New Quilt, Old Ideas.

I have begun making the third and last of the dentist office quilts. Although it sounds harsh, I don't want to spend too much time on any of these quilts but I do want them to be "family heirlooms". I put those words in quotation marks to indicate irony because no one who gives away a quilt can predict what will happen to that quilt. This is probably more true for baby quilts but even full bed sized quilts can be abused by those you love.

Several years ago an older gentleman who swam for our local master's team, for which I was the coach, found out that I was an avid quilter. He brought a family heirloom to the pool and asked if I could repair the damage. Although I am not in any way a quilt restorer, I do know that care must be taken and all steps to repair should be easy to remove. This was a lovely blue and white quilt with very careful quilting that this 75 year old man's grandmother had made but one that he and his wife had given to their daughter when she was a pre-teen. She didn't shred it but she did mark it with ball point pen. Besides that some of the seams were coming apart and some of the old fabric was just disappearing.

So I fixed the broken seams with time appropriate cotton thread. I covered the worn fabric pieces with similar fabrics but in a way that would be relatively easy to reverse. I covered the daughter's teenage messages, luckily most of those were on the muslin pieces, with pieces that were nearly duplicates to the original though not historic muslin. I made sure that all of the repairs I made could be reversed if in the future someone wanted to know what this quilt looked like after being in the same family for 100 years. I also encouraged my friend to document his grandmother's name and what he knew about the quilt's history.

Although it may not seem to be related, I want to add some of the very funny remarks I have encountered in twenty-five years of scoring essays. The funniest to me was the young woman who clearly used a thesaurus when she wrote her essay. The book she read was Ethan Frome and although I don't remember the specific prompt, her essay was based on Frome's character, his self centered view of the world. She was looking for a synonym for self centeredness and chanced upon one for self gratification, a phrase she thought was identical. After all, Ethan Frome was obviously only looking after himself so self gratification surely fit the bill. What she wrote in her essay was that Ethan Frome engaged in onanism. I laughed so hard my husband came upstairs to find out what was going on. It fell to me to tell this young woman that onanism was masturbation and if she needed more information she needed to ask her parents. One student started his essay by writing, "When Charles Dickens sat down at his typewriter..." Last week a student wrote that a character was, "...demised to death."

All of these thoughts flowed through my mind as I picked out the fabrics, considered, chose, ultimately decided what the nearly nine year old daughter of the receptionist would get. My quilting life will have come full circle because I will be making, with some modern changes, one of the first quilts I made. The pattern is almost forty years old, the instructions do not even know that rotary cutters exist. there are no considerations for faster piecing. I will come back tomorrow to tell you just what very old pattern I plan to use.