Quilting is my heritage.
I remember the first quilt I took stitches on. I was about eight years old. It was a gold satin top with a warm flannel back with gold flowers. My mother set it up in the basement. She was making it for my great grandmother. I could imagine her snuggling under the beautiful shiny satin with the warm flannel next to her frail body. What a wonderful gift! I must have stitched about 10” of wobbly stitches, but my mother left them in… I was hooked!
I started sewing my own clothes when ‘culottes’ were popular and I was twelve years old. I machine appliquéd Brown Betty quilt blocks of browns, yellows, and golds in Home Ec as a senior making my first quilt top. As a teenager, we seldom watched TV in our home without working on a quilt, or lying on the floor beneath it.
My memories of my grandmother are filled with images of her sitting in her favorite old chair with her little round footstool made from the bottom four legs of the old kerosene heater they used when they came to Idaho from Colorado in the old Ford, doing needle work. Always working. I have her old treadle sewing machine where she spent hour upon hour piecing quilts in front of the huge bay windows. She always said it made a better straight stitch than her new machine. Her dining room/workroom in her old farmhouse usually had stacks of fabric placed on every surface. The old spring beds in the attic where we played were covered with quilts she had made. Many she contributed to the Lodge for fundraisers.
Grandma gave all her grandchildren quilts—then she started on her great grandchildren. Mine is a heavy red log cabin quilt with an old blanket between for warmth instead of batting. I inherited an old quilt made by her mother; hand stitched together from old blue-flowered cotton flour sacks with tiny triangle pieces. As she grew older, the piece work wasn’t as straight, the stitches not as small, but it just made her work more dear to me.
