Elsie's Aprons

Sitting in her sunny kitchen in the late 1950s, the small drop leaf table covered by a tea cloth; being treated like company as she served me a diagonally-cut tuna sandwich on white toast. Why this moment in time became one of my most vivid memories of my father's mother, I couldn't say.

The Dresden Plates in this quilt were hand-pieced by my grandmother, Elsie Lucretia Race Walton (1894-1976). She had hand stitched them onto muslin squares but those blocks remained in a box until my mother sashed and bordered them with a solid hot pink fabric sometime during the 1970s.

After the yarn-tied, fiberfilled comforter came to me in 2002, it remained folded in our spare room for months. I finally lifted each of the plates from the tired, stained muslin, then waited several more months as I pondered and considered ideas to create the right setting for them.

When serendipity happens, it is wonderful.

The 1930s reproduction fabrics were purchased from a dimly-lit, overcrowded quilt emporium in Franklin, Tennessee months before I had any thought of using them for a specific project. Suddenly, they became the backgrounds for Grandma's plates.

Grandma and I had spent a large part of one 1960s summer debating the quality of my hand work as I struggled to learn Huck toweling from her (the only time I remember her trying to teach me one of her many hand work skills). Her stitches were so consistent and steady and, in hand stitching her Dresden Plates onto their new backgrounds, I felt her standing behind me once again. The indentations of her applique stitches were still visible in the edges of the plates and I instinctively followed them with my needle and thread.

Then it was time for the top and back to find their way to Bonnie Hunter of South Carolina, long arm quilter extraordinare. She added a part of herself to Elsie's Aprons as she quilted this 'something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue' piece of our family's history.