The Comfort of Quilts

The Ozarks Mountaineer was a wonderful magazine that, sadly, ceased publishing a few years ago. My piece about my grandmother’s quilts found a home in that magazine in December 1998.  This was a story as my mother told it to me. Today’s post is excerpted from that story.

Quilting is an ancient craft which still interests a lot of women. My grandmother’s skilled fingers put together many a quilt, and the finished product was as artistic as it was indispensable. The coming of fall saw much of Ma Latty’s outdoor work finished, but she had plenty of inside chores to keep her busy. Quilting was one of those.

When word spread through the Etta community that Edna Latty had a quilt up, Aunt Etta Forrest, Aunt Effie Stewart, great-grandma Willis, and other neighbors would drop in and help Edna quilt a while. They caught up on community news, which was fun, and helped finish the quilt while they talked.

Ma pieced, or put together her quilt tops in between actual quilting times. On long winter evenings, she drew up a chair before the fireplace and sewed together the small, bright pieces of material which would eventually cover her family’s beds when winter blew its icy breath across the Latty farm.

The quilt tops were, in themselves, a record of who wore what and on what occasion. Scraps of best dresses, summer shirts and waists, the best parts of aprons, all found new lives in the cover of a quilt.

I still have a few of my grandmother’s quilts as well as some of my mother’s. Each piece has a story to tell of just how it came to be. In a way, the bright and the dark pieces of the quilt are a record of the long ago life on the farm at Etta. The bright pieces might symbolize the good times; the dark pieces, the harder times, all coming together to make the pattern of day-to-day living. Like the quilts which warmed her family, this heritage from my grandmother warms my heart with its memories. I am grateful for the life and love recorded in those quilts that my grandmother made.