Memories

 

A Quilt of Memories

To start at the beginning, years and years ago I bought my first embroidery machine.  Over time I made several baby quilts featuring embroidery designs for my grandbabies. I made others for friends and extended family.  I would show each one to my mom and after a while she commented that she wished I would embroider some designs for her to use in a quilt.

I hate to admit it but several years passed and then one Christmas I was struggling with what to get for my mom.   After all I now know we all reach that age when there is really nothing that we need and if we do need or want something we probably just go out and buy it for ourselves.

I ran across a set of embroidery designs featuring farm scenes with barns, tractors and various farm animals done in a single color.  Knowing that my dad was a big John Deere fan, I stitched out the designs in a variegated green thread and trimmed the blocks to 10 ½ inches and gave them to my mom for Christmas. 

Now I have to confess that I sincerely doubted that my mom would actually do anything with the blocks but it was the thought that counted and she was very appreciative of them.

Fast forward to the spring of 2021.  My mom had passed away in December of 2020 and we were busy cleaning out her house to get it ready to sell.  I’ve always said that my mom never threw anything away and sure enough in a drawer in her bedroom was the box of embroidered quilt blocks.  My brother asked me what I was going to do with them and I told him that I had no idea.  He asked if he could have them to which I replied “yes”.  And then the other shoe dropped.  He wanted to know if I would put them into a quilt for him.  I really should have seen that one coming.

So now it was 2024 and I was thinking of what projects I might want to work on at retreat in Shipshewana.  In going through my sewing room, I stumbled across those blocks and decided this was the year that they became of quilt instead of a box of blocks.  So down I went to my local quilt shop and found two pieces of fabric.  One was a dark green print and the other was a dark yellow print.  Not quite true John Deere colors but close enough.  I used my EQ8 software and started playing around with different blocks and came up with a design for the quilt.  I now had my project for retreat.  No – I did not get the quilt top completed at retreat but I sure managed to get most of the pieced blocks sewn.  I came home and finished the rest of the pieced blocks and sewed the top together.  I sent it off to be quilted on a long-arm machine in December and was lucky enough to get it back the week before Christmas.

I called my brother and asked him if he could stop by before Christmas as I had something to give him.  He was thrilled, especially since he had forgotten about the blocks and had figured that much like our mom, I would probably never do anything with them.

I called him the next morning and asked if he slept under his quilt and his reply was that he had and had slept the best that he had in a very long time.  I’m not really sure if it was because of the weight of the quilt or just remembering our younger life on the farm with our parents, but I like to think that it was because of the memories.

Bev Day, Guild member.