The Quilters

For Linda Kay's Wit and Wisdom  (awesome writing meme on Senior Adventures!) I would like to share a special legacy....

My mother is a quilter.  My grandmother was a quilter, and every aunt and great-aunt and my two great-grandmothers and on back through my lineage.  It was fore-ordained that I would quilt.  The days of the quilting joys of my grandmother and great-grandmothers were born of necessity.  The quilts were used to warm their families against the winter cold, and were worn out after years of faithful use.  Not many of them survived.  They were made of scraps of clothing and of feed and flour sacks.  Nothing was wasted.  The batting was often hand-carded cotton.  Women's work was truly never done in those early days, and they went to bed to sleep under their hand made quilts, bone tired from the long days.  When the quilting was to be done, a group of women would gather around a frame suspended from the ceiling, to do hand quilting and visit.  My mother sat under that suspended frame as  a child and watched the needles go in and out, snaking across in long lines of loving handwork....it was the perfect fort.

Mom took me to the quilt shop to buy my first fabric for my quilt.  It was the early 80s and life had progressed to templates, and purchased fabric to be cut up into shapes, and sewing machines to put it all back together.  The rotary cutter was new also and soon became the norm.  Prices started soaring for expensive cotton fabrics needed to make heirlooms that would last for generations.  But, as I began to learn the techniques involved in piecing and creating quilt blocks, I also wished to pay homage to my roots...and make an old-fashioned quilt, hand-quilted.  My Mom often hand-quilted her quilts back then too, and she tried to teach me, but I just couldn't get the hang of that rocking back and forth motion that was needed.  So, as you can see from the photo above, I did my first hand quilting by going IN and OUT!  Not the most effective method, but I was comfortable with it.

What I love about the photo, is that the feed sack fabric the quilt is created from was some of my grandmother's fabric.  She was no longer quilting, and she gave me these pieces.  The frame was my Mom's....and she soon after gave it to me as she had moved on to using a hoop.  I love the feed sack quilt, which unfortunately I have never finished hand quilting (perhaps this is the year!) and I love the quilting frame.  Both are treasures!  I do my quilting on the machine now, because hand quilting by my archaic method was just too darn slow!  But I at least know how to properly hand quilt now.  I have made a few quilts, and several wall hangings or other small projects since that day in the 80s when the photo was taken, and I know I will quilt until my hands will no longer hold the needle that I can't see how to thread!  When that day comes,  I hope I will be happy with all I have accomplished.  I know it has given me great joy over these years.  After all, how could it not?  Me being a quilter was truly fore-ordained.