My Mom and her quilts

Yesterday we spent the day documenting my Mom’s quilts…..both old and new. She has done some beautiful work in her life and I really enjoyed seeing many of them. Some of them were really worn out and thread bare and she kept apologizing for how bad their condition was, but I just saw those as being the ones that were loved and used.

Here she is looking at a friendship quilt that was made early in her marriage ……..

She told me a few stories about various quilts, but my favorite was this one…….

She started making 9 patches for this quilt in 1932 (she was 9 years old). She said that the family’s cow was dry at the time so they weren’t using the butter churn and her Mom (my Granny) told her to put the blocks in the churn as she finished them. Then, one day when she was bored with making blocks, Granny told her to pull them all out of the churn and see what she had done. She was so encouraged by the blocks that she had already made that she quickly went on to finish the quilt. The fabrics were from the layette of her baby brother (Jake) and the cotton batting was from cotton that had been picked across the road and then cleaned and carded. She finished the quilt in the early 1940’s.

Here are a couple of her more recent quilts……..