D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
Voice of a Ranchwoman
Page: 3This man once said, "I think quilting is the stupidest thing. What they do is they tear it up and they sew it back together. Now that just doesn't make sense to me." Tear it up and sew it back together. But that's what you do.
So we tore it apart and we sewed it back together. And that quilt, it's called the Rail Fence. It didn't really show the pattern of the Rail Fence because we did a big center, and on that center we ironed on pictures of Grandma Mitchel and Grandpa Jeremiah McDonald, and I did some embroidery on that. And then we had the old original brands for the ranch, six original brands, that I made. I hand-quilted that one. That quilt is hanging down in Granny's living room, at her ranch house.
My work with the Relief Society is the closest I've come to going to a quilting bee. In Silver City, we have workdays where we do humanitarian quilts that we send up to Salt Lake that are distributed all over the world when there are disasters.
Jerry built me some stands and I went out to the junkpile and found some boards and made me some frames. I taped them together to make them the right length. So the Relief Society gets together and we do these quilts. Of course we're talking tied quilts, which are really comforters, not quilted quilts. But I call them all "quilts."
It's like an old-fashioned quilting bee when we work. What I love about it is, as you're working on the quilts, you're visiting, and you'll find out some news you didn't know.
Another thing I love is teaching the very young to quilt. Last summer I invited some mothers who had young girls. We did a crib-size quilt with those little girls, and we taught them to do those knots. We watched them go from not knowing how to do it and feeling frustrated to, by the time we finished the quilt and hollered, "It's done!" they knew how to do it.
I discovered that such a young child could tie knots when my granddaughters Maecee and Maloree, who were only eight and five years old, did it at the ranch. There they were, with their mother, Kristy. They learned to tie a quilt with their mother and their grandmother. When a woman grows up, she loves to tell someone that her grandmother or her mother taught her how to do that.
We want these skills to keep going on. Then they learn how to use up their little pieces of material. They learn how to piece a quilt. How to tie a knot. They learn how to use a needle.
It was my mother's grandmother, May Elizabeth Ensminger, who taught her how to sew with a needle. She told my mother, "You young girls! You get these long threads to sew with, and then you spend all your time taking knots out!" I still do that, get really long threads because I don't want to have to thread the needle.
Back years ago, during the quilting bees, when they had a quilt they wanted to get done, they often wanted it to be done only by the best quilters. Somebody like me wouldn't have been invited. Because to be a good quilter, all your stitches should be even. Your stitches should all be the same length and the same distance apart. I do my best, but mine aren't.
When we're doing our Relief Society quilts, we've got sisters working on all sides of the quilt. Sometimes one sister will do it one way and one sister will do it another way, and I think that's wonderful. I really like that. As long as it fits within the guidelines, who cares? Some sisters put their ties in really close, and others farther apart. I tell them, "Go ahead and do it any way you want to!"
I try to make use of every bit of my time that I can. That's what the colonial women used to do. They were always doing things. Even when they were visiting, they always had something in their hands. Because they were like I am. I'm sure they couldn't go to Wal-Mart and get something for a gift, and they knew they wanted to give something to people. I do sometimes go to Wal-Mart and get the cheap material, and maybe it won't last as long because it's cheap.
But things aren't supposed to last forever anyway.
They used to make quilts out of tobacco sacks. They made quilts out of everything. You know what I have back there that I'm looking forward to doing? I went up to the Bluebird Flour Mill in Colorado, and they were still putting their flour in sacks. I bought a bunch of flour and I've saved every one of those sacks, so I can make me a bluebird quilt someday.