Throwback Thursday: The Return of Oma’s Pumpkin Patch—A Holiday Sequel

Just a couple months plus two years ago, we published the first post of Oma’s Pumpkin’s Patch—in a (somewhat) desperate effort to find homes for the repurposed fabric pumpkins that my mom (a.k.a. Meta and/or Oma) was churning out from her sewing room. The solution we tried was an Etsy shop set up and managed by my son, Sam. Well you my readers, stepped up to the challenge then, and have continued, to lighten the loads of pumpkins (186 and counting sold!) created over the past years. We all thank you, and it so pleases Oma.

However, more pumpkins continue to be “grown” by my mom. Next month, near the end of January, she’ll turn 90 years old! She has slowed down a bit and finds standing at her worktable more tiring, so the numbers of pumpkins made is also slowing down, relatively speaking. When asked by a visiting nurse what was her favorite thing to do, my mom immediately replied, making her pumpkins!

It’s been almost a year since Oma’s Etsy shop has been re-filled, so it’s more than time for an end-of-2022 update of Oma’s Pumpkin Patch.

The harvest on the table above needed to be recently moved to make room for a small Thanksgiving dinner—just for scale, that table can easily fit 10 people. Baskets of pumpkins made their way first to my studio for tagging and photographing this past week. Sam (that’s him with his Oma below), then added 39 new colorful specimens to the online shop. Now, they are waiting patiently in our family room to once again find new homes.

At Oma’s house, as at mine and my sister Heidi’s, these pumpkins are year-round decorations. Even though in most people’s minds, pumpkins are more of an autumn theme, it has never stopped our mom from going with her whims when choosing her colors, fabrics, and decorations. When Heidi and I check in on her, we’re often amused and inspired with the imagination she’s put into to her latest pumpkin. The “lion gourd” below, is just one smile-inducing example. Since Oma has been adding to this batch over the past year, there are pumpkins of every season and taste included in the new additions.

You can read more about the origins of Oma’s Pumpkin Patch in the Throwback post included below. I always print out and show my mom any comments, so please feel free to say hi to her at the end of this post, or on the Etsy page. And while you’re there, if you’d like to adopt a pumpkin or three, to help clear up my and Tom’s family space for the holidays, please do. Even though Sam has moved out and into his own nearby apartment, he’ll stop by as needed to pack and ship orders. As always, he re-uses boxes and packing material that I’ve held on to for just this purpose. 🙂

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Original Oma’s Pumpkin Patch post—from September 2020

For a few years, October has meant hosting my fabric collage retreats here in Maine. And decorating many of those retreats have been colorful specimens of stuffed fabric pumpkins made by my mom, Meta Carlson, who lives next door to us, and has developed a passion for pumpkins.

I’d bring a couple big baskets of pumpkins into the classroom to sell and would barely have time to arrange them on a table or two before students would start snatching them up.

I loved being able to share these creations with my students. And my mom enjoyed having her work appreciated and admired.

Generations of Fabric

People often ask where I developed my love of fabric. If you guessed from my mama—and most do—you’re right. There has always been fabric in our house.

My mom trained as a seamstress in postwar Germany. Her skill helped support her parents and six siblings during that difficult time. When she married my dad and came to the United States, she used her training to make most of our clothing—mine, my sister Heidi’s, and her own. For years she made us matching dresses for holidays like Easter and Christmas (I searched for photos, but came up short for this post).

Eventually our tastes in attire changed (Ah, the teen years!) and in the 1970’s my mom switched from making clothing to making quilts. She helped a friend with a custom drapes business. She re-upholstered the living room furniture every few years. Our family ran and supplied most inventory for a seasonal gift shop called The Craft Cellar. My mama has always kept busy making things—wreaths, doll making, household items, and countless other fabric endeavors.

As she’s grown older, she has been struggling with the small, everyday skills required to make things. Threading a needle, much less her sewing machine or serger, is difficult. Her once deft hands can’t cut fabric all day anymore.

But for the past few years she has come up with a craft that she finds rewarding and isn’t as taxing on her physically: making decorative fabric pumpkins.

Over the years she has collected lots of sewing and craft supplies. One such collection is her tubs and tubs of old sweaters. For a number of years she was altering these sweaters to make new garments out of them, felting the wool sweaters in the washing machine. She cut them apart, attached new sleeves, ruffles and lapels, adorned them with buttons, ribbons, and lace to make textural and colorful jackets and vests.

The years of garment making seem to be over, but the tubs of sweaters and sweater remnants—plus upholstery, drapery, and all sorts of fabric—still exist. Enter the pumpkins.

Sweaters make wonderful pumpkins. The colors and textural quality of the knits she uses mimic the pumpkin-y bumps and crevices of the real things. About this time last year she confessed to me that, silly as it sounded, she dreamt of her pumpkins. Thinking of them got her up in the mornings to start working on them.

She lamented that the fall pumpkin decorating season would soon be over, but stated that really, some of her pumpkins were decorative enough to leave out for Christmas, weren’t they? Of course they are, mama. And I upped the challenge with asking for a birthday pumpkin with a double-knit remnant from a jumper she made for me in elementary school. That request was followed with a Valentine’s pumpkin. Around Easter-time, she presented my sister and I with our own fuzzy-fabric rabbit-topped pumpkins—all in photo below. We’ve since requested daisy-topped summertime pumpkins with a bright yellow wool that a neighbor gave to my mom.

Making stuffed pumpkins gives my mom a creative outlet which she enjoys. Just as important, it gives her a lot of satisfaction to use up older and otherwise discarded materials. She brags about how she didn’t have to buy anything to make them. She has the sweaters and other fabrics for the outsides, she cuts up old t-shirts or sweater remnants to stuff the insides, and she has all the decorative leaves, berries, ribbons, raffia, and buttons she’ll ever need already collected for the finishing touches. My dad cuts pumpkin stems from salvaged branches and we all save the stems from various squash varieties destined for eating.

For a mother-daughters outing last October, I loaned my mom a sweater I thought she’d like to wear, above left. A month later, the sweater reappeared as a unique new variety of Cucurbita, lower left. This year some bright new felted leaves appeared on another pumpkin, upper right. Sigh. The entire family has learned to be careful what they place within the reach of my mom and her scissors.

She repurposes her own clothing as well. She looked at her pumpkin-headed scarecrow sweatshirt and thought it would make a fun kitchen table decoration instead, below.

New pumpkins grow out of my mom’s sewing room almost every day, she enjoys making them and—once they’re made—just looking at them, appreciating the touches of decoration and patterns in the fabrics. Both the making and the having of these creations give her pleasure.

We think it’s something deeper though. My mom has helped to support herself and her family with her handiwork her entire lifetime, and it appears it’s not a habit she can release. In addition to sewing and designing for our family’s yearly Craft Cellar show, there have been decades of other craft shows, many of them showcasing fresh crops of pumpkins. Now at 87 years old, my mom has (almost) accepted that she can no longer set-up and attend craft shows herself.

For a few years, the local garden club show and my Maine retreats have provided the outlet she needed to reduce her pumpkin stock—but not in this year of cancelled events, and the accumulating pumpkins have been threatening to fully overtake all available space in my parent’s sitting and dining areas.

So a few weeks ago at a local outdoor Friday Art Walk (above and below), my sister and I set up a couple tables to sell the produce of “Oma’s Pumpkin Patch.” I even made pumpkin face masks for the occasion, and our mom agreed to stay home. We sold a dozen or so pumpkins, but the rest came back to re-decorate my parent’s living space.

Etsy to the Rescue

Now, our technology-adept son, Sam, has stepped in to help with dispersing pumpkins. He has set up an Etsy page for his “Oma”—grandmother in German—even though my mom has no concept of this “new” online-way to find homes for her current, and continuing, stock of pumpkins.

Sam has titled the Etsy shop: OmasPumpkinPatch, and is busily adding pumpkins to the site as I write this post for tomorrow. And Oma is still making more pumpkins that I haven’t even photographed yet—we can barely keep up with her!

We invite you to check out the store and browse through the images—even if you don’t intend to buy—if you’d like to say hi to Oma (she likes it when anyone calls her Oma) you can do so in the comments section below. We’ll be showing her the comments from viewers.

And please check back to OmasPumpkinPatch to see what what my mama comes up with for the holidays and winter season as well—she continually surprises and delights us with her imagination.