Every Quilt Has a Story 5
My Grandmother’s Flower Garden By Elaine Walizer
The 1775-1776 Bicentennial celebrations awakened in me an interest in Colonial crafts. No one in my family–not grandparents, not the many aunts, and certainly not the uncles–had ever made a quilt–and Granny Ruth was even proud to say so. Undeterred by my inexperience, I made two quilts for friends who were expecting their first babies–one whole cloth and one featuring applique blocks. All the while, I was borrowing books from the library and admiring the many styles, but with special affection for “Grandmother’s Flower Garden.” My older sister–as ignorant as I–sent me a plastic one-inch hexagon template; she also included blithe instructions for hand piecing. That project ended after a single misshapen “flower.”
Next stop, freezer paper! I traced and cut dozens of hexies, ironed them onto my dressmaking scraps, and cut shapes with generous margins. I began basting -- stitching through the paper in time-honored fashion. A few “flowers” later, it dawned on me that eventually all of the basting would have to be removed–an incredible time sink.. This was all going to take forever. Good-bye to all that!
I might never have revisited the GMF if my DHubby and I hadn’t stopped at an antique shop in Powell, Ohio–right outside Columbus. The first thing I saw upon entering was a “Flower Garden” quilt top! The flour sack and sugar sack hexagon Flowers were arrayed in color families that ran diagonally across the quilt. Clearly, the maker had possessed artistic vision. Yellow centers were surrounded by solid colors, which were in turn surrounded by print fabrics. A round of traditional green hexagons finished each block, and white “stepping stones” joined them all together. And every print hexie was “fussy-cut” –including one featuring characters from Beatrix Potter storybooks. I was enchanted. Fully unfolded, the quilt top was found to be unfinished, but I purchased it anyway and took it home.
Who had made the quilt top? Why hadn’t it been finished? Where was it from? The antique shop owner had no answers to those questions, but I felt excited by the challenge of completing this quilt.
With a husband who traveled and both children in high school, I had time to devote to my “rescue quilt top.” I found the right “antique green” solid and a sturdy white muslin for making the missing pieces. Happily, I had been introduced to the new “Paper Pieces” which made my next step easier: basting fabric over the hexagon shapes. For each unfinished block I would need 18 green and 24 white “hexies”; in addition, there were stained and torn spots needing replacements. I was going to need hundreds of hexagons, so I carried my sewing kit and basted hexies during every PTA meeting, each sit-and-sew, any quilt guild gathering, and during time spent in a waiting room.
Every time I had sufficient hexies for one of the quilt’s Flowers, I whip-stitched the pieces into place on the quilt top. I discovered that my Unknown Maker wasn’t perfect; her hexagons ranged from nearly one inch to seven-eighths or three quarters of an inch. More than a few were lopsided. By adjusting my green pieces I was able to persuade the quilt top to accept more uniform stepping stone rounds, knowing that would be a help down the road.
Finally, every round of the Flower Garden was complete, and while the quilt was a generous size, it was not entirely adequate for our queen-sized bed. My solution was to find a 1920's-30's reproduction fabric to complement the flour and sugar sack material in the original blocks. I cut very wide borders to increase both length and width, and then hand stitched the edges of the Flower Garden quilt to the extensions.
Considerable time passed as I accomplished those tasks. Our daughter went off to college; our son was a junior, then a senior in high school; and my restless husband declared that he could not endure more Winters in the Northeast Ohio Snow Belt. Everything was put aside as we packed, installed our son in his university, sold our house in Ohio, bought a house in Arkansas, and settled in our new state. It was more than 18 months before I unpacked my sewing machine and the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt–still only a quilt top. After a 20-year gap, I had re-entered the work force as a special education teacher at Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital in Little Rock–a considerable commute, but a necessary step after our health insurer withdrew entirely from the state. I decided my rescue quilt deserved to be hand-quilted, but I wanted it to be accomplished in my life-time...so I sent it to a Vermont quilter who did a lovely job. When I completed the binding and sewed on the label I was filled with joy.
