I Get to Enjoy My Quilted St. Patrick's Day Table Runner for 30 Hours Before I Have To Put It Away

One year ago, I had the idea to make a table runner for St. Patrick's Day using a deep cut from my Ancestry DNA test. My family has been in America for shockingly long considering how poor we still are. You'd think that people who were in the country before it became a country would have built up some kind of generational wealth by now, but I guess my people were too busy subsistence farming in the asshole parts of Kentucky and Arkansas to enslave other people's ancestors or steal land from the indigenous populations. I'd tell you that it's nice not to have that history of wrongs on my conscience, but somehow they all ended up fighting on the wrong side of the Civil War anyway, sigh.

Anyway, before they lived life in America working all the least profitable vocations and never buying any good land, all my ancestors came from around the Great Britain-ish area. I've got at least a couple of ancestors who emigrated in the early 1700s from Wiltshire, which you know I find super exciting because they knew Stonehenge! I know of a couple more ancestors who came from York, which tracks because Ancestry says about 22% of my DNA comes from northeast England. My DNA as a whole, according to Ancestry, is basically an amalgamation of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, with a few Celts thrown in. Ancestry says I'm 6% Welsh, which in my mind perfectly explains how I picked up Middle Welsh so easily in grad school (I haven't read it since, but we don't need to talk about that part) and 11% Irish.  

I've never tried my hand at Irish Gaelic, but my heart tells me that I'd also pick it up super quickly. I am not taking questions about this statement at this time.

The Welsh lineage has yet to reveal itself in my family tree, but the Irish part does track, since I can trace a couple of McClanahans who emigrated from County Tyrone in Ireland way back in the 1600s. Congratulations on missing the Potato Famine, guys, but you literally landed in Virginia, so why the hell did your grandkids decide to move to a stupid rocky mountain in Arkansas and cosplay famine living?

I say from the middle of bumfuck Indiana, where I own approximately 6 acres of property that tries very hard to be a wetland, including a 1,000 square foot house that tries very hard to fall apart at the seams at all times. Literally--I got up yesterday morning to discover that one of the bathroom floor tiles--WHICH IS PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--had worked itself loose, and there's a section of the family room floor--ALSO PRACTICALLY BRAND NEW!!!--abutting an outside wall that has clear signs of water damage that mysteriously just appeared one day. It's almost like having a whole entire giant elm tree fall right on top of your house is just generally bad for it!

FYI for the future when I one day need to try to sell this money pit: I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANY FOUNDATION ISSUES. Also, I'll for sure be selling this place as-is. I don't want to have to replace the terrible windows, there's definitely something squirrely with the septic system but it still works fine so I'm just ignoring it, and I think there's a human grave about ten feet from the back deck.

ANYWAY. I had the idea for a St. Patricks' Day table runner themed on my Irish DNA a year ago, but as of a month ago, that project still looked like this:

This is Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, and it is my favorite sewing book. I hog my library's copy, so if you want it you'll have to put it on hold.

Fortunately, I made plenty of progress after that, and two weeks ago, the project looked like this, all pieced and ready to be backed, quilted, and bound:

And then I got kind of busy at work, and then the younger kid came home for Spring Break, so I did not touch it again until yesterday, when I spent half the evening binging The Crown (I LOATHE how everyone treated poor Diana OMG! And damn but Scully goes hard on that Margaret Thatcher dialect!) and doing this:

And now I have this!

Because I did all the quilting literally yesterday, I didn't feel like going to the store for green thread and convinced myself that it's more eco-friendly and a better embodiment of my vow to boycott the economy to use the closest match that I had on hand, which was only slightly greenish and looks frankly pretty darn brown now that it's covering the table runner and can't be taken back:

Whatever. It's not perfect, but it's done, and that's much, much better!

Other than that--and, okay, the fact that I need to do probably one more round of quilting right there by the binding--I LOVE my new table runner. I'm obsessed with how the piecing turned out, and I like the look of the quilting (if not the color of the thread, dang it):

I'm not sure if the joke is too obscure, or just too stupid, though, because everyone I've tried to show my table runner to looks kind of nonplussed about it, and then when I explain the joke--("It's my Ancestry DNA! It says I'm 11% Irish!") they honestly somehow look even more nonplussed, but whatever. I think it's hilarious, and I'm the only voting demographic!

This morning, I got to start my St. Patrick's Day with my brand-new table runner, coffee and a chapter in my latest book--

--and then we hung out together while I worked and ate a delicious sandwich and drank more coffee:

Now excuse me, because I have seven more hours to enjoy my table runner before it's no longer St. Patrick's Day. Time to pour some Bailey's and listen to my B*Witched/Sinead O'Connor/Kingfishr/Pogues Spotify playlist!

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Two Off-Season Witch Hats, and One Perfectly Seasonal Table Runner

Somehow I do keep finding fancy fabric! I genuinely thought I'd used up all the kid's leftover Trashion/Refashion sewing stash, all those bits and pieces and scraps and the occasional completely untouched piece of thrifted formalware and scrounged luxury material... and then Mr. Craft Knife helped me organize my fabric one cold and slushy January day, and you'll never guess what I found stuffed at the bottom of one very overstuffed crate.

Ah, well. That navy satin formal dress and black lace T-shirt may not have ever made the cut (lol) as runway material, but it made a BEAUTIFUL witch hat!

I'm high-key obsessed with an interesting texture on top of something smooth and shiny, and I LOVE how two disparate pieces can look like they were made for each other:

And yay for Spring Break, when my favorite witch hat model became briefly available to model this latest hat for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop!

Over the weekend, we swung by my favorite local arts and crafts thrift store because I really needed quilt batting. Alas that I did not find any there, and ended up having to buy some from Satan himself (I miss you, Joann!), buuut I did find two gallon-sized Ziplock bags full of THESE treasures!

I originally bought it just because the light blue colorway is the younger kid's class color at her school, so I'm always needing more baby blue for handmade gifts for her and her buddies, but that long piece is SO big, and so beautifully pieced--look at those perfect open seams!--

--that honestly, I'm probably going to save the smaller blocks for sewing for the kid, and turn that big block into another witch hat. It's just too perfect not to!

But here's what I needed that emergency quilt batting for!

The big kid got me one of those DNA kits for Christmas a couple of years ago, and while it turns out that, unsurprisingly, I am overall entirely from the UK region, there is apparently about 11% of me that's from the Irish part.

How appropriate for the season!

To piece the letter, number, and punctuation blocks, I used Spelling Bee, by Lori Holt, a book that I've actually been dying to use for over a year now, and I was NOT disappointed. The instructions are super easy to follow, and the couple of times I had to seam rip and try again were only because I was paying more attention to hockey on the TV than to what I was doing. I guessed a little about proper sashing width between the individual letters and between the words, but I think they look right:

I've got a couple more projects already cued up after I finish this table runner (fingers crossed it's at least before St. Patrick's Day!), but then I really want to try making a wall hanging featuring my favorite Wilbur Wright quote:

Not within a thousand years would man ever fly!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 2)

What a difference a day makes!

The day before had been, if not quite Fool's Spring, mild enough that while packing for this overnight trip I'd considered not even bringing my coat, but eventually tossed it into the car anyway, because I'm no fool.

Well, I kind of *am* a fool these days--perimenopause brain fog is hitting me soooooo hard!--but not about the weather, at least.

But regardless, I was VERY glad to have that coat on this day, because look at the snow!

And, of course, the mound!

I promise that I DID do some non-mound activities with my daughter on this trip. We walked around Columbus, browsed a giant bookstore, ate hot chicken that bothered my stomach all night because I'm old, she got me to do an impression of Tor Thom doing the world's worst impression of Kip Grady from Game Changer, she egged me into griping so loudly about the Florida Panthers NHL team that a random guy glared at us (Panthers fans are everywhere, gag!), and just that morning I left my husband sleeping in our hotel room, picked her up from her apartment, and drove her back to our hotel to eat waffles and watch the Olympic men's hockey Gold medal match with me. I had not yet been outraged by the ham-handed misogyny of Team USA, and so we had a glorious time treating the breakfast buffet like a sports bar and cheering a bunch of jerks on to victory. 

But as much as I miss this kid when she's away at school, we're not really sit-and-yappers--you can yap just as well when you're poking around a pre-Columbian mound set in a cemetery next to an abandoned church!

I think it's so interesting to have a mound in a churchyard. The Fairmount Presbyterian Church was organized in 1834, so sayeth this History of Licking County.

I must warn you, though, that the same History of Licking County also sayeth this:

          The mound at Fairmont Church was a lookout mound and it was opened at one time but, I am told, it didn’t contain much. A number of smaller mounds like this have disappeared because of plowing fields over the years. In 1860 a keystone, a small triangular shaped sandstone engraved on both sides with Hebrew letters, was found in a mound near Newark. A Decalogue tablet was also unearthed in this mound. The tablet contained an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments copied almost entirely from Exodus 20 in the Bible. For years, it was regarded as a hoax, but two Hebrew scholars along with some scientists confirmed it to be true. This tablet is seven inches long, black limestone, and was found in a circular light brown sandstone box with a whitish cement at the edges. The “Holy Stones” (five in number) were found near the intersection of Rt. 13 and Interstate 70 and at another location in Madison Township are still a subject of controversy, but scholars now think that perhaps people from the Mediterranean sea area reached this country in the days of the mound builders. This was long before Columbus came and these people left their messages carved on stones found in the Adena Burial Mounds as well as on rocks throughout North America.

 The author is referring to the Newark Holy Stones, which were a Big Deal back in the 1860s but have since gone the way of the various Oklahoma "runestones" that were talked about when I was a kid. 

Wait, it looks like some people are still talking about the Oklahoma runestones! I guess the Newark Holy Stones have just gone the way that the Oklahoma ones have NOT, lol!

Anyway... Vikings and runestones and Hebrew tablets and angel-human hybrids aside, I can't help but wonder what the congregation of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church thought about putting their Christian cemetery around that clearly pagan monument. It reminds me that when the Sutton Hoo ship burial was excavated, archaeologists discovered that people hundreds of years after that burial, long after all knowledge of it had passed, had been burying their dead around that then-mysterious mound, too. Did that feeling of awe that you get when looking at an ancient monument feel like religious sentiment? Was it the sense of ancient history and connection to the past that they thought translated well to a cemetery? Or did the place maybe just seem important, and that's what people wanted to connect with?

Regardless, it does make a lovely setting for photos, and I have to think that even though the mound is clearly being regularly mowed, it must fare better as cemetery property than it would have in a farm's acreage.

I need to come back here and take more photos on a sunny day!

Okay, remember this map of the earthworks as Squier and Davis saw them back in 1848?

So far, I'd seen most of what was remaining, i.e. the Great Circle (bottom right) and the Octagon and Circle (top left). But there's one little bit left that I hadn't yet seen...

Specifically, this bit!

The site is pretty depressing, bordered by a neighborhood, some kind of warehousy/factory-ish building, and a highway that, incidentally, used to be where the Ohio and Erie Canal ran instead:

The Goodwill at the top is where we got the kid a couple of shirts for job interviews and where I'm still pissed that I didn't buy two vintage green glass ashtrays. The kid said they were tacky, but what the hell does she know? The gas station in the middle is the closest parking I could find to the intersection of the street with the railroad tracks just north of it, which is where the semicircular earthwork on the Squier and Davis map was until it was demolished to make that street and railroad tracks. I hate civilization sometimes.

But still, we made the best of it and had a proper wander in that limited space:

The ridge that's running horizontally across the photo below is the top left edge of the square--I'm inside the square, and the kid is outside of it. The ridge in the background is the outside edge of the avenue that would have led straight towards that now-demolished semi-circle enclosure:

There's an opening where the two ridges meet, but I don't know if that's how it was originally. I also can't imagine that the original square and avenue earthworks were this short:

Because I'm curious and I waste my focus on that which is inconsequential, I even got into Google Earth's historical maps to see if maybe the ridges had looked different, taller or shorter or maybe more of the avenue was evident, 20 or so years ago, but it doesn't look like anything has really changed. And then I got VERY distracted looking for Kinzer Mound in South Salem, which is on the National Register of Historic Places but has its address redacted so I tried searching old Google Earth images, reddit and Facebook posts, property records for the name "Kinzer," etc., and never did find it, but I did waste almost two hours and there's apparently a cool covered bridge in South Salem that I now want to see, so there's that!

Here's me also checking Google Maps to see how far I'd have to walk and in what direction to get to the Great Circle and the Octagon:

The Great Circle is just about three-quarters of a mile from here, and the Octagon is about a mile and a half. Perhaps an adventure for another day!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 1)

Well, *technically* all I wanted to do was visit my college kid since she isn't coming home for Spring Break--but she's happy to tag along with any adventure, as is my husband, so that worked out just fine!

Honestly, though, my fever-pitch fervor for earthworks is SO bad. We'd barely rolled onto campus and hugged the kid's neck before I was all, "Sooo... y'all wanna catch up while we walk around Octagon Earthworks?"

Happily, they did!

I even got to play tour guide, because thanks to that time that I just happened to be driving the kid back to school on one of the four days a year that it was formerly open to the public (it used to be leased by a golf course that had, like, a million-year lease already signed, but now it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so Ohio was finally able to boot them and open it up properly to the public), I'm the only one who's been there before!

There's a viewing platform that elevates you a bit above the terrain so you can see some of the earthworks from above:

That's really important, because once you're in them the scale is so massive that it's very hard to visualize what you're walking within:

That outer perimeter isn't really there anymore, nor are the paths that lead away, but you can around walk inside the circle and the octagon.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Squier and Davis work that mapped the site is now old enough to be in the public domain, so here:

It's crazy that the site was mapped AFTER they built the Ohio and Erie Canal through part of it, but I'm going to talk more about that later, because OBVIOUSLY I went over there to investigate what was left.

Here it is also in outdoor banner format, lol, and yes, I DO want a large-scale weather-proof map just like this one!

It's so ridiculous that when the site was a golf course, that elevated viewing platform was the only place you were allowed to be to look at the earthworks, because you can barely see them from that platform! Here I am on the platform, looking straight ahead at the path that connects the circle to the octagon. To the left, if I crane, I can see the closer part of the circle, and to the right, if I crane, I can see the closer couple of walls and one mound from the octagon:

But now, THIS is my favorite sign here!

Octagon Earthworks is a lovely site to simply stroll around. Just as promised, we walked the inner perimeter while catching up and gossiping:

The trees wouldn't have been here when the site was in its original use, but there are a few trees that are allowed to grow presently. This site also used to be an encampment for the Ohio National Guard, then part of it was a potato field... and then came the golfers!

Three geniuses, one of whom is graduating with a degree in Environmental Science this May, another of whom still brags an awful lot about the very thorough Ohio state study she led her little homeschoolers through once upon a time, stared in bafflement at this nut for ages before one of us (not me, sigh...), finally said, "It looks kind of like that candy? Oh, it's a buckeye!"

These two really liked the open space within the octagon best:

You can sort of see one of the walls leading off into the distance to the left, but the rest is too far away. The space inside is so big!

I kept wandering off to go hug the little mounds that block the entrances, though. I love a little mound!

So, it's well-established that I love a dedicated, protected earthworks site. I mean, of course! But what I LOVE is a poky, little-known, obscure, under-studied earthwork that's encroached upon by modern civilization in some weird way. I really like that undercurrent of something other and ancient behind the trappings of the everyday. I also love the research aspect, because while these preserved earthwork sites are well-known and Googleable, most of the earthworks still extant are unstudied, poorly mapped, and largely forgotten. 

There are a couple of good historical resources for searching out the thousands of minor mounds in Ohio. The Archaeological Atlas of Ohio has a county-by-county map that's impossible to parse for specific locations, but does show the overall spread and general vicinity, as well as wealth of now-forgotten mounds. The book, for instance, says that the kid's college town used to have 20 known mounds, and now there is definitely just one! A more useable resource is this ZeeMap of Native Sites of Ohio, which looks to have placed the sites from the archaeological atlas onto a Google Map. Whenever I've been able to match one of its mounds with the real mound, they've lined up perfectly, but there are sooooo many sites on ZeeMap that also look like absolutely nothing in real life. Is the site simply gone, or is the ZeeMap location off?

Earlier this year, I treated myself to the very sketchily titled Nephilim Chronicles: A Travel Guide to the Ancient Ruins in the Ohio Valley, because boycotting the economy doesn't count if it's an independent, self-published author. If you can overlook the author's premise that the mounds are the burial sites of angel-human hybrids, it's actually a fairly contemporary guidebook to many of the minor mounds noted in that archaeological atlas and on the ZeeMap. 

And that's what I used to direct us here!

The mound is presented completely without context adjacent to a community sportsball field, but it's this one. 

Over 2,000 years old, and we can just drive up to it, walk around it, and then hop back in the car to head over to spend the evening at the biggest bookstore in Ohio.

Because boycotting the economy doesn't count if you buy it in an independent bookstore!

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