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Tells how friendship quilts recorded family statistics and friendships and includes instructions on how to make three of these lovely quilts.
Traces a pioneer family's history through a quilt
In As Long as We Both Shall Love, Karen M. Dunak provides a nuanced history of the American wedding and its celebrants. Blending an analysis of film, fiction, advertising, and prescriptive literature with personal views from letters, diaries, essays, and oral histories, Dunak demonstrates the ways in which the modern wedding epitomizes a diverse and consumerist culture and aims to reveal an ongoing debate about the power of peer culture, media, and the marketplace in America.
Trick-or-treating. Flower girls. Bedtime stories. Bar and bat mitvah. In a nation of increasing ethnic, familial, and technological complexity, the patterns of children's lives both persist and evolve. This book considers how such events shape identity and transmit cultural norms, asking such questions as: * How do immigrant families negotiate between old traditions and new? * What does it mean when children engage in ritual insults and sick jokes? * How does playing with dolls reflect and construct feelings of racial identity? * Whatever happened to the practice of going to the Saturday matinee to see a Western? * What does it mean for a child to be (in the words of one bride) "flower-girl material"? How does that role cement a girl's bond to her family and initiate her into society? * What is the function of masks and costumes, and why do children yearn for these accoutrements of disguise? Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives suggests the manifold ways in which America's children come to know their society and themselves.
A lavish wedding marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture - romantic love and excessive consumption. This work offers a look at the historical, social and psychological strains that come together to make it the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture.
Quilting hobbyist McDowell sees each moment as a piece of quilt that God weaves together to make a glorious lifelong work of art. In this book, various quilting patterns are used metaphorically to show how God can make the scraps of our lives into something beautiful. This updated and repackaged edition features new four-color illustrations and photos of traditional quilt patterns that mirror God's often intricate work in our lives.
Quilting is a fun hobby -- but where do you begin? Get the know-how you need to create beautiful quilts and decorative quilted items If you're interested in taking up quilting as a hobby or simply looking for new project ideas, Quilting For Dummies is for you. From selecting fabrics and designing a quilt to stitching by hand or machine, this friendly guide shows you how to put all the pieces together -- and create a wide variety of quilted keepsakes for your home. You may think you need some sewing experience before you can start cutting and piecing, but that's simply not the case. You can use this book even if your sewing expertise stops after threading a needle. Quilting For Dummies starts...
"As a blanket, a commemorative covering, and a work of art, the quilt is a nearly universal cultural artifact. In recent years it has been recognized as one of our most compelling symbols of cultural diversity and the power of women. In this collection, Cheryl B. Torsney and Judy Elsley bring together eleven provocative essays on the quilt as metaphor--in literature, history, politics, and philosophy. This interdisciplinary approach makes Quilt Culture an extraordinarily rich exploration of a cultural artifact whose meaning is far more complex than that of a simple bed covering."--Publishers website.
Priscilla J. Brewer examines the development and history of the first American appliance—the cast iron stove—that created a quiet, but culturally contested transformation of domestic life and sparked many important debates about the role of women, industrialization, the definition of social class, and the development of a consumer economy. Brewer explores the shift from fireplaces to stoves for cooking and heating in American homes, and sheds new light on the supposedly "separate spheres" of home and world of nineteenth- century America. She also considers the changing responses to technological development, the emergence of a consumption ethic, and the attempt to define and preserve distinct Anglo-American middle class culture. There are few works that treat this significant subject, and Brewer covers impressive new ground. Extensively documented—based on letters, diaries, probate inventories, census records, sales figures, advertisements, fiction, and advice literature-this book will be valuable to scholars of American history and women's studies.
Intimate Ephemera is the first major study of autobiographical writing produced and consumed in a youth subculture. Investigating the uses of the zine form for life writing, it examines the recurrent themes in texts circulating in Australian zine culture, including depression, consumerism, popular culture and political identity. Intimate Ephemera also examines zine culture as a unique community of life writing and reading, where handmade texts circulate in an economy of gifting and exchange utilising the postal system. The book analyses the material diversity of zines as handmade objects, examining the use of the photocopier and craft techniques in these limited edition publications, bringing a focus to the role of the text-object in communicating personal experience.