Saturday, 10 April 2010

Quilting

I love quilts. They have a beautiful quality to them, like a memory sewn right into the very threads of a blanket. I have made a few easy baby blanket quilts, but that's it for my experience. Not much time right now. But I do get a weekly email from a website called "All People Quilt" which links up to pictures and patterns of hundreds of different quilts. I don't usually even get to read it; I just like that it comes to my inbox so that one day down the road when I do have time to quilt, I'll have a ready resource to get me going.

A few weeks back the email was titled "All about Antique quilts." Well, that's right down the alley ( eventually want to be going down! So let the email linger in my inbox (something I don't usually do - I like a neat and tidy inbox!) Today I got around to clicking into the featured article called "traditions remembered."

There were 22 posted photos of beautiful antique quilts, each with an accompanying quote from someone in the past - a little memory about their thoughts on quilting. Even though the quotes were only a sentence or two long, some were inspiring.

I made quilts as fast as I could to keep my family warm, and as pretty as I could to keep my heart from breaking.
A pioneer woman’s diary

At the quilting bee, one might have learned . . . how to bring up babies; how to mend a cracked teapot; how to take out grease from brocade; how to reconcile absolute decrees with free will; how to make five yards of cloth answer the purpose of six; and how to put down the Democratic Party.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

I have found nothing so desirable for summer covers as the old-fashioned scrap quilt of which our mothers were so proud. Every girl should piece one at least to carry away to her husband’s house. And if her lot happens to be cast among strangers, the quilt when she unfolds it will seem like the face of a familiar friend, bringing up a host of memories . . . too sacred to intrude upon. Annie Curd, Good Housekeeping, 1888

You can spoil the prettiest quilt pieces that ever was made just by putting them together with the wrong color, just as the best sort of life is miserable if you don’t look at things right and think about them right.
Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky

We learned to sew patchwork at school while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl had a bed quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing.
Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood

We learned to sew patchwork at school while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl had a bed quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing.
Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood

It took me more than 20 years, nearly 25, I reckon, in the evenings after supper when the children were all put to bed. My whole life is in that quilt . . . All my joys and all my sorrows are stitched into those little pieces . . . I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me.
Marguerite Ickis, quoting her great-grandmother

1 comment:

heather80 said...

I have made two quilts now. One, which is huge, but looks quite simple, and took ages and ages to do (my first. Leave it to me to make a double-bed sized quilt for my at the time one year old for my first quilting endeavor), and one that I made toddler-sized for Shea, which he uses in his crib when it's cold (it's very warm). The one I made for his crib, which did not take super long comparatively, and was not that difficult to do, is maybe my favourite thing I've ever made (and I make a ridiculous amount of stuff, hehe).