Haute Couture Has Nothing Over Mrs. Grace Snyder

Flower Basket Petit Point Quilt by Grace Snyder, 1940

Grace McCance Snyder, the Nebraskan pioneer, started piecing quilts when she was only seven. Charged by her father with watching the cattle in the fields, she would lie or sit on the back of her favorite and sew all day. Through the next decades of her life, Mrs. Snyder made tens of quilts for her family and later in her life for exhibition. She became Nebraska's most famous quilter and was inducted into the Quilters' Hall of Fame in 1980 at the age of 98. Two of her quilts are on the list of the Twentieth Century's 100 Best American Quilts.


Section of the Petit Point quilt showing the needlepoint effect of the piecing.

Mrs. Snyder accomplished the Flower Basket Petit Point quilt in 16 months, basing her design on the pattern of a china plate produced by the Salem China Company of Ohio. In her design, she used a triangle for each stitch of the petit point to achieve a pointellist impression on the quilt's surface. It took Mrs. Snyder 87,875 tiny triangles, no bigger than a fingernail, and 5 miles of thread to sew to create the Petit-Point quilt!

Here are other samples of Mrs. Snyder's quilting.







A documentary segment has been produced about Mrs. Snyder's quilting, and her work and life were featured in the International Quilt Study Study Center and Museum of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

You may also want to see: Fashion and Quilting: Two Roads

If I Could, I Would...

Evening dress, Chanel, 2011

If I could, I would support the haute couture, speaking of it here in its most narrow definition as the "creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques." Its literal translation is "high sewing."

In this narrow definition, today it involves only those few houses that are official, correspondent, and guest members of the French Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.
Haute couture in itself is not a road that leads to riches. The standards for hand sewing, materials, and design for those with the ability and interest to buy unique pieces of the finest clothing in the world are kept extremely high. For instance, as Karl Lagerfeld explains in describing to an interviewer in the BBC production,The Secret World of Haute Couture , the feathers for his designed evening gown composed of embroidery in the bodice and feathers in the skirt, are specially produced on a farm in South Africa. In short, all pains are taken to render an article of the highest possible quality and all the fabrics are created and treated specially. For his 2011 fall-winter collection, the designer Valentino, reported the September Vogue, showed a "magnificent coat of hammered gold brocade ... which had the brilliant texture, almost a relief effect, of a Russian icon's surface, clocking in at 750 hours' worth of embroidery."


Chanel embroidered gossamer, 2011.

Such "high sewing" could become a lost art. Twenty years ago, a haute couture designer would fashion up to 160 different pieces of clothing for a collection; today the number hovers around 40. In the years after World War II, Parisian haute couture kept 46,000 embroiderers, lacemakers, and hand seamstresses busy in subcontracting ateliers. Today that number has dwindled to 4,500. The money lies in ready-wear, which are duller shadows of the original dress.

Despising ready-wear as a form of prostitution, the French designer Alix Gres, for example, died in penury and obscurity in 1993, after creating clothes for such non pareils as Jacqueline Kennedy. Madame Gres, as she was called, was a sculptor who turned to dress design in the 1940s. Taking inspiration from the Greek and Roman statues of antiquity, she molded a dress from one, uncut piece of cloth directly on the model, through pinning tiny pleat after pleat--with exquisitely graceful results.

A gown of white silk jersey by Madame Gres, 1958

For sure there are plenty of designer clothes that I find incomprehensible or dislike. That said, haute couture repesents the pinnacle of excellence in turning a two-dimensional object--in this case, the cloth--into a three dimensional object, the finished article of clothing, in a way that expresses both the designer's and the owner's ideas and sensibilities. Those who collect haute couture regard their purchase as an investment in a work of art, in the same way that a wealthy person collects original paintings. I can only imagine that if haute couture succumbs, the quality of all of our clothes, including those in the sales bins at our favorite department store, will slip irrevocably downward.

You may also want to see:
Welcome Back Lace!
In Praise of Sewing

Home Economics Revival?

Home Economics Class--on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1951. Today, for the most part, only private Christian schools have home economics as part of the curriculum.

Although couched in politically correct terms--as a means of fighting obesity--the revival of home economics classes as part of children's education was posited by Helen Zoe Veit in an article in the New York Times September 5. Veit feels compelled in her first sentence to acknowledge that such a proposal goes against the grain of feminism, stating this untruth right off the bat: "Nobody likes home economics."

The basis for Veit's proposal rings true though: "Reviving the program, and its original premises — that producing good, nutritious food is profoundly important, that it takes study and practice, and that it can and should be taught through the public school system — could help us in the fight against obesity and chronic disease today. The home economics movement was founded on the belief that housework and food preparation were important subjects that should be studied scientifically."

Who can argue with this, except those who feel that cooking, housework, cleaning, and other household tasks are inherently demeaning to women and should be performed by presumably paid (mostly female--oops!) servants.

Veit does admonish though that "today we remember only the stereotypes about home economics, while forgetting the movement’s crucial lessons on healthy eating and cooking. Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook. Our diets, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, have contributed to an enormous health crisis."

I believe she is right, as the effects of a diet of constantly eating restaurant food, take-out, and fast food quickly lead to body ballooning. Restaurants and processed food manufacturers have the incentive to lard their food with fats, sugar, and salt, because it is an easy pleasure for the palate and they want you to come back for more. That is not the basis for home cooking--you are already there! Here the goals are great nutrition and great taste at lower prices. Home economics classes can give both women and girls the basic rudiments of how and what to cook. Today Veit's proposal was seconded in the Food and Think blog of the Smithsonian magazine and noted by National Public Radio and The Atlantic.

Catharine Esther Beecher, who believed the education of women was crucial to the survival of the republic.

Home economics has a proud tradition among women in the United States and was first launched by Catharine Esther Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe), whose Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) became the domestic bible for women in the settled areas of the United States. For Beecher the proper management of the home was intrinsic to the proper rearing and education of children.

Today, women of all ages can fruitfully turn to Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson (1999). Mrs. Mendelson presents clear and exceedingly helpful discussions of everything from making a bed to nutrition. Offering thorough guidance and suggestions, she never lectures. This book is a great gift for any young woman starting out in her own home or apartment or for a bride.

Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts. She won her way to my heart when she reported that she had held many jobs in her life, including being an attorney, but found performing domestic duties in her home the most gratifying.

But back to home economics classes. In my high school, the girls took home economics, while the boys took shop. The boys always returned from shop to academic classes with a happy sense of accomplishment. Probably we girls less so. Home economics was not taught from the height of this topic down to gritty details, but was taught like First Aid 1: clear instructions only for the most vital things you need to know. It was assumed you already knew why you needed such a course; there was no motivational excitement on the part of the teacher. I think it could be a lot more fun. Nevertheless, I took great satisfaction in making a summer skirt, and the experience of making something wearable prompted me to sew many of my own clothes during my high school years.

Ms. Veit has my gratitude for bringing up such an audacious proposal as the revival of home economics as part of the curricula in public schools. I suspect though that for many, fighting obesity is merely the calling card for ideas of reviving home economics classes and good practices. Fast food and eating out is expensive and goes out of the budgetary ballpark in hard times. Now is the time to learn to cook!

Victorian Husbands and Wives

See the entire set at Retronaut compliments of Lisby.

I feel inspired to write a story for each couple, don't you?

Grace Snyder's No Time on My Hands

Grace McCance Snyder's autobiography, No Time on My Hands, written with her daughter, Nellie Snyder Yost, is the account of her pioneer life from 1885--when Grace is three years old and her family moves to Nebraska from settled Missouri--until 1962, a full 20 years before Grace Snyder died at the age of 100. I have read all of Laura Wilder's books of life on the prairie and other fictional and non-fictional accounts of pioneering women, but No Time on My Hands makes these accounts even more vivid and awe-inspiring because of the great detail that Grace shares about the work that she and her mother and sisters did at their sod homestead on the plains of Nebraska.

The book's title comes from Grace's paternal grandmother, Mrs. McCance, who was heard to say that "if there's one thing more'n another I simply can't abide, it's time on my hands." The elderly Mrs. McCance, as Grace's mother and Grace herself, were in a state of perpetual motion tending to the work on their farms and ranches. Grace and her grandmother thrived on work of all kinds; Grace's mother, of more fragile health, had long bouts of illness and a perpetual cough and her thin body seemed nearly crushed by the weight of her daily burdens. Nevertheless, she too lived to raise all of her children and see her great-grandchildren thrive.


The McCance Family. Grace's parents, Mr. and Mrs. McCance are standing together on the right. The six McCance children (there were eventually nine) are seated, with Grace third from the left. Grace's older sister Florry (second from left seated) died in childbirth.

As I read this 541-page book, I jotted down the different activities that these women routinely performed. Given that many of these tasks must be repeated daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly and also that calamities--primarily caused by extreme weather--posed constant disruptions to any routine, it is difficult to imagine how a woman would plan such a whirlwind of work as that performed in a well-managed homestead. Here is my list:

Creating and tending a vegetable garden (be prepared for heartbreak caused by hail or loose animals pummeling the garden to pulp)
Gathering cow chips for fuel
Berry gathering
Making jam
Drying corn Grinding corn for cornmeal
Churning butter
Curing meat
Making cheese
Preparing meals
Washing up the dishes and pots and pans after meals
Making yeast (boiling cornmeal and hop leaves to a thick mush and drying it in hard cakes, out of doors under cheesecloth in the summer and in the oven in winter) Baking bread
Making desserts with fruit and baking custards
Putting up (canning) fruits and vegetables for the winter and spring

Washing clothes
Making starch (smearing potato starch on a large piece of canvas and letting it dry, then peeling it off, and storing for use)
Hanging and gathering in clothes
Mending clothes--(a major activity, for example: During broomcorn harvesting, "each day the sharp stalks ripped their jacket sleeves to ravlings, and every evening Mama basted the backs of old overall legs to the sleeves, replacing the shredded patches she'd sewed on the night before.")
Making clothes--without patterns
Making quilts--Grace became a nationally known quilter--more on that later

Keeping a sod house clean (no mean feat)
Home decorating (curtains, etc.)

Breastfeeding babies
Watching young children
Homeschooling children

Feeding hens and chickens, goats, and cows, all of which contribute to putting food on the table
Milking the cows and/or goats

Killing snakes--one day a rattler got into the house and was sitting on the same blanket Grace's baby brother was on. Grace's mother killed the snake and then sought and found the den where it had come from and killed all 22 rattlesnakes therein.

Nursing the sick (Grace describes being at the bedside of a seriously ill person for days on end and also night and day)
Tending to and healing wounded or sick animals
Laying out the dead
Helping afflicted families

Even with this workload, Grace's mother found time to make delectable picnic food when the family went to town for the annual Fourth of July celebration, which, next to Christmas, was the biggest holiday. "Under the seats we carried a bag of grain for the mules and a tubful of picnic lunch--including

one of Mama's five-layer cakes, three white and two yellow, with custard filling between the layers and whipped cream, shredded coconut, and black walnut meats on the tops and sides.

Hands of a Farmwoman, photo by Russell Lee, 1936. "Grandma's hands were thin and brown and spotted, their soft, paper-dry skin crisscrossed with high, dark veins, and the fingers twisted and knotty, but she would look at them with grim satisfaction--anyone could see she'd never had any time on her hands."

Jessamyn West: "It's Making Something Beautiful"

In the Old House by Childe Hassam, 1914

Jessamyn West, the 20th-century author of The Friendly Persuasion and many other novels, snapped at a young feminist interviewer when asked if wanting to keep her home neat was an obstacle to writing because she was a woman. The interview, published in the book Women Writers of the West Coast (1983), took place on November 12, 1980. The exchange on order in the home went like this:

[Interviewer] Chapman said, "But you've written that, being a woman, you sometimes feel a certain sense of guilt that gets in the way of your writing. For instance, you wrote, 'I wish I could unlearn the need to straighten the house before writing.'..."

West countered: "Where is anything contradictory about wanting to sit down in the midst of something that is pleasing to the eye? Answer that, please!"

Chapman asked: "What about the fact that you didn't tell anyone you wanted to write until you were 26? You said you thought you were somewhat mad initially for having an urge to write, and I wonder if those feelings of responsibility for the house and the fear of admitting you wanted to be a writer are both tied to your being a woman."

West replied, "I don't tie them to either one. I had a sister, and I think a writer would be lucky if she could be born this way, who didn't give a damn if things are in a wild clutter. She wouldn't have been bothered if there were a pair of shoes on the mantle, but as it happens, I am not that way. I wouldn't feel happy writing until I took the shoes off the mantle and put them down where I thought they belonged. That is just a piece of my temperament. I don't understand the house not being orderly, because that's like painting a picture. It's making something beautiful. That is what I feel about straightening a house."

Village Life in America by Caroline Cowles Richards

Caroline Cowles Richards in 1860

Village Life in America is a name given to a diary written by one Caroline Cowles Richards, later Mrs. Edmund Clarke, from 1852, when Caroline was 10 years old, to 1872, when she is married and has a family. The writer lived in Canandaigua, New York, in the finger lakes region, with her maternal grandparents, Mrs. and Mrs. Thomas Beals, and her sister Anna, younger by four years. Caroline's mother had died, and their father had sent the girls to be raised by the Beals, as he pursued his career, remarried, and had a new family. He wrote to the girls often. Even with these paltry facts, we can note that the nuclear family was not so stable as we might think in yesteryear, as it was often torn asunder by death, and children may be sent to live with relatives rather than stay with a single parent. This is just one example of the richness of comparisons and insights into mid-19th-entury housekeeping, social mores, attitudes, child-rearing, and religious belief and practice that are to be gained from this slim and charming book.

The diary takes us through the Civil War. With a Puritan grandmother, Caroline had been well taught of the necessity to end slavery. She describes in detail the patriotic fervor that gripped the village upon the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, which reached a fever pitch in the early days of the war; of the town's deep sadness at the loss of so many of its menfolk and sons; and its intense joy at the war's end followed only 10 days later by its shock and grief at the assassination of Lincoln.

As a historical record the diary is priceless. As a record of the coming to age of a young girl, it will leave voyeurs disappointed. Youthful perplexities are not subjects for discussion; Caroline says that she wanted to write down only the good things. Nevertheless, we are privileged to learn about daily life in the Beals household, as if we were walking through a museum of their house except they are still there and interacting right before our eyes.


First Congregational Church of Canandaigua, the center of social life for the Beals household, where they attended church, Sunday School, lectures, and meetings regularly each week.

Within the pages of the book we find a social fabric quite different from that of life today. The community revolves around its churches, and the household relies on written Scripture for the raising of children. Particularly, Grandmother Beals cites a verse or two from the Bible, it seems, at any point that she admonishes or reprimands her two granddaughters. For example, Caroline wrote in 1854:

I almost forgot that it was Sunday this morning and talked and laughed just as I do week days. Grandmother told me to write down this verse before I went to church so I would remember it: "Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to offer the sacrifice of fools." I will remember it now, sure. My feet are all right any way with my new patten leather shoes on but I shall have to look out for my head… Grandmother always comes upstairs to get the candle and tuck us in before she goes to bed herself, and some nights we are sound asleep and do not hear her, but last night we only pretended to be asleep. She kneeled down by the bed and prayed aloud for us, that we might be good children and that she might have strength given to her from on high to guide us in the straight and narrow path which leads to .life eternal. Those were her very words. After she had gone downstairs we sat up in bed and talked about it and promised each other to be good, and crossed our hearts and "hoped to die" if we broke our promise. Then Anna was afraid we would die, but I told her I didn't believe we would be as good as that, so we kissed each other and went to sleep.

Grandmother Beals is especially fascinating because she is of Puritan stock and was born in the 18th century (1784). She tells the story of how as a little girl, "down in Connecticut in 1794, she was on her way to school one morning and she saw an Indian coming and was so afraid, but did not dare run for fear he would chase her. So she thought of the word sago, which means 'good morning,' and when she got up close to him she dropped a curtsy and said 'Sago,' and he just went right along and never touched her at all. She says she hopes we will always be polite to every one, even to strangers."

Grandmother Beals is a "good neighbor"--delivering food to families under duress, treating her two hired girls (who live in the household) well, and extending herself to African Americans. In one case, she invites to dinner a former slave woman, and Caroline is surprised to see that the grandmother has her eat in the dining room with the family.

Grandmother Beals was dearly loved and respected by her granddaughters:

I asked Grandmother to-day to write a verse for me to keep always and she wrote a good one: "To be happy and live long the three grand essentials are: Be busy, love somebody and have high aims." I think, from all I have noticed about her, that she has had this for her motto all her life and I don't think Anna and I can do very much better than to try and follow it too. Grandfather tells us sometimes, when she is not in the room, that the best thing we can do is to be just as near like Grandmother as we can possibly be.

Despite the determination of both grandparents to stay on the "straight and narrow path" to heaven, there is plenty of wit and humor in the Beals household. Anna is a jokester, but unless her jokes are sacriligious, she never seems to get in trouble for it. Here is an entry from 1858 that gives an idea of the ruefulness with which the family members thought of each other:

Frankie Richardson asked me to go with her to teach a class in the colored Sunday School on Chapel Street this afternoon. I asked Grandmother if I could go and she said she never noticed that I was particularly interested in the colored race and she said she thought I only wanted an excuse to get out for a walk Sunday afternoon. However, she said I could go just this once. When we got up as far as the Academy, Mr. Noah T. Clarke's brother [and Caroline's future husband], who is one of the teachers, came out and Frank said he led the singing at the Sunday School and she said she would give me an introduction to him, so he walked up with us and home again. Grandmother said that when she saw him opening the gate for me, she understood my zeal in missionary work. "The dear little lady," as we often call her, has always been noted for her keen discernment and wonderful sagacity and loses none of it as she advances in years. Some one asked Anna the other day if her Grandmother retained all her faculties and Anna said, "Yes, indeed, to an alarming degree."

I would love to post the entire diary, but no need, because you can read it right here. I recommend this fascinating book for all, but especially for girls aged 10 to old age.