Cheap fabric and oversized sleeves

The seamstress heroine of my 2nd novel
was too fashionable to fall for this trend

I spent so much time paging through an online 1896 Sears Roebuck catalog that I gathered enough for two blog posts.

Last month, we looked at the catalog's grocery section. Today I'm focused on the fabric department.

Both posts connect to how the characters in my Persimmon Hollow novels would have been familiar with Sears catalogs. I've just reprinted Books 1 and 2 with a new publisher and new covers that fit the theme of Book 3's cover. 

The novels are set in the late 1800s. Fast fashion as we know it today didn't exist in 1896 pioneer Florida. Yes, a person could buy ready-to-wear clothing in stores and from catalogs. But each item was purchased with an eye toward longevity. Most women and probably a lot of men knew how to sew and make garments. They spent quite a bit of time doing so. Far more than today. 

The heroine of my second novel is a seamstress named Josefa. She perfects her craft through an apprenticeship with the town dressmaker. Any author will tell you their characters seem like real people to them. I'm no exception. I can imagine Josefa poring over the fabric selections of the Sears catalog.

The section wasn't named "Fabric." No, it was the Dress Goods Department. It started on page 136, right after a page selling cheese box machines and creamery butter tubs.

Dress Goods depicted “all the newest and choicest products of foreign and domestic looms for the fall and winter season of 1897.” That wasn't all. There also was material touted as year-round fabric and a promise that “all the popular new up-to-date fancy brocades, Jacquards, two toned effects” were always in stock in great variety.

The prices almost made me swoon. A two-color diamond pattern brocade sold for 11 cents a yard. A wool serge was 25 cents yard and scotch wool plaid 29 cents.

Silk was an uptown price, hovering at 98 cents a yard, while soft, fleecy flannel went for 6 and 3/4 cents a yard. If you wanted basic, unbleached cotton flannel, you could have it for 4 cents a yard. Gingham was slightly more expensive: 4 and 1/2 cents a yard. Percales were double that price, or 9 cents a yard.Don't ask me how they figured change when dealing with half- and quarter-cent pricing.

My astonishment grew as I reached the pages that advertised quilts. One seven-pound bed quilt measured 72x78 inches. It was made of twilled sateen, red lining and carded cotton fill and it featured something called "fancy quilting." The price was...are you ready...$1.50. I searched to discover the equivalent of that price in purchasing power today. The result: $52.91.

Seamstress Josefa would definitely have spent time perusing the quilts, household linens and ready-to-wear sections of the catalog. She would have looked for fashion trends, judged the latest styles and determined what would and wouldn't work in her frontier Florida environment of Persimmon Hollow.

One fashion at the peak of popularity at that time was the ridiculous bubble sleeve that puffed out four or five times the width of the wearer’s arm. I’d have skipped that trend had I lived back then. Just like I skipped the whole cold-shoulder blouse trend of recent years.

My seamstress heroine had better fashion sense than to wear those massive winglike sleeves. She had style and taste. Of that I'm sure. I know her pretty well. :) 

Quilts, a novel, and the Florida scrub

My article about the meaning of quilts in
South Moon Under is in the 2018 Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida
Literature, vol 26. (Gerri Bauer photo)

Florida in the 1920s and 1930s was filled with hidden backwoods homesteads.

The frenzied activity of the era's Florida Land Boom may well have been on another planet for anyone visiting these pioneer settlements. One such visitor was author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Rawlings moved to Florida in 1928. As part of her research, she trekked into the Florida scrub near Ocala to live with a Cracker family named Fiddia in 1931.

Her experiences and meticulous notes evolved into her 1933 novel, South Moon Under, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. (Her best-known novel, The Yearling, won the Pulitzer in 1939.)

South Moon Under is my favorite Rawlings' novel, not least because a thread about quilting runs through it, as hidden as those old homesteads were. More about that later. This blog post is now going to split into two threads, no pun intended.

One thread highlights a video featuring the granddaughter of the woman Rawlings stayed with in the Ocala forest. The other is about the novel's quilting aspect and about the article in which I explore quilting's place in the narrative. The article is published in the 2018 issue of The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature, Volume 26. The journal is published by the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society, of which I'm a member.

Rawlings' hosts in the forest were Piety Fiddia and her son. Rawlings learned about and tried her hand at many aspects of the Fiddias' self-sufficient pioneer life. She then gave the name Piety to the fictional mother in South Moon Under. 

The real Piety's granddaughter, Carol Fiddia Laxton, said Rawlings' writing captured her grandmother so perfectly, she could almost see her on the pages of the novel. 

That comment, and others about life in pioneer Florida and Carol's childhood memories of Rawlings, are in the wonderful video linked below. The video was filmed at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in Cross Creek and was sponsored by the Friends of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm.

Back to the novel and its quilts: My curiosity about the bedcovers' role was sparked the first time I read the book years ago, but went dormant. About three years ago, I re-read the novel and the quilting again jumped out at me. I knew I wanted to write about it, but why? What did the quilting signify and why was it featured enough in the narrative for me to notice?

Rawlings didn't use words indiscriminately but she did use metaphors. I let my ideas percolate for several months and periodically did some research, but still came up empty.

Then my mother fell gravely ill, and I started driving back and forth through the Ocala National Forest two, sometimes three, times a week. My mother died and the trips continued as I settled her estate, relocated my ill father to DeLand near my husband and me, and sold my parents' Ocala house.

This was an emotionally hard time for me, as you can guess. Each time I drove, the forest portion of my journey soothed my psyche. And each time, I'd think of the novel and the quilting, especially when I passed the sign for the Big Scrub turnoff. The road leads to a now-abandoned homestead that once inspired Rawlings' writing.

I'd see the sign, think of the author, think of the novel, and circle back to quilts. For I come from a long line of women who plied the needle, sometimes to keep themselves and their families alive. They sewed as peasants in Europe and in sweatshops in New York City, not as Crackers in the Florida scrub. But some things transcend physical boundaries.

On my drives, I thought about mothers and daughters, needlework, communities, connections, so many things. And one day, on one of those drives, the missing link I sought was ... just there, in my mind.

I had just passed State Road 19 and noted one of my journey's landmark sandhills as I rounded a curve. Before I reached the Big Scrub sign the answer came to me in a flash. The quilting in the novel connects women. It helps the fictional Piety thread her extended family together in a way that ensures survival in the scrub beyond basic necessities.

Finally, I was able to write the article that became "Piety's Quilts: Stitching Family and Fabric in South Moon Under." Finally, the meaning of the quilts was clear.

Quilting is a multifaceted art and craft in the 21st century. It encompasses all genders, a range of genres and applications, and collective endeavors such as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which I was privileged to see about 20 years ago. 

But in the story world of South Moon Under and in the daily life I try to uncover in this blog, quilting was part of the pioneer woman's domain. It was something that gave her agency. And that's important no matter what the era.

Here's the video:

Watch the video at https://youtu.be/jI4IsV6chR4

Quilts that inspire

This New York Beauty heirloom quilt was made
 in the 1860s and is featured on Page 60
of the book Florida Quilts.

I'm fresh from a visit to the American Quilter's Society Daytona Beach Quilt Week. I saw beautiful examples of fiber arts - both traditional piecework and art quilts - got inspired, and also got thinking about the threads of continuity that bind quilters.

The fiber arts today are a hobby for most enthusiasts and a career for some. I'm an experienced seamstress but a novice quilter, with one quilt, one star-themed block for the NASA quilt, and one table runner to my credit. (2022 update: I've reached intermediate quilt status, with several more done since I first wrote this post!) 

For women on the Florida frontier, quiltmaking was a necessity. Homemakers crafted bedcovers for family members and young women stitched quilts for their trousseaus. One such person was Sarah Asberry Brown Anderson.

Sarah's story is told in the 1992 book Florida Quilts, by Charlotte Allen Williams (University Press of Florida). Sarah lived in Wakulla County in North Florida when she started making the New York Beauty quilt pictured with this blog post. She was 12, and she dyed her homespun cotton fabric with tree bark solutions before cutting the pieces and hand-sewing the quilt. Sarah began the quilt in 1865 and finished it in 1869.

Williams writes that New York Beauty was a popular pattern in the late 1800s. Other designs popular in the late 19th century included:

• Friendship quilts that included embroidered signatures

• Log Cabin

• Irish Chain

• Album block quilts

• Crazy quilts

• Applique quilts that featured stylized flower designs

Sarah's descendants reported that she was proud of her New York Beauty quilt and preserved it through the years. One look at the photo and the level of craftsmanship is obvious. I'd be proud, too, if I'd cut and sewn together those hundreds of pieces into a beautiful finished whole. Having experimented with natural dyes, I can also attest to the quality of the fabric's colors.

The care given the New York Beauty is why it survived long enough to be documented in Florida Quilts. The book profiles some of the women and quilts uncovered during the Florida Quilt Heritage Project. That project, which I've written about before, did a remarkable job of bringing many women's lost stories back to life through their quilts.

Today, quiltmakers receive their just due and are credited for their work. The fiber arts are celebrated. This post is to pay homage to all the unsung needlewomen of the past.

View the Florida Quilt Project digital collection at The Quilt Index website. The Quilt Index is an open access digital repository.

Heirloom quilts: fabric, thread tell time

I wrote this 1987 newspaper article about
the documentation of Florida quilts.

I'm coming up against deadline to finish a quilt square for the NASA star-themed quilt project. The entry deadline is Aug. 1, 2014. When digging in my closet for complementary scraps of red, white and blue fabric, I was sidetracked by an old journalism portfolio that hadn't been opened in a while. In it were newspaper clippings of articles waiting to be pasted into a scrapbook. Old articles. Not quite antiques, but ... close. 

One was a 1987 story I wrote about a Florida Quilt Heritage Discovery Day at the library in New Smyrna Beach, a coastal city in Central Florida.

So, what does that have to do with Florida frontier? My young reporter self was fascinated with the stories told that day about the quilts brought in for documentation. I shared as many as I could in the article. 

Most of the quilts were family heirlooms sewn in the 19th century and early 20th century. And even though they belonged to Floridians in 1987, the quilts almost all originated somewhere else.

The quilts were beautiful, tangible evidence of the past. They illustrated the way people brought personal treasures that mattered when they migrated to Florida, whether they made the trek in 1880 or 1980. 

Homemade quilts, stitched with love, warmed both body and soul of new Florida settlers in need of roots.

More than 60 quilts were documented that day, including the following. The 1987 owners' names and relationship to the quiltmakers are in parentheses:

• red, white and green Mariner's Compass quilt, made in 1847 by Mary Ann Wilson in Pennsylvania (great-granddaughter Mrs. Newell Adams of Daytona Beach);

• a quilt made in Ohio in 1888 by Alice Hutchins, who sewed into it her own image in silk (grandson Bill Hutchins of Edgewater); 

• Mennonite quilt made by Mary Roth in 1920s in Nebraska, that included part of her 1892 wedding dress (granddaughter Kathy Meck of New Smyrna Beach);

• feathered-star pattern quilt made by Fannie Lord Grimshaw in 1901 in New York, and exhibited at the New York State Fair in 1975 (daughter-in-law Harriet Grimshaw of Daytona Beach).

Fannie made a deliberate mistake in her quilt because she said, as her daughter-in-law related, only God is perfect. Imperfections, to me, make quilts authentic, real ... human. They often outlive their makers and subsequent owners. The Quilt Heritage Day took place 27 years ago. Some of the quilts' then-owners may no longer be alive. But the quilts likely still exist.

View the Florida Quilt Project digital collection at The Quilt Index website. The Quilt Index is an open access digital repository.