Eldorado Store

I could not believe what she was saying. My quilting buddy Susan was suggesting I enter a national quilting challenge. Though I had only been quilting for about a year, she thought I was getting good results and improving all the time, and was therefore trying to talk me into taking the plunge.

At the time we were having this discussion, I was attempting to spread out into printed fabric. Finding it hard to disengage from my favored solids, I had been studying fabric collections in the quilt shops. I didn't want to get stuck in a rut of my own making, so I allowed myself to be impressionable as I explored.

“You are as good a quilter as anybody else. I'd enter myself if I had the time. I like Lynette Jensen's Thimbleberries® fabric, and Mike carries the whole line. Let's just go look at what he has.” Hmmm. I recognized that Susan was using what appeared to be the incremental approach.

Mike Woodson had once been in the retail world, working for the Dayton-Hudson Corporation. He must have come by it naturally, because his family owned the general store and post office in Eldorado, Iowa. On a visit home, Mike learned they were going to close the store because his grandmother, who wanted to sell it and retire, couldn't find a buyer. He had many fond childhood memories of the store, buying penny candy, and visiting with people who had stopped in to shop, or to pick up their mail. Not wanting the place to close for good, Mike packed up and came home to run The Eldorado Store. That's El-doh-RAY-doh, by the way. Not El-doh-RAH-doh.

Mike and his grandma became good companions, and in her retirement she would make quilts. Once, when she was under the weather, she sat at the machine and stitched while Mike would cut and press for her. He starting getting into it. On the way to a quilt shop one day, Grandma commented to Mike that it was too bad they had to drive so far to buy fabric. That's how the idea for the quilt section of the store was hatched. Now shoppers could get a box of Jell-O® for a potluck salad, pick up their mail, and buy fabric, all in one trip. Life was good.

Susan and I chatted animatedly on the way to Eldorado. Quilters are always animated on the way to buy fabric. On the way back, we are frequently more subdued, plotting how we are going to justify new yardage if challenged at home. Sometimes we even daze ourselves at the apparent lack of self-control. Many a scheme has been hatched on those trips home that involved keeping fabric hidden for months, in the trunk of the car or under the bed. When discovered, the guilty threadhead would remark, “Oh, tha-at? Why, I've had that for ages.

I mentioned to Susan that Mike would be the worst husband for a quilter, because he'd overheard all of these tricks from his women patrons, and could easily debunk them. Of course, Susan's take on the situation was that Mike would be the perfect spouse, since he already has all the fabric.

Eldorado is so picturesque that without witnessing it firsthand, it defies belief. Nestled in the valley of the Turkey River, there are around fifty houses in town, though the unpaved streets are marked by big-city signs. St. Peter Lutheran Church stands boldly, it's uppermost portions viewed white among a bed of treetops. The sight of its steeple and roof is a treasured reward for northeast Iowans, as we round the curve at Goeken Park and descend the “Eldorado Hill”, five miles north of West Union on Highway 150. There is no sign to beckon quilters – you just have to know to turn east at the Eldorado sign, go all the way to the end of the street, turn left, and drive a block or so north to the store. Don't worry. You can't get lost.

Once there, parking isn't a problem, but shoppers are required to ascend an incline from the street, and a few steps up into the old general store. There is a double-doored airlock, a godsend during bitter northeast Iowa winters. You always have to figure out which side of the double door to open, and likewise, which way the heavy plate glass and wooden door to the store will open – in or out. By then, my nostrils are flaring, and I'm not in the mood to experiment. Pull/push, whichever works. No wonder I never remember. My eyes are fixed on the prize.

“Here they ah-ahre!” Susan swooned melodically. “Oh, these new ones are nice.”

“Uh-huh. The colors are subdued; pleasant, even.”

“These would be great for the Thimbleberries® Pieces of the Past challenge. Why don't you at least send away for the guidelines? Maybe you won't even like the challenge, but you can't know until you see it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If it doesn't interest you, what have you lost? If you think you want to do it, though, you'd better request the guidelines soon. The entry deadline is coming right up.”

“Oh.”

The muted colors of the patterned fabric did look old-fashioned. Pieces of the Past. I could do something with this. Maybe.

Susan went about making her purchases, chatting with Mike about quilting in general, and discussing the fact that he had made the personal acquaintance of Miss Lynette Jensen, herself, creator of Thimbleberries®. My little newbie-self was agog over such a happenstance. This was before I fully appreciated how talented a merchant Mike is, and how connected members of the quilting world are with one another. I felt all homey and good about Thimbleberries® by the time I left the Eldorado Store. The bell rang on Round One.

Round Two.

“Did you get the challenge guidelines?” I had dialed Susan's number when the manila envelope arrived.

“Yes. There are several appliqué blocks. I love appliqué, you know."

“I know you do. And...?”

“Well, I can use plain muslin, bleached or unbleached, so I'm treating that as a solid. Let's go back to Mike's and take another look at the fabric.”

“I'm already there.” Within a matter of minutes, we were making a second animated trip to The Eldorado Store and Mike's collection of Thimbleberries®. I had taken a good look at the challenge blocks, thinking about how they fit into my past... my family's past... pieces of our past.

I was down for the count by the end of Round Two. I didn't even hear the bell. I was already taking some of the challenge blocks, sorting through the bolts of Thimbleberries®, and boarding the bandwagon of my first national challenge.

Among the appliqué blocks were cherries, Rose of Sharon, and a Grandmother's Fan. Garden? Did my grandparents garden? I hadn't heard either The Barn or the Peg talk about choring in the family garden, and The Peg was known for her purple thumb. The Barn's parents were married in an orchard in South Dakota, on my great-grandparent-Snorteland's farm. A cherry orchard seemed fitting.

These garden blocks were to be fabric, not rooted in soil. The Peg spoke expansively about her own mother's sewing skills. I never knew her – she died when my mother was only nineteen. She had sown seeds of interest in all things fabric in her daughter, who in turn scattered them through my days.

When Grandmother Dorotha Beal Ott was only four years and eleven months old, her picture was taken as she gazed into a mirror. The mirror reflected her tiny-featured face, and her long, naturally curly hair was turned towards the camera. When I was the exact same age, my mother saw me when she looked at that photograph of her mother, and had my picture taken in the same pose. I had always been told I look like my mother, and she in turn thought I resembled her mother. Those companion photographs were imprinted into my mind from a very young age, and when The Dot was four years and eleven months old, her photo was taken to match. Only my mother's missing image broke this chain.

The Peg was seventy-three-years-old when the book she wrote about growing up on an Iowa farm during the 1920's and '30's was accepted for publication. The Iowa State University Press added it to their Iowa Heritage Series. She fittingly named it Threads of Memory, and in the epilogue my mother wrote that she “put down my needle and took up my pen” to write it. On the cover was the childhood photo of her mother, gazing into the mirror.

On a visit to see us in Decorah, I took my mother to the photography studio and had her picture taken. She sat in a chair, holding the book she wrote with her mother's mirror-picture on the cover. Her chair was positioned so that she faced a mirror, and the gap had been closed. Now all four generations of look-alikes were joined in black and white by that pose.

Dorotha planted a fabric garden, and her descendants reap its bounty. Beyond Dorotha, beyond The Peg, beyond me. Our entry in the Thimbleberries® Pieces of the Past national quilt challenge would be a garden-themed quilt called “Dorotha's Bounty”.

Ta-daaaaa.

With the histrionics were out of the way, I needed to design the dang quilt and get the dad-blame thing made up.

I collected the cherry blocks together for an “orchard”, and decorated a “path” around them with my Grandmother's Fan blocks. The Rose of Sharon brightened the outside of this pieced section in four places, and I added a rail fence. The white muslin rails were stitched with a “picket” on one end, to signify the fence that encompassed the fabric garden. For the border, I chose a series of garden path blocks, and I left a few plain unbleached muslin spaces for quilting-stitched packets of seeds and sprouting weeds.

Time was closing in on me. I had taken longer than I should have to join the challenge. I discussed my dilemma with Mary Ann Keppler at her shop in rural St. Olaf, Iowa, and she agreed to use her long arm machine to stitch part of my quilt, and leave a few places untouched for my needle. She patiently guided her machine to make my requested “cobblestones” on the Grandmother's-Fan-come-garden-path blocks. She cross-hatched some of the background, and stitched around the border where it would have taken me too long.

When it was my turn, I put my own little stitches into the plain muslin squares. I began a tradition when stitching on that quilt, a story that I will save for another time. I designed a label to draw directly onto the muslin backing. Considering the harvest of Dorotha's Bounty, I sketched some imaginary wild flowers into a remembered blue and white vase.

The vase represented a pair of blue and white vases that were a piece of Beal family lore. I learned about these vases years earlier on a trip to the Northeast. Family in Dover Foxcroft, Maine, displayed the vases on the mantelpiece in the living room of their enormous Victorian house. That day my mother related to us that those vases had been held on the lap of the Beal ancestor, carried from the civilized East to the wilds of the Midwest by a pioneering family member, and returned the same way as a gift many years later. I retrieved one from my memory to put on the label.

But one stem, it's bloom in contrast to the coneflower and the gerber daisy, held a spool of thread where the flower could have been. It bends slightly forward. Into a mirror. And it reflected back another treasured memory. Of Dorotha, of The Peg, of me, and The Dot, joining us in fabric through “Dorotha's Bounty”.

End of Round Three.

Susan's husband Chip has a photography studio here, and she talked him into taking the slides I needed to send into the challenge. I mailed them, hoping for the best, but I'd come to love my grandmother-y quilt. I had arranged to have my mom and both her brothers use the quilt for awhile. When I got it back, I wanted it to be used by Dorotha's children. It became moot to me how it would do in the national Thimbleberries® challenge.

Good thing, too. It totally flopped.

I stopped by The Eldorado Store a few weeks ago. I had been lost to other pursuits for a few years, and I saw that things had changed there again. The post office is under a different roof, still attached to the main store. The general store itself seems to have been given over completely to the quilt shop, and a sign on the door says, “Open Saturdays and by Appointment”. Mike has been teaching business at the community college, and life has evolved into this new arrangement. I called and asked him about this modification, and we chatted for awhile. I look forward to meeting him again in Eldorado.

“Dorotha's Bounty” is planted on the bed in The Dot's room. It's technically the guest room, but you know how that goes. I continue to make many quilts with solids, and I've never used only one fabric collection in any one quilt again. It's good Susan talked me into doing a national quilt challenge, though – so I could find the pieces of my past.

And the winner is -- Kari Burns!

Smack down.

Copyright © July 2005 Kari E.O. Burns