heirloom

most quilters can trace their love affair with quilting back to a specific quilt or quilter that enthralled them, grabbed their notice, and got them interested in this hobby or that they have an emotional attachment to. my roots in quilting go back to my childhood, to one particularly lovely pink patchwork star.

my mom made some whole-cloth, tied quilts at various points in my childhood, and i even helped her tie a few of them, but she never did any patchwork quilting. so the first patchwork quilt i ever met and loved was the pink texas lonestar quilt that resided on a bed at my grandmother margaret's house in my aunt catherine's former room. when i lived with my grandparents for 6 months as a 13 year old, this became my room and quilt for a while. i always loved seeing it when i visited. as a new bride in 1995, i was staying with my grandmother and noticed the pink lonestar was no longer on the bed in my room. she told me that, sadly, catherine had tried to machine wash the quilt and it now needed repairs, so she had removed it from the bed. at some point, catherine took the quilt in hopes of finding someone to fix it. i was quite disappointed. although i was not yet a quilter, i loved the quilt and had a deep love of family heirlooms. the pink lonestar would have been in my top 3 choices of items i would like to inherit.

last year i contacted aunt catherine and asked her if she could send me a photograph of the quilt because i wanted to try to recreate it. she said she'd hunt it down and send me a picture. the photo never came. however, when i realized our summer travels would be taking us close to my aunt, i asked her to get it out so i could photograph it myself when i visited her. i'll admit i was thinking of tactful ways i could convince her to let me take it home with me so i could get it repaired myself. and maybe keep it. there was no need for me to be devious. when i got to catherine's house and asked her about the quilt, she said, "it's in the front hall. i'm giving it to you." i honestly started crying on the spot. this quilt is the only heirloom quilt in my family that i know of or have ever seen. and now it's mine through my aunt's generosity.

  grandma margaret told me this was a wedding present from her aunts. as a war bride in 1945, i can only imagine what went into the making of this by her aunt(s). i've always thought she said her mother's sister(s) made it, but now i'm not so sure of my memory. anyway, this quilt that was about 40 years old when i first met it is now approximately 70 years old. and it's rather delicate. there is evident fading going on, but it's still in quite lovely condition.

 i don't remember this, but when aunt catherine gave it to me, the quilt came with two pieces: a quilt and a pillow sham. i don't know what else you call the sham exactly because it's not a pillowcase type sham like we have today. it's more of a half-quilt panel. but i'm pretty sure it's designed to cover the pillows. the cool thing about the sham is that it's not as worn or faded as the quilt, so you can see the original colors better. the fact that it's not faded and that i seem to remember using the quilt to cover the pillows when i used to sleep with this quilt, leads me to believe it wasn't on the bed. even the sham has some fading in the brightest pinks, which just don't seem to be colorfast.

here i laid the sham over the quilt to show the difference in the colors. there are anywhere from  4 to 7, possibly more, pinks used, but it's just too hard to say with the fading.

 even with all the fading and spots of damage, this is a stunning quilt. when i laid it out on my bed to photograph today, my three year old excitedly exclaimed, "it's PERfeh!" the sixteen year old was also quite taken aback by it's beauty when she walked in the room.

in light of what we consider "modern" vs. "traditional" in today's quilting world, and now that i know a little of quilt history, this quilt strikes me as not typical for the 1940's or at least not what most people would think of as typical. it is not a scrap quilt, apparently made from fabrics chosen specifically for this quilt rather than pieced together from reclaimed items. also, it's not made from prints - it's all solids. how very modern! and the bright, all-pink palette is definitely modern.

i think it just goes to show that the lines between modern and traditional are a lot blurrier than we think, that traditional quilters generations ago made some very "modern" pieces just like quilters of today can choose to make some very "traditional" quilts. really, even though there are trends in each age of quilting, there have always been quilters who quilt outside the lines of what is most common for their era. and maybe there is just a lot more variety in taste and style all along than we realized.

 at my grandmother's house, this quilt lay on a full-sized, brass framed bed. today i photographed it on my king-sized, aluminum framed bed. as much as i'd like it to stay on my bed, it's not suitable for everyday use anymore. but i think i just found the perfect place for it. more on that later because it's kind of a big deal and is going to take some work before i can get it in place.

peeking through the rips and fraying, the piecing seems to be done by machine, but the quilting was definitely done by hand. on the star, the quilting is stitch-in-the-ditch around the diamonds. these lines then continue into the negative space, where they are crossed by another set of lines to create more diamonds, with the four corner squares all being quilted in the same radiating direction. the four triangles formed between the points on each side of the quilt also were in a pattern, but after studying it i realized just one of them is not going in the same direction as the others. a little oops when in the making? probably. but it's not noticeable in the least unless you are trying to pick out the pattern.

 the backing is a solid pink, pieced together by at least two of the pinks from the front. i think the batting must be some kind of polyester or polyester blend because it's rather full and slightly puffy, and has kept it's shape all these years. it's not creased like a cotton batted quilt would be after so many years in folded storage. also, it's not extremely dense like a wool batting would be. i had no idea they had polyester batting in the 1940's but i guess they must have.  seeing how well the batting has worn over the years has given me pause to reconsider my own personal preference for 100% cotton battings.

the binding is the lightest pink of those used in the quilt. on close examination, i can tell it was machine sewn down and then turned to the back and attached by hand like we would do today.

however, it's not stitched on with a blind hem stitch but tacked down by small, rather uneven stitches every 1/4" or so. this imperfect detail, along with several other imperfect factors in the making of this quilt, remind me that quilts don't have to be perfectly crafted to be beautiful or loved, that the mistakes or small cover-ups for shortages will fade into the larger picture of the finished quilt. this gives me not only comfort about all the flaws in my own quilts, but makes me love this quilt even more.

i don't know how long i'll be able to preserve this particular quilt in good condition, but i'm immensely grateful to have it since it's the only quilt from my family's tree i've ever seen.

truly, it is a priceless heirloom.

i hope i can make enough quilts that my great grandchildren can all say they own or at least have seen something from their family's quilting roots. i hope i inspire lots more quilters and quilts to grow on that family tree in the years to come. maybe this little lady will make some of her own someday, like the great-great-great grandmother she was named for.

but that is another family tree quilting roots story for another day.

Gee's Bend inspiration

if you've read anything about american quilting and it's recent history, especially the modern quilting movement, you've probably come across the term "gee's bend quilt." i enjoy reading about quilting history almost as much as i enjoy actually making my own quilts, so after coming across the term a few times, i looked into it. i found not only a book for myself, gee's bend: the architecture of the quilt, but a children's picture book, stitchin' and pullin': a gee's bend quilt by patricia mckissack, which follows along as a young "bender" girl describes her journey from baby playing under the quilt frame to making her first quilt. there's quite a bit of african-american history woven into the story. best of all, the young narrator describes how she makes fabric selections for her quilt from scrap clothing and fabrics; every piece has a meaning.

yesterday, the two littlest school girls and i enjoyed exploring the picture book and then looking at photos of some of the real quilts from my grown-up book. today we took that one step further when i had the girls pull scraps for their own mini quilts, built around a theme. getting them to stick to a theme and not just pull fabrics they liked took gentle reminding, but they managed pretty well. they also have a few other themes in mind to explore in the future.

 d4 picked "camping with dad" for her theme. she snuck a lot of "wildflower" prints in, but kept pretty close as i reminded what she was doing. her bits represent:

• the paisley - lots of flowers
• the brown spot - a hole i found that one time, probably a snake hole
• pink oval elements - keeping dad's rules, because this one is in order like all his rules
• burnt orange scroll - dad
• purple flowers - flowers i find and trees; i find lots of flowers
• blue - Jesus because i think of him sometimes when i'm lying in the tent or feel him when we are at the campfire
• brown ditsy floral - dirt
• navy blue solid - the river
• green flannel - grass because it's green and fuzzy
• white spots - marshmallows
• orange - camp fire
• green with circles - trees

she also picked some for pinecones, the tent, hot cocoa, and then started getting one for each person that goes camping with her.

 that prompted her to dig deep in the scraps saying, "where am i in this basket?! i need one for me."

 d3 settled on finding scraps to represent people in her life. if she tries to pick one for each and every relative, it's going to be quite a quilt since her extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins is near 100 people. then again, she's enamored of very tiny pieces, so we'll see.

 as they worked on their gee's bend memory quilts, i worked on my memory book - project life. i'm so far behind! probably even farther behind than i am on quilting. there are just never enough hours in a day or lifetime to do all the things i'd like to.

quilting roots - tied

when i was young, there were two quilts in my house. the first was a queen-sized, deep wine colored, whole-cloth, tied, satin affair my mother had inherited from her maternal grandmother, my grandma g.g., as we called her. it was luxurious, thick, and heavy. mom told how several of her cousins coveted this quilt but she was the fortunate one grandma gg gave it to. once i tried to make a tent out of it. when it kept slipping off the beds i was trying to drape it between, i resorted to holding it up with straight pins commandeered from mother's sewing supplies. a lot of trouble followed when mother found her precious quilt full of straight pins, many of which had worked their way through the top and into the batting. sorry, mom! i really didn't know that would happen.

in this photo, you can see bits of grandma gg's quilt in the upper left corner and wrapped around me. (i have no idea why it looks chocolate colored rather than like wine here.) it's the only peek of it i could find in any photos. i wish it were a nice picture of the quilt smartly laid out on a bed rather than a chaotic mess of high school freshman me, my cat, and my baby brother sleeping in a pile on my bed in a messy teenage room, but it's all i've got. i was surprised to find this much. still, you can see the satin sheen and the little white spots where it's tied.

the other quilt was a deep dusty pink, whole-cloth quilt, decoratively quilted. i don't know where it came from but i don't remember it not being around, even before it became my own blanket. it was my personal blanket for a few years then it got passed on to my younger seester, marcee, and it remains hers to this day. i think i cast it off when i got a new pink cotton blanket with satin binding, which i liked to stroke while i sucked my thumb (much farther into childhood than was appropriate). marcee discovered it in a closet and made it her own. now her children snuggle in it. sometimes i think to myself, "wow. i probably should have held on to that blanket." but marcee and her kids love it so much i really have no regrets. i also have zero photos from childhood with even a corner of this quilt showing.

neither of these "quilts" was patchwork, but they are the first quilts i met or had any emotional connection to in childhood. while neither of these quilts inspired a love of patchwork in me, they both contributed to my understanding of how a blanket or quilt can give comfort, become a treasured personal item, and link generations as it gets cared for and passed on.

mom helped me make two other tied, whole-cloth quilts: one when i was twelve and one when i was in college.