After the Fall, Crazy QuiltingOn Oct. 28,...
After the Fall, Crazy Quilting
On Oct. 28, 1988, Linda Ann Smith, a registered nurse in the neonatal intensive care unit at Valley Presbyterian Hospital, became a fallen woman--she lost her balance while standing on top of her refrigerator trying to clean those hard-to-reach upper cabinets in her Newhall home.
As a reward for her good-housekeeping fervor, she spent 10 weeks in traction with a broken leg.
After two weeks at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, she was allowed to go home. Her husband, Hank, had to cut a hole in the garage wall so he could get Linda, her hospital bed and traction equipment into the house.
Her nurse friends from Valley Pres came to visit and left their half-completed handicraft projects for her to finish. The handwork kept her from going stir-crazy.
“I did needlepoint, macrame, made dolls, crocheted and painted sweat shirts,” she says.
She also quilted a pillow, which turned out to be the start of something big.
By the time she returned to work on May 30, 1989, she had an idea for brightening up one of the walls in the neonatal unit.
“It was a long, bare wall that really needed something, and doing that pillow had given me the idea,” Smith says.
Smith talked to fellow nurse Brenda Martin, a demon quilter, and the pair got to work on a quilting project in which anyone on the hospital’s staff could contribute a square.
Smith and Martin decided on the color scheme of mostly pink and blue, the size of squares and the material to be used, and the contributors did the rest.
The result is an 11-by-7-foot quilt made by 60 members of the hospital community hanging on the formerly bare wall near the rooms where premature babies fight for life.
“I was surprised by the response we got to the project,” Smith says. “A lot of nurses quilt, but we also got contributions from doctors, technicians and members of the support staff.”
Dr. Hugh MacDonald, director of neonatology, created a tribute to the neonatal nurses as his first effort at quilting.
Diane Dale, neonatal clinician educator, and another first-time quilter, placed an ambulance on her square, “since half of our infants arrive at the hospital that way.”
Ellen Windel, a social worker, made a square of joined hands, to signify the way everyone at the hospital works together.
Smith says the people who worked on the quilt felt a real sense of accomplishment and community when she and Martin stitched the squares together and it was hung.
“The quilt was a lesson in how much we value our patients and each other,” says Smith, who is no longer allowed to stand on the refrigerator.
Some Widow Advice
When Margaree Klein of Encino knew her comforting book on widowhood was going to be printed by R&E; Publishers, she sent a note of apology to her lawyer son and forbade her 16-year-old grandson from reading it.
Perhaps comforting is not a precise definition of “How to be a Successful & Sexy Widow.”
But for older women with a sense of humor, a functional libido and no dating experience since the Civil War, Klein’s calamities could strike a familiar chord. She calls it a “comfort book for women,” sort of a comic compendium of what happened once she began dating again after so many years.
“When I first began dating after my husband died, I thought I had wandered into a bad dream,” Klein says. “I was absolutely amazed that people do those things with strangers whose names they may or may not know.”
This did not stop her from taking notes for this book, which she hopes will not only give older women information, but a few laughs as well.
Before writing her first book, “The Happy Cooker,” Klein boasted a varied and unusual career path.
She says she has been a magazine editor and a political press secretary, and after becoming an earthquake preparedness expert, developed the Yogi Bear and Quakey Shakey educational programs for the city of Los Angeles.
When asked what her love life is like today, she says she doesn’t have time for a love life. She is going on a book tour and might even get on “Geraldo!” (Maybe Geraldo can give her a few dating tips.)
Ace of an Idea
After years of sitting in dark rooms looking at movies, Simona Elkin wanted to do something new.
“I had been recommended by the PTA to be its first representative on the Motion Picture Assn.’s rating board,” she says.
It was a one-year appointment that stretched to nine years, during which Elkin watched and rated more than 3,000 movies.
“It was time for something completely different,” Elkin says, so she opened a bakery three years ago in Studio City.
Her best sellers are bunuelos, carrot cake, dark chocolate fudge cake and her new offering, edible golf clubs.
The heads of the four “irons” and two “woods” are each big chocolate chip cookies on a wooden shaft, and the golf ball is solid white chocolate.
The set retails for $37.50 and comes in a vinyl golf bag.
Elkin says the chocolate-chip cookies are really tasty, but almost no one eats them because they don’t want to break up the set.
Wearing What?
A news release from the Canyon Country Chamber of Commerce says entry forms are now available for the 1992 Santa Clarita Pageant.
The pageant to be held April 10 at the Odyssey Restaurant is open to residents from 17 to 23 years old, with the winning man and woman to reign as Santa Clarita Valley king and queen for the coming year.
The release also says that “judging will be done in evening attire and a one-piece bathing suit.”
Nice combination. Swim fins and tiaras are probably optional.
Overheard
“The difference between my generation and yours is that we made love not war, and you make war on love.”
--Free-love-era mother to her AIDS-era daughter