Quilting and sewing

I learned to love to sew from my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. Through my youth, my mother made most of my cloths. When I was old enough, she taught me how to place the patterns and cut the material. I was the cutter, at least that is how I remember it. Mom did not teach me to sew, I learned at Girl Scouts -Brownies and a whole lot more in high school, but once I learned, I loved choosing the materials and patterns.


When I had children of my own, I bought a treadle machine and began making clothes for them and myself. A friend taught me to bead, and the children did not leave the house with out some bead embellishment on their home made outfits.

When we moved back to the States my first sewing machine was an "Elnita", made not in Europe but Japan. For years this machine sewed the quilts, bed coverlets, curtains, outfits for my daughter. I have had a large material stash..and two Christmases ago I asked my daughters, Anilia and Erica, to choose what they wanted. Then that spring began stone carving...and somehow I didn't think I would be sewing much any longer. I gave away material that the girls did not want...but I still have a stash of linen and muslin and dungaree material.

This year as I helped my folks downsize, my sisters told me I was to take my mother's material collection. It never dawned on me to say no. And I agreed with them that we would never get a fair price for the material Mom had collected. But along with the material came the treadle machines, which I will lovingly use but they are still in the middle of the country at my younger sister's home waiting to come east. And it will this spring.

At Christmas my husband asked me - would I like a new sewing machine? I said yes. And cried like a baby at so wonderful a gift. Yes to creating for my daughters and grandchildren and my sisters and their children and grand children from that precious gift of my mothers and her mothers, and her mother.