Today one of the books I’ve been editing, Redwork from The WORKBASKET, went to production, another step closer to being published, although the book doesn’t come out until next spring.

I’ve had a special place in my heart for this book, by contributing editor Rebecca Kemp Brent, from the start. Although it’s really a machine embroidery book, the designs are taken directly from vintage embroidery transfers from The WORKBASKET, a great old magazine I remember my mother getting back in the 60s. Twenty years later, I started buying vintage copies in antique malls for the wonderful crochet and tatting patterns. I won a lot of ribbons making projects from old WORKBASKETs.

A little over a year ago I learned that Krause Publications, an imprint of the company I work for, F+W Media, actually owns The WORKBASKET. That means we have all that content at our disposal, including those fabulous embroidery transfers.

The designs were redrawn directly from the original transfers and digitized for machine embroidery. Since I’ve always been into hand embroidery (well, nearly always – I started doing needlework regularly when I was about twelve), the part about this project that excites me is that all 100 vintage designs are in JPEG and PDF formats on the disk that comes with the book. That means anyone who’s as crazy about embroidery as me can print these designs right off the disk and create a fresh embroidery transfer.

I did the hand embroidery samples for the book, which was fun. I stitched a redwork horse head, which is an unbelievable design, on a dishtowel and two pillowcases with morning glory designs in hand-dyed and variegated thread. Rebecca has some wonderful projects in the book, but since I don’t do machine sewing either, I won’t be attempting the bed quilt very soon. But my fingers literally itch to tackle more of those embroidery patterns!

This evening I was shuffling through a pile of stuff on top of a small chest of drawers, looking for a check my mother says she gave me in June, but it hasn’t cleared her checking account yet. I didn’t locate the check, but I did find two silver souvenir charms I bought on vacation – in summer 2008. There were also two small wood shadow boxes, my autumn metal leaf basket that I’d been looking for (apparently I never put it away last November), a bunch of thimbles that I’d bought on eBay to get one Halcyon thimble I really wanted, plus a few other scrappy odds and ends.

Because I’m so untidy, my life is a perpetual treasure hunt. Or rather, I discover treasure when I’m looking for something else. It’s always such a nice surprise. Naturally, I find forgotten money in pockets and wadded in the bottom of my purse. But  there are also the goodies I completely forgot about, like the silver charms.

What’s frustrating, though, is when I know I have something and can’t fathom where to even start looking for it. I’m not talking just about the check. There’s a whole raft of things I know I’ve purchased over the past six months and I can’t imagine what I did with them. Sometimes a small gift will go astray, or some crafting essential that I really needed to complete a project and I don’t know where it is.

The next couple of weeks should be interesting. I’m determined to get at least the living room in order, and God only knows what I’ll turn up. Especially promising and rich is my big dining table, absolutely buried beneath flotsam and jetsam and bric-a-brac. When I finally get things sorted out, I’ll post about the best treasures I uncovered. (I really AM going to tidy up. Really. If I can just locate that darn vacuum sweeper…)

Jumping into doing a blog post a day for a month when I’ve been nearly inactive since the start of the year may be a bit like plunging into an exercise program from a state of total inertia. I feel as if I could easily pull a muscle of some kind.

There were a lot of Facebook posts today in which people sent out good wishes to the vets. Which I think is fantastic!!! I’m astonished at the sacrifices our service people make. I don’t know how they do it now, or ever did it in any war. But to post it on Facebook just to be like everyone else felt insincere, so I didn’t do it.

My mother wrote a great post two years ago about the veterans on her side of the family – her three uncles who served in World War II. Her words are more touching and eloquent than anything I could write here because she wrote from experience and authentic knowledge of the sacrifices they made.

My nearest personal experience is my father having been in the Navy for a very short while, in peace time, before being given a medical discharge. My brother was a military policeman in the 70s and served in the National Guard in the early 80s; apparently he went to Honduras or some similar hot spot at that time. Dad said my brother told him about some of the terrible things he’d seen, but my brother never talked to the rest of us about it.

Although no one seems to include Civil War soldiers in their thoughts on Veterans Day, I’m reminded of my great-great-great-grandfather James Conover, who joined the cause late in the war and never returned home; and my great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Hutchinson, Jr., who was part of the Atlanta campaign but came down with some kind of terrible eye affliction at the Battle of Peach Tree Creek. He didn’t see any more action, but he continued to suffer from eye disease for the rest of his life. I include their names on the roll of those honored this Veteran’s Day.

I’ve always loved cemeteries, especially when I became old enough to appreciate the historical aspects of them. Infatuated with the past and the stories it has to tell, I happily wandered through graveyards, whether I knew anyone buried there or not, reading stones and wondering about circumstances and imagining the deceased’s journey from the East Coast or Ireland or Germany in the 19th century; or the soldier’s experiences in war and his life in the years that followed, however many years those were.

I think the experience of two family members, my father being one of them, dying in the past six months has had an impact on the way I think about cemeteries. It’s brought me face-to-face with the realization that people I knew and love are in boxes deep under the ground beneath my feet.

This came home to me with special force the past couple of days after I accidentally set the cemetery picture of my mother and niece and nephew that appeared in this post as wallpaper on my computer screen. With that big image before me, it’s as if I’ve suddenly developed x-ray vision and can see beneath the grass to all those many, many coffins under the long expanse of headstone-studded lawn. I stare at that photo and imagine Grandpa lying there in his casket as I recall him from the visitation over 31 years ago: horribly flat and stiff, dressed in his colors, marks on his nose where he scraped the racetrack when he fell (or where the horse caught him with a metal shoe or the sulky tire ran over his face – just this year I heard new details that somehow had never been related before).

And under every one of those numerous headstones in that picture lies a fixed corpse like his. It’s a different perspective from strolling through an anonymous cemetery, especially a very old one, where the dead and their coffins may have gone back to dirt and the stones are more like memorials to the idea of that person, not a marker flagging the location of a physical body. It’s not that I haven’t always known all this. I have. In fact, that’s probably why, going back to adolescence, I’ve wanted to be cremated when I die. Many of the adults in my close circle of family feel the same way. I think I’ve come to a point where sprinkling ashes, or even burying them in a container, seems more civilized and more spiritual than the ghastly notion of preserving flesh and storing it underground indefinitely.

As I explained here, I’m doing a series of posts about the stuff that’s in the photo across the top of my blog. Continuing the left-to-right progression, I now back up a bit to zero in on the orange salt shaker.

About twelve years ago I became infatuated with hand-painted china from Japan, especially the strange little scenes with houses or windmills or a placid lake with an overhanging tree. From Noritake to Nippon to items simply stamped “Made in Japan,” I loved them all. In order to rein myself in from starting yet another all-consuming collection, I limited myself to cake plates and salt and pepper shakers, even if there was only one shaker available. These were inexpensive and readily available, and I amassed a nice collection in a very short time.

The orange shaker in the photo above is actually a little different from most of my pieces. The style of the medallion is crisper, and I think this might be a decal rather than hand painted. However, there’s a vintage style to this one that I love – reminds me of the designs that inspired Mary Engelbreit, especially in her earlier works. I don’t remember where I bought the set; probably at a local antique mall or the Burlington antique show. I do have a pair of these shakers, but I was trying to create a “hodge-podge” in the photo, so I just tossed a bunch of unrelated stuff together on a shelf.

The orange shakers reside on a pair of shelves in my tiny hallway near the front door. The rest of the various shakers are on a narrow shelf in my computer room. They make a bright display against the apartment-white walls.

Tombstone of John Alonzo Applegate

My maternal grandfather, John Alonzo Applegate, died on June 20, 1978. He was a harness horse driver and had just finished second in back-to-back races at the old Latonia racetrack, now Turfway Park. Although the racetrack is thoroughbred-only now, for a long time Latonia Trots had a summer standardbred meet. (Funny they don’t mention that in their online history.)

Grandpa was turning the horse around to come back and “salute the judge” when he fell off the sulky. Medical people said he was dead of a massive heart attack before he hit the racetrack. We know a lot of eye-witness details because my father happened to be at the racetrack that night and saw everything.

My grandparents were divorced at the time, and Grandpa’s common-law wife made the funeral arrangements, choosing to have Grandpa buried in Hamilton, Ohio, where they were living, in the Greenwood Cemetery. I was there the day they laid Grandpa to rest, and visited again over the Memorial Day weekend in 1980. I hadn’t been back to the site since then, although of course I’ve been to Hamilton many times over ensuing years.

My mother had never been back at all. When we were discussing with Diamondqueen and the Hooligans what to do outside on such a gorgeous, warm day, Mom asked if we could go up to visit Grandpa’s grave. “Maybe for the last time,” she told us. “It took me 31 years to get up here again.”

Mom had directions, but it still took us a while to track down Grandpa’s grave. I snapped the photo below of Mom and the two Hooligans – great-grandchildren he never knew, and to them he’s just a vague story and a man in a photo riding a horse-driven sulky. (Diamondqueen herself was only eight years old when Grandpa died.)

S.Hooligan, Mom, and J.Hooligan at Grave

It’s hard to tell in the photo at left, but the Butler County Fairgrounds is in the background. In fact, over Mom’s right shoulder is one of the barns and the roof of the old grandstand. One thing I remember about Grandpa’s burial is looking over there and seeing the fairgrounds, and thinking how appropriate it was that horse barns and a racetrack were within view of his grave. It also made me sad – I’d spent many years as a child watching Grandpa race at that track. I have memories going back to when I was five years old playing down in the well of an old dry fountain on the fairgrounds while Mom sat above on a lawn chair; and of gathering thrown-down betting tickets along the fence during the long waits for Grandpa’s races. I once shouted at him during the pre-race parade from that grandstand; Mom and Grandma shushed me, but they laughed when we saw Grandpa grin. He’d heard me!

I wish Grandpa wasn’t up there by himself in that cemetery; there are no other family members buried there. Then again, the situation was awkward and relations were strained by that time. And when he was absorbed in his horses, he always seemed kind of isolated from the rest of us anyhow.

It was a gorgeous fall day here in Cincinnati: near 70 degrees and sunny, a bit breezy but it made the swirling leaves really interesting.

Diamondqueen and the Hooligans decided  to hang out at home, so Mom and I made plans for a restaurant and activities that we normally can’t pursue with Hooligans in tow. We decided on lunch at The Grand Finale in Glendale, preceded by a visit to a nearby needlework store, Stitches. (As I was getting out of the car, my old friend Holly drove up, which was a pleasant surprise for both of us.)

I’ve been looking all fall for certain patterns of black fabric. I’ve been working on a cross-stitch picture in three panels of the Headless Horseman; when it’s done I’m thinking of making it into a kind of art quilt, maybe even something with a headstone motif at the top. So I’ve been hunting for black fabric that’s marbled with gray and has a some movement. I purchased a few fat quarters on our recent trip to Holmes Co. in the quilt shops up there, but I still wasn’t satisfied.

I found what I was looking for at the Stitches shop, plus I bought a bag of pearl cotton skeins in various colors. Then, on to lunch!

I have a favorite dish at Grand Finale – chicken ginger, a pounded chicken breast, marinated, with a walnut and ginger topping; a salad with house dressing (their salads always taste so fresh); and a spinach crepe on the side. I’m tempted by other dishes, but I know this is the only place I can get this particular meal, and we seem to make it to Grand Finale only about twice a year, so it’s hard to break out of my pattern.

We got to sit in the main dining room, where antiquity and Victorian opulence are abundant, in one of the small window tables that overlook the street and window boxes full of pink geraniums and, oddly, some wine bottle corks. (If you look at the photo on the bottom left of the restaurant’s website, our table was the last one along the windows before the glass room divider with the painting hung in front of it and the big stained glass piece just beyond.) Mom always orders the chicken ginger as well, and the servers always joke that we’re making it too easy for them. We certainly enjoyed our meal.

After that we drove up to Moeller High School for an antique show. Some days you just can’t stop spending money. I bought several old crochet hooks with very tiny hooks (one had to be even smaller than a size 14), two little metal Christmas bells just like the one I got for St. Nicholas when I was in second grade (and completely cherished), a big metal wall hanging of a  horse head inside a horseshoe for Mom for Christmas (yes, I showed it to her first, so I’m not ruining a surprise), and a large Ziplock bag filled with vintage needlework items: spools of thread, old buttons, crochet cotton, and other goodies.

It was the kind of can’t-beat-it day that makes you say, “Life is good!” and mean it.

See that photo at the top of my blog? I’m so desperate for something to write about, I’m now going to embark on a series of posts in which I explain everything about each object in the picture.

The first one’s going to be a little hard to see. Look at the far left of the photo. There’s something behind the orange salt shaker. Even if you look really close, you may not be able to tell that it’s a tiny, very primitive kachina doll.

Not a real one, of course. This is one I made out of a stick from our backyard when I was 10 or 11 – which makes it circa 1964 or 1965. I was very interested in Native American crafts at the time, and I continually got books out of the library by W. Ben Hunt. He explained such fascinating things as how to carve a totem pole, how to fire pottery, how to make cornhusk dolls, and how to make a simulated bearclaw necklace from wooden claws.

I made miserable attempts at all kinds of little things. Why the kachina doll survives is beyond me. It’s about 4″ tall, and I carved a few details with a dull pocketknife (probably cutting myself in the process). I then painted it with whatever poster paints I found lying around. The stick already had a hole in the end, which made a perfect place to glue a dyed feather. I think the feather was green. I haven’t seen that feather in decades.

Somewhere along the way I decided to give the kachina a coat of varnish to preserve it, and I’m sorry I did. It’s very glossy now; I miss the original matte finish of the poster paint (the stick absorbed it pretty fast, so it was never very bright).

Sometimes some weird little thing finds a spot on a shelf and you wind up carrying it with you forever. That’s how it is with my terrible little kachina doll.  When I see it, though, I remember exactly what the day was like on the back porch of our Maple Street house in Oakley. And I remember how I felt at that age, and how much I enjoyed making things. I still do.

Tonight we finished up the Aunt Nancy Day festivities with a visit to Mad Potter in Mason, Ohio. It wasn’t easy to choose from all the blanks available, just waiting to be painted and transformed. For my gift, I finally settled on a shamrock-shaped dish; I painted my sort of stock Irish scene of a folk art sheep with thatched cottages, stone walls, and a distant castle.

Diamondqueen chose a gift box-shaped box to decorate. It wasn’t until she’d applied numerous coats of blue paint that I realized she was making herself a Tiffany’s gift box, just like the little blue boxes that send her into paroxysms of jealousy when she spots someone carrying one, or one of the blue shopping bags, on the downtown streets near the store.

J.Hooligan chose a great-looking skull-shaped bank; the skull had an eye patch like a pirate. S.Hooligan picked out a princess figurine that opened to reveal a box at the base of the skirt. She used up gallons of pinkish paint on the figure’s skirts; her princess has blond hair and a wide grinning black mouth.

Sometimes the Hooligans almost lived up to their name, picking at each other and starting to grab-ass, which is perilous in a place where the  walls are lined with shelves chock full of pottery and bisque. Diamondqueen was the last to finish, even though she had only to paint the box and the ribbon and bow. I didn’t mind since it gave me time to browse all the possibilities for my next visit.

The big reveal will be next week, when Diamondqueen picks up our creations from the shop. I can’t wait!

S. Hooligan chose her own Halloween costume this year – and she couldn’t have picked anything more appropriate. I used to see the angel side of her a lot more than I do now. It’s pretty much All Devil, All the Time. She’s more than a little scary, especially when she gets riled up. Naturally, when Diamondqueen went to the parent-teacher conference at S.Hooligan’s kindergarten, the teacher was all praise for the sweet little girl.

“She said she wished she had a whole class of S.Hooligans!” Diamondqueen told us.

Mom replied, “If only she knew!”

Of course, Mom had had her own scary experience with the devil part of S. that very morning. S. was supposed to go to her grandma’s house while Diamondqueen went to the parent-teacher conference. Only S. didn’t want to leave the house. Diamondqueen had to carry her out to Mom’s car, but S. kept unlocking the back door and barreling out again. Finally Diamondqueen flipped the little child switch that basically made S. a captive in the back seat. Mom said that all the way to her house, S. kept wailing, “Turn back! Turn back! I don’t want to go to your house.”

As for other devilment, we won’t even get into her prank of offering her mother a gift – and then farting when her mother reaches out her hand. And S. making herself a pair of falsies out of paper this past weekend is a whole other story.