Writing Up A Storm

The Keeping Quilt

My Thursday children's picture book is The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco. This might be the quintessential quilt story. It carries a quilt from the clothes on a person's back to the quilting bee to the passing down of the quilt through the generations. Here is how it begins:

"When my Great-Gramma Anna came to America, she wore the same thick overcoat and big boots she had worn for farm work. But her family weren't dirt farmers anymore."

With these words, we learn that this is an immigrant family whose whole life in a new country has taken a new turning. And we are given the first hint that this is a true story, and that it is about the author's own family.

The only color in this beautiful book is in the colors of the quilt. Everything else is done in rich charcoal pencil drawings. Because the quilt is the only thing that colors the scenes, it stands out on every page, and soon becomes the most colorful character of all the wonderfully-drawn family characters.

The word "babushka" can mean both "grandmother" and "kerchief." In this story it means "kerchief." The quilt begins with Anna's old red babushka and her old blue dress, to which are added Uncle Vladimir's shirt, Aunt Havalah's nightdress, and Aunt Natasha's apron. Stir in a quilting bee and soon you have a quilt!

"We will make a quilt to help us always remember home," Anna's mother said. "It will be like having the family in backhome Russia dance around us at night."

And so the quilt is born and begins its own life as part of the family, not only as a quilt, but as a tablecloth, a wedding tent, a baby's welcoming-blanket, a pretend-cape, a play-tent.

The quilt enfolds and embraces and encloses the family through births, marriages, playtimes, picnics, and death. Its folkloric motifs grace every occasion.

This would all be enough to make for a classic story, but this picture book is profoundly enriched by the way in which Patricia Polacco draws people, real people. As one reviewer wrote, her people are not "pretty-pretty" people. No, these are people with all their foibles, their moods, their smirks, their stares, their grimaces, their guffaws, their tears and joy. She captures everything, but in the most endearing way. She allows us to laugh at and enjoy being human.

Well, I do believe The Keeping Quilt is a keeper! 

And may you have a wonderful weekend, full of all things keeping: keeping quiet, keeping friends, keeping secrets, keeping the peace, keeping safe and sound all the things that you love!

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Edited to add: Ancient Cloth has begun just such a quilt here in "Family Clothes."

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The Quilt Story

The Quilt Story is one of my favorite children's picture books, written by Tony Johnston and illustrated by Tomie dePaola. I'm always attracted to a story about a quilt, and this is one of the loveliest, both for its gentle, poetic wording and its gentle, poetic illustrations.

It begins this way:

A little girl's mother

made the quilt

to keep her warm

when the snow came down

long ago.

I think these words are proof that the simplest of words can carry the whole world in them. Tony Johnston is a master at taking the most ordinary of words and creating pure poetry from the way in which she puts them together.

Tomie dePaola does the same thing with his art. His drawings look so very deceptively simple, almost like children's art, not that there is anything simple about children's art! But he captures the essence of a thing in the most wonderful child-like way.

The little girl's name, Abigail, is stitched into the quilt in large letters. Abigail falls in love with the quilt. It not only keeps her warm, it becomes a part of her playtime, and a part of everything that means home to her. I love these words to describe her tea party in the woods:

She had tea.
Her dolls had tea.
And the quilt had tea
all over it.

Abigail and her family move. There is a long journey "across wide rivers and over a rock-hard trail." And all along the way, it is the quilt that keeps Abigail "warm from the wild winds."

There is a new house in a woods built by her father, "chop, chop, chop." And it is the quilt that makes Abigail feel at home in the new place. 

Eventually the quilt ends up in the attic, forgotten. I love how this story requires children to think outside the pages. They do not see Abigail all grown up and gone away to a new life, but they must imagine that this is what has happened.

Ahhhhh, but the story does not end there. For there is a grey mouse who makes a home in the quilt. And then a raccoon. And then a cat.

(And don't you just love the expression on that cat?)

And then another little girl comes looking for the cat. She finds the quilt, her mother makes it all new again for her, they move, and once again, it is the quilt who helps a little girl feel at home in a new place.

Because this story takes a quilt from its beginnings and passes it on from one family to another family, I think it mirrors the true story of so many quilts. I often read in blogs how someone found a quilt in a thrift shop, and I think of how wonderful it is that the life story of that quilt goes on and on.

If you want to cozy-up in the warm-hearted story of a quilt, do please find a copy of The Quilt Story! And I hope your weekend is as warm-hearted as this story is. I hope you have your own quilt to wrap up in, to feel at home in. I'll be wrapped in mine (thank you, Helen, Treva, Tom, and Fenwick!)

We are expecting temperatures in the 20s again, so our snow ladies will be back in full force to keep our plants warm.

You keep warm, too!

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High Tea and Hand Stitches

Oleta (my mother-in-law) invited me to go with her as her daughter to a Mother-Daughter High Tea. What a lovely compliment to me! Thank you, Oleta! So we went together to the High Tea. Everyone brought their own cups and saucers to the event. Oleta brought hers for us to use ~ I love these sweet flower-painted cups!

Helen is the guardian angel of these events where Oleta lives, and we sat with her and Helen's favorite niece in all the world. And then the High Tea turned into something unexpected!

Have you ever been so taken by surprise that you didn't know what to say?

Well, I was taken by exactly that kind of surprise.

But now the cat is out of the bag! For Helen and Treva and Tom and Fenwick (Fenwick the dog! Yes, yes, it's really all true, do please read on) presented me with a gift at the High Tea.

And, furthermore, it turns out that my husband knew all about this surprise gift and had even contributed a package of transfer sheets so that Tom and Fenwick the dog could do some copying magic.

And that for months Helen and Treva (and, really, I am not sure who all else) had been stitching and stitching and stitching to make something wonderful just for me.

Here it is ~ an incredibly wonderful quilt with images of seventeen of my cards on it. Tom and his trusty dog Fenwick figured out how to use the transfer sheets and they are the ones who put my cards onto cloth. Then Helen and Treva put the cloth images onto the quilt cover. Oh, and found the fabric and cut the fabric and stitched the fabric . . .

I hung the quilt across the bookshelves in my box room to take a photo of it. This is the room where I work, read, hide, during the day. You can see all the brown boxes across the top of the bookshelves ~ hence the name "box room." This is the room, when we first moved in, where everything in boxes ended up until we could sort them all out, and then somehow, the box room became my room ~ my Virginia Woolf "room of my own" hideaway.

And now the box room is graced with something new ~ this wonderful quilt.

Here it is on the chair that I can usually be found in, reading, or typing away on my laptop. Now I can be found enfolded in this quilt.

And I do believe that a quilt is really the supreme gift.

It is a work of art, it is practical for it can be used for warmth and comfort, and it is a true labor of love (all those hundreds of tiny stitches!)

Here are the stitches, traveling up and down, back and forth across the fabric of this quilt. Such tiny hand-made stitches, bobbing up and down in this ocean of cloth.

I can almost see silver needles breaking through the surface, rising up into the air, and then plunging back down again.

Very dolphin-like, I would imagine.

Here are the wonderful colors and patterns that Helen chose for the border of the quilt.

Do you see the yellow polka-dotted fabric? Helen explained to me that it was chosen because it matched the fabric in my first children's picture book.

Yes, there on the cover are the magical polka-dots that Nancy Carpenter, the illustrator, designed for the baby's dress and sash in my children's picture book story, A Far-Fetched Story. Oh my! What a kind and thoughtful detail to add to such a kind and thoughtful quilt.

You can see how simply overcome I was by such a gift.

I have sat with this lovely little quilt in my arms, thinking of how, in the cold months of late winter and throughout the spring and into the summer, a gift was being made for me, and I never knew it.

Is it not that way with so many things that happen to us in our lives? While we are off doing other things, something wonderful is being prepared for us, and then, suddenly, it is bestowed upon us.

Created by Treva, Helen, Tom, Fenwick, 7-3-09

Maybe someone just like our guardian angel Helen and the lovely Treva and the wonderful Tom and the magnificent Fenwick are making a surprise for you this very minute. I have this sneaky feeling that someone is getting ready to astound you, too!

Well, I do know one thing for sure. I will be carrying this quilt around with me everywhere, dragging it from room to room, a regular Linus blanket, for the rest of my life. I will treasure every teeny tiny stitch of it, forever.

Thank you! Thank you!

And goodbye until next week . . .