The Pennsylvania Dutch loved to add decorations all over.

There have been far too many heated debates about the purpose of decoration among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Early on, Pennsylvania Dutch families documented loved ones with fraktur, especially birth- and baptismal certificates, that were often tucked away in drawers and chests, or perhaps folded and safeguarded in the family bible.

I remember it all so vividly, even over three decades later. I was sitting with my grandmother being let in on a family secret — it was, what seemed to me at the time, a secret language.

This week on my loom are some placemats in a pattern that I’ve called “Meadow Valley.”

This past March, I returned to Marburg, Germany where I did most of my undergraduate college studies.

This week’s post touches on two of my passions: collecting material culture and making material culture.

Although we tend to identify Pennsylvania Dutch artists as practicing a distinctive folk art style, artists of Pennsylvania Dutch stock run the entire gamut of the art world.

On a bitterly cold day in February 1784, General Peter Muhlenberg, enroute to Ohio, stayed at the Kucher homestead near present-day Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

This recipe comes from Gram’s family who lived down near Center Valley in Lehigh County.

Just off my loom are table runners that I wove in a goose eye twill variant. The pattern is based on a diamond patterned tablecloth owned by the Keim family who lived in Berks County’s Oley Valley.