Ladies at the Fair

In my first blog of the state fair series, "Time for the Fair," posted 9/4/2013, I shared the history of state fairs and how they had grown from farmers' agricultural societies.  While the early participants had been primarily men, the women soon began exhibiting their own skills.  The Kansas State Fair has a building dedicated to the Domestic Arts, and it can be seen in the background of the photograph of the John Deere tractor in the blog "A Day at the Fair," posted 9/11/2013.  This year a display of dolls and stuffed toys greeted visitors as they entered the Domestic Arts building.

Today most quilters are not making bed coverings from scraps because fabric is too precious to waste, although in Isaac Werner's time that was a primary motivation.  Especially when women had scrapes of expensive fabrics, like satin, lace, and velvet, they wanted to save even the tiny pieces.  The use of these irregularly shaped and sized pieces of luxurious fabrics resulted in what are called "Crazy Quilts."  Unlike quilts where fabric is cut in specific patterns, these quilts attempted to use whatever bits of fabric could be saved, and they pieced the bits together randomly, producing a "crazy" pattern.  Once pieced together, the fabrics were enhanced with rich embroidery and often trimmed with bits of lace or beads.  Generally, these quilts were not subjected to everyday use, and many have been passed down through the generations, admired for their luxurious fabrics and trims, as well as for the hours of piecing together the oddly shaped fabrics and stitching the elaborate embroidery designs.  These lovely quilts are still being made today, although the price of fabric is not so dear. 

 

There were many types of textile exhibits entered for judging besides dolls and quilts--clothing, wall hangings, rugs, pillows, tatting, bobbin lace, beading, samplers, needlepoint, knitting, and crochet among the many exhibits.  According to the entry book, the total prizes offered by the Fair and Sponsors for the "Clothing and Textiles" entries was $7,045, a nice recognition of quality work but only a few dollars for any individual piece when divided among the many exhibits.  Obviously, these women (and some men) did not spend the countless hours creating their entries for the prize money! 

 

 

The Domestic Arts Building contains cooking entries as well as textiles, and as I reached that section of the building they were judging apricot jam.  As a regular maker of sand hill plum jelly (See "Sandhill Plums," posted 3/1/2012, and "Plum Harvest," posted 6/14/2012), I enjoyed watching the judging and seeing the jewel-like sparkle of jars of jams, jellies, and preserves lining the shelves of the exhibit. 



At a time when Smucker's jellies and jams can be bought for less than the jars, lids, sugar and fruits to make your own, when dress patterns sell for several dollars and few towns have fabric shops, and when busy career mothers and busy at-home mothers assume more volunteering responsibilities--in such times, are many of the skills celebrated in the Domestic Arts Building at the state fair disappearing?

I hope that there are still young people learning how to make jellies and jams, although I did see many empty shelves in that exhibit area.  I hope grandmothers are passing the skills of tatting, knitting, and crochet to their grandchildren.  And, I hope children are still arriving home from school to the smell of cookies fresh from the oven, although the smell of freshly baked bread is more likely to come from a handy bread machine than from  hours of mixing, rising, kneading, forming into loaves, and baking in the oven!  For now, at least, there are still those who exhibit their "domestic arts" at the fair, and with Halloween so near, I could not resist sharing this wonderful, prize-winning Halloween quilt with you!

 

 

Plum Harvest

Today's post is about harvesting things long awaited.  First, after more than two years of research and more than a year of writing and re-writing, I am polishing my manuscript in preparation to begin marketing.  Seeing the pages in a neat stack feels like quite a harvest to me!

Second, I have posted about canning plum jelly and have shared photographs of the blooming plum bushes, but for those of you who have never seen a sand hill plum, I have supplied only my verbal description of the plums.  Every year, like Isaac, I await the sand hill plums, hoping that there were no late spring frosts to harm the blossoms and that rains came at the right times so that the bushes will be loaded with plums in summer.  Those of you who follow my blog know that a late frost and too little rain left the plum bushes nearly empty last summer.  You also know that I have hoarded one last jar of the 2010 jelly, refusing to be completely without.  Now I can open that jar.

Hurray!  The 2012 plum crop is here, and the bushes are loaded.  Most are still too green to pick, but this morning I went out with my pail and my camera to pick and photograph the early ripened plums.  I will gather more in coming days before I set aside a day for making jelly, but the first day of harvesting the plums is deserving of celebration.

I believe they are early this year, and I know they are earlier than Isaac picked his plums.  I found one incredible thicket on which the plums are remarkably large.  Perhaps there were plums like these in Isaac's day that gave him so much pleasure eating them right off the bush, but I don't remember ever seeing plums so large.

Although my manuscript is nearly complete after many drafts and much editing, I will continue to post stories about Isaac and his community on my blog.  For those of you on facebook, you may visit my Lynda Beck Fenwick page to follow my progress in seeing Isaac's story published.  Just enter Lynda Beck Fenwick in the search window at the top of your facebook page to visit.

Things long awaited are especially enjoyed, and although finishing the manuscript is only a milestone and not the final goal, thank you for supporting me along the way so far.

...And May I Add?

Spring has arrived in Kansas, and with a couple of days of rain, the wheat is growing, leaves on the trees are opening, and everything seems to be eager to crowd the season a bit. The sand hill plum blossoms opened earlier than usual, and like Isaac and his friends, we all have our fingers crossed that a late frost won't spoil the plum crop again this year. I opened our last jar of sand hill plum jelly a few days ago, and I need to restock the shelves this summer.

I'm not complaining, but the rain knocked some of the petals off before I got outside with my camera to take pictures, but for those of you who read my post of March 1, 2012 titled "Sand Hill Plums" and are interested in seeing what blooming plum bushes look like, I'm posting two pictures taken yesterday as we returned from Stafford. (You can click on the photographs to enlarge them, and if you look closely, you may be able to see the thorns.)

My husband and I were returning from the Stafford County Historical & Genealogical Society where we had hosted friends who spent the afternoon cleaning and cataloguing some of the glass plate negatives from the Gray Studio Collection. You may read my January 6, 2012 post about the "Stafford County Museum" collection by going to the blog archives. I bribed my friends a little by planning a tea party as an excuse for gathering at the museum, but it was really their spirit of volunteerism that caused them to accept my invitation.

The Gray Studio Glass Plate Negative Collection may be seen at http://www.contentcat.fhsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/stafford.

Sandhill Plums

When Isaac arrived on the Kansas prairie in 1878 the land was waving grass from horizon to horizon, with little else left to accentuate the scene because of the prairie fires that swept the land so often. There were exceptions. In the spring, wild flowers, whose tubers and seeds lay waiting, burst into bloom adding splashes of color amidst the swaying grass. At the same time, thickets of sand hill plum bushes opened their delicate white blossoms, offering hope to the settlers of fresh fruit to come, for somehow, enought of the thickets survived the flames to reproduce.

Today's plains dwellers cannot appreciate what a welcome sight those blooming bushes were to the early settlers, who longed for the taste of fresh fruit. Sand hill plums are hardly bigger than cranberries, and unlike cranberries, the fruit has a central seed nearly half the size of the plum itself, leaving very little edible fruit between the seed and the outer skin. Regardless, the settlers enjoyed the beauty and slight fragrance of the blossoms and crossed their fingers that frost would not return to freeze the blossoms and deprive them of that season's tart little plums.

Isaac had a thicket on his "Timber Hill" but he had also saved seeds from some of the best plums to plant plum bushes near his house, finding that it took the seeds two or three seasons to germinate. They were also difficult to transplant because the bushes colonize from one bush with a deep root to form shallow-rooted bushes around it. These shallow-rooted bushes are unlikely to survive if transplanted, and it is difficult to tell without digging which among the bushes is the one with the deep root. Isaac explained in his Journal: "I took up some select Plum bushes on timber hill and set them in rows N. of house patch, 2 rows E. & W. Transplanting Plums generally failures by many. I determined to experiment at least, then also transplant some in the spring."

Because of the effort he had expended in both planting seeds and transplanting the deep-rooted bushes, he was annoyed when one of his neighbors raided his plums. "Lady Frack yesterday out on a plum raid through my door yard of nicest plums, vengeance mine, by calling nearest neighbors in to strip every bush." Today, with farmers having cleared fields for crops, few plum thickets remain. On Isaac's old homestead only some scraggly bushes have managed to survive in the fence row.

As a bachelor, Isaac had learned to cook for himself, but he never mentions attempting to preserve fruit. It would be nice to imagine that one of the neighbors who stripped the plum bushes to spite Mrs. Frack might have made a jar of plum jelly for Isaac, but he only describes the annual pleasure of gorging on whatever fruit was in season.

For my family, enough jars of sand hill plum jelly were canned every summer to last through the year. They were stored with the canned tomatoes, green beans, and two kinds of pickles on rows of shelves in the basement, the walls a kaleidoscope of tomato red, green beans, mossy green dills, noxiously-tinted (with green cake coloring) 3-day lime pickles, and the glow of the scarlet plum jelly. I do not continue the tradition of canning vegetables, except rare years when I can the 3-day lime pickles, but I do make plum jelly. Last year's late frost and summer drought left only a lonesome plum here and there, and we are down to the last jar of the previous year's jelly. One day, I set that jar with one that we received as a wedding favor in the window to admire the beauty of sunlight through the jelly.

Plum jelly is delicious, but it is impossible for me to separate the flavor of childhood memories from the taste of the jelly. Plum bushes have thorns, and picking the plums is a prickly business. They ripen at the hottest time of year, and filling a pail of the small plums is an exercise in endurance of heat, sweat, gnats, and often, mosquitoes. Once in the kitchen, with the jars and the lids sterilized, and the plums rinsed clean with all the stems removed, the process of cooking, mashing the last bit of juice from the pulp and skins, straining through cheese cloth to assure the jewel-like appearance, adding the sugar and a bit of lemon with Sure-gel to give you a little more insurance that the jelly will set, pouring the hot, sticky liquid jelly into the jars, sealing the lids and listening for the "pop" to know the seal is good, and finally cleaning the stickiness off the jars before putting the jelly on the shelves--all of this is the stuff of my memories, and when you add to that the memories of sitting around so many breakfast tables with loved ones it is impossible for any store-bought, expensive gourmet jelly to ever taste as good!

When we finish that last jar of jelly, we, like Isaac, will be forced to await another season's crop from the tough and prickly sand hill plum bushes with their sweet-tart little plums.