The Lady Who Quilted Stories

By Shannon Smith

The Lady Who Quilted Stories is the debut novel from Shannon Smith. The book is a stream of consciousness examination of the female experience of a baby boomer reared as a military brat, as revealed by her quilting history.

About the Author:

Shannon Smith is the descendent of several generations of Pennsylvania quilting

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barn Cat Books
• Release date: Oct 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781087977522

Shannon Smith

If you're feeling frustrated in your career, Shannon is the one you need to call! She is a multi-passionate Career Strategist and Personal Effectiveness Trainer. She is living proof that it is never too late to upgrade! Shannon will help you shine and discover new opportunities. She partners with clients to develop personalized action plans that get them what they want from their careers, as well as overcome any challenges or obstacles in the process for sustainable results! She chose this work because she know how hard it can be when are you stuck in a career that doesn't make you happy. Her work is accomplished by addressing mindset, skillset, and strategies to achieve career alignment. Shannon has a unique perspective because she transformed her career after divorce and continues to expand her capabilities daily. You can learn more about Shannon at shannondsmith.com

Book preview

1

THE LAST AND FIRST QUILTS

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.

MURIEL RUKEYSER

Life is what happens when you are making other plans. Who said that? It’s an old truth, made popular in recent music. But it was happening now, today. A meeting with the doctor. A pronouncement of doom. The Lady’s lifeline just took a sharp left turn.

Her thoughts burst out like staccato music. There was no flow. No time for flow. No time for elegant articulation.

Maybe it was a gift, being told that only months remain. Some never see it coming. Really? Could she call it a gift?

But she had some months to prepare. Perhaps she would count it out in weeks. It would sound like more time, if she used weeks instead of months. Math started rolling in her head. Times seven would make it days. In days the number would be much bigger. But that all seemed too precise. And medicine is not an exact science.

The Lady’s brain jerked to attention. What did she need to do, if life was headed pell-mell down the cliff? What would be a fitting use of time? Letters to friends? Yes. Moments with the grown children and grandchildren? Yes. Sitting with morning coffee on the porch and watching the sun rise with the Husband? Yes, all these people things.

She must find time to have final conversations, to enjoy the glue that holds them together. She must thank them for all the kindness they have shown her. She must tell them how proud she is of them. She must leave them with words of hope about the future. She must assure them that they are all the legacy she has ever needed.

Pictures raced through her mind of moments with each important person. These were happy pictures. She was determined about that, to retain the best times. No matter if there had been times of tension, she would—she should—remember the best times.

Could they be repeated? What activities were the best? Could she set it up to do it all again? Could she collect memory moments together in the last months, weeks, days? She would have nothing more pressing, would she? But would others find the time to sit with her, to humor her, to let her do it her way?

And, still one more thing. She would start a final quilt. After fifty years of quilting, fifty years of stitching stories, there was still one quilt unmade, one story untold. One moment of import which had never been memorialized in cloth.

Was this a crazy thought? To start something new when there was so little time? It would not need to be a large quilt. Probably three foot square. She could accomplish that in the time remaining. This was doable, she hoped.

In a sense, it would be a baby quilt, just as the first quilts had been. This one would be a tribute to one gone. A tribute to one who predated her first experience with quilting.

The first quilting. She thought back fifty years to a time when babies were on everyone’s mind. When her generation was starting out careers, and families were forming up. And her life of quilting was taking its first steps.

It was a time when many friends were welcoming babies, a time when thoughts of diapers and jars of baby food seemed like the door to a whole new adventure. Picking names from baby books and family history. It was the stuff of dreams.

All things were possible. Every baby ever born had potential to become someone exceedingly important. Parents saw a future leader in the face of their little one. Before the child could speak or walk, there was still every chance that this child would invent something or write something or discover something that would change the world.

This was the impetus for the Lady’s first quilts. They were baby quilts, made for friends from work who were having babies.

It had been the Lady’s original idea to knit afghans, but her Mother would not hear of it. Her Mother insisted on starting quilts, saying the cloth quilts would be more beautiful and more personable and would last longer than something made with yarn. Her voice was dripping with scorn for woolen goods.

The Lady was part of the macrame and crochet generation. She and her friends were sewing granny dresses and re-discovering home crafts. It was part of the charm of the flower-child generation. She enjoyed making shawls for herself and wanted to crochet a simple zig-zag pattern blanket in soft yarn. She could not imagine making anything so complicated as the granny-square blankets like the one on her own grandmother’s sofa. She had loved to look at it when she was a five-year-old visiting grandma’s house. She did not know how to make the little circles that turned into squares with rings of color. But she was good at straight line crochet. That she could do.

However, as the Mother dictated, quilts it would be. The Mother pulled out children’s coloring books to find simple, large figures of animals. These became the templates to cut animal shapes from bright printed fabric. These would be appliquéd onto background squares, arranged in rows and columns.

The Lady spotted a bunny figure. That would be perfect for the gal who raised rabbits. There were rabbits in several poses, with ears up or ears cocked. The Lady and her Mother paired up the bunnies with bushy-tailed squirrels. These looked like soft, huggable pets, even if rabbits and squirrels did not usually make good lap-friends in real life.

These shapes were appliquéd on very pale green calico and then sashed with medium blue. It was the soft sky blue of spring days cheerfully contrasting with the color of new grass.

The other expectant mom was a country gal from Kentucky, who claimed to be a distant cousin of Daniel Boone. She and her husband lived on a small farm where they raised chickens and goats. The Lady said she would like to use gingham and calico for this second quilt. Her Mother fixed on the children’s poem by Eugene Field, The Duel. So gingham dogs and calico cats were appliquéd onto white squares and sashed with a red print, which resembled cowboy kerchief print.

The quilt embodied the popular children’s poem that the Lady had memorized as a school girl, as had her Mother and Grandmother before her. It was a poem with a total joke as the punch line, and the Lady always laughed at the end. They printed up a copy of the poem to go with the quilt.

Mother did the appliqué. She liked the hand-sewing and her deft fingers made quick work of it. Mother cut and laid out all the parts. She did the math and all the logistics of the quilt piecing. She pinned the blocks to the sashing strips and let the Lady do the machine-sewing required for assembly.

Father, sitting in his recliner chair, said that his mother had never sewn a quilt together on a sewing machine. He said that she always did it by hand. And Mother would reply that she knew for certain her mother-in-law had used a sewing machine.

Years would pass before the Lady figured out how the differing views came to be. Her Father remembered his mother sewing by hand on the farm. That had been when he was a boy in the 1920s. By the time the family left the farm, moved to the city and got an electric sewing machine, he had already long since run away from home. Twice. Father remembered his mother as the woman who married onto the large farm and lived with her husband and his wild half-Native mother. No running water in the house. No electric lines to the house.

It sounded pretty spartan. But there was always a hired girl to do the cleaning and cooking. All the wife had to do was produce babies, which the Grandmother had done nine times. And when the wife was too uncomfortable with pregnancy, the man of the farm always had a hired girl to turn to. That was the time frame in which Father remembered his mother doing all the sewing by hand. Every quilt. Every dress. All sewn stitch by stitch, by hand.

But in later years, long after Father had run away from home, and long after his own father had left her, his mother owned a sewing machine. By the time Father brought home his new bride to meet his mother, the sewing machine was earning its keep every day.

Reality like this never abated the back and forth, about sewing quilts by hand or on machines. It wasn’t a loud argument. Nothing mean was said. But they would banter back and forth, each sure they knew the one true story.

Meanwhile, the Lady was merely twenty-four, and still did as she was told, stitching the pieces together on the sewing machine as instructed. Use a one-quarter inch seam. Keep it straight. Keep the fabric taut. She followed the rules as they were explained to her.

Mother had taught her machine-sewing for apparel. Tailoring stitches were especially emphasized. There was a need for straight lines when the stitching was visible on the outside of the garment. Years later, her friends would look at jackets and tailored dresses which she had made and marvel at the perfection of her stitching.

At one point, the Lady made a simple sewing caddy for her mom to use with quilting. Mother was skeptical. She said the stitching was too perfect and challenged the Lady to admit that it was a purchased item being passed off as handcraft. The Lady wondered if the Mother ever dropped her skepticism and believed her.

But the concept of sewing a straight line, exactly one-quarter inch from the edge, seemed easy compared to the garment tailoring. And the Lady rejoiced that she got no criticism from the Mother on her seams.

She used both hands to guide the fabric, as taught, with the left behind the rhythmic needle, and the right in front. Her hands kept ever so slight a pressure on the fabric, holding it just a little taut to keep it from bunching up as the stitches traveled.

The stitching was straight-line sewing, and the pieces needed to feed under the presser foot evenly. A pin at each end, and more at ten-inch intervals seemed enough. The Mother told the Lady to sew just up to each pin, stop the machine to remove the pin, and then sew up to the next. The left hand steadied the fabric as it came out the back, and the right hand steadied it from the front. Thus it was taught, and thus it would ever be.

The original sewing lessons involved garments, which had curves and arches to the seams. More pins were needed, and there was a technique for sewing over pins. But quilt piecing required the straightest of seams, with no little jiggles from crossing pins.

When the quilt top was completed, Mother brought out her quilting frame. This consisted of one-by-one boards and C-clamps—four of each. The boards were marked in ink for a mid-point, and the quilt sandwich was stapled right to the board. The boards criss-crossed at the corners, and C-clamps provided the tension.

Mother propped this whole unwieldy contraption up, laying it across tables and chair backs in the basement. They sat at the sides to stitch through the layers of cloth and batting. Mother told stories of the old days, when women would attach ropes to the corners of such a framework and hang the whole frame above a bed using clothesline rope. Thus, it could be raised to the ceiling at night and lowered when it was time to quilt.

As the hand-stitching progressed, the boards were rolled toward each other. With each turn, the cloth was released from the side boards to allow the roll. And eventually, when the top and bottom boards were only a foot apart, and every part had been stitched, the quilt was removed from the frame.

Everything about this process was just so with Mother. She was teaching a master class on how to quilt, and no detail was too small to spend time on. She was especially attentive to every seam, which required hand-quilting stitches at one-quarter inch on each side. This would stabilize the quilt so that the stitches for the piecing would not pull out.

It turned out that there were some spaces which Mother considered too open. The batting might stretch and sag within these larger spaces. Modern batting was better than the pulled cotton tufts of a century earlier. But it still required stitching at fairly tight intervals to prevent shifting.

So, extra designs needed to be used. These were hand drawn by the quilter, made into cardboard templates, and traced onto the blank spaces. It needed to come from the quilter’s imagination and be part of the personalization of the quilt. This process originated in the days before quilt stores stocked plastic sheet templates in myriad shapes. Only a few limited patterns were available in the days when the Lady started her quilting journey. But the individual cardboard-shape method was as old as quilting.

For the rabbits and squirrels, the Lady chose to use acorns and leaves as the extra quilting designs. For the gingham dog and the calico cat, she drew dog bones and fish shapes. Mother said this was the funnest part of quilting. The Lady’s reaction, which she wisely kept to herself, was, Oh, no, not one more detailed step!

Then there was the binding. It needed to be double fold. It had to stand up to heavy use if it was a baby quilt. It needed to be cut on the bias. The Lady did not know the why of this, just that it was so. The Mother, who was overwhelming with all of her procedures, got her way at every step.

Along the way, the Lady enjoyed the weeks of quiet monotony of stitching to calm her spirit after the tumultuous breakup she had just gone through. That was how she had ended up back at her parents’ house for a few months. A boomerang child before there was a term for boomerang children. She just needed a break from the breakup. A complete break. The distance of a thousand miles.

It wasn’t her desire to have the relationship dissolve. How could it all be over? She wasn’t at all sure how it had progressed from storybook love to something ugly and unbearable. She wondered how a man who professed so much love could throw it all away.

She tried to square up the two contradictory pictures of love times and rejection times. The timeline just didn’t make sense. It would be decades before she would come to understand how lies had made all understanding impossible. Lies created a house of mirrors, where shapes were in the wrong places.

Before she would figure that out, she would sink into a deep abyss of isolation. She would move away. Rent a small place. Spend time alone. Spend more and more time in which she interacted as little as possible. Even paying at the supermarket and accepting change was a jolt.

That would be after finishing the two animal quilts and presenting them to the happy moms-to-be, never to see the quilts or the moms again. She just pulled away from people. She did not want to be happy. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be.

But she had to keep being. She was with child. In her hasty departure, she had packed a piece of the past deep inside herself. For months, this had been her secret. Making quilts at her parents’ house—that was before she told them. She knew it would be chaos when she did.

Father told her to give the child up for adoption. Mother told her to rush to a doctor and end the whole business. The Lady was numb to these suggestions. She could not see into the distant future when the child would be the most beloved of little girls, her photos displayed with pride and her very existence a great source of joy. In the future. But not yet.

In the Lady’s mind, the emotional pain she had borne during the breakup was so desperate that she would never again let any man be close to her. This baby, this one, this small secret, was her very last chance.

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. There were on-again moments when he made offers to repair all the damage and be true to her forever. But they passed. And the lonely pain returned in its place. He would call and say he was coming, and she would sit up all night and wait and fall asleep in the chair. And when she woke in the morning light and realized that no, he would not be coming, she would turn again to despair.

Somewhere in this cloud of despair, she lost the belief that she was lovable as a person. The betrayal and rejection cut that deep. The failure on her part to see more clearly or to do better—that failure was a stone tied to her self-image, dragging it down and down.

But she could not completely let go of living. She was looking forward to having a baby. Both a blessing and a responsibility. A new life, one that would be dependent on her. She must hold it together, for this little one.

2

THE UNFINISHED QUILT

The Lady had gone to a new town to start a new life, to welcome this baby into her world in a place of neutrality, if not cheer. It did not feel like anyone was ready to share in the baby joy. Not the baby’s father, who had not been consulted about the decision. Not her own Father, who advised adoption. And certainly not the Mother, who suggested something more dire. There was no joy in her surroundings.

She was still grieving the death of a dream. Her heart ached. She retreated into eerie silence. It was not just external silence. Her thoughts often stopped completely and left her in the comparative peace of blankness.

She began a minimalist existence long before the phrase was born. How little could she do and still be a being? What was the least number of activities she needed to do each day?

The Lady had the wherewithal to rent a small three-room duplex. She began to shop garage sales for furniture. A bed for her. A crib for the baby. A card table and two folding chairs for dining.

She got an hourly temp job in an office. And in the evenings, she returned to her small home alone, and she sewed. She put the sewing machine on the only solid support in the residence: a serving bar in front of the kitchen sink. She did her stitching standing up. The cutting and pinning happened at the flimsy card table.

She made maternity jumpers to wear over her own shirts and sweaters. And she made baby clothing—boy clothes and girl clothes, alternating—since she had no idea who this baby might be. The miracle of seeing into the womb with machine imaging had not yet come about. So, she prepared for either type. She sewed sheets for the crib, mostly using cloth from the Mother’s stash.

Her day job drew her into human interaction. It was a refreshing journey into a circle of women. They were a collection of females who were educated enough to compose formal correspondence to the customers: college librarians and museum curators. Responses to business inquiries were dictated and typists made the error-proof copy. There were no personal computers, no memory typewriters—just perky young gals who majored in typing in high school. But this was a panel of females, so they labored in an egalitarian group room in the basement.

Company executives regarded them as interchangeable widgets, despite their knowledge of the business and the product, as well as their ability to discuss it in letters to people with masters and doctoral degrees. One of the gals was designated the Officer in Charge. She was the one with the bigger bosoms. Not the one with a better understanding.

The female workers all knew they were undervalued as a group. And this gave them a group ethos. They supported one another, and they joked about the big-bosomed nitwit when she was out of the room. The Lady gained appreciation for the ability of women to pull together and support their own. It was a safe space. Being segregated from males may have been designed to demean, but it also gave the females safety.

At home, as she sewed on her baby’s layette, the Lady began to dream of a quilt for her own baby. So she cut the leftover scraps from baby dresses and suits into small animal shapes, which she appliquéd onto six-inch squares of cloth.

The whole project used the most mismatched fabrics in outrageous colors. Indeed, the baby clothing was largely made from scraps she had inherited from her Mother’s scrap bag. There was cloth from pajama projects—checkered cloth and striped cloth. Some flowered cloth left from blouses. And the Lady searched the remnant table at the store for cheap bits of cloth. She had paired up fabrics to make dresses with contrasting yokes, or shirts with contrasting collars.

The Lady sketched out the simplest outline shapes for her animals. She followed the Mother’s process: draw the outline, cut one-quarter inch larger, machine-stitch right on the line, clip along the edge for suppleness, fold under, and then hand-stitch the animal to the square. When stitched and pressed, the little profiles were satisfyingly neat.

When it came to the appliqué, the colors were a jumble. She just grabbed one fabric and put it on something that contrasted. Quilting was supposed to be about using up the odd scraps randomly. At least, that was what she had learned from her Mother’s stories and her Grandmother’s quilts. For the ladies who came before her, it was about making something from whatever was at hand. It might not be beautiful, but it could be serviceable.

This was in keeping with the depression era mantra that ruled Mother’s house and all who lived in it. Every jelly jar was washed and saved. Plastic bags from bread were washed inside and out and re-used. Tubes of ointment were squeezed completely dry. Every bit of batter was scraped from the mixing bowl. And every bit of fabric was used. If necessary, fabric bits were sewn together, side by side, before cutting a small quilt piece. That’s what Grandma did in making her famous Double Wedding Ring quilts.

For her quilt, the Lady had carefully designed two animal shapes: an elephant and a giraffe. They were African animals, circus animals—animals which would ignite the wonder of a child. The Lady imagined making a large Baobab tree to stand in the center, with the animals arranged around it. Maybe she would embroider birds near the tree.

But she never got as far as the tree. Before she knew it, the baby had been born, and the quilt patches stacked in a box, where they remained hidden for decades. Whenever she chanced upon the little container, she was quite surprised to see that they had survived. There had been several moves. All sorts of changes in life. And that box of appliqué animals was still awaiting the day they would be called upon again. They waited in the box long enough to graduate to the status of Legacy Quilt by virtue of age.

Eventually the little patches did get an outing, at least. The Lady’s quilt group planned a program in which each member would show a first quilt—or very early quilt—and discuss what they have learned since then. The Lady invited the Daughter to attend, without telling her why. On her show-and-tell turn, the Lady opened the small box and held up a few of the circus animals and described a quilt which never even made it to assembly.

The Daughter was touched to know that a quilt had been planned, had been started, had been dreamed of. That was perhaps enough. She could accept that the task was interrupted by her birth. Then the Lady no longer needed to play with quilt blocks; she had a baby to occupy her time.

The Lady had requested rooming in at the hospital. It was a new concept in birthing. The medical community was developing a new approach, after a century of knocking women out with drugs and ignoring their emotional connection to the birthing. An era had come when there were classes to explain what to expect during labor and delivery. There were exercises that would somehow make it all go easier. And in this hospital, there were two rooms set aside for rooming in.

The standard hospital stay was five days, during which most babies stayed in the nursery and were only brought out to the mother for feeding. With rooming in, the Lady and her baby would share a room. The baby would not be away. Not in the day. Not in the night. No one else would diaper the baby. No one else would pick her up to soothe her if she awakened in the night.

Or at least that was the plan. But immediately after the birth, the baby was whisked out of the delivery room and off to the nursery for a complete assessment. Her APGAR was ten at birth (a perfect score). But she still required a full nursery workup.

The Lady, meanwhile, was cleaned up and transferred to her room. Alone. It was ten in the morning, and she was starving. She had not eaten in sixteen hours, and she had labored. The nurses brought her lunch at 11 a.m., but no baby. They explained that there were too many people in the halls—it was not a time for transporting babies.

Minutes ticked off, slowly, till the Lady threw on a robe and