Jennie Gaskin loves to talk crochet and says her involvement
in crochet is precious to her. This is fortunate for all crocheters, since
Jennie provides an invaluable resource for us all, especially the Threadies.
Jennie owns and operates Country Yarns, a mail order business selling crochet
leaflets and pattern books, and she specializes
in patterns that are hard (if not impossible) to find elsewhere.
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| Here is an order that Anne Kroner Cho recently received from County Yarns. Anne says Elizabeth Hiddleson is her favorite designer, and when she discovered Country Yarns, her husband told her to go ahead and order 20 books as an early Mother's Day and Birthday gift! photo used courtesy Anne Kroner Cho |
Here is Jennie's story:
Here is a little background on me, in case some of you have
no idea who I am , LOL! I have been a Threadie since the age of 12. I learned
from my mother on size 30 thread, probably because she needed her size 10 for
herself. I've been married and sitting on this 120 acres of pasture and timber
for 45 years this coming April 4th.
Back in 1982, hubby decided I needed more
adults to talk to so he built me a little needlework shop across the driveway
from our house, using mostly leftovers from when we built our home back in '77.
The lady in our tiny, tiny town who sold yarn in their general store had just retired
and closed the store, so it was a good time to do that. The shop was only 16 x
24, and some of that was storage so there wasn't much room but it made me
happy.
It wasn't long before we had to enlarge (and then enlarge again!) after I started carrying craft supplies
for the groups (scouts, school, church, etc.) in our area. I was a Girl Scout
from way back, and I knew how hard it could be to figure out crafts for the
groups so I started putting together little inexpensive individual kits for the
leaders. It was a blast, and I had so much fun over the years until I finally
had to close the shop in 2007 for family reasons. The best pats on the backs were from leaders
and teachers; one teacher told me that her class "bad boy" came to
her one day and thanked her for getting the kits to make beaded Christmas tree
ornaments.
In the meantime I had become very friendly with the sales reps at LA and
discovered that with the new ownership back then there had been changes in
their reprint policies! Before, when inventory on a title ran low they would
just do a reprint. Now, they discontinued many of their titles when inventory
ran out. Ack! So I started watching their inventory list and started buying
what I could afford of certain "good" titles, like the Patricia
Kristoffersen titles and even older ones, especially thread titles because
nobody seemed to be printing many anymore.
I also sell a large selection of Elizabeth Hiddleson pattern books.
Not everybody even knows who Elizabeth Hiddleson is. She was
just a "threadie" like all of us, except that (like a few of us) she
had a creative side and loved to fiddle with her doilies and turn out something
new. Her son told me that she would come home from work (I think she worked as
a bookkeeper in the shipyards in Vallejo, which is across the bay from San
Francisco) and sit in her chair and crochet until time to start supper.
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| Elizabeth Hiddleson |
Mrs. Hiddleson sold volumes 1-15, and Delena
Byrd (her daughter) sold volumes in the higher numbers. Then Mrs. Hiddleson
started on the "A" series for herself, so they both ended up with
about an equal number of volumes and individual patterns. Delena passed away,
and Delena's daughter Shirley Siracusa took over her mother's part. On top of the 49 volumes, there are about 300
individual patterns, and I'm pretty sure I have all except one of them which
nobody seems to have.
At the time, Lily Mills was selling EH books along with
their thread, and they were the ones who advertised EH books in the Workbasket.
That was because Mrs. H. recommended and "advertised“ Lily threads in her
books, and it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. When Lily Mills quit, that
meant there were no more advertisements, so naturally sales went down because
nobody knew they were still being published!
I heard through the internet
grapevine that Shirley was still selling the books, so I wrote her a letter and
asked her if she wholesaled the books because I would like them on my web site.
Her reply said that she would actually like to sell them all at one time
because she was moving into a smaller house and wouldn't really have room for
them. She was on the verge of having them hauled to the dump!!!!! *gasp*
Nooooo!!!
So I talked to my husband and asked if I could borrow that much money
from our savings, and his only question was, "Can you sell them?"
Could I sell them?? You bet! I got back
in touch with Shirley to tell her we were interested. She told me there were
about 200 book boxes full. Yikes!
Okay, my husband works for a moving &
storage company and he could figure out how to get them here from California
(to Louisiana). A week later, Shirley called back and said, "Jennie, I
have some bad news." Uh oh, she's found somebody who can afford to pay
lots more than me. But it was other news - there were more like 300 (!) boxes.
Okay, George can handle that. We sealed the deal, and when they showed up there
were 328 boxes, not just book boxes but double stack book boxes, like the boxes
that copy paper comes in but slightly larger! And a (small) water heater box full of loose
patterns. And in that box was what I called my Golden Easter Eggs - two
Japanese EH books!! Apparently, Mrs. H. had made a deal with Ondori to let them
publish her patterns in special books with just her patterns in them. And best
of all, Ondori charted them all! These were only patterns from her first 15
books. (I've since gotten the other ones from Japanese Yahoo auctions, and you wouldn't
believe how much the Japanese were bidding on them against me!) So I got volumes
16 through 49 from Shirley, although a couple of them were very low in stock
and volume 24 was sold out.
The books mentioned Wheeler Publishing in Vallejo, so
I decided it couldn't hurt to call them and see if they were still in business
or maybe could at least tell me how to get in touch with the Hiddlesons. Rita
Burke, the owner of Wheeler (I think that was her maiden name), is a delightful
80+ lady who still went into the office every day and enjoyed a busy life. She
told me where the Hiddlesons were (they had moved to Arkansas with Mrs.
Hiddleson who was in her 90s then), and she told me that she had a printing of
volumes 1-A through 10-A that a missionary in Japan had ordered and would pick
up when he came back to the states for a visit, but something happened and he
never picked them up or paid for them. She was happy to sell them to me and ship
them to me. Thankfully, this was not 7 TONS like the last shipment!
I got in
touch with the Hiddlesons in AR, and they had boxes of books and patterns that
they had hauled to AR from CA, but because they couldn't advertise and mail
wasn't being forwarded after all that time, they hadn't sold them. They were
glad to sell them to me, so hubby and I drove up to AR and picked them up.
Unfortunately,
Mrs. H was in the nursing home by that time so I didn't get to meet the Doily
Pattern Queen herself. But I did get to hear about her from her son and daughter-in-law!
She was designing back in the 1940s (maybe even longer) and selling her
patterns to Lily, American Thread, and Coats & Clark, but as you all know
those companies didn't name their designers on the patterns. Mrs. H was interviewed
by the Vallejo newspaper (I have a copy) and she told them, "Call it
vanity, but I wanted to see my name with my designs."
Mrs. Burke told me
that Betty, as she called her, came into the business "sometime in the mid
50s" with 2 doilies and a hand-written pattern. She had already been to another
business in town and HE hadn't wanted to bother with it. Mrs. Burke said she
could photograph the doily against a black background and have the patterns
typed for her. After that, Mrs. H advertised the pattern in a "weekly
newspaper" (probably something like the Grit newspaper, if you remember
it) for 25 cents, and she sold all 1,000 copies in 2 weeks! Her daughter-in-law
Carolyn said that it was either the year before or the year after she and Bill
got married, so that puts it in the mid 1950s.
So, here I was with all these
books, sometimes a couple thousand of one title but only a couple hundred of another.
Luckily, I got in touch with a distributor who sold to Hobby Lobby, and HL
wanted them! With that money, I had reprints of volumes 3 and 24 made by Wheeler
Printing from the original plates (!) which they still had because they did so
many reprints through the years for Mrs. H and for Lily Mills. Lily would call
Wheeler and order a printing of certain volumes, which they sold through stores
to help sell their threads, and Mrs. H would get royalties on those books too.
When I have reprints made of either the volumes or the individual patterns, I
paid Mrs. H (and now her son) royalties on the reprints too. It's the right
thing to do. I just wish I had the money to get them all reprinted *sigh*
Mrs. H's last patterns were all published in Decorative
Crochet and Magic Crochet (look in the early 1990s editions), because she
didn't have to write out the patterns. She just sent them the doilies and they
"wrote" the patterns and charts themselves. Her goal was to have a
final volume 50, but with Lily Mills not advertising for her anymore it became
financially impossible. I would love to realize that dream for her, but it
doesn't look like we'll ever get to do it. But at least we have a dream!
Thank you, Jennie, for sharing your story with us. I admire
and appreciate all you have done for crocheters everywhere, and I know we all hope someday
your dream of printing volume 50 will come true!
You can find Jennie at:Web site: http://www.countryyarns.com
Blog: http://countryyarnscrochet.wordpress.com/
