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Heirloom quilts reveal family histories
We heard several stories last Thursday when two local women told about their quilts, but if the colorful patchwork coverlets in their laps had been able to tell their own tales, we’d have learned even more.
The occasion was an N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching seminar titled “If Quilts Could Speak: Storytelling with a Needle.” The session, organized and led by Center fellow Carrie Gates, placed Tuckasegee residents Gladys Hooper and Mary Jo Harris in front of a group of teachers who had traveled to Cullowhee from around the state to learn more about both making quilts and incorporating the patchwork creations and their stories into lesson plans.
The idea, according to Gates, was to give teachers ideas that could be useful in their classrooms. For example, a unit on quilts and the fabrics used to make them might add another dimension to a history lesson, she said.
It was something of a role reversal for the educators who were quilting novices. As they attempted to master a new set of skills, they also experienced the way their students might feel when faced with a new concept.
“It certainly helps me empathize with what the students feel,” one said.
The treat for me, however, was listening to Gladys and Mary Jo tell about the quilts that link the generations of their families.
Gladys, who turned 93 on June 29, began with a quilt she’d pieced when she was 12 years old by stitching narrow strips of fabric into a circular pattern her mother cut out for her (See photo page 1A).
“My mother was making a quilt, and she used all the big pieces and gave me the little strings,” Gladys said.
The circles that Gladys pieced out of the scraps of scraps lay tucked away until several years ago when Gladys finally assembled them into a quilt.
“I picked material for the backing that looked like an old feed-sack pattern,” she said, adding that many of the small pieces that make up the circles had been cut from old cloth sacks.
Looking at a quilt top Gladys said was made by her late husband’s bed-ridden grandmother, Ingabo Queen, who spent her last years sewing when she couldn’t do anything else, I was reminded of my own great-grandmother in Georgia who excelled at needlework.
Left widowed with two small children, she sewed to provide for them. I can see in the red-and-blue, star-patterned quilt on my bed the neatness and symmetry of her stitches and her attention to detail.
My great-grandmother’s practicality and forced thriftiness are evident as well. The small pieces of printed cotton that form the star are uniform and perfectly matched – except for the two or three that are the wrong shade or a different print. When I asked my mother why it was like that, she told me that her grandmother would never waste anything, and that she’d never, ever, spend money on extra material to complete a quilt, no matter how lovely the pattern.
As Gladys and Mary Jo shared their stories, they would point to squares of fabric that had come from the kitchen curtains or a dress their mother wore. My mother could look at the quilt tops my great-grandmother pieced and remember clothes she and her sister had worn.
It that sense, quilts do indeed provide a record of family history, and it’s important that those able to recall those stories share them with younger relatives.
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