{"id":23241,"date":"2012-09-26T00:08:15","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T07:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/?p=23241"},"modified":"2012-09-26T00:08:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T07:08:15","slug":"miss-wilma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/23241","title":{"rendered":"Miss Wilma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don’t miss Miss Wilma’s Christmas Show comin’ right-up-just-around-the-corner in November.\u00a0Get the low-down here<\/a>. And if for some reason, you haven’t\u00a0met or heard of Miss Wilma, below is the feature we ran on her in 2005 in an issue of my magazine. (She’s still sewing for us,\u00a0claiming she’s burned up several sewing machines:)<\/p>\n

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When pillows piled on chairs or plumped into couch corners are made by Miss Wilma and Friends, they are pillows that echo times past. Those are times Wilma Gilbert remembers well. She still lives in rural Kentucky, half a state from where she was born in the mid-1940s. And she cherishes memories of time spent with her grandmother, turning old scraps into colorful gowns for corncob dolls. \u201cWhen I was just little, I stayed a lot with my grandmother,\u201d Wilma says, her Southern accent deepening with the memories. \u201cMy grandmother had boxes and boxes of old quilt scraps, and I\u2019d sit and play with them for hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

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These days, Wilma shares a pastoral wooded farm with her husband, Sterling. \u201cWe have acres of oak and maple, walnut and cherry. Cedars grow here. And we brought in fir. This area one of the best little places left in the whole world. Everybody knows everybody. And it\u2019s just about perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilma and Sterling see the son and daughter they raised often. \u201cOur daughter, Susan, says she doesn\u2019t like sewing and antiques, but that hasn\u2019t stopped her from telling me what of my old furniture she wants someday,\u201d Wilma quips. \u201cAnd I can\u2019t get my son, Brian, to working on these pillows because he wants to fish all the time.\u201d Wilma\u2019s granddaughters sleep over every Friday night. \u201cSix-year-old Brieanne likes to be outside with my husband, playing with the animals,\u201d Wilma says. \u201cEight-year-old Brooke is just like I was. She loves making things out of cloth. She helps me make pincushions, and I give her the money out of them. It\u2019s a good way to start learning about making a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides pincushions, Wilma sews her signature pillows, old-fashioned baptismal-type baby dresses, drawstring bags and more. She sells all her wares at events like antique shows and sells cushions and drawstring bags through MaryJanesFarm <\/em>magazine. \u201cMaryJane walked into my booth at an antique show in Texas,\u201d Wilma recalls, \u201cand that was a wonderful day.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pillows that Wilma makes have history woven right into them. Each is down-stuffed and covered in repurposed ticking. \u201cI buy old feather beds,\u201d Wilma explains. \u201cI empty the feathers into garbage bags, then I wash the covers through a wringer washer with lots of bleach three times before they ever go into an automatic washing machine or dryer. After that, I iron the material, cut it up, make it into pillows and stuff them with feathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

It used to be easy for Wilma to find feather beds close to home. But she has been making pillows this way since 1984, and now uses more than 200 feather beds a year. So she has to seek them farther afield. \u201cI have people from here to Cincinnati buying them for me,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd when I can\u2019t find enough featherbeds to keep up with demand, I buy new pillows for the feathers. Then I put those feathers into old ticking from materials I find at antique shows.\u201d<\/p>\n

New ticking can be purchased from stores and catalogs, but Wilma finds it less tightly woven than vintage ticking. And that tight weave keeps the feathers from working out through the cloth. What Wilma\u2019s pillows look like depends on what old ticking she currently has on hand. \u201cBlue and white is pretty common,\u201d she says. \u201cRed and white, you can\u2019t hardly find it at all anymore.\u201d But there are many pretty fabrics still available. And once filled and plumped, Wilma\u2019s pillows are dressed in old-fashioned style. One may boast a tie-on cover of red-plaid ticking. The next one is tucked into crisp, white linen with a fancy lace edge. A third is encased with ivory linen with an original verse embroidered on one side and an old-fashioned design on the other. All are unique and designed to bring memories of simpler times.<\/p>\n

Wilma draws some of her pattern ideas from a turn-of-the-century book of patterns. \u201cBut most of my embroidery prose, I just make up,\u201d she says. \u201cLike the \u2018Good Morning, Good Night\u2019 verse. It\u2019s just whatever runs through my head, I\u2019ll make pillows with that embroidered on them. And if they sell good, I\u2019ll make some more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the sewing machines Wilma uses have led previous lives. \u201cI have 17 sewing machines,\u201d Wilma says, \u201cand when I did the first big order for MaryJane, I worked them so hard I almost burned them up.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a child, Wilma learned to sew on a treadle sewing machine. Sterling bought her first electric machine in 1963 for $50. She now owns a new state-of-the-art machine and a serger. But what she likes for her projects are the old Sears and Singer machines from the 1950s and \u201960s. \u201cThey\u2019re built sturdier and will take the heavier fabric,\u201d she explains. \u201cAnd the sewing I do is supposed to look like the sewing people used to do. The old machines have that stitch. So I always use those old machines.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s what Wilma grew up with. And it\u2019s that nostalgic theme that she continues to work into her pillow designs. Pillowcases that button or tie. Or cases short enough that one end of the striped ticking-covered pillow is exposed. \u201cWhen I\u2019m doing pillows, I think up my own patterns based on traditional methods,\u201d she says, and then she laughs. \u201cI\u2019ll never have time to make all the different pillows that have come to mind.\u201d But she keeps trying, because being industrious is something she learned young. \u201cI\u2019m the oldest of four children,\u201d she says. \u201cI grew up on a farm. And I\u2019m not one just to be sitting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilma\u2019s folks were married in 1943, when her mom was just 13 and her dad 17. \u201cMy mama had four children by the age of 20. And being the oldest, I guess I was sister-mom to three brothers,\u201d Wilma says. \u201cMy mom helped dad a lot in the fields with the crops, corn, tobacco and cattle. We didn\u2019t have a lot of money. But that didn\u2019t matter because no one else had any either. We kids were raised to be honest and to work hard for what we had.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Wilma\u2019s parents sometimes help her. Her father makes stick bobbins. Her mother hand-embroiders pillowcases. When a big rush order comes in, both of them stuff pillows. \u201cThey live over a hundred miles away,\u201d Wilma says. \u201cIf they were closer, I know they\u2019d help me even more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making those pillows is work done the old way. By people who understand what it means to \u201cuse it up, wear it out, make it do.\u201d The result is priceless. History we can hold in our hands. Pretty pillows that remind us of simpler times. Handmade by Miss Wilma and Friends.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Don’t miss Miss Wilma’s Christmas Show comin’ right-up-just-around-the-corner in November.\u00a0Get the low-down here. And if for some reason, you haven’t\u00a0met or heard of Miss Wilma, below is the feature we ran on her in 2005 in an issue of my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[549,588],"class_list":["post-23241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gift_for_gab","tag-maryjanes-gift-for-gab","tag-miss-wilma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raisingjane.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}