Plaid fabric and Washington's Crossing

Before I begin this post I'm struck by a comment made by another blogger. After my comment on the Kentucky State Fair and the heat in an earlier post I received an e-mail conversation from Leigh at Cinnamon Sticks. She talked about it being freezing here. Isn't it wonderful and amazing that a little box with a monitor on our desks can bring someone from the other side of the globe into our homes, just to say hi and comment on our lives. It's great, I think.

Back to almost all things quilting. In another earlier post I wrote about going to NYC and West Virginia and around Washington DC. This caused my husband to want to find out more. So he went to the library to check out this book: Washington's Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer. After finishing my last book, I happened to pick his up and my gosh, so far so good, this is a good read. I highly recommend it if you like history, or have traveled in the northeast of America, as we just did.

I'm interested in word beginnings and phrases that have origins in the past. Believe it or not there is a word in this book that relates to quilting. Well, maybe not quilting, but, quilter's do use this type of fabric, it's plaid. Plaid is Gaelic for blanket. Here is a picture of a uniform worn by the Scotland Highlander's Forty Second Foot soldier in the American Revolution. The passage begins , "some of the men joined for the uniform. Reading on it says they wore plaid and parenthesis, Gaelic for blanket. I love plaid fabric and I didn't know this about the word origin. Hmmm...smile.