Christmas Shopping at the Five and Ten

At Christmas time, my little sister and I loved to go to Neisner’s 5 and 10 (“the dime store”, we called it), a treasure trove of gifts for children, or adults for that matter, with small coins in their pockets.  We circled around and around the counters, picking up cards with beautiful jeweled earrings or flowered boxes of dusting powder or the ever popular Midnight in Paris perfume in small cobalt blue bottles.  These would be wonderful surprises for Mother, the Grandmas, the aunts – if we pooled our money.  There were small bottles of shaving lotion, glistening emerald green on the counters, which were standard fare for the men in the family.  For small cousins there were jack sets, paddle balls, tiny dolls – such an array!

Now, that 5 and 10 stores are a thing of the past, I remember all those dear people opening our dime store gifts, clumsily wrapped and labeled, and exclaiming with wonder – the same as my sister and I did as we entered the marvelous world of Neisner’s.

HAPPY MEMORIES OF THE WONDERS OF CHRISTMAS

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Amish Children Garden Banner – Canvas Duck Fabric

A while back, I made my first garden banner featuring a harness horse.  So far, it has held up well through a very hot, sunny summer and a few torrential rains.  I wanted to make another banner for “back to school” and chose a favorite design by Helan Barrick from my decorative painting days.  I call this a banner rather than a flag because it is quite stiff and becomes even more so when exposed to the weather.

I used canvas duck fabric (not outdoor canvas which is treated) which was sewn to make a double thickness 12×18 inch banner with sleeve and primed it with two coats of Gesso front and back.  Then I drew the design on the front and painted it with acrylics.

For the back, which I can see clearly from my front window, I painted a design of an Amish-style quilt block.

Both sides were finished with two coats of Minwax Clear Satin Polycrylic to make it weather-proof.

I like seeing the banner in my front yard – my dog Rusty is looking out the door, probably admiring the quilt block on the back!

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Garden Flag Made from Canvas Duck Fabric

I have a small garden flag stand beside my front walk and have a lot of nice seasonal flags for it, but I was never able to find a flag with a harness horse on it.  This past week, I bought some canvas duck fabric at JoAnn’s to make a floor cloth and thought I would try making a small banner out of this material, using the same general procedure I have used for floor cloths.

The duck canvas gets several coats of Gesso to provide a good surface for painting.  The design is painted with acrylic paint and inked with a Sharpie fine or ultra-fine pen on the canvas and then several coats of clear satin acrylic varnish are applied.

I cut a piece of fabric for the back from an old county fair panel I’ve had for years.  This was also coated with the varnish.

This piece is something of an experiment for me since I know the process works well for indoor floor mats and the acrylic works well for outdoor wood items, but I’ve never combined the two processes before.

I like the banner very much.  The barn is from a photograph of the horse barn my father had for his harness horses for many years.

It was a gathering place for the family in the 1950s and 60s, especially during county fair time when everyone congregated.

I’ll see how this banner works out in all kinds of weather and I may be making a few more throughout the year.

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County Fair Table Topper

In a previous post, I wrote about resurrecting some old decorative art sketches to make pen and ink panels for a tri-stand quilt rack.  That post is here:

http://lillianscupboard.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/july-4th-parade-tri-stand-mini-quilts/

I thought I’d give another favorite sketch a try and made a panel for my larger mini-quilt rack using a design from 1996.  I thought it would be nice to do a crazy-quilt border using actual fair award ribbons.  Although I have a box full of county and state fair ribbons I‘ve won through the years, I didn’t want to cut those up.  Luckily, my daughter found a box of Montgomery County award ribbons (Dayton, Ohio) in an antique mall and I used some of those.

It’s rather ironic that I’m using ribbons from this fair because it was a major event that we attended all the time I was growing up in the 1930s-40s.  I even posted about their big Labor Day Fair here:

http://lillianscupboard.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/labor-day-in-the-1930s-40s/

I added strip borders and quilted in gold thread to match the lettering on the ribbons…

…and a sleeve, label and binding.

Back in 1996, I had made several wood projects with this design to sell in our craft mall booth.  It was like meeting an old friend again after all these years.

Click on pictures to enlarge.

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July 4th Parade Tri-Stand Mini-Quilts

In the 1990s, my oldest daughter and I had a booth in a large craft mall in Cincinnati.  My contributions were mainly decorative art painted on vintage wood pieces and enamelware.  We had the booth for over 4 years and I made and sold countless pieces with designs sometimes from pattern books but mostly from my own sketches.  I’m not painterly at all and just did my thing with pen and ink accentuated with acrylic painting.

Although I haven’t painted anything since 1998, I kept all of my sketches and designs and thought I might be able to incorporate some of them into pieces for wall hangings or my mini-quilt racks.  First, I scanned the sketch which was bigger than I wanted for this project ….

…and then, using a light box, I went over the basic elements of the sketch with pencil.  I then scanned this sketch, made it the size I wanted and printed it onto June Tailor Colorfast Fabric Sheets for Ink Jet Printers.

I left the paper backing on the printed panel and painted the design with acrylic paint thinned with water.  When the piece was dry, I went over it and added details with an ultra-fine point Sharpie pen.  Then, the piece was pressed to set the colors and the paper backing was removed.

These panels were combined with strips of fabric to make them the correct size for my Tri-Stand table topper.  I added batting, binding, a sleeve and a label to complete the panels.  I also added a patriotic button to each that I found half-price at Joann’s.

I was pleased with how the panels turned out and since I don’t intend to wash them, the colors should stay vibrant for a long time.  It made me happy to be able to use an old familiar sketch again and to be able to do a little painting.

This particular design was used for 5 different projects which were sold from our booth.

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Easter Rabbit Wall Hanging

About 15 years ago, my oldest daughter and I had a booth at a large craft mall.  My contributions were all decorative painting and I did a lot of design sketches inspired by  photos, greeting cards, calendars, etc.  I used my sketch of an Amish girl feeding rabbits to make a 6×6 inch redwork panel.

The log cabin blocks surrounding the redwork are 3×3 inches.  The finished piece, made to fit my mini quilt rack, is 12×15 inches.

It’s not the typical Easter bunny quilt, but I like it.

My daughter made the beautiful crocheted doily.

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School Days–Cincinnati–1930s-40s

The day after Labor Day in 1938, I began my education by entering old Raschig School in downtown Cincinnati.  I’m sure Mother must have pointed out the school to me many times before I started the first grade there.  It was just across Central Parkway from our first floor two-room apartment on Elm Street.  If we were standing on the street or even sitting on the front stoop, we would have been able to see the big red brick building and the heavy iron fence that surrounded it.

I remember the dress I wore on my first day of school because a picture had been taken the day before at the County Fair in Dayton, Ohio.  My grandma had bought it for me – a yellow silk dress with brown velvet ribbons and a full circle accordion pleated skirt.  This was before World War II when silk was the fabric of choice for special occasions.

I can remember Mother walking with me to my first day at Raschig and then suddenly being gone.  I don’t recall being particularly happy or unhappy – I was just there.  Because I hadn’t been to kindergarten, they put me in a class with kids who needed to be evaluated.  The teacher was a middle-aged lady and not particularly friendly  Soon after I arrived,  I noticed kids were passing around food for our mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks.  One bowl held the most gorgeous purple plums.  I don’t believe I had ever seen plums before.  I asked the teacher if I could pass the plums and she was very brusque and said the children were chosen ahead of time and to go sit down.

Luckily, I left her class within a couple of weeks and had Mrs. Clark and a young student teacher who were wonderful.  I remember struggling with reading – it didn’t seem to make sense and then one day it all came together and I never had any problems after that.  I also struggled a little to make the cursive letters that spelled out Lillian.  We never did learn to print but went into handwriting immediately.

I looked forward to the stories the teacher read to us – “Lazy Liza Lizard”, “The Three Bears”, and particularly “Little Black Sambo” because I loved the description of the butter and the pancakes.

Ours was an inner city school but during the housing shortage of those war years there were many middle-class people living in the area with children going to Raschig.  Kids like Rollo, a black boy who always wore stylish knickers and argyle knee socks and appeared to come from a well-to-do family as well as a girl named Mary Jane and another girl named Patty Lou (double names were big in the 1930s).  Our family was about middle-ground economically – there were kids much poorer – Dorothy, Mary Lou, and poor Otto, a raggedy boy whose shoe soles flapped as he walked.

This was a Valentine I designed one year to show Rollo, Otto and myself in our classroom

Those Raschig years were good for me – I did well in school, the teachers seemed pleased with my work, I thought most of the kids liked me, nobody bothered me except for teasing occasionally about my long finger curls and I never took that seriously.  When I was 9 years old, I jotted down a poem about school starting again at old Raschig.   I never did outgrow my love of school.

Poem by Lillian (9 years old) – August, 1942

I love to go to school
And see the teachers dear
There to teach us children
All through the year.

I love to go to school
To learn to write and read
And there to learn to be
Very good indeed.

I love to go school
Because it’s so much fun
For when I have gym
I sometimes get to run.

I love to go to school
Way up into June
For you see I am so anxious
School will be starting soon.

In autumn when the leaves are falling
We hear the children’s voices calling
I think how glad they must be
To go to school the same as me.

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Christmas Fudge

During the rationing of World War II, we children craved sugar

As we watched Mother sprinkle carefully measured sp0onsful over our oatmeal.

We wanted more sweetness in our hot chocolate, in our pudding;

We longed for a bottomless sugar bowl.

But in the fall Mother stood in long lines that coiled around the city tenements

To get an extra bag of sugar allotted for canning and preserving.

She squirreled this away until Christmas

When it was transformed into the most glorious pecan studded fudge,

Sweet enough to make up for a whole year of rationing.

“Christmas Fudge”, by Lillian – 1997

My mother was famous in our family for her homemade fudge, made without benefit of a candy thermometer and cooked and beaten until it was perfect.  Then, it was placed in a special rose-bedecked tin to be brought out on Christmas Eve, opened and squares of never-to-be-forgotten goodness placed on her fancy Christmas plate.

I was never able to duplicate her fudge and have had to rely on the easier candy since she passed away in 1991.  I have several good recipes but my oldest daughter asked for some fudge made with marshmallows rather than marshmallow creme, so this is the version I made for her.

FUDGE MADE WITH MARSHMALLOWS

• 2 cups mini-marshmallows*
• 1 cup chocolate chips (I like Ghiradelli)
• 1-1/2 cups coarsely chopped toasted walnuts
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup undiluted evaporated milk
• 1 tsp. vanilla

*20 large marshmallows = 2 cups mini-marshmallows.  Cut large marshmallows into 8 pieces using kitchen shears that are dipped in water to prevent sticking.

Butter a large plate or platter

In a medium bowl, combine the marshmallows, chips and walnuts.  Have ready and at hand before starting the fudge.

In a large, heavy bottomed pan, combine the sugar and milk.  Cook over medium high heat (#6 on my gauge) until the mixture comes to a boil, stirring occasionally.  When there are bubbles across the entire top surface of the mixture, set a timer for 5 minutes and cook at the same heat setting, stirring occasionally.

After 5 minutes, remove pan from heat and stir in the marshmallows, chips and nuts, stirring quickly until the marshmallows and chips are melted.  Stir in the vanilla.

Immediately pour onto the buttered plate and let cool at room temperature.

This is a batch made with milk chocolate chips.  I also made a batch with semi-sweet chips, resting on Mother’s World War II era platter.

Mother always cut her fudge in big squares.

The fudge does not need to be refrigerated.  Should be stored in a container with a tight lid.   My mother’s old rose tin is just the right size for a batch of fudge.

This is not even close to my Mother’s fudge, but brings back the memories of all the Christmas Eves when I enjoyed her wonderful candy.

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Happy Thanksgiving

In the 1990s, my oldest daughter and I had a booth at a large craft mall which we kept supplied with a variety of handmade crafts.  My interest was in decorative painting.  I liked to scour antique malls and thrift shops to find old wooden or enamelware items to paint and sold hundreds of pieces over the years.

Fast forward to 2010 and a walk through the Ohio Valley Antique Mall in Fairfield, Ohio (near Cincinnati).  In one of their beautifully decorated booths, I saw a familiar object….an enamelware platter that I had painted in 1996.  I had adapted the design from a picture in a school textbook, simplifying it and adding a few items.

I had painted the design on several projects through the years but had never kept one for myself.   A week before Thanksgiving, this old platter seemed to call to me to take it back home, so I bought it and after 14 years, it’s on display in my living room.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYBODY.

Granddaughter at her First Grade Thanksgiving Dinner

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Cincinnati’s 6th St. Market in the 1930s

When I was a high school junior in 1949,  one of our assignments in English class was to write an autobiography.  A portion of my life story was about visiting the old Sixth Street Market with my mother and little sister.  In 1936, our family had finally left the home of relatives during the Great Depression and rented a one-room flat on Elm Street in downtown Cincinnati.  My 20-something father had a job on the WPA and my teenage mother made the one room into a comfortable home and took care of my sister (age two)  and me (age four).  Since we didn’t have an ice-box, one of our daily chores was to walk about 4 blocks to the Sixth Street Market to get our supply of perishable food.  My father would tell my mother what to fix for supper, give her a list of ingredients and the money to cover it, and we made our way through the city streets which were completely unfamiliar to my mother and her small-town upbringing.    Since my memory at age 16 was much sharper than it is now, I’m offering my chapter on this experience from my 1949 high school autobiography, exactly as I wrote it then.  Accompanying the piece are pen and ink sketches I did in 1992, using old Cincinnati photographs as my reference.

MARKET DAYS

“One of my earliest memories is that of going to the Sixth Street market with Mother and Shirley.  Each day we took the trip and made our rounds of the stores.  In the butcher shop, the friendly butcher always presented Shirley and me with a fat, juicy hot dog.  You can imagine what kind of picture we presented walking along the street, hanging onto the handles of Mother’s shopping bags, munching hot dogs.

Sixth Street market was a fascinating place, always bubbling over with loud-mouthed vendors who tried to out-do each other in shouting their bargains.  I can remember the outdoor stalls and the piles of fruits and vegetables each one contained.  The apples and oranges were wrapped in flimsy, red tissue paper, and an abundance of these wrappers could be found laying on the pavement near the stalls.  The vendors of oranges or lemons were always anxious to cut one of the fruits in half in order to show the good quality of their products.

There was a row of little shops along the street and we frequented all of them.

One shop was full of poultry products.  Cages of cackling chickens were setting all around the room.  That queer, stale odor that goes with fowls filled the shop and floated out of the open door into the crowded street.  Men with blood splattered aprons were on hand to kill any chicken the customer might desire.  Fresh eggs could also be purchased as well as fat ducks.  The chatter of the men, the demands of the customers, and the quacks and clucks of the fowls added to the general confusion of the shop.

In the very middle of the square was a huge meat house.  It was very quiet and cool in the house, and it proved to be a welcome place to enter from the scorching street.  Great halves of beef hung on the walls, and fat,  jolly butchers cut the scarlet meat and wrapped it in brown paper taken from a big roll that was kept on the counter.  Attached to the ceiling was a large ball of string with the loose end hanging down so that the butcher could grasp it and use it in wrapping the packages of meat.  Through the windows of the showcase,  I could see heaps of juicy, soft hamburger; strings of pink hot dogs; piles of lean steaks and chops; and smooth, red liver laying beside big hunks of rich, yellow cheese.

At the very end of Sixth Street was a little store which sold such articles as tobacco, cigarettes, gum and candy.  Mother would always take us to the store and let us choose a piece of penny candy.  There was never any hesitation – Shirley and I always chose “candy fudges”.  Sometimes, we purchased dark, rich chocolate ones, but more often we chose the creamy, smooth vanilla squares of fudge.

On our way home from the market we passed an ancient Jewish synagogue.  It was a gloomy-looking building, its dark, yellow walls covered with vines.  Surrounding the temple was a short, wide wall, and my sister and I delighted in walking on top of it.  We thought that we were performing quite a daring feat, although the wall was only two feet tall.  At the end of the wall, we scrambled down with mixed feelings of satisfaction and regret that the fun was over, and headed for home.”

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