More from the Chestnut Pipe

Quilts

Patchwork quilts, like hooked mats, were a part of home life. Their bright blocks of squares were sewn together according to a design, such as "crazy quilt," "hole-in-the-wall," "wedding ring," or "Star of Bethlehem," and many other designs. Quilted to a lining, through a cotton or woolen bat, or, as was discovered in Lockeport when a century-old quilt was repaired, through a bat of newspapers, they made warm bedcovers.

Bed ticks were stuffed with hay, oat, or barley straw, or with eelgrass, where oats or barley could not be grown. Thus the old command, "Com' on boy, 'tis time to get in your eelgrass." Those who had hay-filled ticks were told "to hit the hay."

A family in Welshtown used to sit around the kitchen stove on winter evenings stripping fine strips of birch from birch sticks to be used to stuff their bed ticks. In spring, the old crushed birch stripes were thrown away, and the new ones were stuffed into freshly washed bed ticks, starched stiff with flour paste. Over the birch tick was a feather tick. In the winter those high-mounded ticks were warmed with peeled sticks of wood scorching hot from the oven or hot stones wrapped in flannel.

Witherod Baskets

Baskets were woven from long slender rods of witherod and were used aboard fish boats; smaller witherod baskets were used to carry fish ashore. For a housewife, fish could be easily washed in a witherod basket, for the loosely woven strands permitted the water to flow through. The farms of Ohio used witherod baskets when harvesting crops of potatoes.

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Please note ........ the Ohio spoken of here is Ohio, Shelburne County, Nova Scotia, Canada. Many place names were brought here by the United Empire Loyalists who settled in these areas after coming from the US.