Holmestead

No, I didn’t misspell homestead.  The home pictured in the thread art below was that of my Uncle Pendley and Aunt Carolyn Holmes when I was little.  I have very vivid memories of playing in this house with my cousins and sister and memories of Thanksgiving dinners with the entire family!  I haven’t seen this house in maybe 40 years but I can draw you the floor plan of it.  I loved the way you had to crawl through the dining room window to enter the screened porch (you could also walk around the porch outside to enter it, but crawling through the window was much more appealing).  This house had porch after porch on it.  The kitchen looked as though it had once been a porch.  The house had a preacher’s room, a room accessible only from the front porch.  I have heard that those rooms were also used as offices on farms and plantations so the field hands didn’t enter the house.  As a preacher’s room, it would have been for itinerant preachers or strangers who needed a place to bed down for the night.  I remember walking up the steep ladder like stairs to the attic where rough hewn logs held up the roof.  I loved the  (I could use chaotic or scrambled-up but prefer the more genteel sounding) quaint arrangement of rooms  where you walked through my aunt’s bedroom to get to the dining room and cousin’s bedrooms and the fact that the laundry room and bathroom were the very same room and it was larger than the kitchen in my mind’s eye.  Situated  in the middle of 300 + acres with cows and ponies and barns and guinea hens and fences and huge boulders and swimming  holes and corn rows and tractors and 4 girl cousins and a dozen Barbie dolls, it  made the perfect house to someone who had spent her years in a 1960’s tract ranch.

I loved this house or maybe I just love the memory of it.  I don’t know, but I was thrilled to come across a picture of it and find it on Google maps recently.  Little changed except the addition of badly proportioned dormers but  I guess the next owners wanted to view those old logs in daylight.  At least I hope they didn’t cover them up with drywall.

I think it may be the inspiration of more than one piece of art.

Tags: embroidery, free hand machine embroidery, sewing, Thread Art