The Quilt Legacy

When I think about how I first started to love quilting, my mother comes to mind. I remember my mother setting me under the shade of a walnut tree in our walnut grove yard with a needle and thread and a stack of tiny square patches to sew together. I was just four years old! I had seen her sewing fabric together and I wanted to do it too. She patiently showed me how to sew a straight row of tiny stitches to join the blocks together. I was going to make a quilt for my Tiny Tears doll. My mother actually finished it for me and I probably loved it to death, because it is no longer around. I still have the Tiny Tears doll I used to wrap it in and rock to sleep. I remember lots of hours spent playing with cousins under the quilt frames while my mother, aunts, and neighbors quilted. When I got older, I was summoned many times to ?Thread these needles for us, will you. Your eyes are younger than ours.  I never imagined it would be hard to thread a needle someday.

My mother did lots of creative things— making posters for church and community events, sewing our dresses, painting furniture, and of course, there were the many Relief Society craft projects. I still have a bunch of glass grapes and a very primitive cut-out wooden black child with quilted pot holders hung from cup hooks on each foot. I helped her paint the black child with black shoe polish and apply the white hole reinforcements for the eyes and mouth. I remember that I ruined my green wool coat with the shoe polish. She embroidered many pillow cases and her crochet work graced the edges of many of those pillow cases. Once when my family was camping my mother spent nearly a whole day with my sister and I, building a log cabin complete with rail fence, with tiny logs my sister and I had collected. I know she loved to do creative things and she instilled in me a love for all things creative.

Besides the black potholder doll, the glass grapes and the pillow cases, I have several quilt blocks made by my mother. I treasure these, not just for the vintage fabric— fabric that I recognize from dresses she made for us— but because each one tells a story of my mother‘s life. A partially done Lone Star was pieced together after she cut out each diamond individually, using a cardboard template. She and my father had been given a Lone Star quilt by an aunt when they got married, but they had worn it out because it was one of the few blankets they had. She couldn‘t figure out how to set in the side triangles and corner squares so her attempt to replicate it was put away to be found by me over fifty years later. I have one set of Ohio Star blocks that she pieced, that have several small triangle patches that had been pieced together from scraps no larger than a half inch. She couldn‘t afford to toss those still usable scraps in the trash like we do today. Her life was not an easy one. She worked hard, but still found time to make beautiful things and leave a legacy of creativity for her posterity. This Mother‘s Day, think of all the women in your lives who taught you, mentored you, and loved you enough to leave you with an appreciation of all things beautiful, especially quilts.

~Liz