Nora Hoffman Macbeth: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Craft"

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: November 17, 1899-April 7, 1994

Combining Beauty and Practicality Through the Craft of Sewing

My maternal grandmother, Nora Hoffman Macbeth, was a talented craftswoman with the needle. She married in 1926, and had my mother in 1928, just a year before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression. She and my grandfather, Ivan Macbeth, like nearly everyone in their area, struggled to hold onto their farm and earn enough to survive. Nothing was wasted—everything was put to multiple uses. My grandmother was very practical, but she also had an eye for beauty and tried to make her surroundings pretty.

She and her sisters would buy plain cotton pillowcases, and use their embroidery skills to make the hems bloom with violets, roses and apple blossoms. Flour came in big fabric bags, and Nora would make dresses for my mother from the flour sacks. She would use scraps to sew clothes for my mom’s dolls as well. 

                                  Pillowcase embroidered and edged by my Grandma Nora


Clothes that were worn out were never thrown away—they found a new home in the “rag bag”, a burlap sack hung in the basement. Buttons would be cut off first for re-use, and saved in the “Button Box”, which I loved to dig through as a child, sifting the different colors and shapes, loving the big, heavy coat buttons the most.

The rag bag clothes would be cut up, either to be re-sewn into clothes for my mother and uncle when they were young, or cut into pieces for a quilt. Grandma made some lovely quilts—I remember a Double Wedding Ring one, as well as Tumbling Blocks and a Crazy Quilt. She would point to the fabric shapes and tell you whose clothing it had been—“That was a summer dress I had—it was lovely with short puffed sleeves. And that was a shirt Ivan wore for years...” 

I still have a lovely little doll quilt she sewed, featuring charming applique tulips made from fabric scraps and sewn on a creamy white background.

Doll quilt about 18x28 inches

I also have a larger baby quilt featuring applique animals that I believe she originally sewed for my mother, Ione, but was also used in my crib when I was young. The animals are charming, with some embroidered details, like the chicken below.

                       


When I was a child, my grandmother had a sewing machine in a charming sewing table that once held a Singer treadle machine before my grandfather adapted it to hold a modern electric machine. The table had four tiny drawers stuffed with spools of brightly colored thread, tiny scissors, pins and needles. I loved to watch her sew, bathed in the sunlight from the narrow window at the top of the stairwell where the machine sat. She sat on an old round swivel piano stool painted a glossy white to match the sewing table. I wish when they sold her house furnishings at auction that I’d taken that table and stool—so many regrets!


                 These vintage items are similar to my grandmother's--she painted hers white.

At least I still have a few examples of her needlework to save for my children and to help me remember that she was a bit of an artist with needle, thread, and fabric.

                               Last sample of Grandma Nora's embroidery--flannel baby blanket