First quilt

Growing up in a farm family where the family mottoes were "raise what you eat and eat what you raise", and "make it, or make it do", quilting and sewing were not optional if one wanted clothes on their back or warm covers on the bed. My mother was skilled at both and began teaching me as soon as my legs were long enough to run the treadle machine and my hands quick enough to avoid the sewing needle. Piecing my first quilt was her way of teaching me to sew a straight seam of a particular width, a bit about utilizing scraps left from dress construction, and perserverance in finishing a big project to her exacting standards. Many seams were ripped out and many tears were shed, but the finished quilt still resides on my guestroom bed some 50 years later, only a bit worse for the wear. Some of the pieces were printed feedsack, and I vividly remember accompanying my parents to the feed store warehouse and watching my mother pick out 100-pound bags of chicken feed in matching patterns so as to have the required yardage for a dress. Sometimes those choices involved having the sales help move several bags of feed to uncover the specific bag she wanted, not an easy task when the stack was 20 bags long, 10 bags deep, and 10 bags high, a seeming mountain of feed to a small child.

That first quilt was a simple 9-patch in a straight setting with lattice strips. Sometime during my junior high school years, I remember handpiecing a set of lemoyne star blocks on newspaper foundations from strips out of the scrap box, which I think Mom finally set together with 16-patch gold-and-green blocks fromthe '60s, though I don't remember that the top ever got quilted. Guess I need to dig through some of the still-packed boxes and see if I can find that one. Most of the quilts I make now are gifts, some large, some small, some only for wall hangings, but I still get a great deal of enjoyment from handpiecing and handquilting.

Y'all have a great day now. Marie in Maryland