The coronation of this year’s Ma and Pa Teapot will coincide with a history lesson.
Once the royals are crowned, cowboy poet and amateur historian Yvonne Hollenbeck will present a quilt show called “Patchwork of the Prairie” that limns the history of the prairie using quilts from five generations of the same South Dakota family.
The coronation will take place at Tea Community Hall this year.
The coronation’s previous home – Tea Primary School – was too large for the event.
“There was just too much space in that gym,” Tea Area Historical Society President Luella DeJong said.
Moving the coronation to the Community Hall – in the same building as the Historical Society Museum – will give those who attend the coronation a chance to see some of the city’s history if they choose to.
Hollenbeck’s presentation will tell more history than that. Her quilt collection consists of blankets made by her family members over the past 135 years.
All of the women in Hollenbeck’s family have been quilters.
“The first quilts I have were made in sod houses,” Hollenbeck said. “It’s kind of unique that I have a collection that goes back that far.”
The social and economic changes of the past century are sewn into the quilts, she said, and each generation’s work tells a new tale.
Those original quilts spent decades in a hope chest, she explained, which is why they are still presentable for such a show.
The quilts made during the depression era aren’t in such good shape. The well-worn quilts of that era were made largely from the burlap of leftover grain sacks and used to keep warm when the firewood dwindled.
“They were made out of feed sacks or anything they could piece together,” Hollenbeck said. “That was the fabric of choice because they didn’t have the money for anything else.”
Quilting died down during the baby boom years, but the creative rush of the 1960s signaled a return to prominence for the craft.
“God bless the hippies,” Hollenbeck said. “In the 1960s, they brought back a lot of those folk crafts.”
Lennox resident and Tea Area Historical Society volunteer Verlyss Jacobson took up quilting during that era. The quilter, whose car-themed quilts are awarded as raffle prizes each year for Teapot Days, always made her own clothes and found the activity to be an easy way to get rid of the leftover fabric.
“You have to do something with all that scrap fabric, so I started quilting,” Jacobson said.
She’s also seen Hollenbeck’s work during a “Patchwork of the Prairie” presentation at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell.
“I thought it was good,” Jacobson said. “I always like to see what other people have done.”
Hollenbeck will work some poetry into her presentation, as well, as she has at each of her shows. She’s given the shows in Colorado and California over the years.
The show will start just after the coronation of Ma and Pa Teapot at 7 p.m. on Thursday.