I am fond of saying that I am Chinese by marriage, and after 15 years of marriage I feel like a Seah. But I am by blood and birth a Pittsenbarger. I have the dogged persistence, the stubbornness and independence of a Pittsenbarger.
As a girl I loved to visit my Father’s family. I marveled at the pictures on the wall all painted or drawn by my aunts, everything from acrylics to colored pencils. I loved to wrap myself in one of Grandma’s crocheted blankets or try to figure out how Aunt Nancy had stitched that Cathedral Window cushion. Don’t forget the bookshelves and potato bin made by Grandpa.
At Aunt Lois’s there was homemade jam and occasionally pickles. There were caddies of paints and boxes of scraps for patchwork. There was always something to learn, to watch and to marvel at.
My Aunts sewed their own clothes, painted their own pictures, refurbished their own furniture, they played instruments, wrote stories and poems, crocheted and knitted, cooked and gardened. Everything you imagine the perfect Victorian Farmers wife doing they did and did it well and kept the house tidy at the same time.
It is a difficult legacy to live up to, but I sit and think of them as I work the patchwork quilt for my daughter and plan out the poncho I’m going to knit for myself. (Not with anything like their skill or speed but it gets their eventually). And I sew a quite a few of my clothes.
I think of them when I write blog posts and craft my writing career. It seems the most natural thing in the world to go Indie, to design my own book cover, to take my own photos and design my own artwork.
I mean why would you pay someone to do what you can do/paint/build/publish yourself?
I guess you could say PIttsenbargers, like other Missouri farmers, were the original Indies.
Now if only I had inherited the Pittsenbarger patience as well….
Amber Seah 
I had dreams of making my own clothes once, and then I realised that my brain missed out on the ‘geometry’ section 🙂 looking forward to your books 🙂
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Funny I went through a stage after having my daughter where I could not make heads or tails out of patterns. Even now I work it more by intuition than mathematics. My pieces have personality, definitely won’t pass for store bought.
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Hi! It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but your blog is just as charming as before. Btw, I adore this post you wrote. Based on what you shared about your family, I think you could write a novel on their life, because to me it sounds like they’re amazingly talented and accomplished.
If you end up going Indie for your writing career, I’d love to hear all about it as your journey through the process. I guess I’m interested in people geared that way, because I’ve always wanted to get published myself… and one day I might have to take the leap and just do it myself through self-publishing. Who knows what the future holds?!
Any-who, if you happen to be interested in a holiday reading challenge, please visit my blog for ‘A Literary Christmas’! I have a Christmas giveaway too.🙂
Happy reading & writing, my friend!
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I am going Indie, I am preparing to release my first book, Helen’s Summer, next month. I’m just deliberating on covers now which entails a certain amount of humming, hahing and biting of finger nails.
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