Dreaming Spirals

Over the last year, I have been doing a lot of family history research.  I’ve been lucky in that first my Aunt, then my parents and my brother, have built up a huge family tree and I’ve been adding to it and looking into it more.  I have also been given various family treasures by family members over the years and I decided recently to photograph them and put them all together rather than scattered all over the house!

I’d love to find out more about this handkerchief.  It was given to my Nan by my Grandad during the Second World War.  I think it is silk, but the edges have been cut in a scallop pattern and outlined in pen, and the heart decoration is a sort of raised embellishment.  The writing is also in pen and there is no stitching on it at all.  Apparently while my Grandad was in the army, one of the things he was involved in was running a prisoner of war camp so I wonder if this was made by one of the prisoners?

My Nan wore this hat at my parents’ wedding in 1959. 

My Mum’s cousin (who was a lot younger than her because she was the daughter of my Grandad’s oldest brother… I had to look that up on the family tree!) was a house servant when she was young and she gave me her maid’s uniform – this is the cap and one of the cuffs she wore.  I’ve got the apron and collar as well but the apron is too rumpled to photograph at present and I don’t want to risk it picking up all the gunk on the iron (wonder how that got there?!).

I took this photo the other day of the reflection on our bedroom ceiling and thought it fitted in well with a post about vintage textiles.  Doesn’t it look lacy?  (I think that is a reflection on the state of the windows but the less said about that the better.).

Golly, where does the time go?  I can’t believe it’s 2 weeks since my visit to the West Midlands, where the Black Country Museum is based.    It’s called the Black Country in that area because of all the mines and industry which abounded in the 19th century. 

This is the house which my great great great grandparents, Benjamin and Elizabeth Meredith, lived in in the latter half of the 1800s.  It is called the Tilted Cottage because of the effects of the subsidence caused by mining in the area!   Apparently the Museum took great care to rebuild it that way when they moved it brick by brick to its new home.

Benjamin was a bricklayer but I don’t know if he built this house.  Most of my other ancestors were coal miners, potters and farmers, though the butt filers listed on several of the census returns amused the kids!  Typical male teenage humour…

The main part of the museum consisted of a reconstructed village – here are the ‘back to back’ terraced houses typical of a lot of Victorian workers’ buildings.    They are two houses put together only one room wide.  I used to live in a terraced house till I was 11 and it felt strangely familiar, although it wasn’t a ‘back to back’ type.  Click on the link if you are unclear what I mean – I was a bit vague about it and looked it up on Wikipedia!

I liked it because you could wander around all the back gardens and yards and see exactly what was there, the washrooms and coal houses and chicken coops…

The museum also links up with the canal system and going down there I saw these geese with their goslings:

It reminded me of the train journey up there, where the train driver stopped for some geese and their young family who were crossing the railway track!

This was the view from my cafe table when I was eating my lunch:

You could also go down a mine but I passed on that as I’ve been down several already and preferred to stay in the warm sunny outdoors!

If you’re a member of QuiltWOW, you’ll notice I have an article in the new June issue, about painting on fabric with acrylic paints. Maggie Grey asked me in the spring to write one, and I was thrilled because her online workshops site, Workshop on the Web is well respected and well known and QuiltWOW is the quilting version of it. As you’ll know if you are a regular reader, I love online workshops!

If you haven’t come across them before, there are free taster issues online which are well worth visiting.

Here is a sneak peek at one of the photos in my article:

I painted lots more fabric that I didn’t use for the article so I might post pics of them in the blog over the next month or two.

I was also honoured to be asked by John Turner, editor of the journal of the NSW Guild of Craft Bookbinders, if he could reprint my tutorial on making concertina books in the journal. Of course I agreed, and he kindly sent me a number of issues of the journal which I’m looking forward to reading.

If you missed the tutorial, which I wrote back in December 2006 and which still gets hits today, here’s the link to it.

Summer always seems to be a busy time with exams and kids’ outdoor activities, so I haven’t had much time for textile stuff. I recently bought some family tree software – other members of my family have done most of the hard work and have got back as far as the 1700s in some cases – but I thought I’d like to have a go myself. The software came with a free month’s subscription to Ancestry so I have been making good use of it while I can, delving into census returns and trying to solve the mystery of missing persons and wrongly transcribed names! I also went on a visit to the Black Country Museum just outside Birmingham where they have a cottage that my great great great grandparents used to live in! More in the next post, when I’ve uploaded my photos!