About Carol
I was born to Gustav and Emma Tetz, the eighth of what would be a family of ten children. (It was actually three families blended together due to the death of a mother and then a father.) I grew up on my parents' dairy farm in Belvidere, NJ, graduating from Belvidere High School and then from Concordia Teachers' College in River Forest, IL. My first full-time job was teaching third grade in St. John's Lutheran School in Glendale, Queens.
Being a country girl and farmer at heart, I took advantage of the first good opportunity I had to get out of the city, back to the life style I loved. My parents had a good offer for our farm and were looking for a home to buy in the Finger Lakes area. They encouraged me to buy my own home. It soon transpired that they had their home, and I was a single lady making payments on a home of my own at age 23. It is still my home today. I quickly got a job teaching fourth grade in Watkins Glen. I enrolled in the Masters Degree program at Elmira College, attending classes at night and during the summer while teaching. After several years, I got my Master of Education Degree. I soon met a very nice man, Bill Fagnan, and we were married. We decided that I would quit teaching and "work" at home. Our daughter was born, and a son two years later. We took in foster children and adopted one of them. We made maple syrup and raised red raspberries and sheep while Bill worked full time. I started making quilts, having learned the basic concepts from my mother. I sold the quilts from our house and soon was also selling quilts and related items plus red raspberries and maple syrup at the Ithaca Farmers' Market. The children helped out and also made bread, pies and jam and jelly to sell at the market. We also sold the red raspberries U-pick. I was very involved in volunteering, being on the town board, school board, historical society board, starting the library in Odessa, being on the Montour Falls library board, and other activities as opportunities arose. We hosted four foreign exchange students, and our son and daughter were foreign exchange students themselves. I was appointed Town of Catharine historian in 1989. Soon I was inspired to begin researching and recording information on those people who had lived on Connecticut Hill, now a Wildlife Management Area, mainly in the towns of Catharine and Newfield. It had never been done before. This research let to a 10+ year project encompassing the whole Town of Catharine (excluding the village of Odessa) and resulted in my book, Town of Catharine History, Schuyler County, New York. Life moves on. Some things change. The sheep are gone, as are the red raspberries and the maple syrup. After 30 years, I ended selling at the Ithaca Farmers' Market. But some things never change. I am still a farmer at heart, needing to "dig in the dirt", planting and tending a large garden and tending the many flowers in our yard, as I have since I lived here. And I continue to tend my chickens and guinea fowl. Most importantly, I continue making hand quilted quilts and fabric items and have returned to selling them from our home. Hope to meet you at my Farm House soon - Carol Fagnan |
My Quilt Frames
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The quilt frames I use are four 1" x 4" pine boards arranged in a rectangle and held together at the corners with C-clamps. A frame like this is what my mother used to quilt her quilts. I use a large frame for quilts twin size and larger. I use a similar smaller frame for quilts smaller than twin size. Two of the boards in the big frame are ones my mother used.
My big quilt frame is suspended from the ceiling of our living room using ropes and screw eyes. To work on a large quilt, I lower the frame using the ropes and support the frame with four small saw horses, one at each corner. The small frame can be picked up off the saw horses and slid upright behind some furniture and leaned against the wall. To set up any quilt, I set up and clamp the four frame boards to the size of the quilt top. I center the backing first, then the batting and the top. All three layers are pulled tightly and held in place with thumbtacks--the reason for pine boards, being soft wood. I quilt along the top and bottom of the quilt. After quilting a "reach", I loosen the clamps on that end and take out a few thumbtacks on each side so I can roll the quilted portion under. Then I replace the clamps, now having the next "reach" available to quilt. |