Elsie's Pinwheels

This crib size pinwheel quilt was pieced by my grandmother.

I remember covering my baby sister with it

(although it was a yarn-tied comforter then).

Like the other rescue quilts of my grandmother's,

I gently removed the yarn ties,

the poly fiberfill batting,

and the stained muslin backing.

I added new inner and outer borders

and handed it off to Chris for quilting.

What a sweet, wonderful little quilt!

Elsie's Broken Dishes

My grandmother,

Elsie Race Walton,

pieced this quilt top.

Along the way,

my mother turned the flimsy into a comforter

stuffed with polyester fiberfill batting

and tied with acrylic yarn.

After the quilt moved to my house,

I gently removed all those yarn ties,

unstitched the binding

and discarded the aging batting and muslin back.

The flimsy was gently laundered

before I added a narrow inner border

and a wider floral outer border.

The project was then handed off to Chris ~

but we later decided

it was more than she wanted to deal with.

In the end, Elsie's Broken Dishes was quilted

by Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville.

She graciously coped with the

extra border fullness

and slightly askew flimsy

to create what I call one of my rescue quilts.

Baptist Fans were the one and only choice for quiliting.

Who knew growing up that my staid and proper

English grandmother

had such a scrappy-colorful inner self.

What a treasure.

Susie's Sunbonnet Sue

My sister's rescued Sunbonnet Sue quilt hanging at the 2006 Mid-South Fair.

This is what my sister's tired, worn childhood comforter looked like when she loaned it to me to rescue. After removing the yellow yarn ties, I cut through the tissue thin sashings to separate the squares appliqued long ago by our maternal grandmother, Elsie Race Walton. Then came the slow process of unstitching each Sue from her muslin background.

Next came hours and hours and hours of stitching narrow strips of reproduction fabrics to create filler blocks. During the same time period, I carefully hand appliqued each of the rescued Sues to a new background square.

Finally the completed top was handed off to my long arm quilty friend, Chris, who incorporated her version of McTavishing as fill for the backgrounds around each Sue. Many long hours later, the beautiful, newly-restored quilt was gifted to my sister for Christmas 2005.

Birds Reborn

How completely exciting . . . a reporter from the Enquirer & News (local paper) came to our house (!) to interview me (!) and take pictures (!) of the embroidered comforter I had entered in the Youth Talent Competition. I was all of 15 years old.

At some point, I had found the 1950s pre-stamped muslin pieces at my grandmother's house. For reasons I don't remember (maybe it had something to do with blue skies?), I chose royal blue embroidery floss to stitch the 48 state abbreviations and bird names. The birds themselves, along with the flora and fauna, were embroidered in 'true-to-life' colors. When the hours and hours and weeks and months of stitchery were completed, my mother helped choose a bright, sunny yellow for the sashings and border.

My muslin-backed, yellow yarn-tied, fiberfill comforter earned an honorable mention in the 1966 talent fair; then spent the next 35+ years on one bed or another. By the time it came back to me in late 2003, the borders and backing were stained from use, and the lumpy fiberfill batting was very sad. I unstitched the seams in order to 'liberate' the birds, even though I had no idea how to re-purpose them ~ another example of contemplate then wait.

Finally, inspiration struck. It was time to square up the blocks (oh, how I wish I'd known about that concept in 1966) and choose colors to accentuate the embroidery flosses (royal blue to highlight the lettering, dark green to echo the foliage, golden yellow to honor the original sashing, and cardinal red like the feathers of my mother's favorite bird). There would be no boring, monocromatic layout this time, no poly fiberfill, and no yarn ties. These early 50s birds would have a brightly-colored, machine quilted abode for their new life.


The sashings were quilted using variegated thread and stitch in the ditch. For the borders, I took a huge chance and used one of the 'border on a roll' designs ~ the first and last time I would ever use the technique (picking out all the little paper bits after stitching was much too much like work, although the quilting itself turned out fine).



As I worked on this project, I felt a strong parallel between the birds' resurrection in their newly quilted environment and my own state of transition. How curious that the idea and timing for this quilt came as Iwas ending seven years with the same employer and approaching my 51st birthday. How fitting that the dual concepts of heritage and transformation are forever represented in this labor of love.

God's grace . . . serendipity . . . I'm so grateful that they're at work in my life.

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.