Quilt-maker's Daughter

I learned to quilt by examining my grandmother's quilts. When I was young, quilts were just a part of our lives. In winter, there were several on every bed and nobody, including myself, thought too much about them. My great aunts were quilters, as well as my great grandmothers, my grandmother, and eventually, my mother.

My great grandmothers made quilts out of whatever they had, which included the proverbial flour sacks, worn out work pants and old sport coats, as well as store-bought cotton cloth. Those quilts were made simply for keeping people warm in winter without much regard for symmetry or design. Most of the time, the layers were tied together, rather than stitched, because that was faster and required less work. Also because it's not easy to hand stitch heavy fabrics, and their quilts were filled with heavy cotton batting, or sometimes old wool blankets that had become too frayed for use.

                                                                                      

My great aunts, on the other hand, were master quilters—the kind who concentrate on the stitch patterns. They gave me a double wedding ring quilt as a wedding gift. It has an intricate pineapple pattern stitched in the center of every circle. I have studied this quilt for decades and still can't understand how they did the complicated design. I simply don't have the patience for such tedious work, but I'm truly glad they did. Their stitches give me a goal to shoot for.

My mother only began quilting in her middle years. She was something of a compulsive quilter, who would cut out every piece before she stitched anything. The idea of cutting one hundred eighty-four brown hexagons, two hundred twenty-six blue squares and three hundred ten cream trapezoids would be enough to send me screaming into the night, but that's what she did. And once she had hand-stitched them all together to make the top, she wasn't interested any more. She never quilted a single one, so I have several of her enormous quilt-tops, but only one completed quilt that one of her frustrated friends took to Louisiana and had quilted.

As I said before, I learned how to quilt by studying my grandmother's quilts. In fact, except for colors, I copied her butterfly quilt. I was in my twenties, newly married to a pediatric resident, so I spent a lot of time alone. We lived in Manhattan, and I was homesick for all things Southern and homey. For several years, I bought quarter-yards of fabric wherever we went and incorporated them into the quilt. Every bit of it was hand-stitched, because I fancied myself a purist. When the top was finished after literally years of working on one butterfly at a time, I had no idea how to quilt it. By then, we were living in Birmingham; I had two children and no time alone. So, someone gave me the name of an old woman who lived out in Ensley, a steel mill suburb of the city. I took the quilt and batting and backing to her and negotiated the fee for quilting it. When I picked it up several months later, it was in terrible condition. She had, I'm sure, done her best, but it was a total mess, bunched and ugly. I was so upset, I cried all the way home. I packed the quilt away in a box and stuck it on the highest shelf in a closet. I just couldn't bear to look at it. And that's where it lay for about ten years.

When I finally took it down from the shelf, it was because we were moving, and my marriage was coming unraveled. I took out every single stitch that the old woman had put in and I had paid for. I took the quilt apart and gave it new batting and backing, and then I painstakingly quilted it myself using real ivy leaves as stencils. When it was finished, I realized it had been twenty years in the making—from 1976 to 1996—the same length of time that my marriage had lasted. It was a symbol for me of all the ways women find to heal what is broken, and create something beautiful out of the pain that life serves up. It's on my bed today.

Jane