Embroidered Pot Holders

 How many little girls, I wonder, begin working with embroidery at the age of six?  How many, I wonder, even know what embroidery is?  I started my life as a needlewoman at the age of three when my mother introduced me to Lacing Cards. I loved weaving that shoelace through the holes in the thick, chunky, cardboard picture. I would do it again and again and again. When I was six I graduated to perforated sewing paper and a fat, blunt-ended needle.  It was magic watching a picture emerge out of a series of Xs.  Gradually, as I got older, I was introduced to thread, and various embroidery stitches - running, outline, back stitch, lazy daisy, etc.  Tea towels (though, at that age, I never once had tea) and pillow cases were my specialty.

It's been a while since I've talked with young girls to see if this skill maintains. Sadly, I think operating a keyboard seems to be the only skill at which modern young people excel.  I mention this because I came across this worn set of potholders the other day. 

My mother had given them to me long ago. She made these, she told me, when she was sixteen. They were one of the first things placed into her “Hope Chest” (a chest or other storage unit in which young women collected household goods in anticipation of marriage).  

Take a look at them. The tiny, perfect stitching is phenomenal. 

The sweet pattern is certainly reminiscent of earlier days, but also the great skill in their creation. In all my years of stitching with my oversized, Mississippi Valley farmer-sized hands, I've never been able to accomplish what seemed to be natural to her.

If you have a young girl in your life, do encourage her to set aside her iPhone and learn to stitch. Her progeny will find her creations to be such treasures.

This post is linked to:

Favorite Things Thursday

Creamy Ham Towers

I began to call this a "vintage" dish, but then thought that perhaps that made it sound as if it had been around for a while, gathering dust, like me.  No, actually this recipe comes from a vintage cookbook.  I'm told that vintage is anything that dates back to the seventies, which, I suppose, would make me a Classic {sigh}.  That thought alone pretty much makes me want to throw myself on the floor, but I digress...

Back in the day, young women used to have something called a Hope Chest (a term, according to Wikipedia, used primarily by Midwestern and Southern U.S. women).  It wasn't literally a chest (although it could be), but more a collection of household items gathered by women in the anticipation of marriage.  In High School my girlfriends and I had a ball collecting such things for our "Hope Chests" which really amounted to plastic storage boxes that we kept under our beds.  Any time we'd spot a special deal, we'd alert the other and as a consequence, pretty much ended up with boxes of the same things. We embroidered tea towels that I doubt any of us, to this day, have ever used, collected dishware, pots and pans, and cookbooks.  The '70s were a decade of lots of rewards for shopping, banking, buying gas, etc.  Upon opening up my first savings account, I got a two-slot toaster for free (into the Hope Chest).  For buying gas (at 35¢ a gallon) I managed to collect an entire set of NFL glassware (ditto), and each week I'd go to the grocery store, buy $5.00 worth of items to make myself eligible to purchase one in a series of Better Homes and Gardens Cookbooks for $1.99.  The toaster, glassware, and dishes are long gone, but I still have the cookbooks and use them to this day.  The recipes are simple, generally call for on-hand ingredients, and while not gourmet fare, are great comfort food.

Feeling nostalgic yesterday (read: old and tired) I pulled out the cookbooks and ended up making a favorite dish called Creamy Ham Towers.  A friend joined us for dinner (and the Mizzou basketball game) and loved the meal, that also included broccoli, a side salad, and rice pudding for dessert. It made me smile to get such high praise for something so simple, but then any time you want high praise for cooking, invite a single man to dinner.

This recipe comes from the book called Make Ahead Meals, the page of which I'm sharing below.  Look to the right and you'll see a recipe for Oriental Beef Casserole, another make-ahead family favorite.  If the spatters are any indication, this book is well-used. I've not yet tried the Ham-Vegetable Strata.

Photo by Robert Redenbaugh

This is linked to Foodie Friday.


Modern women may want to add this gem to their cookbook collection.