COLUMN: Carillon Flashback April 24, 1974 – Norma Coleman sews for 18 Hanover Fairs

While many of the activities and shows once connected with the Hanover Agricultural Fair have been reduced or cancelled, the women’s home crafts exhibit remains as strong as ever, largely because of the efforts of a few women who every year enter nearly every category.

One of these women is Mrs. Norma Coleman of Steinbach, who has been entering her dresses, cakes, pies, breads, vegetables, cookies and canned goods for about 18 years. And Coleman wins red ribbons in nearly every category she enters.

There are women who stay up all night the day before fair day to bake, but Mrs Coleman, in spite of entering so many exhibits, has never stayed up later than 2 a.m. the night before. That was when her daughters, Janet and Arlene, were too young to help her write out the tags for her entries.

Now, the three days before the fair are rather hectic, but Mrs. Coleman takes it all in her stride. Bread and cookies can be baked a week ahead of time and frozen. If she takes them out the night before, they’ll still taste fresh the next day.

The main problem is with cakes. When the temperature gets to be over 80 degrees outside, they won’t turn out properly and she has to bake several before she can produce one for exhibit. She doesn’t bother with vegetables at all, if it has rained.

Canned goods and sewing are the least problematic. She simply picks out the best-looking of her jars and prepares something she’s sewn for practical purposes.

Asked why she puts herself to so much trouble every year, Mrs. Coleman said, “It’s a challenge to see how much you can enter. It’s fun. You go to the exhibit and compare notes.”

Sewing is probably her specialty, although she has many other talents useful in her job as a homemaker. She sews nearly all of her own clothes, including jackets and coats, and most of her daughters’ clothes, except their jeans, which have to be Lees, she says with a little despair.

She also sews sheets – the bought ones aren’t big enough – pillowcases, bedspreads, tablecloths, spreads of all kinds, pillow covers and drapes. Her bedroom drapes, which she sewed with a stretchy material, gave her a real headache and she finally put them aside out of sheer frustration, only to take them out again six months later, because she didn’t want to waste the time and money she had already put into them.

Unlike most women for whom sewing is almost a full-time job, Mrs. Coleman didn’t grow up loving it. Her mother always sewed for her and she had no interest in learning the trick. The idea first occurred to her when the oldest of the Coleman’s four children, Arlene, had to have a dress altered. Mrs. Coleman spent all day at it and finally decided that buying clothes was a waste of money, if she still had to put so much work into them. When a friend invited her to a sewing club meeting organized through the home economist, she jumped at the chance.