Move over Pocahontas

Generally I try to avoid two saints in one month (& there is already a saint queued up in less than a week) but Lily of the Mohawks is brand new saint this week & it seemed petty not to cover her.  Anyone who has ever traveled anywhere in the americas (north, south, central, wherever) would have to take quite the circuitous route not to trip over a story of an indian princess.  Even then, I am 99.9% sure you would wind up smack in the middle of an indian princess story not-on-purpose.  Indian princesses jump off cliffs, marry the wrong man, betray their people, save their people, sometimes they just abandon their people.  In short they are very busy people themselves.

& up until last week I would have said Pocahontas was the most famous in the world.  If you have never seen the Disney movie (& I haven't), you would still have to be living under a rock not to know who Pocahontas was.  Or rather, who history says she was.  Or might have been.  Whatever, it doesn't matter.  This is not a post about Pocahontas.  That being said, let us all take a moment to listen the Peggy Lee's Fever, which mentions Pocahontas.

Back to our saint: Tekakwitha was born to a family of mixed heritage (one parent was a Mohawk, who are part of the Iroquios language group, the other was an Algonquin, who have their own language, Algonquin; I might be misremembering, but I don't think these two groups always got along that well), but was orphaned at a very young age.  Much of her family died of the same thing that wiped out so many people in the 17th century New World:  smallpox.  It really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Anyway, she was left dependent on an uncle who had a great distrust of christians in general & priests in specific.  First, let me speculate this might be why said uncle was around to care for the much afflicted (scarred & partial blinded by small pox scars) little girl.  Second, guess what kind of indian princess listed above, not that Tekakwitha was a princess-princess, but guess what kind of princess she was.  If you guessed the kind that left her people you would be right.  As a young woman, she ran away to be baptized, then ran away again (I don't entirely follow that one myself) to become a nun.  Then she died of tuberculosis, another disease I am guessing her unreasonable uncle did not catch.

So, that sums that up.  Except that on her deathbed, witnesses say her scars disappeared & she became beautiful (they don't say anything about her putting a on a little weight, so she must have been beautiful à la heroin chic).  & of course later she started performing miracles, pretty much isolated to those who prayed to her so that probably helped determine who got the credit.  Anyway.  Tekakwitha is a saint now, better known as Lily of the Mohawks. 

Which brings me back to Disney.  It is a very familiar story; see Therese the little flower for the sickness in childhood, the tuberculosis in adulthood & so-forth, or countless others for the whole running away thing, or, or, or.  Seriously, it is a familiar story, but now we have a native american heroine.  Sigh.

Scraps gone wild

A few weeks ago, when I did the string quilt trunk show, I also got back (temporarily) one of my other quilts.  I consider it a string quilt but no one else does so  I will let you be the judge:

Yes, these are more of the omnipresent Classic Pooh scraps.  Two of my mothers three grandchildren had Classic Pooh nurseries (the other had all trademark figures banned; we are not a family of compromise).  Then there are all the other babies born around me & what with living so near the Magic Kingdom, most people consider Pooh a basic.  Like black.  Or plaid.

It made sense to buy what I saw on sale & just hang on to it.  When I got down to more minuscule pieces, it was hard to just toss them, so I would run them through the machine "just to catch the threads".  Then I would iron them, to practice my ironing...?  They would grow into these odd, amorphous, blobby shapes -much like the man himself- only to be squared off, sewn together & Voila!  Scraps gone wild.

Years after I made this first scraps gone wild quilt top, I came across someone in blog-land (I do not remember who, I would give you credit if I did) who framed her scraps on three sides with white.  She was going for ultimately uniform squares but still it segwayed nicely into what I was already doing.  What with printing a lot of photos on fabric I have a lot of strips of bleached muslin.

So I have started to add scraps, orphans block parts, previously unused scraps gone wild to the strips.  When I have a few in more or less the same width, I attach them.  Then maybe border them in white.  & keep going.

I have become one of those cooks who is more interested in the left-overs than the main course.

This is what happens when you get edumacated in the Magic Kingdom

Not quite ten years ago nineteen people took over four airplanes & flew them into buildings in New York City & Washington DC & a field in rural Pennsylvania & for a long time after that, no one wanted to get on a plane.  Yes, I know there were a lot of other things that came of it, but for the purposes of this story....

Here in Fladidah, we make a lot of our operating cash off of people who do not actually operate here.  This business of not getting on planes was a big big problem because no one brought their money here & the industry (& I do mean INDUSTRY) that revolves around the practice of overcharging touristas was feeling the pain.  Along with many many other such entities, Disney's Epcot Center threw open their doors & offered state residents significantly reduced entrance fees during specific week-days. 

I am not now & was not then a particular fan of Disney.  I am naturally suspicious of any large corporate entity.  Also I was not crazy about the mickeyfying of every story (Scrooge McDuck?  Really?)

Still we thought, lets see how Disney educates the youngsters.  Well, it was quite the eye opener.  & the biggest eye opener of all was the Monsanto Loves the People of the Earth exhibit.  It would be correct to say it kind of made my skin crawl.  Even A, who is not so likely to get amped up as me, kept shaking his head at the people lining up to hear a commercial (because whether there is a amusement park ride involved or not, endless platitudes about the wisdom of spraying your crops with Monsanto products is still a commercial).

We left the Agriculture-is-your-friend-so-long-as-you-are-on-the-other-end-of-a-large-piece-of-machinery Pavillion & went to have lunch.  In France.  A funny thing about France, a friend of mine teaches middle school to the Epcot employed offspring & she tells me she has a hard time convincing her students the the countries that border each other in International Plaza do not actually necessarily border each other in real life.  She discovered this was a problem when talking about World War II;  there was some confusion about Germans having to travel through Japan & Morocco to get to France.  I do not remember much about lunch except we were served white bread.  I have been to France.  I do not think they know what white bread is. They also served wine, which is how we happened to settle on France.

A while ago, another friend was doing an installation in one of the Epcot places-something to do with language & soy sauce...  Anyhow, he told me he often had lunch in Germany (where they serve beer) & then take a short walk around the plaza.  Although I cannot find it on the map he swears that Israel was somewhere near Norway (which I do kind of remember myself, you know, from geography class)  & one of his great joys was to watch the young Arab men pass by the blonde beauties of the Land of the Midnight Sun that are the stock-in-trade of international consumer marketing & make straight for the Israeli girls, who clearly had been chatted up by every Arab male over the age of five in the park & were frankly ready for something completely different.  He swears it happened every day & he was there for months.

So it seems there are some things you cannot teach people to buy, even in the Magic Kingdom.