Fait Accompli
I’m finally over the head cold from hell! I finished the whipstitching around the edge of Nan’s quilt this week. Done and Done.
This part is always slow going. I fold the interfacing under and whipstitch it down by hand. It is a very slow, meditative process. I rather like it, it allows me the space and time to mentally wrap up each quilt. It was particularly slow with this quilt given how fragile the edge pieces are. But it is done! Yeah!
Now onto the quilt for my great great aunt Elizabeth. Elizabeth, or Lib as she was known, was married to my great great grandmother Grace’s half brother O’Dillion (Dilly) Turner. Lib and Dilly lived in a house that they built when Dilly came back from the Great War. It was just over the Veazie town line in Orono. They had one child, a daughter, who died shortly after she was born when she was dropped at the hospital. While Dilly was away at the war his mother (Grace’s stepmother) died of the Spanish flu. They always struck me as a sad couple (some would say cranky) as if the child had left a hole in their lives but they always had each other and their home which they took great pride in.
Since they had no children of their own my mother would bring my sisters and I over to visit Lib and Dilly on holidays and from time to time. Lib was an amazing quiltmaker. The quilt I am planning for her will be based on one of her’s that I have in my collection. It’s queen sized and I believe she made it sometime around 1940:
It’s hand stitched and hand quilted:
I wasn’t able to figure out what the pattern was so I took a picture of it and sent it to the New England Quilt Museum, where I am a member. They were able to identify it for me right away! It is a Bumble Bee pattern.
I’ve been percolating for a while on exactly how to translate this into paper and wax… still gurgling.