Hendersonville quilt sightings

I enjoyed your 'tour' Lia. You know a docent at the art museum told me if I kept bringing my kids in they would learn to enjoy the place. (free day only when nobody expected a nice quiet museum) It didn't work so well on my kids but like you it wasn't due to my not trying.

I have gone along with my dad to what he calls 'the hippie book store'. It is an occult store where he enjoys the astrology section. I try to be interested but it is tough for me. I do like the crystals but he isn't looking at those. I try.

My mom was my biggest sewing fan. I miss her. Gotta love family for what they have in them though. Each has their own special gifts. I am still looking for that is some family members. LOL

So what you gonna quilt with that thread? I enjoyed your stash saga. Taria

Julia Altshuler wrote:

Beautiful story, Lia. Thank you for sharing your quilt shopping event with us. It's a memory you'll always cherish even if you came away almost empty-handed. Polly

"Taria" I enjoyed your 'tour' Lia. You know a docent at the art museum told

My grandparents had a summer home in Hendersonville. The last time I was there must have been when I was 13 or 14. The house was long since sold. Several owners have lived there since. My parents remember the area well. This was a nostalgic trip for them. They kept asking me if I remembered this or remembered that. The answer was always no. They even got Jim to drive us all out to the exact street where the house still stands. Nothing was familiar.

Dad walked straight up to the house, knocked, explained to the annoyed man who answered that he used to live there and asked if he could look around. The man answered no. If I'd known what Dad was going to do, I would have stopped him. As it was, I merely wanted to climb into a hole, but Dad has reached that age where people make allowances for him. He talks loudly about people in their presence too. No one seemed to take offense. That's either because North Carolinians are nice or because they all have grandfathers at home themselves. Mom gets away with things too. At a restaurant on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Mom got up to get a closer look at a special sort of wine dispenser. If I'd done it, a waiter would have kindly asked me to keep out of the way. When Mom did it, no one said a word.

One place that my parents remembered especially fondly was the Folk Arts Center in Asheville. They bought a beautiful handcrafted wooden bench there 30 years ago and figured they'd go back and get another. No similar bench was to be found, but it was a wonderful outing.

Oddly enough, I was more impressed with the turned wood bowls, the stained glass, and some of the pottery than I was with most of the quilts. It was nothing I could put my finger on. Maybe it was the way I thought the quilts had gotten too far away from their roots. Yet I've said that I love artquilts, so maybe it was just that I didn't think the ones displayed were the best examples. I've seen better in shows.

I was more impressed with the quilts I saw in an antiques mall on Brevard's main street. On another day, we'd driven out to Brevard. My parents are slowing down. Dad especially can handle a little activity, then needs to nap. Mom can stay awake longer, but she has a hard time in the heat-- which is defined as anything sunny. So we'd taken a very short hike in a state park, seen a waterfall which couldn't have been a quarter mile from the parking lot, continued on to Brevard, had lunch, and just as I would have loved to walk up and down Main Street, my parents had had enough. I convinced them to walk into a store with antiques in the window that was between the restaurant and the car.

It was the best thing I could have done. They loved it. They'd never been anywhere like it. They remarked on that at length. I explained that I didn't go into Antiques Malls daily, but I had seen them before, that they were fairly common with a lot of dealers all with merchandise displayed under one roof. That meant that there were quilts speckled a few places around the store.

The one I liked the most was an orange peel with a white background. What made it especially interesting in addition to good workmanship was that it used a lot of 30s fabrics. After talking about 30s reproduction fabrics only days earlier, it was cool to see the real deal. Right next to it was a nearly all white quilt that was quilted with white thread. It wasn't quite a whole cloth, but it was close. Mom said that she was thinking that there wasn't much work on that one, then saw the stitching and knew better. See? She's learning.

Upstairs, they had a whole section of pages from popular magazines from the 40s. That was a hit. You could reach in at random and see some ad for Karo Syrup or for train travel on pullman cars where the ad writers were trying to turn the wartime shortages into advantages. They were selling everything by appeals to patriotism.

I saw the most unusual quilt there. It wasn't in the best shape. In some of the scraps, the weft threads had worn away. That gave me another chance to show off my superior knowledge. (That's a joke. I've picked up a lot of information about quilts and quilting as we all have. I'm no expert.) With all the avenues to take an interest in quilting in, I've purposely avoided antiques. If I got into them, I'd be collecting old quilts in addition to a fabric stash, and there literally would be no place to live in the house.

First I explained how cotton fibers usually last a long time but when certain sorts of fancier silks were used something in the mordants for the dyes (not sure of this; I said I was no expert) the chemicals in the fiber itself made it deteriorate faster. That would explain patches with some fibers still in good shape and others that were non-existent. But that wasn't the most interesting thing. This quilt was made with rectangular blocks.

I'd told my parents how a block is a repeating design motif. At the fabric store, Mom had picked up a book on sampler quilts and had asked what made a sampler. I explained how blocks are repeating motifs but how they don't have to repeat in a single quilt. During that explanation, I said how blocks are nearly always square, sometimes hexagonal, and not other tesselating shapes until the modern day. (There are exceptions. You have one-patch quilts made up of equalateral triangles or apple cores, but those would be called patches, not blocks.)

And then we see a quilt with a rectangular block made up of half square triangles with an alternating plain (rectangular block). I'd never seen anything like it and wondered if I should be getting a photograph.

The other place we saw quilts was in Asheville's arboretum, but I'll save that for my next post.

--Lia

Did you go to that big house? What's it's name. The Biltmore. That's it. I'd go again in a heartbeat. Spend less time in the house and more time in the gardens. It was beautiful.

It was a side trip from Columbia, SC where several of my girlfriends and I vacationed with one of the friend's daughter.

I could have spent a lot more time in the Asheville area. We spent the night with some friends who live on the side of a mountain.

Heady stuff for a flatlander like me.

Cindy

What a wonderful story, Lia! And how patient you were with your parents and their lack of interest/knowledge in what you love to do! :)

We talked about going to the Biltmore. Jim was especially interested in segway rentals. He's been intrigued with them since they were invented but has never been on one. In the end, it didn't happen. Going to the Biltmore would have been an all day affair, too much for my parents. None of us saw the point in paying the $40 admission fee in order to go in, see a few rooms, then turn around because everyone was tired.

It was the same with the Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe homes. My parents are very well read. My mother especially loved Wolfe. But they have no interest in historical homes. I adore seeing the architecture and design in those places. I love the furnishings, wallpaper and dishes. I like imagining people in those settings. My parents want to go straight to the published work and quickly get impatient with tour guides that go over the basics of what a particular book was about.

So I would have loved to go to the Biltmore and spend all day there, but Jim and I will have to go some other time when we're on our own.

--Lia

I have really enjoyed these trip repots Julia

Thankyou

Dee in Oz

Georgia Bonesteel lives in the Hendersonville area. She has a few books out there and did a TV video series of quilts, making a quilt a block at a time. It has been 6 or 7 years since I was in Hendersonville, but there was a store that was "sectioned off" and had a back corner that had Georgia's books, and samples of her work. I have a few of her books. Barbara in SC---more than an hour south of Hendersonville.

From the start, we were looking for excursions that would be easy on my parents. We tried the Arboretum in Asheville. The property is much larger than the part we explored. We stuck to the formal gardens and the buildings.

I hadn't realized it before we left, but the area is in the midst of a drought. The local papers were filled with news of regulations for conserving water. Not wanting to be the sort of tourist who breezes into a place, takes no interest in what's going on, and leaves with the faucet dripping, I did my best to cut down on water consumption even in the motel.

The drought was apparent at the Arboretum. They normally have water gardens. You can see where the water would have flowed for a lovely effect. That was all dry. Never having seen the way it would have looked with water, that didn't bother me. The part that had an emotional impact was seeing the workers going around with single buckets of water to care for the plants. They have an irrigation system that wasn't in use. Instead, they hand watered.

You can bet I was interested in something they call the quilt garden. I liked the concept, but in the end, it wasn't all that special. Each year they choose a traditional quilt block and plant a garden of flowering annuals in that shape. I don't remember the block they chose this year, but it was cool to go upstairs so you could view from above the shocks of color planted in triangular shaped beds. It was pretty enough, but with a name like that, they should have been growing quilts.

The Arboretum is also famous for its bonsai collection. My parents found them especially beautiful. I realize that they're trees and not feeling pain, but after a while, I started thinking they were creepy. The whole idea of stunted growth made me think of foot binding. (I realize that's quite a stretch to leap from the harmless art form to ritual torture perpetrated on generations of women, but sometimes my brain works that way.)

To my surprise, there was a small showing of quilts in the education building. The first 2 hung in the hall would have gotten my viewer's choice if they'd had one. They had an old fashioned homespun look that caught my attention. May of the others were recognizeably from patterns or done all in brights. Some were on display but were for children's use. I guess the homespun ones are from patterns too since a traditional block design is a pattern, but they don't have the slick look to me. (I'm not using "homespun" in its literal sense. The fabrics were probably newer.)

We ended up going to the Arboretum twice, once just with my mother because Dad was tired, then again with Dad because Mom lost her cell phone there. I swear the woman is as bad as any 10 year old. 84 years old, and she hasn't learned how to keep track of her things. (Lest you think this is a sign of her advancing age, I can assure you she's always been like this. Dad saw me put putting my credit card back in my wallet before signing the slip and seemed delighted at the evidence that I'm not like her. My mother walks around without money or identification, leaves important things lying around when she does take them out of the house. Once, since 9-11, she landed at the airport without her wallet, no id, no money, no credit cards, nothing. They wanded her, let her on the plane, and she spent the weekend with work associates begging for money.)

--Lia

It was her husband's hardware store, I heard that they have closed the store. I have most of her old shows on tape, somewhere... Perhaps I should try and put them on DVD. Bonnie, in Middletown, VA

Yes, Georgia had about 1/4 of the hardware store for her quilts, with an upstairs class room. After the store was closed, she had an area inside another store that had small sections set up for different "home businesses". The cashier was at the front of the building. Barbara

Georgia Bonesteel's name did come up. I forget whether it was at the quilt store or at the Visitor's Center, but the woman I was talking to said that she'd been asked to help pick colors for one Bonesteel's quilts and what an honor that was.

Quilting is big in that area! There's a visitor's center with pamphlets and post cards and information on what's going on in town. The pamphlets are about concerts, hiking, restaurants, shopping, wineries, and you-pick. But the things that catches your eye when you walk in are the 2 big quilts on display. One was a log-cabin that was being raffled off for a guild fund-raiser. Another was a shriner's raffle.

I didn't win, but I did buy a ticket. It seemed like the thing to do, buy a ticket in support of quilters when visiting another place.

--Lia