A Perfected Technology

I mentioned the other day that people give quilters bags of fabric. People also give them sewing machines. A few years ago, I was able to send off two or three old but perfectly usable machines in my possession to an organization that was trying to help out tailors and seamstresses in a small country that was going through a bad political period, including riots and fires. Mostly, such moments to transfer machines don’t come along, and the machines just stack up.

You might have an old sewing machine around because you bought a new one, although sometimes you can trade the old one in for a new purchase. Or you might have an old machine around because you bought it at the thrift store for no known reason other than the fact that it was a perfectly good 40-year-old machine for $10. Or you might have an old machine around because someone—friend, relative, or stranger—felt their old machine needed a good home and you seemed the local version of a sewing machine shelter.

Currently, I am home to three pretty new machines (under 5 years old) and maybe six old machines ranging from 10 to 70 years old. All of them work just fine. Three of the old ones are in active use for one reason or another; the others are awaiting their next moment in the sun.

The reason that these machines gather up in my home (and, similarly, in the homes of other serious quilters) is that the mechanical sewing machine is what I think of as a ‘perfected technology.’ That is, it does what it does perfectly and any improvement will involve its doing something else and if you don't need that 'something else,' you don't need a different machine.

Thus, at some point after WW II, the zig-zag stitch electric sewing machine replaced the more common straight stitch machine (although the zig-zag stitch machine patent dated back to the 1873 it was not commonly available until much later). A machine that does only straight stitching is less desirable, generally, than a machine that does both straight and zig-zag when you are making clothing, for example, as most machine owners were. Quilts, by contrast, can be made very nicely with only a straight-stitch machine.

I mention this because the other day a neighbor dropped off an old sewing machine that she thought I might be interested in; the alternative was for it to go to the dump, she said. (Not even to the thrift shop!) I took it in the way you might take in a stray puppy or kitten and found that what I was receiving was the most famous straight-stitch machine of all time: a Singer Featherweight 221. Introduced to the world in the middle of the depression (1933) at the Chicago World’s Fair, it became the most widely sold portable sewing machine ever made. It’s estimated that 3.5 million were sold worldwide. And that’s because it was a simply perfect machine, given what it did.

And, if my experience is any indication, unless they went into a landfill, they’re all out there still, somewhere, still capable of working beautifully, of doing what they were made to do. I learned to sew on my mother’s Featherweight, acquired in 1937 when she and my grandmother each bought one for $100. I still have my grandmother’s Featherweight and most days I use it, and have over the past 50 years since she gave it to me. It has never had any substantial repair. When it needs cleaning, oiling or lubricating, I do it myself easily in less than 15 minutes. It runs perfectly.

So now I have two of them, but this second one is a problem. The problem is this. Nobody wants to throw anything away, but once they have made the decision to get rid of it, they would like it to stay gone. They may not welcome the recipient saying to them, ‘You know, you should really keep this.’ It’s the stray puppy that you successfully talked someone else into parenting coming back to your door, saying, ‘I missed you!’.

On the other hand, a Featherweight is a sought-after machine and you can’t go to a store and buy one: they stopped making them almost forty years ago. There are maybe four of them for sale on Ebay right now, ranging from $250-$400 plus shipping. Quilters love Featherweights and would love to have this one. There’s both a money market and a heartfelt longing market for this machine. If it were mine (and it may be), I would give it to someone who longs for a Featherweight; but maybe my neighbor would love to put it on Ebay and sell it; but also, maybe, my neighbor would not like to have this machine back on her hands to deal with.

I sent my first computer (a Kaypro) to the disposal unit long ago. Nobody is missing it. Not a perfected technology at all. But here’s this little 12-pound sewing machine, still doing beautifully, decades and decades after it rolled off the assembly line. No reason to suppose it won’t still be running just fine after a century. It's got to have a home.

Memorable Times

We have just said goodbye to the last of our children/grandchildren visitors for the summer. Always good to have them come, sad to have them leave, and then we lie down and take a long rest. This last visit featured accounts of all the recent animal mayhem, of course, as well as a bear sighting. While walking back from the beach, a couple of blocks from our house, they found themselves coming up the road while the local bear was going cross the road. Great excitement all round!

Mayhem continues in our life as a heron arrives at the frog pond to consume the frogs (2) and a host of goldfish. Of course, they’re always at risk; it’s like leaving chickens around for coyotes and raccoons. But you can’t very well put the goldfish from the pond in a bowl every night, the way you put chickens in their coop (or their ‘chicken vault,’ as my son refers to his daughter’s chickens’ very safe night-time abode). And even if you could or did, the herons are out looking in the daytime. In fact, the fish are probably pretty safe at night. It’s the day-flying herons that are the menace. And were not even used to thinking of herons as menaces. That is, I suppose, the trouble with romanticizing the natural world. There is a great chain of eating that we have sort of lost touch with…at least as participants. Well, not that we don’t hold our place in that great chain of eating, but we have lost touch with the fact that we’re in the chain. It’s more like, ‘well, they’re eating each other out in the fields, whereas we are going to a nice restaurant where it's called cuisine not animals.’

This past spring we watched about 5 DVD’s worth of the BBC’s Planet Earth, which had wonderful photography but the most tedious narration in the history of the movies, with its endless, ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Look! There comes a big animal to eat this cute little baby-sized animal.’ More recently, we’ve been watching The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, which have a different format for their mayhem. The ones we’ve seen so far have tended to focus on a world in which objects take on a life of their own, and that life is not, necessarily, one that bodes well for people. Maybe we’re just in a time when we humans feel particularly threatened. Svankmajer is one of the most famous animators in the world (though not well known in the U.S.), and his stop-motion work is absolutely amazing, though a tad on the dark side. This is not Pixar or Disney, certainly.

We watched about a half-dozen of these short pieces with the visiting 12-year-old grandson and, although he allowed as he wasn’t sure at all what they were about (I had warned him this would likely be the case), he was very taken with them. Or led us to believe he was. Who knows with twelve-year-olds? But perhaps this is the role of the grandparent: to astonish, or at least to be memorable or to cause memorable things to happen. (Also to serve a lot of cuisine.)

When he’s forty, he can look back on the visit to the grandparents during which he watched weird Czech animated films and heard about herons eating the frogs and goldfish and saw a bear, right in front of him. You do what you can…

Law, Order, and Finance

“Hope is about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Point Roberts, Washington state, the last place Jenkins was reported to have been seen before entering Canada. Police believe he took a speedboat from Blaine, Washington, across a bay to Point Roberts, Wash., and then walked across the Canadian border.” Thus reporteth the Associated Press.

Point Roberts is now so famous that I have had two California friends/relatives get in touch with me to find out about how we’re doing. That is, have we survived the brief visit to Point Roberts of some Calgary guy who is alleged to have killed some Hollywood model after appearing on a TV reality show. Well, with that kind of drama, I suppose Point Roberts is a natural next step on one’s escape route. And then a stroll across the border into Canada before going on to Hope to commit suicide. I guess Hope would be the next natural step, although Bountiful might be an alternative choice. All that border guarding and this is the result? A Canadian guy who has inspired a manhunt takes a speedboat to Point Roberts and then walks across the border? I presume he was not traveling with stone fruits or contraband beef.

[Later addition: It occurs to me that if he knew enough to get to Point Roberts from Blaine, he might have known enough to walk across the border at some locale NOT the border station.]

I guess we were lucky to have been up here in the Sunshine Coast so we didn’t have to risk being stuffed into the trunk of a car or whatever by the alleged Mr. Jenkins.

During the same interval, or a little more, the plucky little Sterling Bank has come to yet another crossroads that has left it looking unclear about the next step on its journey. Early this year it announced no dividend for the common shareholders. Last week, alas, it had to announce that it was not going to pay any dividend to its preferred shareholders either, nor to its junior debt holders, and its fans responded by knocking it down another 20+ percent. Now, at barely half the price of Citigroup, it looks like it has a chance to get back to its low of $1.01. That’s a destination that sounds a little Hopeless. On the upside, it hasn’t yet received a ‘cease and desist’ order from the FDIC, which means it is not on the FDIC list of 300 deeply troubled banks. That drama continues.

Point Roberts Rules!

What we are festivating right now on the Sunshine Coast is Fibre Arts. This past week was the tenth annual Fibre Arts Festival, which includes classes, exhibits, merchandising, and evening parties to celebrate all things fibrous. And this would include the arts/crafts of woodworking, paper arts, quilting, art quilting, knitting, spinning, weaving, needlework, felting, crocheting, wearable arts, and rugmaking. Except for the woodworking, it is largely a lady activity, I’m afraid. I’m sorry I won’t live long enough to see such work not considered women’s work, hobby activities. It is possible that no one will ever live long enough, I suppose.

I’m not sure whether it’s the ‘women’s work’ category that drives the sponsors/organizers to need to have prizes for all those categories of work, but whatever it is, if you go to the exhibit, you are urged to fill out a ballot in which you get to designate the one thing in all this panoply of wonders that you think is the very best. How it is that you calculate that an exquisitely built wooden train is more best than an exquisitely felted unicorn and wizard I cannot begin to imagine, so I always throw away this ballot without forcing my little brain to tackle such perplexity.

The Festival does have independent judges, however, whose task is to decide, at least within the categories, which are the best and the almost best and the very nearly almost best and the slightly not as wonderful as the very nearly almost best. Even here, I’m really not all that sure as to how a well-made 8-foot-on-a-side Irish Chain quilt can be determined to be slightly better or slightly worse than a well-made 15”x24” place mat, or how a beautifully made Fair Isle Sweater is better than a beautifully made (and funny) pair of socks. But we can leave that to the judges who, I presume, sleep well at night.

In any case, there were about 70-80 interesting fiber pieces of all descriptions and well-madedness and well-designedness on display. And anyone who was lucky enough to be in town here and had the time to spend an hour or two looking at what these women (and a few men) had wrought, would have had a day well spent. But what makes this time-spending slightly more relevant than the time spent at the showings of all the other shows around at this moment, in one town or another, in one country or another, is that the first prize in the Art Quilt category was given to the quilt in the photo above which is none other than a representation of Point Roberts back in the days, many thousands of eons ago, when Point Roberts was but an island button, with no visible connection to what was to become Richmond and Vancouver, and when Tsawwassen was under the water, which of course prohibited it from having strip malls of any sort. (Also: no border station.)

The maker of the quilt is Rose Momsen of Point Roberts. And further to add to P.R.’s PR, my quilt received an Honorable Mention in the same category. Its photo is at the bottom and actually makes no internal reference to Point Roberts, being a story about a courtroom drama. The thing is, in Point Roberts, we have drama, but no courtrooms.

Congratulations, Rose! You did well by our home town.

Animal Mayhem

In the past two weeks, there’s been considerable animal mayhem up here on the Sunshine Coast. This is the time of year when it usually happens if it’s going to, but this was quite a bit more destruction than usual. The customary bear, messing around with garbage a few miles from us, found itself on the wrong side of a gun and, although he is no longer available for shooting, his pal apparently is, as a second bear has been seen eyeing the same trash can area subsequent to the initial bear removal. (This is, perhaps, a bigger trash problem than that seen down in Point Roberts?)

Then, a few days ago, a cougar was fatally shot after having removed 5 llamas and 5 sheep from the living livestock/pet world inventory of Roberts Creek in three separate incidents/properties (2 llamas, 3 llamas, 5 sheep) over two weeks. The cougar weighed in at 135 pounds and at least some people say they have spotted a second, bigger cougar in the same area.

Llamas are pretty big and have hooves, surely, so I’m sort of surprised that cougars would attack them. But I guess they look like prey and probably have in their native world very little experience with big cats. A lot of loss and a lot of worry from people in the neighborhood. My first thought was that a llama probably looks about the same size as me to a cougar. Not a pleasing thought. They have also had trouble with cougars over in Squamish (near Whistler) this summer. Maybe the dry spell? Maybe more construction of houses and loss of cougar habitat? Well, whatever the reason, the outcome is not likely to be a boost for the ‘live and let live’ ethic. And not likely to be an improvement in the quality of life of cougars, either.

Our bear is around, according to my neighbors who had him strolling through their back yard this week. I’ve given up composting anything but plant stuff so as not to encourage him to be dealing with food in our yard but the trees all round are beginning to fill up with ripe apples so it’s hard to discourage the bears from coming round with that attraction. And cougars? I don’t know what they want (other than livestock), but I’m definitely hoping that we don’t have any of it.

Indoor Orcas

When you are a quilter exposed to the public, the public tends to give you things. As far as I can tell, every household in the world has a closet where it keeps bags of special fabric. Might be leftovers from a couch re-cover, scraps from a dance recital, or remnants from bridesmaid dresses. One way or another, it’s something that had enough meaning in its original use to make it not possible just to let it fall to the trash or the thrift store. And, eventually, much of it comes to quilters.

I have had virtual strangers arrive at my door with a small bag of black tulle with embossed flowers, suitable for some part of very fancy evening wear; with a bag filled with 2 tweed jackets and 2 fabric purses, including one that was entirely covered with gold sequins; with a carefully folded two-yard piece of batik the owner had bought on foreign travel and had never found a use for, but who was now filled with the conviction that I, somehow, will find for her fabric the higher purpose it deserves. And I try to fulfill those beliefs. It’s all great fun, a chance to talk to people about fabric and their attachment to it, and a chance to get some excellent fabric that I might never, otherwise, run into to. Sometimes it’s even more than that, discoveries of things I’m delighted to discover.


So it was two weeks ago at the Art Walk when a couple came up to me to tell me that they had a bag of fabric they thought I might be able to use for the quilts with people, specifically, for the skin parts of the people in those quilts. We talked, I took down their address, and got round to stopping by their house a few days later to see what they had.

They did have the fabric (leftover from pillows for the couch…and a lot of it: they must have planned for more pillows than they got around to having made), but they also had orcas. In fact, this house was all things orca. It's a 2-story house on the south-facing beach in Point Roberts and, as it turns out, there are two separate telescopes trained on the water to catch sight of any passing orca or orca pod. There are photographs of orcas, paintings of orcas, and stone collage/sculptures of orcas.

The photo at the top is of the orca outside the main door, about 6 feet tall. It is granite with naturally-colored beachstones and shells forming the background. The second photo is over the stove, and is a 'portrait' of J-pod, one of the orca pods that travel by us in the Georgia Strait, and whose members, I was told, tend to stick very close together. The third--heron--panel, made by the same method as the door orca (and the driveway orca, of which I don't have a photo) is a panel in the shower/bath, again, very large. All three were made by the householder whose wife was offering me the fabric. The householder's line of work was software, and these were definitely not part of that work.

Yet another example of knocking on a door in Point Roberts only to find things/people/events that you didn’t know were there, but are very happy to know are there. I try to imagine doing this in Los Angeles, e.g., and I’m sure that there are lots of unusual things behind those doors--some of which I definitely wouldn’t want to see--but I suspect there are a higher percentage of the delightful kind in Point Roberts, especially the kind that people have made themselves out of a need to create. Or at least it pleases me to think so.

What Do You Really See?

What is life like in Point Roberts and the Roberts Creek area of the Sunshine Coast in B.C.? There are a lot of ways to approach this, and I use (mostly) words to try to write about it in this blog. One tends to get one’s own life deeply intermingled with Point Roberts’ life in such a presentation but I have come to realize that, at least for me, that’s inevitable.

In a very different way, Ed has taken to capturing his/Point Robert’s/Roberts Creek’s life visually. In his ‘Pick of the Week,’ he offers up a weekly sighting. You can see it here.

Carol Fuegi's current exhibit at The Blue Heron in Point Roberts (Gulf Road) is another place to see a set of gorgeous photographs--of the Pacific Northwest, in her case. For a small exhibit, the range is impressive. Some pieces are deeply dreamed; others exist in extraordinary realized detail. You'll have to get out of your house to see her work, but both these photographers are showing work that is well worth seeing, and especially if you want to practice your own skills at seeing: what do you see in what they see?