint, but let’s not split hairs. Grab a quilt and come along. You are all invited!

Yi-lan has extended the “Take Your Quilt To Lunch Special” to include our visit on February 8th. And I’m bringing a very special quilt to present to a very special person that day at Ba Doy Ow. Please come and join me for lunch and for the quilt presentation. If you don’t like miso soup, there are lots of other delicious things to pick from on the menu.

If you don’t want to drive in from Colorado, well…. I understand. We’ll miss you!

Shipshewana

All I have to do is just hear the name and I begin to drool.

I’ve shopped for quilting fabric at Yoder Department Store in Shipshewanna, Indiana since 1976. I was fresh out of Kalamazoo College and working  towards a Michigan teaching certificate as a 5th-year student at Western Michigan University.

The year before I had written my thesis (The Old Order Amish: Compromise & Contradiction), after hanging around with a wonderful Amish family who lived between Middlebury and Shipshewanna.

Ida taught me how to quilt. That’s me, dressed Amish (except for the Earth shoes) and that’s probably what I was wearing the first time I went into Yoders, totally clueless. 

My goal had been to learn about the Amish by participating in their culture, of course with permission,  and with lots of guidance. Ida and her daughters helped me make my Amish outfits and took me wherever they went so that I could do whatever they were doing. I dressed Amish, ate Amish, did farm chores (poorly), and learned to speak about 14 words in Pennsylvania Dutch.

One particular phrase got a lot of mileage: “Nay dange, Ich bin urshtum gooka.” (“No thanks, I’m just looking.”)  That was my response  when Mennonite shop clerks and local Amish would strike up a conversation with me in Dutch thinking I was Amish too!

I remember Yoder before they had a Quilting Department and when most of the yardage on the bolts were polyester: blends, knits, and double knits.

That’s what the Amish were wearing at the time and that’s what they were making quilts with too. I had never seen so many solids in my life.

I bought fabric for my first dozen quilts at Yoder, all polyester blends, convinced that Michigan didn’t have appropriate quilting fabric!

I’ve learned a lot since then, visited many a quilt shop, and bought more fabric than I’ll ever use, but I still love shopping for fabric at Yoders.

I’m heading over to Kalamazoo on Thursday night after my lecture with the Lansing Area Patchers to see our daughter. After she heads off to work Friday morning, I’m driving south to “Shipshe” to buy some batiks for a few new Rag Fur Jackets!

This is your official invitation to join me in the Yoder fabric department  on Friday morning, February 5th. Don’t be shy; come and find me. I’ll be the one messing up the bolts, unfurling, squinting, petting, and making piles of my favorites. I will be there for hours. For lunch let’s go to the Essenhaus!

Can you come?

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Is This Up To Code?!

I travel quite a bit. And I’ve got loyalty cards for more than 54 different hotels to prove it. Never mind that I haven’t been able to earn a free hotel stay yet, because that’s another story.

Upon entering my hotel room for the first time, I cheerily announce to the empty room, “Hi Honey, I’m home!”

Then I busy myself with actually making myself at home. I’m not a coffee drinker so I move the coffee maker out of the bathroom. I know they have to put it somewhere, and the bathroom is often the only source of water, but esthetically speaking, even if I did drink coffee, I wouldn’t want to brew it in the john. It’s just not right.

I also unplug the  hair dryer as I bring my own. I’ve written about my big hair before, so you know how important this is.

I can’t remember which hotel I was calling home when I took these pictures, and I sincerely hope that mentioning it does not embarrass anyone who has made my housing arrangements in the recent past. While I can’t remember where this was, I know that my stay was comfortable as well as thought-provoking.  

So check out the “interesting” way this hotel devised to keep patrons from, I don’t know, walking off with their wall-mounted hair dryers?!

I’m no electrician. I’m not sure how this is supposed to be wired, but I have a feeling this isn’t it.

Put it this way, I’ve never seen this before. I can’t even imagine how they did it, but I have a feeling beer was involved.

When the hair dryer dies, what do they do? Kind of makes cleaning the splash guard a little more difficult than it needs to be. I guess it just proves there’s more than one way to plug in a hair dryer.

Thank goodness the hole in the wall is centered.

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The Seal of Approval

Mom was cleaning closets and I was helping.  When she feels the urge to purge (and clean and straighten) she usually takes a nap and waits until the urge passes.

But, for some reason she was MOTIVATED.  Did I mention I was helping?

Readers with very good eyes will notice that there is a bottle of glass cleaner that appears to be coming out of my tail area. It is not. It is on the steps, behind me waiting patiently with the other cleaning things.

First we remove, and sort. Then we clean. Then we put back. And in the middle we play. That’s what we were doing in the picture.

If I remember correctly, my sister (the girl person) found the gloves and put them on to see if Mom would notice. I am so happy when people notice me.

I think I look like the very noble creature, the seal. The black flippers are very atractive on me.  I approve of them. I approve of most things. Therefore, in this picture, you may think of me as the Seal of Approval.

Sadly we had to go back to cleaning.

No gloves were harmed in the making of this blog.

Respectfully submitted and awaiting your approval,
Madison T. Dog

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An Unexpected Quilt Connection

Last time I visited Shipeshewana, Indiana I walked over to the antique mall to have a look. It was summertime and it was hot. I had shot my wad at the fabric department at Yoder’s and I only had an hour to look around, looking being the operative word. 

There were all sorts of treasures to examine, including a wonderful old crazy quilt. It was very past its prime as much of the fabric was disintegrating. Several pieces were in shreds.

I nosed over to see if there was a date anywhere.

Indeed there was! It was on a ribbon of some sort, right at the bottom.

The year was 1891! Wow!

And then I noticed that the ribbon commemorated a reunion for the Michigan School for the Deaf in….

FLINT, MICHIGAN!

That’s my town. I could hardly believe my eyes.

There was nobody around I could even elbow to share this with. No camera; all I had was my cell phone. But how cool was that?!

Click on the image to see it larger.

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Take a Bao

It’s “Take Your Quilt to Lunch Month!”

For those of you in and around Flint, Michigan, Ba Doy Ow is offering a special treat if you bring a quilt in to their wonderful restaurant during the month of January. Why? Because when I blogged about Ba Doy Ow before a bunch of quilters showed up. Yi-lan,  the owner and chef , wants to thank you. (I’m also trying to get her interested in quilting!)

Big or little, show your quilt to the folks behind the counter, listen to their praise for your talent, and get a free BAO! 

A  free what?! A bao (pronounced BOW, as in “take a bow”) is a tasty, doughy, round thing with either something sweet or something savory inside. Like everything else at Ba Doy Ow it is steamed. Yum! And good for you, too!

(Flavor Tip: Peel the paper off the bottom before you eat it. The paper won’t hurt you, but there are other ways to get fiber in your diet.)

Sweet bao fillings include Red Bean, Custard, Sweet Taro, and Lotus Nut. The savory fillings are Bar-B-Q pork, Spinach, Mushroom, and Leek.

I had a Spinach and Mushroom bao this time. See my steamed dumplings in the background? (Yes, I often photograph my food.)

Ba Doy Ow is on Linden Road, north of Genesee Valley Center on the east side of the street. Here’s a handy map.

Enjoy! And maybe I’ll see you there! Yes, I really DO eat here. A lot.

I will warn you, it will take you a LONG time to order unless you’ve eaten Taiwanese food before. Everybody is good at explaining what all the things are, but if you’re too timid to ask, just get a #1 combo. You’ll still have to pick the kind of dumpling you want and decide if you want a Coke or one of the 35 different teas they have.

In the interest of full disclosure, nobody paid me to write this. It was entirely my idea to blog about Ba Doy Ow. Yi-lan did give me a free bao for the photo, and  once I took a bite out of it I had to destroy the rest of the evidence along with the dumplings and pork rice I purchased.

If you don’t quilt, just say that I sent you and you’ll get a free bao. Unless you mispronounce my name. Then the deal’s off.

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The Sound of Shears Delight

I have two really strong memories about scissors. When I was very young I remember that my mother kept her sewing scraps in the bottom drawer that was built into the wall of our hallway, between the kitchen and the bathroom. The three built-in drawers were always a mystery to me. Where did they go when they closed?!

The contents were a mystery too, filled with a jumble of colorful fabrics of every texture. Mom took in sewing to help ends meet. She fixed zippers, hemmed pants, and let out waistbands for families in the neighborhood. She also made all her clothes and all of my clothes.

I was allowed to play in the scrap drawer whenever I wanted. When I was about three I remember taking her scissors and hacking off a chunk beautiful pink fabric to play with. I hadn’t taken the fabric all the way out of the drawer, I just pulled and some came out. I remember feeling so proud that I opened the heavy drawer as far as I had all by myself (it didn’t slide easily) and negotiated the cutting with Mom’s big shears.  Turned out I cut a rather large piece of out of my favorite pink dress!  Mom had put in the drawer until she had time to lengthen the hem.

It’s funny that I remember that as a “good” memory. I can imagine how Mom must have felt, but she barely scolded me. She just held up the dress to examine the hole, and pretty much that was that. I remember being way more disappointed than she was; I had really liked the dress. Mom had an extraordinary sense of perspective. If she had made a big deal about it, I may never have gone on to sew my first garment a decade later, making a Superman outfit for one of the cats, complete with cape, hat (plus ear holes) and tail cozy. (But that’s a whole other story!)

The second scissor memory is not a particular eve nt, but rather a sound. It’s the sound made by a heavy pair of scissors cutting fabric on a wooden table. What an amazing sound! I love it for the melodious rumble it makes and for the anticipation it triggers. To me that particular sound is filled with promise, excitement, and challenge for what will come next:  SEWING!

Maybe that’s why I thought of it this morning. It’s a great sound with which to begin the New Year. So, put down your rotary cutter for a minute, find the big scissors, and cut something on a wooden table. Enjoy the memories it conjures for you and savor the excitement to come.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Back to the rest of Ami’s Newsletter.

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Santa Dog Brings Tidings of Joy

Mom’s busy. She is procrastinating. That’s why you haven’t heard from her.

Mom said I could bring you holiday greetings, however. So, like the song about the merry gentlemen resting, I bring you tidings of “Come Fur and Enjoy!” (I’ve recently been brushed.)

I love to wear my Santa suit. Mom made it for me. There was a hat too, but I don’t wear hats. (Tell her, please.) 

We’re wrapping present now, which is a good thing because I don’t smell very many under the tree for Madison. I will smell again later tonight when nobody is looking. Mom doesn’t wait until night-time. She vacuums the presents that say “AMI” under the tree. She tries to see if she can move them around and guess what’s inside or possibly suck part of the paper off. 

Mom is the worst present-wrapper ever. Nothing ever lays flat or matches up. She rips the paper all the time (half the corners are bare and poking out) and she uses lots of tape. I try to help whenever possible by holding things and suggesting places to strategically cover the rips and tears with bows. I wrap for her, but Mom is the only one that likes yellow fur under the tape.

One of our Internet  friends recommended this singing video on You Tube. Mom and I got a big kick out of it, so I hope you watch it. http://vodpod.com/watch/2393854-silent-monks-singing-halleluia

I hope you find something nice to chew on under your tree this year and may all the squirrels that come into your yard be a little slow so that you can catch them and give them big Christmas kisses.

Mom will write again soon. Meanwhile, tell me what you’d like for Christmas!

Madison T. Dog
(A.K.A.  “Santa Dog”)

Note Cards or Greeting Cards?

Which do you prefer?

I’m doing a little market research here. Let’s say there was an incredibly beautiful quilt, or part thereof, that was just begging to become a small piece of mail.

If you were going to purchase such a card, possibly in a set of 12, and in an attractive package, would you want them BLANK to write your own personal message, or would you like them to already come with a message? And what would that message be?!

To review:
Option #1: BLANK
Option #2: WITH GREETING
     a) Happy Birthday
     b) Thinking of you
     c) Get well
     d) Condolence
     e) Quilt related (give example)

Now’s your chance to change the world, or at least make your opinion known about greeting/note cards with pictures of quilts on them. Write a comment!

Thanks!
Ami :)

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