Come and enjoy an "Evening in Paris", the theme for our annual guild members holiday party, on January 10, 2017! The evening begins at 6:30 pm, a bit earlier than our usual meeting, with a pot luck buffet starting at 7:00 pm. This year the guild will be providing the main course ~ fried chicken. We respectfully request members bring a dish to share as follows:
Last name S- Z: apéritif (appetizer)
J - R: plat d'accompagnement (side dish)
A - I: dessert
Following dinner, we will enjoy a performance of THE BEDQUILT, performed by professional actress Michèle LaRue.
As is our tradition, a donation of a non-perishable food item, toiletry or paper product for Loaves and Fishes would be gratefully appreciated!
QUILTING IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS January’s program is something new: The Bedquilt, performed by professional actress Michèle LaRue. Two vibrant vintage stories, plus a revealing lecture, take us back in time, to the days when quilting was an essential part of everyday life.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Bedquilt follows the suspenseful journey of an unlikely heroine: Aunt Mehetabel is a downtrodden, elderly spinster, taken for granted by her New England family. Otherwise unskilled, she is “clever in the way of patching bedquilts.” Mehetabel grows throughout the story, winning admiration and finding selfrespect, as she painstakingly devotes herself to the realization of her ideal: “a pattern beyond which no patchwork quilt could go.”
The Bedquilt, written by Canfield Fisher in 1906, is introduced by the gleeful account of A Quilting Bee in Our Village, penned by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, eight years earlier. In Freeman’s little town, good food, gossip, and games make a successful bee—it’s not just about the sewing. LaRue concludes the program with Fisher’s surprising description of how she wrote The Bedquilt.
LaRue, who specializes in tales from America’s Gilded Age, creates a dozen distinctive characters in her energetic and empathetic performance of The Bedquilt and Bee. Stories from this period return us to a time when literature was written “for the ear,” she explains, continuing: “Before radio, family and friends made their own home entertainment—reading aloud by flickering candle, kerosene lamp, and gaslight. Today, only the lighting has changed: adult audiences still hang on every word. Despite TV and films, the Internet and special effects, we still crave simply to listen to a tale well told.”
LaRue has twice presented The Bedquilt at the invitation of the American Quilter’s Society International Quilt Show and Conference. “You had the audience in your command,” declared her host: “We could have heard a pin drop as they listened to your every word.” In Seattle, last year, audiences exclaimed, “I was spellbound!” and, “Riveting—twice—I would love to hear it again!”
The Bedquilt and of A Quilting Bee in Our Village are two of thirty stories in LaRue’s repertoire of vintage TALES WELL TOLD. She has performed these, collectively, in 400 venues, from Massachusetts to Washington State. A Chicago native, she has made her home in the New York City suburbs for . . . a very long time. LaRue is a member of both actors’ unions—Actors’ Equity and SAGAFTRA—and a much-published theatre writer and book editor.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879 – 1958), has been called “one of the most popular and engaging American writers of the first half of the twentieth century.” She wrote more than forty books, including translations and nonfiction, as well as novels and short-story collections.
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852 – 1930) spent most of her life in Randolph, Massachusetts. The people she knew and the scenes witnessed there form the background for most of her tales of New England rural life.
Last name S- Z: apéritif (appetizer)
J - R: plat d'accompagnement (side dish)
A - I: dessert
Following dinner, we will enjoy a performance of THE BEDQUILT, performed by professional actress Michèle LaRue.
As is our tradition, a donation of a non-perishable food item, toiletry or paper product for Loaves and Fishes would be gratefully appreciated!
QUILTING IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS January’s program is something new: The Bedquilt, performed by professional actress Michèle LaRue. Two vibrant vintage stories, plus a revealing lecture, take us back in time, to the days when quilting was an essential part of everyday life.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Bedquilt follows the suspenseful journey of an unlikely heroine: Aunt Mehetabel is a downtrodden, elderly spinster, taken for granted by her New England family. Otherwise unskilled, she is “clever in the way of patching bedquilts.” Mehetabel grows throughout the story, winning admiration and finding selfrespect, as she painstakingly devotes herself to the realization of her ideal: “a pattern beyond which no patchwork quilt could go.”
The Bedquilt, written by Canfield Fisher in 1906, is introduced by the gleeful account of A Quilting Bee in Our Village, penned by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, eight years earlier. In Freeman’s little town, good food, gossip, and games make a successful bee—it’s not just about the sewing. LaRue concludes the program with Fisher’s surprising description of how she wrote The Bedquilt.
LaRue, who specializes in tales from America’s Gilded Age, creates a dozen distinctive characters in her energetic and empathetic performance of The Bedquilt and Bee. Stories from this period return us to a time when literature was written “for the ear,” she explains, continuing: “Before radio, family and friends made their own home entertainment—reading aloud by flickering candle, kerosene lamp, and gaslight. Today, only the lighting has changed: adult audiences still hang on every word. Despite TV and films, the Internet and special effects, we still crave simply to listen to a tale well told.”
LaRue has twice presented The Bedquilt at the invitation of the American Quilter’s Society International Quilt Show and Conference. “You had the audience in your command,” declared her host: “We could have heard a pin drop as they listened to your every word.” In Seattle, last year, audiences exclaimed, “I was spellbound!” and, “Riveting—twice—I would love to hear it again!”
The Bedquilt and of A Quilting Bee in Our Village are two of thirty stories in LaRue’s repertoire of vintage TALES WELL TOLD. She has performed these, collectively, in 400 venues, from Massachusetts to Washington State. A Chicago native, she has made her home in the New York City suburbs for . . . a very long time. LaRue is a member of both actors’ unions—Actors’ Equity and SAGAFTRA—and a much-published theatre writer and book editor.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879 – 1958), has been called “one of the most popular and engaging American writers of the first half of the twentieth century.” She wrote more than forty books, including translations and nonfiction, as well as novels and short-story collections.
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (1852 – 1930) spent most of her life in Randolph, Massachusetts. The people she knew and the scenes witnessed there form the background for most of her tales of New England rural life.