Honoring My Roots
My grandmother taught me to admire quilting as a child and later shared her love of quilting and fabric with my mom and myself, just ask my dad about the stacks and stacks of fabric we keep acquiring. She was an awesome quilter, crafter, baker, and just plain creative! She learned from her mother, who had to quilt and sew in order to provide warmth and clothing for their family during the Great Depression. She turned what was once a need into a passion.
Nanny, as we called her, always had the grandkids involved in a craft of some sort when we would visit or get together for holidays. We would visit a craft show and then go home and recreate things that she admired. She would often buy something that looked challenging so she could take it apart and then put it back together again, often with some improvements. Shortly after I was married, we visited her for the day and I was admiring something she was working on. Needless to say, I went home with a sewing machine and all the fabric and tools I needed to complete that project (that project is still in a box as something else caught my eye.) We would visit quilt shows and at different times my mom and I would be working on something and she would be checking in, as she was usually working on at least 5 different projects at a time.
After I finished hand quilting a project, she got my mom and I started on Grandmother’s Flower Garden flowers with her. We each had our assigned hexagons in various colors and she would check in and make sure we had enough centers and the other background staples. It was something I could do on the couch while watching tv, or in the car on road trips. It was a great topic of discussion and lesson in hand piecing. Then my Nanny got sick.
My mom and I both kept working on the hexagon shapes while she was in the hospital and were so looking forward to her getting back to her “normal” creative self. But after many many strokes, we realized things were not going to be the same. She lost a ton of her ability to articulate words and her right side was severely impaired. Unfortunately as time passed things just kept getting worse as she continued to have strokes.
As life got busier for my mom as her primary care giver, the hexagon shapes were set aside. We eventually had to clear out Nanny’s house and box up the rooms full of projects and fabric to move her to a home where she could receive 24 hour care. The sheer amount of items we had to pack was overwhelming and sad at the same time, to think of so many of her projects never being completed. Each project was part of her passion, her lifeblood.
A week ago I started looking at a different type of quilting than I had seen in the past. It was captivating! I now have a teenager and two small children and life just looks a lot different than it did back then, so something I could work on and not be attached to the sewing machine was exciting. The more I researched this quilt project the more I realized it was so similar to the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilts that I started working on over 13 years ago. But whatever happened to all of those hexagons and completed flowers?
I’ve moved since that project and my parents are in the process of preparing to move. I asked my mom if she knew where they were, and she had an idea of where they were boxed up, but not exactly. So the daunting task of unpacking the repacked boxes of crafting and sewing projects began. We found thousands of those hexagons! My mom found the quilt top that she had started to piece them together. The original idea was that all three of us would have a quilt for our beds of the same design. So I’m now on a mission to complete as many lap quilts to give to her now great grandchildren and my sister in law and cousins.
Over the last few days of sorting and matching paper hexagons covered in fabric, it’s been like a walk down memory lane. That sounds lame, but to see her handwriting on various papers, be able to pick out fabric that was absolutely her favorite just based on the sheer volume, and to see her needle still in the middle of one of the flowers has brought back a flood of memories and some regrets. Wishing I had started paying attention to her quilting sooner, really wishing I had gone back to have her teach me how to bind a quilt and how to deal with quilt squares that just aren’t lining up (she had a way of making things look great).
This process has also brought gratitude for the investment she made in each of us with great patience. I’m so grateful that I did take the time to learn to hand quilt from her and blessed that she said my stitch reminded her of my great grandmother’s tiny little hand stitch. I’m blessed to have several quilts that she made, often as gifts for each of us. One year she gave all the guys, including my hubby, flannel rag quilts that are amazing during winter!
It’s also made me a bit fearful that our culture is no longer honoring those that went before us. Families often don’t live close to one another or only see each other for weddings and funerals. What are we missing out on by not learning from the generations before us. One of my favorite history teachers once said that one of the reasons we should study history is because like a pendulum,it has a tendency to repeat itself. This is so true! Some of factors may be different, but the root causes are often the same. Are we learning from the experiences of the great grandparents, grand parents and even parents that we still have to learn from their success and their failures? Or are we a generation that is so enamored with learning for ourselves that the art of story telling has been left to the wayside so we can look up the instructions on Pinterest or YouTube?
As those known as the Greatest Generation start to become less and less prevalent in our daily activities, are we doomed to repeat their failures because we didn’t make the time to learn about their experiences?
