Every year for Walt’s birthday I make German Chocolate Cake. The recipe comes from the Iowa State Fair Cookbook from 1985.
Author: Michelle Page 29 of 34
My Grandma James was born on July 4, 1912. We always enjoyed celebrating her birthday, and as many of us as possible came to Watertown, South Dakota, every year.
Irene Belle Hodge was born to Clyde and Bessie May Trevettt Hodge in Emerson. Nebraska. She married Claude James and they had 7 children. She was a nurse in Watertown for many years.
Chuck, Paul, Lynda, Mardell, Claudette, Sherrey, Grandma and Delores
I dislike sitting idly and doing nothing, so I often take small sewing projects along with me when I have appointments or I am traveling. It might be knitting, cross-stitch, a beading project, or a hand-pieced or appliqued quilting project.
I used to just toss the tools in a bag and go, but found myself hunting for the various things I needed. So I spent some time thinking about what I needed for my projects and sat down with pencil and paper to design a kit (or two) for travel. Stick on hook and loop tape keeps the kits closed.
Sometimes the challenge in genealogy is sorting out language differences, both in translation and in writing styles. In his post about the Bruegenhemke place, Walt mentioned high and low German. We will look at that and then look at writing patterns.
Dialects
Low German, High German
German language has several dialects, just like many other languages. High German is the official written language of Germany. It is based on the spoken languages of the highlands of southern Germany and is spoken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Low German is based in old Saxon language and is not spoken much these days except in certain areas in northern Germany. It does not have an extensive amount of literature like high German does.
In my post about the challenge quilt Snow Goose, I mentioned paper piecing. There are plenty of tutorials about it out there, but I thought I would show you how I do it.
When you are researching family history, you often find that names have changed over the years. It can make the search for your family’s history challenging.
There are a number of reasons a name might change – immigration, transcription errors, translation, marriage, a desire to fit in the local community or a desire to hide from something in the past.
In our family history, we have a few names that have changed over time – most notably Hoel. Several of Walt’s ancestors spelled it Hole. It seems to have changed back and forth a couple of times, and it also depends on which document you are looking at for a few family members. Walt’s great-grandfather was listed as John Swisher Hole. His son, Walt’s grandfather, was William Henry Hoel.
In my discussion of color in this post, I showed a quilt that used two blocks to create the design. This quilt also uses two blocks, and creates an interesting secondary design.
This was from one of the earliest classes I took after I joined my local quilt guild. It was before I started putting labels on my quilt, but I am pretty sure it was made in 2003.
The two blocks used in the quilt are commonly called a square-in-a-square and an eight-pointed star. Blocks often have more than one name, depending on when an where they were published. This square-in-a-square has also been called an economy patch.
The eight-pointed star in this quilt has two different color layouts.
The one on the left is the center block. The one on the right is the four corners.
The instructor was encouraging us to use our color placement to make secondary designs. I was so new to quilting that I didn’t understand what that meant until I took this class.
By this time, I had started to understand that the quilting design added to the overall appearance, so I spent some time deciding how to quilt this one. The arc shape is the same size in the pale green circles as it is in the diagonal line going across the quilt from corner to corner. You can see it much better in this photo of the back of the quilt.
Quilts offer a lot of opportunity to play with color and color placement. When you change the color placement on a design, you can get very different looking results.
I have taken a fair number of quilting classes over the years. My favorite classes are those that stretch my skills and teach me new things.
In 2008, my guild had a teacher in named Sharyn Craig. Her class was teaching a couple of piecing skills – curved seams and y-seams. Piecing is the term for how you put the fabric together to make the quilts.
Delores was born on June 7, 1934 and died on January 25, 2005.
I remember sitting on the porch at my aunt and uncle’s farmhouse, listening to my Aunt Dee playing the guitar and telling stories. When I was very little, I thought she made up all the songs she sang for us. I remember being very surprised to learn that she didn’t write “You Are My Sunshine”
I was looking through some pictures the other day and I noticed how many of them showed people fishing. It was a popular way to pass the time for Carl and Georgie and other members of their family.
