Chair is product of more than 4 years of work

By DONNA RYDER
Associate Editor
Area residents who attended the Obion County Fair last week and visited the Domestic Arts Building may not know how special one entry was to its maker.
Sitting in the adult sewing department was a chair. It may have looked like most any ordinary chair until viewers started to take a closer look. What they would have found were a frog, a bird, an eagle, a Tennessee “T”, an American flag, a cat, fish, flowers and a spider web, among many other things, embroidered on the covering.
It is the creation of Crystal community resident Nadine Killion. She said the late Jack Drerup, a member of her husband’s family, told her he had a box of silk ties he had been saving for years and wondered if there was something she could make with them.
She told The Messenger at first she was going to make a crazy quilt, but decided it would only lay on the back of a chair, so why not cover the whole chair instead.
Mrs. Killion said she started the project 4 1/2 years ago by first taking the ties apart and washing them. She then cut them up to make 12-inch crazy quilt blocks. She looked high and low for the perfect chair finally finding the one she would use at the local Goodwill store. It was the third chair she had purchased for the project.
At first, she added some velvet to each square and embroidered each piece. She even put beads and lace on some until she decided beads might be uncomfortable to sit on. There’s even one button on the chair.
She had no pattern and did not match colors. She even let the tags from some of the ties show in her work. The back of the chair was covered with the long part of the ties, while the squares were made from the remaining pieces.
She said she was surprised that of all the ties in the box, of which she still has enough to cover the remaining two chairs purchased for the task, none of them were holiday ties.
Drerup, who died in 2006 only a few months after giving Mrs. Killion the ties, will forever be connected to the chair as she embroidered his name and her name on the front of the chair.
Mrs. Killion said her grandmother taught her how to embroidery. In fact, one of the first gifts she can remember receiving from her grandmother, the late Mary Hayes of Nova, Mich., were a hoop and dish towels with the names of the days of the week on them.
She currently belongs to the embroidery club at the Obion County Public Library and is a member of the Crystal Family and Community Education Club. She enjoys many different kinds of handwork, including knitting, crocheting, smocking and weaving. She even teaches embroidery.
Mrs. Killion came to Obion County in 1994 with her husband, James Lloyd Killion, whom she married in 1956. He traveled to Michigan for work and they returned to the area when her retired, fulfilling a promise he had made to his mother to come home.

Published in The Messenger 8.22.12

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