The Crazy Quilt of Life goes back in time to chronicle life on the prairie as Lida Beaty-Jackson shares her vivid memories and experiences in her diary. She shares the pain and struggles of the journey west to a new home and new opportunities. Her unique and diverse neighbors are active players in a strong midwestern community. The charm and joy of their holiday celebrations in the late 1800s is set against the backdrop of the dangers of living on the prairie. This memoir provides a unique opportunity to experience life in the late 1880s through Lida Beaty-Jacksons personal writing. It offers an honest view of life in those days and allows us to appreciate how far our society has come in the last one hundred years in terms of technology and comfort. Lidas diary shows how much more difficult it was to eat, rest, stay healthy, and be safe from the elements in her time. They were able to find joy in the little thingsthings that we in the present so often overlook. The Crazy Quilt of Life also includes intriguing ancestral information about Lida and her familythe real lives of real people. The quilt pictured on the cover was sewn together by the author herself, Lida Beaty-Jackson, her mother, and her sister Minnie Elizabeth. The quilt remains in the care of Margaret Ann Parker today.

Turn family photos and mementos into quilted scrapbooks with this crazy quilting guide featuring 10 projects and 24 embroidery stitches. In Crazy-Quilted Memories, quilt artist Brian Haggard shows readers how to turn treasured family keepsakes—including photo prints, buttons, beads, and other keepsakes—into meaningful quilt embellishments. He offers a fresh take on traditional crazy quilt techniques, as well as 24 basic and combination embroidery stitches to create never-before-seen motifs. Each of the 10 projects featured in this volume will tell a story about your life and family history in unique and creative ways. Lovingly stitched by hand, these small, portable projects are destined to become prized family heirlooms for generations to come.

“[The author] presents her fabulous crazy quilt composed of colorful fabrics cut in hexagons [and] describes how to take each stitch.” —Publishers Weekly Nothing shows off beautiful stitching and embellishments like the blank canvas of a crazy quilt. Jenny Clouston’s gorgeously illustrated primer shows you how to make your own heirloom crazy quilts. Learn: which fabrics, threads, and needles to use how to piece crazy quilt blocks how to embroider with thread, ribbons, beads, and other embellishments how to assemble your blocks into a finished quilt, and more Included are complete instructions for over 100 embroidery, beading, and embellishment stitches; links to full-size patterns for nine hexagonal crazy quilt blocks; and 25 stitch keys showing proper stitch placement and thread and needle selection for 25 different blocks.

Includes how-to information.

Part memoir and part urban social history, Pieces from Life?s Crazy Quilt is an African American woman?s personal account of her life during a racially turbulent period in a northern American city. Raised in a black neighborhood in urban Detroit, Marvin V. Arnett begins her book with her birth during the Great Depression, and ends with the infamous Detroit race riot of 1943. Arnett?s close observations and attention to the details of her neighborhood and the complex adult relationships around her make this an understated yet powerful story of witness. ø Like the idiosyncratic pieces of a crazy quilt, each chapter functions alone but takes on particular resonance when considered with the whole. Choreographed as one-act plays, each chapter invites the reader into the life of the Sprague family and their neighbors during the years after the Ford Motor Company closed their Detroit plants. Arnett tells the story of her childhood with subversive allusions to the Victorian-era coming-of-age stories she consumed while growing up and the moral lessons she absorbed in such readings but could not reconcile with her own experience.

Create your own heirloom crazy quilts with help from world-famous expert Judith Baker Montano! This classic guide has been updated in full color. New projects, new photography, and up-to-the-minute techniques make the process more user-friendly than ever. 3 new designs for a total of 10 beautiful projects to get you started, including wallhangings, jewelry, and an evening bag. Judith walks you through the process of putting together a crazy quilt using her unique center piece method, showing you how to choose fabrics and lay the foundation, to adding decorative details and solving problems. Detailed instructions for traditional embroidery stitches, beading, lace, fabric painting, and other creative embellishments. Dozens of color photos of stunning crazy quilts, wearables, accessories, and more. Features historical notes on crazy quilting, an illustrated stitch dictionary, and exciting crazy quilting embellishments

The Patchwork Girl of Oz - Lyman Frank Baum - The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum is a children's novel, the seventh in the Oz series. Characters include the Woozy, Ojo "the Unlucky", Unc Nunkie, Dr. Pipt, Scraps, and others. The book was first published on July 1, 1913, with illustrations by John R. Neill.The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum is a children's novel, the seventh in the Oz series. Characters include the Woozy, Ojo "the Unlucky", Unc Nunkie, Dr. Pipt, Scraps (the patchwork girl), and others. The book was first published on July 1, 1913, with illustrations by John R. Neill. In 1914, Baum adapted the book to film through his "Oz Film Manufacturing Company."In the previous Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz, magic was used to isolate Oz from all contact with the outside world. Baum did this to end the Oz series, but was forced to restart the series with this book due to financial hardship. In the prologue, he reconciles Oz's isolation with the appearance of a new Oz book by explaining that he contacted Dorothy in Oz via wireless telegraphy, and she obtained Ozma's permission to tell Baum this story.

In this provocative study of eight novels, Karen E. Beardslee asserts that American writers often engage with folk traditions as a necessary part of their characters journeys to wholeness. Focusing not only on African American, Native American, and Hispanic American cultures but also on women s culture, Beardslee traces the connections between folk legacies and the search for selfhood in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Within each chapter, a novel by a contemporary author and one from an earlier period are brought together: Whitney Otto s How to Make an American Quilt and Harriet Beecher Stowe s The Minister s Wooing; David Bradley s The Chaneysville Incident and Charles Chesnutt s The Conjure Woman; Leslie Marmon Silko s Ceremony and Zitkala-Sa s American Indian Stories; and Roberta Fernandez s Intaglio and Maria Cristina Mena s The Birth of the God of War. These pairings are not based on matters of intertextuality or influence but are chosen according to the folk groups to which the novels characters belong. This strategy enables Beardslee to trace the particular legacies that inform the work of the twentieth-century authors. As Beardslee notes, contemporary texts and the critical commentary on them have focused, until fairly recently, on the search for self in male (usually white) characters. Such works have also positioned that search outside the character s family or community and have usually emphasized its futility. With the growing shift toward multiculturalism in fiction, however, folk traditions have come to play an increasingly crucial role in characters journeys to self-awareness as well as in the success of those journeys. Thoroughly researched and cogently argued, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of both folklore and literature as it explores the relationship between knowing one s cultural heritage and achieving a sense of self that is whole instead of fragmented, connected instead of drifting. The Author: Karen E. Beardslee teaches in the Department of Language and Literature at Burlington County College in Pemberton, New Jersey. Her articles have appeared in MELUS, The Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature, and the Zora Neale Hurston Forum. "

For the sake of peace in the family, Jo-Beth kept her feelings to herself. But she and Wes were pledged to each other, and nothing could change that. Not even war. With the death of her father, Jo-Beth and her family, moved in with relatives. There, her mother makes a living sewing her exquisite quilts—and Jo-Beth discovers a special friend. Wesley Rutherford draws Jo-Beth like a magnet ... and their attachment to one another becomes strong enough to endure a long separation. Their future together seems certain … until the Civil War forces a decision that places Wes at odds with friends and family. Beginning in the mountains of North Carolina, the American Quilt series takes readers through the Civil War, across the country by wagon train to California, and finally across the Pacific to the romance and wild beauty of Hawaii. At the end of each book, you’ll find the pattern for its quilt. Follow it to create a beautiful quilt of your own.