Our next door neighbor in Kanawha had a long and full white beard (he actually won a 'beard contest' with that beard!), and he was the Santa Claus for Kanawha when our daughter was little. Here is a photo of her sitting on Santa's lap when she was about 18 months old.
In this photo, she is sitting in my mother's rocking chair in Cedar Rapids, all dressed up, so it was probably some holiday or other. (The photos of our daughter are often in 'frames' of paper. They were used in scrapbooks I made for her.)
This photo with Santa was taken in 1979, when our daughter was about 18 months old. Same Santa...our neighbor George! (I think we had her visit Santa twice that year! Why not? Just two blocks from home at the grocery store, and you are only a kid once!)
This photo is a bit 'grainy,' but it is one of the few we have of her Great-grandma Chase (Ann Rueber's mother) when our little girl was about 1 1/2 years old.
Here's our daughter when she was 1 1/2 years old, opening her 'little red wagon.' (One needs to get right into the business of opening gifts!)
I had been working at the Kanawha Reporter, and when our little girl was almost 2 years old, I made up my mind to go back to college at Iowa State University. David was totally supportive (we had paid my parents back for the money I borrowed to take classes when I was still in Cedar Falls, and David comes from a family that highly values education, so he was super about me getting my teaching degree.)
It meant that I would be living in married student housing on campus, and David would be staying in Kanawha and working at the research farm. I took our two-year-old daughter with me that summer and took some summer art classes. Diane and Dave visited me in my quonset hut house (I remember it was horribly hot, and of course, I had no air-conditioning as my money was all going toward the cost of my education, and bare necessities for living - food, rent and transportation.)
I had signed up for some art classes that summer - Weaving, taught by the expert staff person, Shirley Held (probably one of the most expert weaving instructors in the state), at ISU. The class was held for four hours each morning, and I had a lot of work to do at home, including picking over a sack of sheep's wool (taking the bugs and burrs out, and getting it clean so it could be carded, spun, dyed, and eventually woven into a 'tapestry' that would be my project for my grade. You can imagine that it was very hot and sticky work pulling that wool apart, bit by bit, and removing sheep dung, bugs and all kinds of detritus like straw, burrs, and mud. Finally, when it was as clean as I could get it (pretty darned clean, if I say so myself!), we washed the wool in class to get the lanolin and dirt out of it, and when it was clean and dry, I began to 'card' the wool. Carding is basically combing the wool with a wire-bristle brush with the wires about 1/4 of an inch apart, to pull out snarls and odds and ends, and to make it into nice long fibers that I would use to spin and weave. When the wool was being carded, it was rolled into small rolls of combed fiber called rolags. These rolags could then be spun in either a drop spindle or on a spinning wheel. I didn't have a spinning wheel, so I used a drop spindle that I made. It basically consisted of a length of dowel with a cut into its side near the top to form a place to wrap the spun fiber around. The other end of the dowel had a circle of 1" pine with a 1/4" hole in the center (to accommodate the dowel rod). The pine circle had to be sanded very smooth so it wouldn't catch on the fibers, as did the dowel. A short end of the dowel stuck out of the bottom of the circle. To set it up for spinning, you would spin a short length of the wool (about a foot or a bit more), and tie the end of the spun 'rope' to the center of the dowel. Then you wound the rope (this rope was only about 1/8" thick) around the point at the bottom of the spindle, beneath the circle of pine. Then the spun strand was taken up to the cut place at the top of the dowel, wrapped around and under the strand coming up from the bottom, and that left you with a piece of spun yarn that the spindle could 'hang' from. Essentially, you would be using gravity to pull on the fibers and help you spin. Once you got it all set up, you gave the wooden circle a quick spin, and used that spinning action to pull down the fibers from the rolag above the spindle. (The rolags can easily be attached once you've run out of fiber, simply by pulling out an end of wool from the new rolag, and rubbing it between your fingers with the wool that is already attached to the spindle. The fibers tend to cling together, and form a new cord so you can continue spinning it into the yarn you need to complete your project.
Each student was required to design a small tapestry, which would be dyed with natural materials (I will go into more detail about that eventually). So, initially, our assignment was to clean the wool, wash it, card it, spin it, make skeins of yarn, and dye the yarn into the colors we wanted to use in our tapestry. We made the loom we were going to weave the tapestry on by making a rectangle of wood pieces which we nailed with nails every 1/2 inch. We strung the loom with string that would support the wool as we wove it.
In order to get the natural dyes we needed, we were required to find materials found in nature, such as marigold blossoms, onion skins, walnut hulls, etc. Each dye was made in a chemical action using what is called a 'mordant' such as alum, tin, chrome, copper, etc. These chemicals would leach out the color from the natural material into the water bath, and would allow the wool to accept the dye. Part of our assignment was to assemble various natural materials, make dye from them, and dye samples of wool using each color we made. Those samples were assembled by tying a few strands of the dyed yarn from each color we made and attaching it to the corner of a small square of card stock paper. Then we were to label each sample with the name of the natural material it came from, the kind of mordant that was used, etc. Each student was required to submit a large string of about 40 or 50 card with various samples of dyes attached to them and labeled.
This was not just a fun, 'adult' education class. It was a very serious, scientific and extremely exacting study of just how fabric is made, and it was wonderful!
This is my tapestry. The brown is from walnut hulls, the blue is from indigo (a plant - since they can't be found in Iowa, we didn't have to collect it; Ms. Held had a variety of dye materials we could add to our tapestry colors, but the majority of the colors were to be from dyes we had made from materials we found in nature.) The yellow is from marigold blossoms and the off-white is the natural color of the wool. This piece is about 12" x 18", and had a fabric back with a sewn pocket at the top for a rod to go through so it can be hung on the wall (which is where it was for the next 30 years!...therefore, it is somewhat faded, but still interesting.)
In any case, I was in my own kind of 'heaven,' attending classes and riding my bike to take our daughter to the babysitter who lived about a half mile away from campus...I was getting a real workout, and it showed...thinner and more fit than I had been in quite a long time!
Below are some photos I took of our daughter for various drawing and etching classes. I took a bundle of them so I had some good shots to choose from...
This photo and the others below were taken at a park in Ames.
As you can see, I was 'in my element' taking art classes in Ames. It was a struggle with a two-year-old to care for and make arrangements for her care, along with cooking and keeping my little quonset hut. But, when you are happy, things just seem to flow more easily. And, I was happy! (I have my husband David to thank for this...he was doing all of his own cooking - which he is quite good at, I must say - and was working, supervising the research farm by this time. I could not have done this without his help and willingness to have me spend all that money.)
More to come...more of our daughter's early years, more of the other kids, as much as I could see them, and more of our lives in Ames and Kanawha.
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