Here’s the pattern. It was published in the Kansas City Star on August 31, 1932.
What makes this pattern special? My grandma designed it…when she was 12. She sent it in to the Kansas City Star newspaper, who published it in their weekly quilt pattern series. Not knowing her age, they attributed it to her with ‘Mrs.’ before her name. That famous KC Star quilt series ran from 1928 to 1961. You can read more about it here. More information and a partial list of all of the KC Star patterns can be found here.
In 1986, the KC Star did a feature page on their quilt series, featuring The Purple Cross in their images.
Here is how the Purple Cross block can look in various quilt configurations. The diamond configuration was the first one I made. That is me and Grandma holding it.
This
Here’s a close-up of a kaleidoscope block.
Myrtle the dog stresses the importance of testing works in progress, and proper use of finished quilts.
This was the grandma who taught me to sew really well, on her dream machine, the Singer 401a Slant-O-Matic, that I now have care of, until it’s time to pass it on to the next generation.
The Purple Cross pattern is difficult. It starts out easy, when making the stars. But when you add the circle inserts it gets more complicated, and then the corners make it even more difficult. And then when sewing the blocks together I literally almost give up completely, feeling like I really don’t know how to sew at all! It would be slightly easier to construct if sashing strips are added between the blocks. As you can see from the examples above, I haven’t done that. I like the look of the blocks right next to each other.
So anyway, Happy Birthday to Grandma’s Purple Cross Quilt Pattern! Looking forward to making more of these quilts.
And now for some music!
The Slicethelife.com song draft continues, and is now on Round 5. The Run-Sew-Read.com round 5 selection will be this weekend. What will it be? I’m still deciding. A listing of the songs in the first four rounds can be viewed here.
The drawings of KC designer Nelly Don’s patented zero-waste apron, so intrigued me, that I committed myself to working out the measurements and construction process for the apron. My post last week about Nelly Don and her apron design (including a downloadable copy of her 1925 apron patent) is here.
And now, for the measurements and steps to cutting out the apron…
The 1925 patent diagram shows a single layer of fabric. For my apron, I concluded the fabric needed to be 48″ long and 36″ wide (1 1/3 yds x 1 yd).
Drawing the diagram. Start with the measurements across the yoke and work out the rest from there.
From there you can work out the width of the side panels, and the front and back pieces:
Here’s the process in a step-by-step slide show. If helpful, it can be viewed on Youtube in full screen; pause and rewind as often as necessary.
For shaping the simple round neckline in the yoke pieces, here is a pattern you can download and print on an 8 1/2″ x 14″ (legal sized) sheet of paper:
I tried some different dimensions and measurements for the apron layout, but the version I’ve described above is the only one that really worked. Some problems I encountered when varying the dimensions were:
Narrowing the yoke width also means the side panels become narrower, which makes the side pockets too narrow to be useful.
A longer/lower yoke meant the side panels became shorter, which made for a shorter apron; which then made the A-line angle more exaggerated. Alternatively, if the hem length were maintained, it made the side panels sit too far below the waist, or not extend all the way to the hemline.
A shorter/higher yoke made the side panels longer, which made them come up higher to the waist. This made a smaller, tighter waist because the front and back pieces are narrower at that higher point where the waistline is located.
So, there you have the apron pieces. Nelly Don designed the pattern so that the entire apron could be constructed without ever having to remove it from the sewing machine. I’ll tackle that in the next post…
In August I traveled to Dallas to see a Traveling Wilbury and his Electric Light Orchestra.
As it should be, ELO’s full sound filled the huge American Airlines Center arena. The light show was the most extravagant and spectacular that I’ve seen; as it should be for a band called the ‘Electric Light Orchestra’. There was no bad seat in the house. There was no empty seat in the house, either.
My seat was in the nosebleed section, which was fine for ELO’s show only because their sound and lights filled the arena spectacularly, as I knew they would. The songs were all familiar. The entire concert was a big, fun sing-a-long with the band and 20,000+ of their biggest fans.
But as I was getting ready for the show, practical considerations won out. I was going to have to walk 1/2 mile from my lodging to the TRE transit shuttle that drops off at the concert arena. I didn’t want to make that trek both ways in a dress with wedge sandals; the return trip in the dark. So, I opted for a pair of knee-length shorts, flat sandals, and this comfortable floral blouse that I recently made and wrote about last week.
The blouse has just one reflective bit… the button in the back. So, anyone sitting behind me who tried to take a flash picture, may have gotten my button reflection instead of the stage. But who in the nosebleed section uses flash at a concert? Probably no one.
As for the concert, it was a lovely, lovely night. Everything was perfect. (Except for the guy sitting next to me, who had pulled up an ELO set list on his phone, and kept announcing what song was coming up next. Grrr.) But this guy below sure didn’t bother me. The crowd all around me was really into the show, which made it that much more fun.
For the best sampling of Jeff Lynne’s current ELO live show, I recommend the “Wembley or Bust” live CD-DVD set. I ordered it after I got home, and am quite glad I did.
Travel and lodging
The drive to Dallas for me is a straight 6-hour shot down through the middle of Oklahoma, all on Interstate-35. It’s a boring and crowded highway. There was a lot of rain in the forecast too, which I didn’t relish driving in. My solution was to drive to Oklahoma City and then take the Amtrak ‘Heartland Flyer’ the rest of the way. Turns out it is a scenic, relaxing train ride.
The night of the concert, I stayed at a hostel in Irving. This was my first-ever stay at a hostel in the US. I booked the hostel through Hostelworld. The girls’ room in the hostel slept 6. When I checked in, the three bottom bunks had already been spoken for. So this was my view from the top. 🙂
I enjoyed chatting with several fellow hostel guests, who were all passing through the DFW area for their own various reasons. I loved the hostel stay, better than a sterile, isolating hotel room. The hostel was an easy walk to and from the commuter train station, where the TRE train took me straight to the concert venue–the American Airlines Center arena.
The next day, I took the TRE back to Fort Worth, where after an afternoon of sightseeing, I boarded Amtrak for the trip back to OKC.
Here’s the ‘Heartland Flyer’ arriving in Ft. Worth to take us back to OKC.
My departing view of Ft. Worth.
Once the train was on its way, the cafe car opened.
For dinner, I ordered the spicy Buffalo chicken tenders and wine. It hit the spot. Each time I see this picture, I want that meal again.
Amtrak was also an excellent choice for the return trip, because the weather got severe as we progressed toward OKC. Strong storms, heavy rains, tornado warnings and a massive area of flash flood warnings even caused all area trains to be ordered to shut down on the track to wait for a bad cell to pass.
Trip interrupted.
Our train arrived at the OKC station about 2 hours late, which meant I would be driving the rest of the way home after midnight, through flash flood warnings all the way. Instead, I did a very adult thing (for me), and got a value-priced room in OKC for the night. The storms had wreaked havoc with street lights in town. It was a dark and eerie quiet drive from the Amtrak station to the hotel.
The hotel I chose is a huge once-fabulous sprawling complex. As I was waiting my turn to check in, the old maintenance man told me stories about famous athletes and performers who had stayed there back in the day. He and the hotel were absolutely charming. The hotel lobby hints at its grand past.
The hallway leading to my room revealed that the hotel hadn’t fared so well during the storms. They’d taken on some water. Bags of concrete had been used as sandbags, doors were propped open for drying out, and carpet had been pulled and piled in the hallway. I didn’t care because I was so tired. I felt bad for the hotel.
My room was nice and comfortable for the price, but when I ventured over to the door that opens out to the courtyard, I discovered the carpet along that outside wall was wet and squishy. I didn’t care. I was tired, and I wasn’t going to need to go out that door anyway.
In the bathroom was a relic from its past as a luxury hotel–the toilet telephone. It still works.
The next morning, I got up well-rested, and drove home. There were places on the interstate where flood water had obviously been up on the road. Staying in OKC had been the right thing to do.
Now, back to the Traveling Wilburys for a moment:
A fellow music lover told me that the Wilburys had intended to keep getting together to make music from time to time, and to possibly add new members. So I’m thinking, should Jeff Lynne and Bob Dylan convene the next generation of Wilburys? Who should the new band members be? Should their music follow the same style and formula as the original Wilburys? The departed original members can’t be replaced or mimicked. But do it right and their spirit will be there with the new guys. I have a few ideas of who should join Jeff and Bob and make some new Traveling Wilburys music. I’ve grouped them in threes, to keep the band at five members:
Option 1:
Robert Plant
Gillian Welch
An Avett brother
Option 2:
Lindsey Buckingham
Dhani Harrison
Carlene Carter
Most of these are really huge stars, so why would they want to do it? Well, you don’t get much bigger than Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and a Beatle, so the standard has been set.
The night before my recent trip to the vintage clothing store, I went to the county fair. I enjoyed looking at all of the hand crafted items, and home grown produce of the local 4-H’ers.
There were some excellent handmade garments on display, by teens and by grade schoolers. To my distress, what you see here was all of the constructed garment entries this year. This downtrend makes me want to stop what I’m doing and personally try to reverse the trend and bring young people into the wonderful world of sewing and handmade clothing.
There was beautiful home grown produce.
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There was gorgeous woodworking, and a fun repurposing challenge.
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The foods entries were great. They had everything from breads and baked sweets to canned and dehydrated produce. I was too busy admiring to remember to take a picture.
Over in the animal buildings, there were newly shorn sheep in fabulous jackets. Two of my favorite jackets were the high necked trench coat and a fabulous hot pink number. The sheep were quite friendly, too.
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As for the other animals, there was a handsome rooster that did a great cockadoodledoo, but refused to do a repeat performance for my camera. There was a lovely dairy cow who looks great with purple accessories, a perfect pink pig that belongs in Charlotte’s Web, and a spotted pig on the loose, who had the prettiest floppy pig ears.
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It was demolition derby night, too! This event was packed; standing room only. This picture should come with sound. The motors were loud, and the crowd roared with appreciation.
Campout!
That night, hotel rooms in town were scarce and pricey, but that didn’t matter to me, because I’d opted to take advantage of the gorgeous weather forecast. I packed my tent, chair, backpacking stove, and breakfast, for an overnight at the lake campground just outside of town. The lake was a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) construction project in the 1930s, and has been nicely preserved. My siblings and I loved visiting this lake when we were growing up. Point of trivia: William S. Burroughs had a little cabin at this lake in the last years of his life.
On this particular night, my thirtysomething nephew came out with his lawn chair. We sat and talked while looking out over the lake until 1am, mostly sharing fun memories about the lake and about our siblings, parents and grandparents.
Several times this summer, women aviators were on my mind. Most recently, the news that Mary Ellis, one of the last living female WWII pilots has passed away. This BBC article gives a summary of her wartime service and her life after the war, when she was put in charge of Sandown Airport on the Isle of Wight.
AMELIA EARHART
Amelia and I were born more than six decades, but only about 50 miles apart. Hers was one of the first biographies I read as a young girl.
Her accomplishments as an aviator are universally known. But did you know:
She sewed her own clothes
She designed practical flying attire for women pilots, and
She launched her own line of women’s clothing designs.
She pioneered the use of ‘Lastex’ yarn, that may be a sort of precurser to the now-ubiquitous and indispensable Spandex.
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary–“Lastex”:
During the Great Depression, she made her designs available as sewing patterns.
It’s more well known that Amelia had a line of suitcases.
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The suitcase line bearing her name continued after her disappearance. Below is a May 1947 ad; ten years after her disappearance.
Before she became a pilot, she served as a nurse during WWI. During this duty, she contracted pneumonia. The pneumonia treatment left her with a sinus injury that plagued her with headaches and other complications, requiring occasional treatment and hospitalization for the rest of her life.
From the time I was little, she inspired me with her independence and determined character.
Amy was a British pioneer aviator. I’d never heard of her until I one day looked up the meaning of Al Stewart’s song, Flying Sorcery. Wow, what a lovely tribute. Amy Johnson is another person I wish I could have known. In 1930, she became the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. She set other flight distance records as well. Like Mary Ellis, she flew for England in WWII; ferrying planes to the war front. While on one of her missions in 1941, she died in a crash in the Thames Estuary. The circumstances of her crash have never been fully explained. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Johnson
ONE MORE
So, why women aviators, and why now? The answer is that on the same day I read the news about Mary Ellis’ passing, I was talking to an acquaintance who’s had a long career as an aviation engineer. She casually mentioned being able to ‘cross another thing off her bucket list’. That ‘thing’ was an emergency landing she’d made a few days before, while flying alone through rural Oklahoma. (By crossing it off her bucket list, she meant she never wants to experience it again.) She told the story calmly and technically, how the engine started acting up, so she maydayed the nearest manned air traffic control tower, which was an entire state away, in Fort Worth, TX. The controllers stayed in continuous contact with her and talked her through the entire process. Long story short, she safely landed at an unmanned airstrip in rural Oklahoma. I was hanging on every word she said; my mouth probably gaping open in awe. She immediately shot to the top of the list of women badasses I personally know.
I was so excited when I brought this 1960s daisy dress home from the vintage clothing store in August 2015, that I mentioned it in my blog right away.
For two summers I wore the dress as-is and loved its style. But bicycling in it was a no-go, because the dress is narrow and straight with no stretch and no pleat for getting on and off the bike and for pedaling. I loved the dress too much to change it.
Eventually my desire to wear it on my bike commute won out. I formed a bold plan to add box pleats, and worked up the courage to make the first cut. I measured and sliced the skirt where four pleats would go. I was lucky to find some fabric for the pleats that was a near exact match of the creamy white color in the dress.
The result: Ta-da!
The next morning as I was preparing to wear the modified dress for the first time, I took a mirror selfie, BHM (before hair and makeup).
On its first outing with the box pleats, I bicycled a total of 14 commute + errand miles. The skirt was perfect, in roominess, length and drape.
After that first wearing, I decided the top of the pleats should be reinforced to prevent inevitable strain and fraying in the corners. So I added little tabs.
This project was an unqualified success. The person most surprised is me. I feared I was going to ruin the lovely dress for good. But no, I’ll be using the box pleat ‘hack’ again sometime when I need to convert another dress for bike-ability. I want to post a set of instructions, but I feel like I need to try it again a time or two before telling others how to do it. Stay tuned.
And their love that was more than the clothes that they wore,
Could be seen in the gleam of an eye…
Absentmindedly I tossed this dress into the wash with a load of colors, on the cold gentle cycle. Out came a tiny dress for a shorter stick version of myself. Turns out it is one of those awful super-shrinky rayon dresses from a prior decade.
I didn’t take a picture of the shrunken dress, so you’ll have to imagine the dress in this picture not draping freely from the dress form, but instead fitting snugly with open gaps between the buttons down the front. The sleeves were skin-tight on my arms. It was bad.
My only options I thought, were to put it in the donation box, or repurpose it into another garment. Then I found this unshrinking method that uses hair conditioner. This blog gave super easy instructions: Almostherealthing.comI checked a couple of other sites to compare, and they were mostly consistent on the method:
In a tub or pan, combine warm water and hair conditioner, in a ratio of 1 quart of water to 1 tsp. conditioner. Soak the garment in the solution for about 10 minutes. Remove the garment and blot with a towel to remove dripping water, then stretch and reshape and dry. Repeat if necessary for more stretching.
I didn’t have hair conditioner on hand for the unshrinking project. Dollar Store to the rescue!
I was dubious. But…wow, it really worked! The unshrinking was easy and inexpensive. It’s truly regrettable that I didn’t take a ‘before’ picture of the dress in its shrunken state, for dramatic comparison purposes.
Here is the dress after unshrinking and drying. I’ve had the dress for years. For ‘vintage’ events, such as WWII or 1940s themed occasions, it is my go-to garment. It’s super comfortable and bike-able. It goes well with a straw sun hat. I’m glad to have it back.
I’m wearing the dress in this shadow picture, taken at the end of a vintage homes bicycle tour.
About that $1 bottle of conditioner…
Now that I have a nearly-full 32oz bottle of hair conditioner on hand. I need to figure out what to do with it. Here are some ideas. 20 Genius Uses for Hair Conditioner This article makes hair conditioner seem like WD-40 for the body. I’ll certainly be giving some of the suggestions a try.
There I was, browsing through my then-fave antique furniture dealer/restorer, telling myself I didn’t need any more furniture. Then I came upon this.
The hand crank turned easily, and all the parts appeared to be there. The price seemed low. I’d never worked with an antique machine, and my curiosity quickly won out.
This was more than 15 years ago. The internet was still new enough that personal web pages consisted of a lot of plain text and a few little photos. But lucky me, a few people had done DIY pages on bringing an old Singer back to life. All it took for this one was some sewing machine oil, and careful cleaning of the head, to not ruin the decals. A universal bobbin and needle were all the parts I needed. Soon it was sewing beautiful stitches on a test scrap.
The decals are the “Lotus Petal” design. The serial number is stamped on the base, in nice big numbers. There is a little storage compartment under the hand wheel, for holding attachments, etc.
I love looking in the storage compartments of old machines. They are like opening a time capsule. There were a few specialty feet in this compartment. I confess, I still haven’t used them. I need to make that a future fun project.
There was also an online database of Singer serial numbers, that quickly told me this machine is a Model 66k; one of 75,000 manufactured in Clydebank, Scotland, in 1917.
Around the same time I got the machine, I acquired a little stack of scrappy stars in another antiques shop. In keeping with their vintage status, I decided to assemble them into a quilt top using my ‘new’ hand crank sewing machine. Then, I taught myself to hand-quilt. Then I took the finished quilt into the shop where I’d bought the stars. The owner got choked up, and told me her mom had made the stars. She loved how I framed them in red and muslin.
The sewing machine currently resides in my sitting room, on top of a treadle base. There is another antique sewing machine folded up in the treadle base. This first purchase and all of the wonderful experiences that came from it, caused me to buy more old Singers and put them back into ‘service’. My feeling is that they need to be re-appreciated, and used occasionally. And that’s a duty I thoroughly enjoy.
This hand-crank machine’s most recent use was at a workshop where outdoors enthusiasts were learning to make custom straps with buckles, adjusting slides, and other embellishments, for camping, hiking, and biking. A small bit of straight stitching on the straps was optional. This sewing machine being non-electric, low-tech, and virtually unbreakable, was not threatening to people who had never sewed, or who’d had a bad first sewing experience. Everyone opted to take a turn with it. I think I (or more likely, the machine) successfully recruited some sewing newbies that day.
Over the 4th of July holiday, I worked up the courage to to hack into one of my fave summer shifts to make it more bike-able. The dress is straight, and the fabric a sturdy woven cotton with no spandex. Getting on and off the bike and pedaling were all problematic.
I opened the side seam 9 inches from the hemline, and added a 9″ zipper and a stretch panel in coordinating fabric.
Success! I can unzip the pleat and have room for pedaling a bike, and then close the pleat up the rest of the day.
The steps I took in order:
Open side seam to 9 inches from the hemline.
Sew in 9″ zipper.
With zipper open, pin triangle insert in place behind zipper, lining up fabric edges.
Topstitch insert in place through all layers.
From the inside, the pleat looks like this closed.
And open.
(The pleat insert fabric is intentionally shorter than the rest of the hemline to keep the insert from peeking out from under the hem when the pleat is zipped shut. )
Ready for pedaling
Ready for the office.
I’ve biked in the dress a couple of times since installing the pleat, and it works just as I’d hoped. There are a few other dresses and skirts in my closet that probably should get the zipper-pleat treatment.
___________________________
A breeze crosses the porch
Bicycle spokes spin ’round
Jacket’s on, I’m out the door
Tonight I’m gonna burn this town down
And the girls in their summer clothes
In the cool of the evening light
The girls in their summer clothes
Pass me by
run | sew | read 