Welcome to My Red Cape. Long ago in another time my husband Jack and I lived in a little old red house. It was the stuff of dreams to us for the few years that we were there. I live there still a number of hours every day in imagination, with old dolls and paintings and fabrics and feather trees. I draw inspiration and happiness from the memories of that space in time and share some of it here with friends who remember how to step with Alice through the looking glass and take delight in whimsies and antiquities. ~Edyth O’Neill

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Quilter's clamps



Jack and I love early iron and had a huge collection of it before the cape burned, all of the iron was saved and cleaned, but little of it has found a place in our lives here in a modern new house. Still the old hand wrought pieces are decorative and graphic, and we find ways to show it here and there. Among the charming pieces we have had a long time are a set of quilter's clamps, one for each corner of the frame, when 4 long flat boards were used to make a collapsible frame. This was often set across several chair backs to hold it up while a group of quilters gathered around to finish it in perhaps a long day. The little hand made ones in the photo with some hooks belonged to our friend Felicia many years back. Felicia used them on her mantle to hold garlands of seasonal material, not only at Christmas when they held strands of cranberry garland. This was more interesting than a nail or hook in the mantle board. Yesterday, friend Nancy gave us a set that had been her grandmother's quilting clamps. These are Victorian in feeling, and mass produced as are most of the Christmas things we collect. I thought you might enjoy seeing these. Edyth
I heard from friend Helen, "Happy Easter to you two, and, as the old toast goes, "to all whom you love, to those who love you and to those who love those who love you." Just visited the website and spent a pleasant while reading it - like a visit, almost. Great clamps, by the way. My Grandmother Ashcraft had a quilting frame with clamps like that in her old West Texas farmhouse, except it was suspended from the ceiling by ropes, let down to work and rolled up other times. I have such vivid memories of that place and time, bleak and bare and a world of sand, but home to me."

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