The Master Quilter

Mom, Sally C to her friends, was a master quilter. Fabric, thread, needles, and quilting frames were the tools of her craft. She made quilts of every size, color, and shape. Some were rustic, tied quilts. Others were intricately stitched masterpieces. What Rembrandt did with brush and paint, Mom did with fabric, scissors, and thread.

She spent hours in fabric stores painstakingly choosing fabrics of assorted colors, random patterns, and varying textures. Those pieces of cloth were gold in her hands. What looked like random samples of chaos to the untrained eye were prized pieces for her finished quilts.

She enjoyed almost nothing more than laying out her fabrics, looking them over with her discerning eye, cutting them into various shapes and sizes, pinning them, and sewing them together. She was in her own little world, humming a song from her childhood as the sewing machine purred.

When the quilt top was finished and met her discriminating expectations, she pressed the seams and carefully folded it so as not to fold in any wrinkles. It was then, and only then, ready for backing, batting, and quilting frames.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite places to watch television was underneath her quilt top, stretched tightly across sturdy wooden frames. Sometimes, she let my sister and me pull the needle through to the bottom and poke it back up through the fabric to her. Of course, our stitches were too long for her taste, so she would pull the thread back out once we had gone on our way and begin where she had left off.

As she grew older and her hands gnarled with arthritis, she joined a quilting group that employed a long-arm quilting machine. No quilted pattern was the same, each one highlighting the pieces and fabrics.

She made hundreds of quilts in her lifetime, and no two were alike. Her favorites were critter quilts—ducks, squirrels, dogs, cats, cows, and a zoo full of miscellaneous critters. But these weren’t typical critters. She machine-embroidered huge eyes, rosy cheeks, snouts, grinning mouths, and intricate beaks. When my first son, her first grandchild, was born, she gave me a duck critter quilt. Not wanting to soil or spoil it in any way, I hung it on the nursery wall. When she saw it hanging there, she said, “Let him snuggle in it. That’s what I made it for.” Indeed, each snuggle in her quilts was like being wrapped in a glorious Grandma hug.

My sister and I laughed after Mom passed away as we looked at her homemade quilt collection. From the woman who proclaimed that one should never mix stripes and polka dots and assured us that a red blouse with a yellow skirt looked like ketchup on eggs, to the woman whose favorite pastime was matching seemingly mismatched patterns and colors, she was a living, breathing contradiction.

There were a few quilts I wasn’t fond of, however. Mom went through her polyester double-knit fabric stage, making quilts out of giant-sized squares and weird color combinations that made sense only to her. She made a few Levi quilts so heavy that once she added the batting and backing, we had to use them as groundcover when we camped or risk suffocation while we slept. They weren’t lovely, but they kept out the cold.

Mom’s gift for piecing together fabrics that, at first glance, didn’t look like they belonged together but, in the end, became one-of-a-kind masterpieces is a lot like life. We all bring something different to the quilt of life. And sometimes, it appears that bringing us together would be sheer chaos. But in the hands of the Master Quilter, the design becomes a masterpiece.