D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
 |
Voice of a Ranch Woman Sixth in a Series |
Using Up the Scraps We Have
The surprise of quilting is that you wind up giving someone your heart, in the time you spend making a quilt.
By Linda McDonald, as told to Victoria Tester
This first-person reminiscence is excerpted from recordings of Linda Nielson McDonald at her home on the McDonald Ranch. Established in 1903, the McDonald Ranch is among the five oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. Linda McDonald, born in Moab, Utah, in 1942, is the wife of Jerry McDonald, the son of Jonnie McDonald and Evelyn McCauley. These recordings are a collaboration between McDonald and author Victoria Tester, whose book Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press) won the nationally recognized Willa Cather Literary Award. Their efforts mark the beginning of a project by the two women to record and publish a book of oral histories of ranch women in southern New Mexico.
My first recollection of quilts was when my grandmother, Lulu Josephine Green, my mother's mother, gave me several real old things she liked. One of the things she gave me was a crazy quilt, made by my great-grandmother, Alma Jacobs Parker. Alma was born in 1870 and died at a very young age, in 1907. So my mother never knew her.
 |
The quilt by the author's great-grandmother,
Alma Jacobs Parker, circa 1905. |
But Alma had made this crazy quilt out of my great-grandfather's neckties. It has a real special square in it — a square she painted, because she was an artist. It has a beautiful rose and two yellow birds on it, painted with oils. Some of the fabric on this quilt is fabric that probably wasn't necktie fabric, but velvet. Then Alma put all these beautiful stitchings on each square, and there's also a square where my-great grandmother did some beautiful embroidery. This quilt was never made into a finished quilt, it's just a top, but I've been so grateful to my grandmother Lulu Rhinehart Green who gave it to me because I feel like it's tied me back to Alma. This quilt is a hundred years old, or more. And it's falling apart. It's disintegrating, some of it, which makes me really sad, because you want to keep these things forever. But they don't last forever.
Down through the 43 years Jerry and I've been married, we've come into possession of some special quilts here on the ranch. We have the quilt that was the Morton quilt. It's a cream color, a solid fabric, not a piece quilt. The quilting on it is about a fourth of an inch apart. The reason they did that quilting really close like that back then is because the batting was made out of cotton, and they wanted to hold the batting in place, and so they'd make that quilting really close to hold the batting in place so it wouldn't wad up. Nowadays, our batting is polyester, and you can hardly pull it apart, so it isn't as important that we do that really close quilting. But this Morton quilt, we figure, was made by Granny Evelyn McCauley's grandmother, Martha Jane Brewer Morton, who was born in 1862 and died in 1903. The quilt was reverenced by Granny's mother, Nancy Morton McCauley, who gave it to Granny. This was a special quilt to Granny McDonald, whose grandmother, like my own mother's grandmother, died at a young age, when she was just 41. This quilt is so special that we hardly ever get it out, but we did display it when Granny and Grandpa McDonald had their 50th wedding anniversary.
The other quilt we have here at the ranch is a friendship quilt made for Mitchel Ann Gordon, Jerry's great-grandmother, Jeremiah McDonald's wife, by the women in Virden when she lived down there. I feel very blessed to have this quilt, which was given to me by Jerry's Aunt Jane, Grandpa Jonnie McDonald's sister. Mitchel Ann died in 1932, so this quilt was probably made in the late 1920s, and each one of the gals in Virden made a pieced quilt square, and they embroidered their names on it. When you look at it you see all these old fabrics in it, and you just know that it's an older quilt, because it doesn't have any new fabrics in it. It has what they had. These gals made their quilt squares out of their scraps that they had in their own home, and they're not matched in any way. These kind of quilts are my favorite quilts. Because to me, that's what a quilt is. A quilt is to use up the scraps we have.
Another special quilt we have that was Granny's is one that Nancy Morton McCauley made when she went to the Shiff's Department store in Silver City and got wool samples. They had those wool samples there for people to pick out what kind of suit they wanted to order. So she got these wool samples. Evidently she made several of those Shiff's wool-sample quilts. The samples are only about three inches by five, and she sewed all those together. Now that is a lot of sewing on a treadle sewing machine!
Sometimes a woman doesn't quilt, but will hire someone else to make her quilts. Grandma Nancy Morton McCauley went down to Lordsburg to a lady who was living down there who did quilts. And Grandma Nancy had her make up a bunch of quilts so that she could give one to each of her nine children. Those were Lone Star quilts. Granny McDonald had Aunt Alice Gordon make up Lone Star quilts for Jerry and his sister Annalee. Granny didn't quilt, but she wanted her children to have these quilts, and so we've got Jerry's Lone Star quilt.
Granny gave me several other quilts when we got married and later I put a Log Cabin quilt on one of our kids' beds, and discovered that after we'd used it three years or so, it started to wear. And I go, "We can't wear this out!" A Log Cabin quilt is where they start in the middle with a little square, then they sew a piece of material to that and then another piece on the other side, and another straight rectangular piece on the other side, and then on the other side, until they've made a square. Anyway, I put that Log Cabin quilt away.
I told myself early on, "We're never going to use these old quilts because I don't want to wear them out." But I also go, "What's the purpose? The purpose of making quilts is to keep people warm, not to have in a cedar chest someplace!" We do that with a lot of things, don't we?
I made a compromise. I decided that when our kids got married, and they came back to the ranch for the very first time, that their bed would have the Lone Star quilt on it for them to sleep under. Then I would carefully put it up after they left and wait for the next marriage. So now all of our six children have slept under the Lone Star quilt.
I've sewed a lot of things in my life. I wasn't an expert at it, but I did sew. When Jerry and I got married, I had that treadle sewing machine, and then we had children and I loved to make little shirts and things for those little kids out of flour sacks.
When you sew and you make things, you always have scraps left over. So quilting, really, all starts with scraps. You sew and you have these scraps left over. I don't know if that ever ends and you use up all the scraps.
Quilting is about using up the scraps, not about going out and buying new material. This fits into the philosophy the [Mormon Church has of "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." That's why I don't fit in with a lot of the quilters nowadays, because they go out and buy all this expensive fabric that matches just so. They're beautiful quilts — I am not disputing that in the least. But they're also very expensive. Me, I'm just saying, "What do I have here? How can I use this up?"
There's a lot of math in a quilt. You've got to figure out how big the squares are going to be, and if you're going to have strips in-between you've got to figure that out. You've got to figure out how the squares fit around the center. And I'm not that good at math. Anyway, with my kids' quilts, I didn't have any quilt stands. I didn't have any quilt frames. So I go, "How can I do this?"
I found out you can do a whole big quilt with a hoop.
So I bought me a hoop that's about two feet in diameter. What I'd do is I'd lay my quilt out on the floor with the bottom, the batting and then the top. I'd always get the loose weave sheet, the least amount of thread count, because your needle will go through it easier; you get a really high-quality sheet and you can hardly get a needle through it. Then I'd pin it all together. I didn't baste it, I'd pin it. And then I'd put it in a big sack and I'd work on it just one part at a time. You have to start in the middle and work out.
I'd take that sack with me and I've quilted from here to Utah so many times, going to see our kids, and wherever we went. We didn't travel that much, so most of it was done here right by the fireplace. But if we ever got on the road I got a lot of quilting done. Jerry would drive and I'd quilt.
Nobody taught me how to do quilts. My Mom didn't quilt. Nobody showed me how to do a quilt, but my great-grandmother Alma Jacobs Parker inspired me, because I adore her quilt.
If you're going to have a celebration, you make a quilt for it. They mark time, they commemorate, and you've got to remember that event. I wanted my kids to remember their weddings, so I made them their wedding quilts. When they were younger, they'd gone on tour with their music to Maritime Canada and they'd gone to France, to perform with the Ricks Folk Dancers — they were the band. So what I did was — they had clothes that they wore, certain clothes — I took those clothes, and made strips, and then I did a map showing where they went on that tour, and embroidered all that on there. I also did a map of where our boys served their missions, in Argentina, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Ireland. It was just so fun to put into a quilt an experience they'd had, and of course their missions were such special, spiritual experiences.
Then Granny and I got this great idea to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Community Hall at White Signal. We go, "Let's make a quilt!" I had already seen a quilt at the museum, that the Cow Belles did, and it was a brand quilt. I was lucky enough to have this old grandpa, Grandpa Jonnie McDonald, who knew all the old brands at White Signal. He drew the brands for me, and Granny and I went out into the community and if they had a brand, I asked them to do their own brand on a square of material I gave them. So all the community members, not all of them, but the ones who were still here, did their own quilt brand. We had quite a few people in the community who helped do those, and so we made a quilt, a beautiful quilt. It was white, and it had red-and-white-checked gingham in-between the squares. I made the middle: "White Signal Community 1931-1981." I embroidered it. And I've found out since that embroidery work wears really fast off a quilt. I sewed the top together, and we had a lady do the quilting. We hired the quilting done. We had a drawing, and Uncle Harry and Aunt Pauline McCauley won that quilt, and I don't know where it is now.
Not too long after that, Grandma and Grandpa celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. And I go, "Let's make Grandma and Grandpa one of those quilts." So Annalee, Jerry's sister, Aunt Bertha and I undertook that project, to embroider all those squares. And then I embroidered the center, which was quite a project, too. It was much more complicated, the quilt we made, because it had to do with all the facets of their lives. I had to portray, every 10 years, what happened in their lives. I used the Ace Reid cartoons. I'd look at the Ace Reid cartoons and go, "Here's this old cow. I can kind of draw that old skinny cow." I think the good Lord helped me, because I'm not that great an artist. And I embroidered the White Signal Schoolhouse, where Grandpa and Granny went to school together as children. It took us two years to get that quilt done. Then I sewed it all together, and then we hired that quilted. Ella Gatlin quilted that one.
When I was with Primary, the children's organization of our church, I happened to be the president when they celebrated its 100th anniversary. Well, we had to do a quilt for that! So we did one, and we had all the children — there were over 100 children in Primary — each draw a picture with fabric crayons, and we ironed it onto that fabric. Then we put it together with the Primary colors, which are red, yellow and blue. I had a very dear friend, Nancy Strange, who was one of those very particular people who does everything perfect, and she did the center. And it's gorgeous.
The Gerry Billings family bid on that at our celebration, and they bought it. Granny and Grandpa were bidding against them for the quilt, because they wanted to buy it for me, and the bid just went too high, and they said, "We're not going to pay that much!" So the Billingses got that quilt. Anyway, on my birthday, a few years after later, Darlene Billings gave it to me. I cry when I remember her doing that.
I tell myself it's not that the quilt means anything. It's a worldly possession and worldly things aren't where it's all at. It's spiritual things. It's us improving our lives and coming closer to Christ, those are the things that are important in our lives. But when someone gives you a quilt, they're giving you their heart. Because they've spent their time on it, or someone spent their time, on it.
There's lots of time goes into these quilts that are quilted like that. First of all you start out just using up your scraps. Then you go, "I need a gift for somebody. What can I make 'em?" But guess what? The surprise of the whole thing is that you've given them your heart, in the time that you've spent making it.
I just finished the 27th little baby quilt for the little babies in our family, the 27th grandchild, though four of those have been grand-nephews.
When we got ready to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ranch, our nephew Duane says, "We need a quilt." Not another quilt! So when my daughter Michele came down here, I sewed on the treadle sewing machine and she sewed on my electric sewing machine. We had some fabric Granny had bought. Granny bought fabric but she didn't sew — she wasn't much of a seamstress, but she mended like crazy. That gal was a mender. But anyway, she'd bought this fabric, and we started tearing it up.
This 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.