Grandma Was Up to Monkey Business

      If you walked into the ladies' house in the afternoon you'd probably find bottles of YooHoo Chocolate drink in the frig waiting for any guests who might just pop in.  You'd also find Aunt Tillie upstairs, sewing and Grandma downstairs, sewing.  Of course they would stop what they were doing to sit and visit.  I hated to interrupt their work.

     Grandma did all kinds of sewing; both with the machine and by hand.  She made quilts with a pattern that she called "Round the Mountain".  The entire quilt was  constructed of squares about three inches in size.  You started with one square in the middle and worked around and around until the quilt was big enough for the bed.  Today I look at the two "Round the Mountain" quilts I'm fortunate enough to own and I marvel at the workmanship and am dumbfounded when I think of the hours it must have taken.

                                          Here is the center of the quilt.

               Each trip around the mountain was done with a different fabric.

And amazingly that the quilt was constructed with all set-in seams.  This means the point of one square had to be set into the V of the previous row.  It is a time-consuming process and one that is avoided at all costs today.  They were not straight strips of  squares like you would find in today's quilt patterns.  

         But I digress!!  I was talking about Monkeys.  

      What Grandma was really known for was her sock monkeys.  She made sock monkeys long before they were fashionable and seen in stores.  In fact, the only place I ever remember seeing sock monkeys when I was a kid was at Grandma's house.  She had monkeys everywhere and in every color.  

          These two monkeys belonged to me and my sister, Nancy.  We passed them on to our nieces, Kathleen and Ally when we became their Godmothers.    

      It wasn't long before the whole family was involved in some way with the monkey business.  Since neither Grandma nor Aunt Til drove a car, my mother and aunt were responsible for buying the heavy-duty work socks that formed the body of the monkeys.  The only place Mom could find the work socks was in the Montgomery Ward catalog.  Maybe that's why we all called the store Monkey Wards. She bought them by the the dozens.  

     Once the bodies were constructed they had to be stuffed.  Remember, the ladies were very frugal.  Grandma was not about to go out and buy stuffing.  So it was the job of every female in the family to save their old, runny stockings and pantyhose for Grandma to stuff the monkeys with.  We called the hosiery "monkey guts".  Everybody kept a bag of monkey guts going: my cousins, my aunt, my mother, my sisters. And all those runny old stockings were stuffed into the monkeys.  

      I remember the first time we saw commercially made monkeys in the stores.  We called Grandma on the phone!!!  "Grandma, we saw store-made monkeys.  But don't worry, they aren't as good as yours."  And they weren't.

      Grandma's Monkey Business has long since closed down.  But monkeys have lived on in our family in oh so many ways.  In 1982, when Grandma turned 90 years old I made her a monkey birthday cake.

        And the popularity of monkeys continues today.  My granddaughter, Katherine, loves the story of the five monkeys jumping on the bed.  I couldn't give her a Grandma Monkey.  So I did the next best thing.  I made her a monkey quilt with a matching pillow case.  Wouldn't Grandma be surprised to see that today you can buy monkey fabric!!