In the Nick of Time

When Abigail was born, I was admonished from all quarters to enjoy every moment of her babyhood because babies grow like mushrooms after a warm rain.

I thought I comprehended this fully, until I arrived for Christmas to find the sweet but mostly inert lump-in-a-blanket I'd seen in July had sprouted arms, legs, and motor skills. Here she is accompanying me in selections from Schubert's Winterreise on Christmas Day.



That was a real kick in the ass to finish the incomplete Debbie Bliss baby kimono I'd had lying around the apartment since August. I'd made it in the 9-12 month size when Abigail at 9-12 months seemed a remote possibility. Now I had minutes to sew the thing up before she'd outgrow it.

My experience with seaming is limited, but I admit (at the risk of being smacked in the head by several of you) that I actually enjoy it. The seams (in spite of my incomplete grasp of proper shoulder technique) were not the problem.

The problem was the embroidery. In My Baby Is Better Dressed Than Your Baby, Ms. Bliss covers the kimono with little daisies rendered in embroidery floss. The effect is charming and in perfect taste, but I wanted...I dunno. Something with a little more oomph. And there was no way I could finish until I'd settled upon the perfect solution.

I consulted Ravelry to see what others had done. No help there. Of the four Ravelers who list this piece as a finished object, only one has bothered with embroidery–and she notes that she hated doing it.

I wanted to push the envelope, if at all possible. Grandly disregarding that my needlework skills have been rusting in the toolshed for over a decade, I hunted down photographs of traditional Japanese, Chinese, and Arab motifs. For a long time I fancied the idea of a dragon swirling around the back, over the shoulders and down the front. Alas, a few small samplers brought home the realization that it would take me another year of work to bring my skill set and my idea into alignment.

Meanwhile, Abigail would move out of baby clothes entirely and begin asking "Does this cut me in the middle?" and "Does this make my butt look big?" and the other questions forced upon ever-younger females in our present Era of Enlightenment.

I was on the verge of giving up and sprinkling the damn piece with the damn daisies when I looked down at my breakfast and realized what I'd do.

Not a dragon. Dragonflies.



That motif, happily, was within my grasp (once I'd practiced French knots a few dozen times). I actually used the simplified insect on the plate to work out my own design.



For good luck, Abigail's kimono has a very tiny swarm of three. One on the front:



And two in the back:



Now all I have to do is ship it express to Maine before she begins work on her dissertation.

They grow up so fast.

More Personal History

But not mine, this time.

The collection at the museum in Smock was enough to make my visit to Pennsylvania especially memorable. But then, on my last day, my grandmother's friend Sue invited me over to see some "family things" she thought would interest me.

Sue's life had a romantic beginning. Her mother, an Englishwoman, was in the RAF. Her father, an American, was in the Army. Her mother outranked her father, but they fell in love and married before her father was shipped back to the United States.

Sue was born in England, and at six months old sailed to America with her mother on a ship chartered specially for war brides. Sue still has their orange cardboard "WAR BRIDE" identification tags. From the ship they transferred to the train that brought them to Pennsylvania and Sue's father. According to Sue's mother, she was so excited to see her husband again she nearly left her daughter on the platform.

Sue's grandfather, a native of the Cotswolds, was a stone carver and a fanatic for historical relics. He kept a museum of artisanal implements and antique farm machinery, and also acted as de facto curator of the family memorabilia. Much of it came to Sue, who shared it with me.

There is so much beautiful stuff in her collection (she has four christening gowns, the oldest of which appears to me to date from the 1840s) that I'm going to confine myself to showing you the highlights, which she kindly allowed me to photograph.

The first thing she pulled out was a black silk apron, intended to jazz up a plain dress for calls or company. The lower part is worked with a series of floral sprays worked in ribbon embroidery.



There was also a rather spectacular silk choker with an ornamental bib worked in a combination of silk and metallic threads with some bead embellishment.



On the christening gowns and many other pieces (including a petticoat and a piece of lingerie made for her grandmother's dowry) I noticed a lace pattern that appeared several times over the generations worked in different threads and at different sizes.



Sue says that her family claims descent from the first marriage of Catherine Swinford, who was the mistress and then the wife of John of Gaunt, uncle of Richard II. Her mother taught her that the Tudor Rose in the pattern is intended as a reminder of Catherine.

Out of more recent history, but no less fascinating to me, were textile souvenirs sent back to England from Sue's grandfather from France and Belgium during World War I. There are two handkerchiefs like the one at right, but what really caught my attention was an album filled with dozens of embroidered post cards.

I've seen embroidered cards before, but most of them were cheap and utterly graceless junk from China. The level of creativity in Sue's postcard album was astonishing.







The last of the pictured postcards is, Sue says, a portrait of her grandfather. The images themselves are slightly smaller than actual size.

And finally, she pulled out something that had been specially made for her during her English babyhood by her mother with help from friends. It's a simple but sweet dress with a beautifully smocked bodice. The material? Sky blue silk–from an RAF parachute.



We'd finished with the textiles, but before I left Sue showed me a set of astonishing mementos actually made by her grandfather. During the war, stuck in the trenches with restless hands, he turned shell casings into matchbox covers to send to the family.

My favorite shows, on one side, Sue's worried grandmother on the home front, thinking "I wonder how my dear boy is in France."



On the back, sitting in a trench, calmly picking lice out of his uniform, is her grandfather, with the reassuring message, "I am all right."



Sigh. Do you think they loved each other?

Personal History

When I was a junior in college, studying art history, my tutorial group of six drove from Boston to New York to have an in-person look at several pieces large and small, including a visit to the Frick Collection.

Our tutor had connections of some kind there, and so the six of us were met at the door by a very tall, thin woman who introduced herself to me by saying "My name is ________.* My great-grandfather was Henry Clay Frick, and he is responsible for the works of art you see around you."

I shook her hand and said, "My name is Franklin Habit. My great-grandfather dug coal in a Frick mine for most of his life, and so is he."

I am pleased to report that the august lady's response to this piece of impudence was a hearty laugh and an arm around the shoulder. Times do change.

The Fricks have their museum, and now my great-grandfather (and great-grandmother) have theirs, though not on quite so grand a scale. A couple years ago, a group of volunteers from Smock, the coal patch where my grandmother grew up, got together and turned the company store building in the center of town into the Smock Heritage Museum, a set of rooms dedicated to the memory of patch life during the "Coal and Coke Era" of 1884-1943.

I've wanted to visit the museum ever since it opened, and on this trip I finally got the chance.

Family history has always fascinated me. Although my grandmother left school after fourth grade, she has an astonishing gift for vivid description and recollection of detail. Under other circumstances, she would no doubt have become a novelist or a journalist. For as long as I can remember, a visit to her meant perching on kitchen chair and peppering her with questions about how she lived as a child, then listening as she peeled potatoes and told stories. I still ask questions, and she still has new stories.

I was always particularly interested in the details of household life–how people in the patch cooked and slept and spent their days–and the newest features of the museum (which Grandma hadn't yet seen) are re-creations of the four things found in every company house: the back porch, the kitchen, the sitting room, and the bedroom.

That's all a miner's house had, really. A porch, a kitchen, and two small bedrooms. Whether you had no children or (as one Smock family famously did) fourteen, that's all you got. At one point, in my great-grandparents' house, there were two parents, four unmarried daughters, a couple of unmarried sons, and one married daughter and her husband, and their baby.

I asked grandma where they all slept. "Where we could," she said. Cozy.

The model patch house rooms were put together by volunteers using items donated by families who'd lived in Smock, with most of the work being done by local Boy Scouts as part of their Eagle Scout projects. How well they did is probably best gauged by my grandmother's reaction. When we walked into the kitchen, she just about burst into tears.

For my part, I was dumbstruck. It was like finally, after all these years, standing inside one of her memories.

I distinctly recall my grandmother saying that every self-respecting woman in Smock filled up her house with needlework, and evidence of that was everywhere. There was very little knitting, however. The only piece I found was this jacket (with matching crochet hat), made for a little girl named Eleanor Vandigo by her mother. The museum has it on display next to a school photo they found of her wearing it.



If the number of surviving objects is any indication, crochet was far more popular. In the patch bedroom, I found this nightcap displayed with the bed jacket (trimmed in filet crochet lace) it was made to match.



There was also a delicate pair of crochet gloves; Grandma remembers these as being reserved for extremely solemn occasions.



Embroidery was everywhere, worked from patterns either drawn by hand on the fabric or purchased from the local company store. Grandma says every house in the patch had one of these comb-and-brush holders over the kitchen sink–the only source of running water in the houses until after World War II.





Embroidery brightened up other everyday items like bedspreads....



...as well as special occasion pieces like covers for the basket of food taken to church on Easter Saturday for a blessing.



This one was hard to photograph, but just like the one Grandma has (made by her mother) the florid inscription is written in Slovak.

The museum has two sets of three-panel portières. Portières hung in every home in the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room. They were a prominent showpiece, embroidered on both sides and embellished with crochet lace and medallions.





Most of the mining families in Smock (including ours) were some flavor of Eastern European. I was fascinated to see that a lot of the colors and designs were reminiscent of the folk art from that part of the world. I asked Grandma whether she knew if the commercial patterns were shipped from abroad or created domestically for the immigrant market, but she couldn't say. All she knew is that it all came from the company store.

Most households had several sets of these, and also several sets of window curtains. Both had to be taken down every month and washed, because the air pollution from coal dust, ash-paved roads, coal burning kitchen ranges, and the the adjacent coke ovens for the mine, soiled everything so quickly. It must have been an absolute nightmare to keep house under those conditions, especially using a hand-cranked washing machine or (if you weren't so lucky) a washboard and tub.

It was good to see a monument, however humble, to the people who lived and raised families in the patch. It was a hard life, at times desperately poor, but my grandmother remembers it as being on the whole not a bad way to grow up.

If you're interested in a visit, the museum has a Web site. If you go, see if you can spot my great-grandfather in the photograph of the band that used to perform at weddings and dances. Here's a hint: five of the six men are tall and the other one is shorter than the body of his bass fiddle.

Yeah, that one.

*No, I'm not going to tell you her three names. I'm a gentleman.