the listening days



http://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/128817097/1-vintage-carpet-beater-from-england?ref=market

 

Thank you to members of the Wellington Tangent Club for sharing their wonderful memories last night when I went to give them a talk: 'Underfoot Folk Art: the History and Art of Rag Rugs'. Rag and Bone men, washing coppers, rug beaters and hearth and home. Memories stretching back 74 years for one person...to the listening days, of wireless set and gramophone.

'slack kind of folk in housekeeping ways'

  Finished!

Rose with buds (Rag rug)

 

I love this exert from a letter written by a Nova Scotian rag rug maker in the 1920s:

 

"When I finish [a rug] I feel as relieved as if I had had a baby!!! When I am doing one I feel something akin to an artist because I look just as untidy as Rosa Bonheufs [sic] pictures, to say nothing of the state the house is in, and I ease my conscience by thinking 'We are an easy going slack kind of folk in house keeping ways but the fires of genius must burn.' "

Stella Surette, Pomeroy Ridge, N.B., 16 March 1924.
 (Nineteenth-century French artist, Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), was famous for her animal paintings and eccentric lifestyle which included "manly" dress and a menagerie of exotic pets).

From:

"As the Locusts in Egypt Gathered Crops":

Hooked Mat Mania and Cross-Border Shopping in the Early Twentieth Century

Sharon M. MacDonald

Material Culture Review. Volume 54, Fall/Automne 2001

http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17903/22068#no16

My house has been in a pretty pickle too, while I've been finishing the rug. Can't say my that conscience needs any "easing" 'tho!