Quilts... a Love Of My Life

There were always quilts in my life. Aunt Berl quilted when I was very small while we lived in the shot-gun house in Kosciusko, Mississippi. She made what she called "Dutch Doll" quilts. It was a very simple pattern and she sewed with great big stitches, two or three strands of black embroidery thread. She just sort of slammed the blocks together with a "get-it-done" attitude, put it in the quilt frame and quilted it with white sewing thread and big, long, uneven stitches...

Not so my Mama. Anything she sewed, whether by hand or machine, was carefully cut, placed, and stitched with tiny, precise stitches. She didn't care how long it took. It was going to be beautiful when finished, with no mistakes.

Having been raised by those two women with opposite ways of sewing, I have become a quilter somewhere in between. I like to get it done. If I make a mistake, I will evaluate whether it has to be ripped out and redone (as Mama would have done) or can I just leave it as an "oh, well" kind of thing (as Aunt Berl would have done), or is there a way to cover it up? Hide it? I've been known to cover up unfixable mistakes on a quilt top by fabricating a three-dimensional fabric butterfly and sewing it down to the quilt to cover the boo-boo.

So I'm somewhere in between Mama and Aunt Berl when it comes to sewing, especially sewing quilts.

Since 1965, I have created probably more than a hundred quilts. I have made them for other people, so I have kept and used only maybe a dozen of them over those forty-plus years. Eventually I began to take pictures of the quilts, especially since I came into possession of digital cameras.

At first my quilts were small projects, quilts for babies. Ignoring copyright laws, I shamelessly used pictures out of simple coloring books for children and appliqued the designs on the blocks. I remember once using a furry fabric for the hair of a little boy picture. The recipient told me they were not going to use that quilt for the baby but hang it up on the wall instead. I know I should have felt honored, but somehow I was just disappointed. It seemed to me quilts were meant to be touched and clutched and smelled and rubbed while sucking thumbs...

In those first years of quilt making, I tried to emulate Mama's way. She used a cut out paper pattern, drew around it with a pencil on the fabric, cut out the fabric, appliqued it down on the "block" with embroidery thread, and after sewing all the blocks together by machine, she would attach a sheet, batting, and the quilt top to a wooden frame. Then for days she would hand-quilt beautiful designs.

She told me how Mam'aw used to go along the edges of the cotton fields and pick up dirty scraps of cotton, pull out the seeds by hand, wash the cotton by hand, dry it, and put a big pile of the clean, light cotton on a sheet attached to the quilting frame, and whip it with a switch (the same kind of little prickly willow switch she used for "whuppin'" kids) until it was spread evenly over the quilt back. Then she would attach the top, roll it up in the frame and quilt it with beautiful small stitches.

For many years I hand quilted, too, but when I discovered that there is a way (with the proper equipment) to machine quilt a masterpiece that will hold together a lot longer, I left hand quilting behind forever. Good-bye bloody fingers. Hello fancy swirls and stippling.

I think if Mam'aw could see my quilts, she would be impressed. She would say, "Ohhh..."