Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt

I have this great quilt top.  It is super old.  It is bright and cheery.  It makes me smile.  However, it needs to be finished!!  And because it is all lovingly hand pieced, it seems to be crying out to be hand quilted..

I love the movement in this picture.  It was such a pretty sunny day, however a bit windy.  I love it against the white aspen and blue sky.

So here's the story:  My grandmother (FarMor) had Alzheimer's disease and we cleaned out her house after she moved to a nursing home.  This would have been about 1990 or so.  She passed away in October, 1992.   When we went through her things, this quilt top was in the bottom of a trash bag up in her attic.  It was almost thrown out.  Anyway, since I am the family seamstress, I became the new owner.

The mystery:  My grandmother never really sewed.  She was a knitter. A knitter extraordinaire.  In fact, she taught lots of people how to knit.  Back in the day, May D&F was a marvelous department store, with their main store downtown on 16th Street.  It had this really cool part of the building that was designed by IM Pei, and it was this modernistic parabola shaped building.  Also, there was a skating rink there, sort of like the Rockefeller Center in NYC.  Sorry for the rabbit trail.  May D&F  had a yarn department (hard to believe) and she was their knitting expert.  She sat there knitting, and people would bring in projects for her to help with and also give classes and lessons.  She was the May D&F knitting guru.  Sometimes she finished things for people.  You know, they would knit the front, back and sleeves of a sweater and then not have a clue what to do with them, and she would finish it for them.  She got paid in some interesting ways, for instance a cake, some pickles and jams, etc.

It is our best guess that someone gave her this quilt top in payment for some work she did.  She never told any of us, and I have no idea how she thought it would get finished or what she would do with it.

Second part of this story is that in 1995, at my 20th high school reunion, I met a former classmate who was doing quilting.  She had been a peds nurse for Kaiser, and so she had actually worked at some point in after hours care with Ted.  But she had been diagnosed with MS and was working much less, and doing quilting in her days off.  So, I gave her the quilt and she was going to finish it.  But I never heard from her again.  Every few years I would try to find her, send a letter to the last address I had, etc.

Then I started doing some quilting, and really getting more interested in quilts.  A year ago I began in earnest to find her.  Then one day I got a call from her, answering my last letter.  It was pretty sad, her husband had just died of alcoholism, her mom was starting to fail, and her MS was pretty severe.  Needless to say, she hadn't worked on the quilt.  She wasn't sure where it was, somewhere in her mom's attic.  But after a year of each of us trying to get our schedules to meet up, I went to her house this week and picked up the quilt.

PHEWWWW....  Long story but I am really excited now to have it.

The reason that in this last picture the quilt isn't blowing all around like crazy is that I was standing behind it, holding it down.  Annika took the pictures with her new digital SLR that we gave her for Christmas.

So, now I need to pick out a fabric for the back... I think I will do a pieced back, maybe 3 blocks of solid with pieced rows in between or something like that.  I will never be able to match the fabrics, so I need to just blend/contrast sort of.  And I guess I need some sort of frame or something.  There are these square ones I have read about, Q-snap frames, and they are square and laptops.  The old fashioned laptops :)

I am going to make a small table runner and hand quilt it for practice.  Hopefully I will have it ready to take with me next week to the Broadmoor so I can do some handwork there.

Here are a couple of pictures Annika took on the trip she took with Ted and the Ptarmigans earlier this month.  I think she is doing a great job with her camera.  She has a very creative eye!!!

Sleep well,

Karen