Elsie Vredenburg

Elsie Vredenburg

MI48824-005

Elsie Vredenburg

Jan Frank

8/10/02

Moda Fabrics

East Lansing, Michigan

Francie Freese

Note: Michigan State University Museum also has a copy of this interview. The identification number there is 2002:63.54.

Jan Frank (JF): Today we're interviewing Elsie Vredenburg, and this is at the Great Lakes Folk Festival in East Lansing, part of the Quilters' [S.O.S.-] Save Our Stories. August 10th, 2002. The interviewer is Jan Frank. Let's start at the beginning here Elsie, and kind of give us an idea of when you started quilting and who influenced you early on.

Elsie Vredenburg (EV): I started out taking Home Ec in 9th grade like most every girl in my high school did and I really caught the sewing bug. I made a lot of my own clothes and so on. And then when I was about 15, my dad's mother came to live with us, and she was a quilter. And one day she just announced, 'you and I are going to make a quilt.' And like most 15-year-old girls, I probably wasn't really thrilled but my mother encouraged this and said, 'Well, you know, Grandma needs to be needed. She needs something to make her feel worthwhile and it won't hurt you to do this.' So, she ordered a pattern from the Michigan Farmer magazine, which had no name. Just a number, and we each made a quilt from that, and I still have that first quilt, although it's seen much, much wear. But that was hand pieced. The first three quilts I made were hand pieced. And Grandma did not own a sewing machine or I'm sure she probably would have used it.

JF: Do you remember the pattern on that first quilt?

EV: Oh yes, it doesn't have a name. Let's see, it has a Nine Patch in the middle of the block and then some kind of kite-shaped pieces in the corners. And I have used it again in a subsequent quilt in a different way.

JF: Now was this a bed quilt?

EV: Yes, it was.

JF: So where did you go from then?

JF: At 15 did you continue to quilt for--

EV: I did a couple more quilts while I was in college. I actually brought 'em into my dorm room and hand pieced when I had an extra few minute. But then I didn't do much for quite a few years because I was busy raising a family and I taught school for a while and sewed a lot of clothes. Maybe made an occasional quilt to give as a wedding gift or something for family members. But it was really the bicentennial in 1976 that got me into quilting. I wanted to make a quilt to celebrate the bicentennial and uh about that time someone had opened a quilt shop. Well, Karen O'Dowd had opened a quilt shop in Rockford, which is not very far from where my mother lives. And so she kind of sent me down there one day and Karen and I developed a relationship where I did some work for her in the shop. And this was a good opportunity to get some exposure and also to improve my quilting skill. By doing some custom work for someone else.

JF: Do you remember the colors in the 70s that were available in the quilt shop?

EV: Everything was earth tones. I got so sick of earth tones for a while. [laughs.]

JF: Then at that point were you hand quilting your quilts?

EV: Yes, I was hand quilting. By that time, I had figured out that if I could sew clothes on the sewing machine, I could sew quilts. And so I started machine piecing, but I was doing hand quilting.

JF: Just to kind of put us back at that point, what were you using for the batts? This would be back in the 70s.

EV: Polyester batts had just come out and they were uh pretty decent to work with.

JF: Yeah, yeah. Now were you doing just pieced quilts or were you doing appliqué?

EV: I did a little bit of appliqué, but I really am not a fan of appliqué. I mean I like to appreciate it and look at other people's appliqué, but I don't particularly like to do it.

JF: Now, so we're back in the 70s, the bicentennial era and you're quilting more at this point?

EV: Right.

JF: Are you had to be balancing it with a family?

EV: Well, by then my children were in high school. And pretty much looked after themselves. And they were very helpful about helping with cooking and housework. In fact, I've always said I believe in child labor, my children. [laughs.]

JF: I agree. [laughs.] Well, at that point, were you a member of a guild or a small stitching group, or were you doing this alone?

EV: It was around 1980 that I realized that there was a small guild in Cadillac, and I joined with that. And it was probably within a year or two of that same time that I joined the West Michigan Quilter's Guild. And I'm still a member of that. That's based in Grand Rapids.

JF: Where were you getting your inspirations at that time for the quilts you were making?

EV: There was not much there. Quilters Newsletter [Magazine.] was available. I think I started subscribing to that about that same time. In the late seventies or early eighties. Once in a while there was a quilting magazine that would show up on the bookshelf, on the magazine racks. I particularly remember one that was. Oh, I don't even remember the name of it now, but it was just quilting patterns like maybe from, maybe McCall's or somebody like that there were just some old traditional patterns and I know that magazine was dog-eared by the time I got done with it.

JF: What type of patterns were you doing?

EV: Traditional things.

JF: Traditional quilt patterns. Were they generally bed quilts?

EV: Yes, I prefer making larger sized things, bed quilts. Although now I'm probably focusing more on large wall hangings, in-betweener kind of sizes.

JF: Had you started to do any teaching at that point?

EV: No. Well, I did a couple of demonstrations, maybe at the fair. Our guild had a little quilt show at the fair and we took turns doing demonstrations. I really didn't get into teaching until probably closer to 1999, as far as teaching quilting.

JF: Then through the period; it's nice to talk to someone like you who has a span, a time span--

EV: Um hum.

JF: With your quilting. Through the 80s, going into the 90s, how did your quilting change in terms of design or color?

EV: I was still very traditional at that point. In the 80s, I would say, my big focus became doing arts and crafts shows. I was not working outside the home at the time. I felt my kids needed me at home and my husband was underemployed and I needed a few extra dollars. So, I sort of hung out my shingle. Started taking in quilting and doing it for other people and also did arts and craft shows, which means you have to make a lot of little, under $25 items, which I did not really enjoy as much as I enjoy making the larger quilts that are more of a challenge.

JF: Right. Now, through the 80s and 90s, we see the technology changes--

EV: Oh yes.

JF: A lot for quilting.

EV: Yes.

JF: So, what did you--did you go from your cardboard templates to the--

EV: To the rotary cutter.

JF: Rotary?

EV: Started doing some machine quilting. I got a computer, and I used my computer in conjunction with my quilting somewhat. And that's what I'd love to get into.

JF: You have done a number of quilts, and we'll talk about a few of them, but can you take us through the design process that you use? For instance, do you use a design wall? And you just mentioned the computer.

EV: Um hum.

JF: Do you plan the whole thing ahead or are you more spontaneous?

EV: Well, that kind of depends on the quilt.

JF: Okay.

EV: I do have a small design wall. The room I use as my studio is kind of limited in space, so I really don't have a large area, but sometimes my bed functions as a design wall when the quilt gets too big for the wall. I like to be surprised. If I'm doing a traditional quilt, maybe something that's scrappy with lots of different colors in the blocks and so on, I don't really. I have a general idea of where I'm going with it but I kind of like the surprise of putting it up and saying, 'Oh wow, I didn't see that in there before.' And 'Oh, isn't that neat?' And it happened totally when I was unaware of it. If I'm doing a pictorial quilt, I usually start with a photograph and I have several different ways that I can get that photograph enlarged. Sometimes I'll scan it into my computer and enlarge it as large as I can, trace over that, scan in the tracing and chop that up into little pieces and keep enlarging until the house quilt that's hanging behind us took forty sheets of paper to get that enlarged. Sometimes I hand draw it. I've used copy machine. I've made it into a slide and projected it on the wall and drawn over that. Whatever works, whatever my mood is at the time. Once I have the thing enlarged to the size I want, then I put some tracing paper over that, and I start sectioning up the design. I actually make my own pattern by finding the straight lines. If there are curved lines in it I'll straighten them because short straight lines, changing angles frequently will give you the illusion of a curve. So, when I do my pictorial quilts, you will not find a curved seam in them but yet it still looks like they are. I just divide this design into sections that can be easily pieced. I think paper foundation piecing, although that's not the method that I use, but the same design ideas apply. What I use is a method called freezer paper piecing, where I transfer this design, in reverse, to freezer paper. And then I cut the freezer paper up and use it as individual templates. They are ironed onto the wrong side of the fabric and then I take my rotary cutter and my ruler and add a quarter of an inch seam around each piece. And then I stitch those together, now the paper's going to be on the outside when you do that and then I stitch right along the edge of the paper. And then that becomes like traditional piecing except that you've got some really odd, shaped pieces and probably no pieces in the quilt are the same shape.

JF: Right. Now when did you first start entering quilts in contests?

EV: Actually 1987.

JF: Do you--

EV: I entered--

JF: Remember that first quilt?

EV: Yes, I do, it was a scrap quilt that I made out of out of one of Judy Martin's first quilt books. And I entered it in the National Quilting Association show in the scrap quilts division and it won a blue ribbon.

JF: Oh really?

EV: And that really surprised and pleased me and it kind of gave me a nudge. Because I had, you know, you open your mouth, and you say foolish things sometimes. I had made the comment in my local quilt guild that I didn't think. I'd been to a major quilt show and was just overwhelmed by the workmanship, and I made the comment that I didn't think anybody in our group was quite up to that standard, you know, we didn't have that kind of workmanship in our group. Well, within probably three years after that three of us had won awards at Paducah. And so, you eat your words sometimes. [laughs.] But a friend had entered hers in Paducah in 1987 and won an award and I have a few competitive juices flowing around in me and I thought if she can do it, I wonder if I can. And so, I entered one the next year and won a third place in Paducah. And so, from then on, I just determined that I would make one quilt a year for exhibit, to show, and sometimes I do manage more than one but that's my goal is to have one major piece a year that I can enter in shows.

JF: I know you are very prolific, and everyone really enjoys seeing your work.

EV: I think I'm product oriented. I like to have it finished.

JF: Do you finish your projects that you start?

EV: Mostly, yes.

JF: You don't have a whole closet of unfinished--

EV: I do have a few. I have to confess to that.

JF: Okay. I would like to switch now and talk about the quilt that we have hanging up here.

EV: Okay.

JF: If you could tell us a little bit about that and where it's traveled and how you made it.

EV: Okay. That came about in 1997; my husband and I took a trip to Colorado to visit some relatives. And we sort of took the long way home, visited more relatives in South Dakota. And they took us out for a drive just to see the countryside and we drove by this old set of farm buildings that was structurally sound, but you could see nobody lived in it for a long time. And it was just so picturesque. And I made 'em stop the car and I went and took a picture and had in my mind at that time a quilt called "This Old House." And it kind of stewed and I didn't go anywhere with it, which is often the case because it might take me five years to get from the idea to the actual quilt just because of the demands on my time. And in a couple of cases, it's been, well I didn't really know the technique yet that I needed to make the quilt so this one kind of got put aside in the memory file. And then in October of 1998, my husband died suddenly and, you know, I went through a lot of other things getting my life back together, and then in early 2000, I got this picture out and decided it was time to do something with "This Old House." And what I ended up with was a two-sided quilt that has on the front an old weather-beaten looking house and kind of a cloudy sky and a dead tree representing our earthly life. The reverse of the quilt is the reverse image of the house so that the two of them line up exactly. It has a live tree, it has-- well it actually has the Tree of Life, the River of Life, a rainbow, and heavenly symbols. And this represents our life in heaven. And this is made in memory of my husband.

JF: Can you give us, I know it's complicated, but a short idea of how you accomplished the reversibility on this?

EV: Oh, that was fun! [laughs.] Actually, I made the center panel of both the front and the back, and then to do this I had to reverse the pattern from the one to the other, and then I did some more drawing on the back so that they're not exactly the same. I made the center panel of both and pinned them carefully together, matching all the seam lines, without any batting in between. And I trimmed the edges, so I knew at that point they both matched up. Then I took 'em apart and added the borders, which are the same on both sides, there's a little lattice work that kind of looks like old-fashioned many paned windows. And then I layered it with the batting in between and tried as best I could to get things matched up by laying. I do my layering on my dining room table. I got it to the point where I felt well it's probably pretty good and then I hung it up and would take a pin and would put it in an intersection on the front and see where it came out on the back and tried to line up that way and just had to do some adjusting and fiddling on it. It took me a whole day just put it together.

JF: Where has this quilt traveled?

EV: It's been in several quilt shows. It actually has won Viewer's Choice in two of them, one at Houston in 2000, and at the Dogwood Quilt Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2002. It was in American Quilter's Society show in Paducah, Kentucky in 2001 and won a third place there. Just got back from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from "A Quilt Odyssey." Didn't win an award there but it was exhibited. It's been in some other shows where it has just been exhibited and didn't win an award.

JF: Well, you've brought a number of quilts here today and I think by looking at them we can get an idea where you are as a quilter now and you can give us some ideas. The next small quilt that we can talk about is, tell us the name of it.

EV: Okay, this is called "Stew Pot and the Chickateers." It was made for a specific, it was an invitational exhibit put on by some people in the Flint area, and the exhibit was called "Artimals," and we had to do some kind of a quilt with an animal in it. And after mulling it over for a while I finally decided on these chickens because--

JF: Why chickens?

EV: My daughter occasionally raises a few chickens. And she had these Araucanas, which are quite colorful, and uh my granddaughter named the rooster Stew Pot. And actually, she called the hens the chickateers. And I just kind of kept thinking, oh, you know, that's kind of cute for a name and so that's why I did it. And this is another quilt that's designed in the same way, with the freezer paper piecing. And actually, I found the design for the rooster from computer clip art, which I enlarged and put tracing paper over and drew the lines.

JF: Are you using the computer quite a bit now?

EV: Yeah, it varies. I do have a quilt program called The Electric Quilt, which I use to design traditional quilts and I'm probably more likely to use this when I'm dealing with a customer because I can real quickly put something on screen that they can see, and they can have a visual idea of what their finished quilt is going to look like.

JF: Um hum. Do you do much quilting for sale?

EV: Not as much as I used to. I still do hand quilting for other people but I'm really sticking to repeat customers. I'm not actively seeking work in that area.

JF: Because you're quite prolific. I don't know how you have the time.

EV: Well, I think as I get older, I tend to slow down a little bit too and decide I need to not spend as many hours a day at the quilting frame as I used to.

JF: Well, we're all interested in work habits. Especially those of us that never finish many things. Do you quilt a certain number of hours a day? Do you have a routine or--

EV: I do.

JF: You do?

EV: And I really do think that being organized is a big part of getting more done. My day goes something like--I don't know if you're interested--

JF: Yes.

EV: In a play-by-play--

JF: That's what I want.

EV: Or not, but I get up at 6:30 and I eat my breakfast and have a little devotional time. And then I go to my computer. I read my e-mail and I have some quilting forums that I belong to on the internet 'til probably sometime between 8:00 and 8:30. Then I go in my studio and maybe do some piecing, little jobs that take a few minutes kind of thing. I might piece a block or two or whatever's going there. About 9:00 I go out for a walk--

JF: Um hum.

EV: Because I've really discovered that quilting is the kind of an activity that does not give you a lot of physical activity and I need to get some exercise. So, I take about a half hour walk. Then I come back and usually spend the rest of the morning or a good portion of it, at my quilting frame, hand quilting. Maybe I'll do a little more in the studio and then I take an hour lunch break. Spend a little more time on the computer during that lunch break, and then I come back and quilt for another hour after lunch. There's a radio program that I like to listen to--

JF: Um hum.

EV: and so, I'm, the quilting is a good time to do that, and it keeps me tethered. [laughs.] Then I maybe quilt a little more, go get the mail, do some other things around the house. At 3:00 I sit down and read the paper, with a cup of coffee, take another break. And this is probably a routine I inherited from my in-laws, this coffee break [laughs.] kind of thing but then some more quilting. You know, just whatever I have going, whether there's more pressure on to finish the quilt I'm hand quilting or whether some other ideas. I bounce around a lot during the day, so I have several projects going all at once. And after dinner a lot of times I have meetings in the evening and I'm gone, but if I'm home I usually spend some more time quilting and maybe work in my studio awhile, depending on what demands--

JF: Um hum.

EV: The most attention right then.

JF: Okay.

EV: So, I used to put in 14 hours a day quilting, working on quilt-related things. Now I'm actually hand quilting probably three or four hours a day at most, and then doing. So, I have slid down the number of hours that I put in, but then I'm not making the little stuff that I need for art fairs anymore and I can just--

JF: Right.

EV: Concentrate on the projects that I have going, most of which is for customers.

JF: You have an excellent routine. There's a quilt here on the end of the table. What is the title of that?

EV: This is called "Sunflowers and Sunlit Ridges." And the picture was taken on the same trip that I took the picture of the house. When we drove through the Badlands, I only took one picture and that was one that I kind of staged because I had the quilt in mind when I was doing it. And it's a scene of just a vista of mountains just going on and on and on. But right along the road were growing some wild sunflowers. And I actually got right down in front of the sunflowers so that they would be in the foreground of the photo. And I used that photo to design the quilt. But it's a little different from the others in that I tried to do something a little more abstract with it. The Badlands are brown and grey, rather uninteresting as far as the color that you see. And I wanted this quilt to be a little more colorful so I actually before I started with the quilt itself what I did to design this one was had the photo made into a slide and projected it on the wall, the full size that I wanted the quilt to be. Then I put paper up on the wall to draw on. But before I started drawing on the quilt, I just made some boxes on the paper, and they were kind of arbitrary borders only they weren't all equal on each side. And then I drew the picture of the quilt, sectioned it up so each one of these became a border and, in those borders, I shifted color. I still have the overall design of the mountains but the color shifts in these boxes, so it makes gives a more abstract look to the mountains.

JF: Did you do this with the freezer paper technique--

EV: Yes.

JF: again here?

EV: Yes.

JF: Now what did you learn in this quilt--

EV: Oh boy I learned--

JF: that you hadn't--

EV: a lot. [laughs.]

JF: experienced before?

EV: Every quilt has some new things in it.

JF: Um hum.

EV: It's hard to think of anything specific that I learned, but it was quite a challenge to do it because it's larger than I usually work.

JF: Yes.

EV: And just the act of getting 60 by 80-inch piece of paper to behave itself.

JF: Uh huh, right.

EV: Oh, actually it was several pieces taped together.

JF: Now has this been in any shows--

EV: Yes, it has.

JF: Or--

EV: It was in Houston last year. It was in a show in Bloomington, Indiana, where it won an award. It won an award in uh Gettysburg at Quilt Odyssey just last week. It's been a couple of others that I can't think of right now. And it's going to be in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine. I'm not sure when. They're going to do a "First Quilts, Last Quilts" article and that one and my first quilt will be a part of that article.

JF: We'll look forward to that.

EV: So, I've no idea how long a time there is on that.

JF: Um hum. Now your quilting career has taken a number of directions.

EV: Right. I wear lots of hats.

JF: And I think this small quilt is another--

EV: Okay, I'm--

JF: Thing that you can tell us about.

EV: about, this has a kind of a history behind it too. Nineteen ninety was the two hundredth anniversary of the Coast Guard and Betty Boyink arranged a quilt show. In conjunction with that was quilt contest. The quilt had to have something to do with the Coast Guard. And I made a quilt with lighthouses on it. And they were all Michigan lighthouses. And the quilt was fortunate enough to win the Best of Show, which was a purchase award and that quilt now resides in the Tri-Cities Museum in Grand Haven. But a few years after that I was, actually it was kind of something we kicked around on the internet a little bit with a group that I belong to, and this one person said, 'You know you ought to take some of the lighthouse designs from that quilt and market them as individual patterns.' And at the time I'm thinking, 'Who'd buy a pattern I made?' [JF laughs.] It's I kind of lack confidence in myself sometimes I think, and I just couldn't believe this happening. But yet, you know, the idea wouldn't leave me alone. And my husband was very encouraging about it. He says, 'You're not ever going to know if you don't try.' And so, I thought okay. So, I did up a couple patterns, and because they have the pattern printed to freezer paper, they have to be printed by a commercial printer, and I had to make a sizable investment in it. They won't print less than 1,000, so it was a decision that I really wrestled with to do this. But I started out with two patterns, and they met with enough success that I did two more. And then a little while later I did two more.

JF: Were they all lighthouses?

EV: They're all light, well, at one point I started doing a few barns too, but I have lighthouses and barns. And now I've done 16 patterns in the last uh about seven or eight years I think and this little quilt that you just showed is the last one in my series of patterns and it's actually two lighthouses in the Straits of Mackinac area, White Shoal and Round Island. And they're all done with the freezer paper technique, and they're printed to freezer paper so that the end user only has to take the pattern out and start cutting it up. She doesn't have to trace it to freezer paper like I had to do to start with.

JF: Right. So do you enjoy this aspect of quilting, coming up with the designs, and dealing--

EV: Yeah.

JF: With it commercially?

EV: I have to be in the right mood. I don't enjoy marketing. And I'm not very good at that or I'd probably sell more patterns, but I basically have a distributor who handles them and sell a few to quilt shops and have them to take with me when I go to teach and things like that. But I really didn't want the pattern end of it to take over my whole life. I just wanted to have another avenue to get my designs out there. So, I really do enjoy wearing several hats and uh having a variety of things going on and I think I must have a little attention deficit [laughs.] because I'm always looking for something else to do, moving around a lot.

JF: Now if someone said to you. You met a stranger and they said, 'Now what does an Elsie Vredenburg quilt look like,' What would you say?

EV: Oh dear. [laughs.]

JF: Well in this year, 2002.

EV: Well, this year probably I would say the pictorial ones. And, you know, mostly I'm known for the lighthouses, they call me--some people call me the lighthouse lady. I did have a quilting judge say to me a number of years ago, 'The one thing I like about your quilts is that they don't all look the same. That I can't look at a quilt and say it's yours, like I can with some people because you have enough different subject matter going.' I don't know if that's true anymore now because I have a larger body of work and it probably is more recognizable.

JF: Is part of that because you keep several projects going at one time, do you think?

EV: Right. And I enjoy the pictorial, but I also enjoy the traditional.

JF: So, you still do them.

EV: And sometimes I will use traditional blocks as a border around a picture in a quilt because I like to combine the two. And I have some ideas churning for some more things in that nature, but I don't know yet what's going to happen with that.

JF: Where do you see yourself going in the next five or ten years?

EV: I'd like to improve my machine quilting. Actually, this fall I'm going to do something which is kind of, I think it's kind of exciting, I'm going to a quilt retreat in Colorado, in the mountains, which is going to be five days of independent study where we'll be spending the first day going around the area photographing things and then we'll spend the rest of the week creating from our photographs.

JF: Will that retreat have a leader or--

EV: Yes, Ricky Tims who's in charge of it. And it's going to be held at the Glen Eyrie Castle in Colorado Springs which is--

JF: Oh wow.

EV: A beautiful, beautiful area.

JF: Wow.

EV: So I'm really looking forward to that and don't know yet if that's going to have any influence on my work as far as where I'll go. Time will tell on that one, but the one thing I am really feeling a need and a desire to do is to improve the quality of the machine quilting.

JF: Yeah. And part of your quilting seems to have a lot to do with travel and where you've been.

EV: Right. I guess my quilts are pretty personal in nature when you get right down to it. I do pictures of things I've seen. They come out of my own life experience.

JF: How do you feel about quilting or sewing as kind of a healing art?

EV: Oh, wonderful. Actually, I have a slide lecture that I do that's called "When Life Gives You Scraps, Quilts of Healing and Hope." And this came about because of the quilt, well I did several quilts after my husband died that I considered healing quilts. And one day I was driving down the road on the way home from a teaching engagement and this idea just popped into my head to do a lecture on healing quilts. And I thought about it a little bit and then I put out the word on the internet and at three quilt shows and so on, inviting other people to send slides of their quilts that they had made in response to something in their life, a life event. And I really got a nice assortment of quilts, a nice positive response to it. In fact, people just poured out their hearts on paper to me. I asked for a little artist's statement of maybe a half page and some of them were three and four pages long, so I had to do a lot of editing. But we need to talk about our events, the things that bother. Some of these were illness, deaths, divorce. One of 'em even was something which to me is kind of silly, but it wasn't to the person who was involved, was the death of a cat. The things that affect us in our lives, we need to share them with people and the quilts really do help. And they expressed several different reasons why. For me, I say quilting's like the home keys on a keyboard, it's just where I feel comfortable, I feel normal. It's very soothing. One lady said that it was something you could be in control of when everything else was out of control. Lots of different uh ways that people would express that the healing does occur through quilting. Medical people will tell you that quilting lowers blood pressure, relieves stress, so I think it's something that we need to encourage people to do because it does have those qualities of being soothing and healing.

JF: Is there anything else you would like to add to this interview that I haven't asked you that you really need to say?

EV: Haven't I talked enough? [laughs.]

JF: No.

EV: Well, I could say this that I have three granddaughters who spent a week with me this summer and we worked on a quilt for each of them, so we've got another generation coming up that I hope is going to get involved in quilting.

JF: The future of quilting.

EV: Right. It's not going to be completely lost because there's--

JF: One person at a time.

EV: Right. And there are a lot of younger people who are taking up quilting. I have a niece who's in her twenties who just made her first quilt and she never really sewed before and she's just wildly enthusiastic about it so I'm just trying to encourage her too.

JF: We keep passing it along.

EV: Right.

JF: I think it's probably--

EV: It's not the lost art that people have been saying--

JF: No.

EV: That it--

JF: No.

EV: Is, not at all.

JF: No, it's very much alive.

EV: Exactly.

JF: That's true. Well, this is the end of the interview with Elsie Vredenburg at the Great Lakes Folk Festival in East Lansing, on August 10th, 2002.