Why I Needed a Hand Quilted Vintage Scrappy Doll Quilt

The little girl in the photo is my husband's grandmother Nova Dickerson who was born in 1891 in a coal mining hamlet in southern Ohio. Someone built and gave her a doll baby cradle and, since she lived in a dirt-floored cabin, she was also given a smooth flat board to put her cradle on so it would be "rockable". Fast forward to the year 2000 and Nova's oldest daughter, my husband's Aunt Thelma, has died and we find the pieces of Grandma's doll cradle (and the smooth flat board that goes with it) among Aunt Thelma's possessions. The cradle had separated over the years .... dried out and fallen apart but no pieces weere broken. I asked if we could have it as a keepsake and since no one else was interested it becomes ours. I washed the cradle parts with Murphy's Oil Soap as a "restorative" and plotted and schemed.

I sent a photo of the reassembled cradle to JudyPete and told her of my plans to make a ticking "mattress" on my sewing machine and how I was going to order an old-style doll with a photo transfer of Nova's face on the doll. I dropped a VERY SUBTLE HINT that this cradle might need something small and exquisitely hand quilted to rest on top of the ticking mattress. This, of course, was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. LOL

JudyPete created the lovely doll quilt you see in this photo and and gave it to me after she had an article about it published in the Fall, 2002 issue of "Country Quilts" magazine. This is called "quilting two birds with one needle" or something like that .... :-)

Judy