The Feedsack Dress

Talking about mysteries

Every spring for 21 years writers and readers have gathered in the Washington, D.C., area to talk about mysteries, particularly (but not exclusively) traditional mysteries written by women. Members of Sisters in Crime started Malice Domestic, which takes place May 1-3 this year.

I’m moderating a panel on a popular subgenre, mysteries in which an amateur sleuth is devoted to a craft or hobby. The panel is called Killer Hobbies: Crafty Authors Discuss the Hobbies That Drive Them to Murder. The panelists are Monica Ferris (needlepoint), Margaret Grace (miniatures), Betty Hechtman (crocheting), and Terri Thayer (quilting). For the last three, the hobbies were a passion before they put them into mysteries.

For centuries all of these crafts were necessities rather than hobbies. All gave women an outlet for their creativity, but they also took hours of labor, often by candlelight. The old saying about women’s work never being done stated a fact. Today most quilters create works of art, but years ago women made desperately needed coverings for the family beds from any scraps of cloth available, usually clothing that no longer held together and, of course, feedsacks. The feedsack quilt that I inherited from my great-aunt is definitely not a work of art, but it’s warm, and the bright scraps sewn together by hand remind me of our heritage.

I, for one, am delighted that I don’t have to piece quilts or crochet doilies or do anything with a needle more demanding than sewing on a button. I’d much rather read books where wannabe detectives do such work as they figure out who committed murder.

—Carolyn Mulford

 

 

 

Shoveling the grass

Shoveling the grass

 

The other day I needed to bag the grass that had blown onto my cement driveway the last time I mowed my yard. Knowing the rake wouldn’t work well on the hard surface, I thought of using a broom, but the grass would just stick between the bristles or float off.

Then I thought of my blue plastic snow shovel. Perfect for scraping the grass from the cement and dumping it into the bag. 

A neighbor driving by slowed and gawked, apparently wondering what I was doing with a snow shovel on a 70-degree day.

I laughed to myself and remembered that in my childhood on the farm we often used something intended for one task to do another. We didn’t have time—or money—to run to town every time something needed repair. Farmers adapted what they had to what they needed. Feedsacks, of course, were bought for one purpose—to hold feed chickens or other animals—and later used for another—to make clothing, aprons, curtains, quilts, etc.

The snow shovel wasn’t my only adaptation this weekend. An earpiece fell off my glasses and the tiny screw vanished. Nothing in my tool chest was small enough, but a threaded needle in my sewing kit would go through the screw hole. I sewed on the earpiece. The thread should hold until tomorrow when I can go an optometry shop.

As the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

 

—Carolyn Mulford

Planting potatoes on Good Friday

I didn’t plant any potatoes today, but in the 1940s my parents talked about planting the crucial staple on Good Friday. I remember them actually doing that only once, and that year we dug up the abandoned garden on our back 40 where a house had once stood.

Most years the soil remained too cold until well after Easter. My father didn’t usually till the big garden behind our house until early May.

You have to prepare not only your soil but also your potatoes. My parents took potatoes stored in the storm cellar and inspected them for quality and eyes, the little white sprouts peeking out of the brown skin. A little before planting they would carve the eyes from the potatoes, leaving a sizable piece of white to ground the sprouts.

They’d toss the eyes into a bucket, and the whole family would go to the garden. My father would work one row, creating a hole with one whack of his hoe, and my mother would go down another. My older sister and I dropped in the eyes, making sure they were looking up at us, and our parents covered them.

I much preferred planting to harvesting, which came months later. When you dug up potatoes, you couldn’t jump on a spade to drive it into the earth or even attack with a hoe. You had to be careful not to cut the potatoes under each plant, and that often meant loosening the soil with the hoe or spade and then digging with your hands. Dirty work, but we had to do it.

—Carolyn Mulford

Documenting history on DVD

The stark differences between how students work today and in 1949 struck me again yesterday when I watched eight DVD documentaries prepared by middle school students.

The students were competing to represent Missouri at the national National History Day contest in June.

In 1949 few children lived in homes with typewriters or televisions. Even in city schools office staff were the only ones with typewriters. Almost no schools had a television. Farm kids attended one-room schools through the eighth grade. They wrote with pencils and fountain pens, and the major research tool was World Book Encyclopedia.

Yesterday Ken Burns workalikes introduced documentaries on people who had made a difference. Only the voice-overs indicated the producers’ youth. They brought together

·      still photos—including Marie Curie as a child, medical practices in the late 1800s, Hiroshima the day after the atomic bomb,

·      news film—including blasts into space, America Football League games, and 1960s civil rights demonstrations,

·      numerous quotations and much information from books and online sources,

·      videotaped interviews—including a doctor, a presidential library curator, and a NASA official,

·      background music.

To pull all of these elements together in a meaningful, interesting narrative required many, many hours of work, culminating in manipulating sophisticated software. A few years ago only professionals could have produced documentaries as sophisticated as those presented by kids age 12 to 14.

Did the kids do the work themselves? I’m betting that they did. I don’t think their parents or teachers possess the skills.

—Carolyn Mulford