{"id":1136,"date":"2010-11-16T06:54:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T11:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2010-11-16T06:54:21","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T11:54:21","slug":"utility-plus-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=1136","title":{"rendered":"Utility Plus Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If you’re going to use something every day, why not make it beautiful?”<\/em><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 is the comment made by Quiltart list member Wendy Starm, in context of discussions\u00a0 on various aspects of this area of quiltmaking, and\u00a0many totally agree.\u00a0 In the days before cheap industrially produced bed coverings of cotton, wool and now man-made fibre\u00a0were available, in better-off\u00a0 households\u00a0a select few quilts of relatively fine design and higher standard of craftsmanship were kept aside for ‘best’ – (weddings funerals, special visitors etc)\u00a0 compared to the other other more hastily constructed quilts for every day, which produced as quickly as possible for the required warmth,\u00a0and therefore often showing\u00a0fewer stitches per inch quilting,\u00a0which was one of the main ‘rules’ or standards some members of the Quiltart list have become a little hung up about lately.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Wendy’s comment\u00a0prompted me to share\u00a0this memory of a highly memorable afternoon I spent with an elderly lady, Marta, here in Montevideo some years ago.\u00a0\u00a0Marta told me how for many years she and 7 or 8 friends used to meet every week from around 2 in the afternoon to 8 in the evening, breaking once for afternoon tea around 5pm\u00a0\u00a0 The rest of that time they organised into teams to\u00a0 produce these very utilitarian scrap bedcoverings.\u00a0 While some laid out\u00a0the wool samples they got from local manufacturers,\u00a0 others sewed on their machines and others pressed after that.\u00a0 In Australia we’d call these ‘waggas’.\u00a0\u00a0They were\u00a0backed with either whole cloth or pieced large areas of wool fabric, but had no batting and were not quilted but tied here and there just to hold the two layers together in relation to each other.\u00a0\u00a0(For the technical minded it was a bagged backing)\u00a0\u00a0 These ladies’\u00a0work began as\u00a0their relief effort response to\u00a0unusually severe\u00a0flood\u00a0damage and\u00a0losses\u00a0among very\u00a0poor people\u00a0in the\u00a0mid ’60’s; but continued\u00a0through\u00a0many years because they found there was an ongoing need for what they produced.\u00a0 As time moved on their work finally stopped\u00a0as one by one they\u00a0just became too old to go on.\u00a0 She was left with a couple of these covers which she showed me, and this one I found especially beautiful.\u00a0 I remarked how the\u00a0cherry red patches really ‘sang’ in among the earthy neutrals, and her comment was an echo really, of Wendy’s above: \u00a0“We might have been making them for charity, but we always felt we had to make them as beautiful as we could for these needy people.”<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If you’re going to use something every day, why not make it beautiful?”\u00a0\u00a0 is the comment made by Quiltart list member Wendy Starm, in context of discussions\u00a0 on various aspects of this area of quiltmaking, and\u00a0many totally agree.\u00a0 In the days before cheap industrially produced bed coverings of cotton, wool and now man-made fibre\u00a0were available, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-ik","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1140,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions\/1140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}