Rags to Riches: Helen Chappell

Rags to Riches

by Helen Chappell

One of my earliest memories is crawling around on the rag rug on my bedroom floor. I remember the colors and the pattern and the rough textures. Seeing a rag rug brings back memories like few other things.

There was a revival of interest in Early American style after World War II, and my parents hopped on it. Antiques were the thing for them, while other people hopped on the austere teak Scandinavian style now making a comeback as Mid-century Modern.

But Early American was my parents’ passion, and I still have two Chester County case pieces they picked up somewhere before my brother and I were born. I also still have the quilt I had as a baby, even though it’s worn and ragged. It was made by some North Carolina relative, so it’s got sentimental value.

The shelter magazines of the ’50s were filled with Early American, both real and reproduction. It might have been a century and a half since anyone had used a spinning wheel, but if you look at the

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old photos, no Colonial-style brick hearth was complete without a rickety old spinning wheel decorating the fireplace. Cast iron warming pans, straw brooms, rush- and cane-bottomed Hitchcock chairs ~ the enthusiastic collector had to have these things, ideally in a second house somewhere in the country, if you believed what these shelter magazines were selling to those post-war couples.

The value of the mundane from the past had suddenly become a thrill. Of course, all the formal pieces from the grand cabinetmakers had been snapped up by Henry duPont for his legendary Wilmington estate Winterthur.

But the average person could haunt the auctions and the antique

Rags to Riches and necessity was suddenly ART. Recycled from clothing that could stores and find stuff used by their no longer be patched, printed flour average ancestors to haul home sacks, sheets and curtains long and recreate a reproduction of an past patching, what had once been Early American home. a thrifty way to cover a bed or in-

Quilts and braided rugs, once sulate a floor had become a quaint considered old fashioned and way of decorating your Early downscale, were suddenly de- American-themed home. sirable again and, at prices that While I know of many people would have made our ancestresses who still make quilts, and I espeswoon, were draped across four cially treasure a Diamond in the poster Grand Rapids beds or laid Square made by an Amish writing out on kitchen floors. student of mine, I thought braided

Even after my mother replaced all rugs were a dying art. her Berbers with Persians in the for- A great-aunt of mine was the last mal rooms, those rag rugs remained person I knew who braided rugs, in the well-used areas of the house. and she died when I was about five.

The needlework our great- A few years ago, my friend Karen grandmothers had made from rags and I wandered into a small gen-

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eral store near Shaft Ox Corner in Lower Delaware. It was a lot like the country stores of my youth, dark and musty, with out-of-date dry goods and a bunch of old retired farmers and watermen sitting around a kerosene furnace while the proprietress, an older lady with a gray bun, sat among a pile of rags, braiding rugs no bigger than three or four feet. Every once in a while, she would bend over, pick up a piece of cloth from the pile, rip a strip away from it and braid the strip into the rug.

All kinds of rags were in that pile: men’s flannel shirts, polyester curtains, worn-out sheets, you name it. She wasn’t picky; she stripped and braided. Even the colors didn’t match. But Karen and I thought they had a certain kind of

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Rags to Riches told me about Iris Willis, her lifelong friend and the mother of some old-fashioned charm. of her best pals from high school.

We picked up a handful of her This remarkable nonagenarian rugs. I think they were about five has made some of the most beautidollars each, and they were great ful rugs and quilts I’ve ever seen. throws in the bathroom and the On a recent visit to her home kitchen. I guess they lasted a few near Trappe, I met Miss Iris and years before they began to unravel got to see her remarkable handiand disintegrate. work. Not only has she spent her

We stopped by Shaft Ox Cor- life making beautiful quilts, she’s ner again, hoping to replenish our also a master rug braider. stock, but the store was boarded up Of course, she doesn’t do as and we were told the rugmaker had much as she used to, but examples passed. of her work are all over her home,

Until recently, I thought the along with other carefully curated last of the rugmakers had passed objects she’s collected over the and braiding had become extinct. years. I’m always awed by people I wasn’t sure if anyone did it any- who surround themselves with more, but then my friend Lynne wonderful collections that reflect

Rags to Riches then, he has to be near Miss Iris. The rug beneath her feet, indeed all the rugs in the house, are products of her handiwork. Wool only. No cotton or cheap polyester for her. “You should see her take apart a wool men’s suit and cut it into strips,” Lynne says. It’s not a job for amateurs. But there’s nothing amateur or clumsy about Miss Iris’s work. Her father not only built her house as a wedding present, he made her a rugging tension machine that allows to her to adjust the stretch of the cloth before she works on it. It must also be washed and shrunk for maximum tension. As we tour the house, more and their taste, especially if their taste more of her work is on display. is what mine aspires toward but Quilts in every pattern from cross will never quite reach.

As we sat in her sunny Florida room, surrounded by thriving plants, Miss Iris told me she had started out training to be a nurse in Baltimore. Her goal was to get her R.N., she smiles, but she got married instead. A widow, she survives three of her children. It was only after the death of one of her children that she took up fabric work. “At first,” she says, “I just made things for myself and my family.”

Her mixed breed rescue, Buddy, wanders over to have his ears scratched. He adores Miss Iris and is never far from her side, unless you offer an ear scratch, and even 20

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stitch to Philadelphia Pavement to Log Cabin, so beautifully rendered you feel clumsy just admiring them, spread out on beds, hung on walls, folded on chaises.

And under your feet everywhere, braided rugs in singing tones. Some big enough to cover a living room floor, others small enough to guard a hallway.

I feel as if I have visited a museum. She has a skill and talent and an understanding of craft that I hope some generations ahead will pick up and carry on.

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.