Written by Linda Wolfe

OLD TIME ARTS – Grandmother’s Flower Garden

Quilts are an old-time art. Our maternal grandmother created this quilt decades ago. The photo shows a lovely bag my sister made from it. The quilt design is called “Grandmother’s Flower Garden”. It is quite appropriate as she loved growing flowers! The design is entirely fashioned from one-inch-wide hexagons! Her original quilt was the size of a double bed. Our grandmother was born in the eighteen-nineties, so it feels as if she lived in an entirely different world. Things she made were, for the most part, necessities for everyday life.

In her day, most women worked outside the home (and in) …but certainly not in the same way women do nowadays. She never learned to drive and lived in the country most of her life. During her early life, she hung the clothes outside the house to dry (at least in warm weather.) Planting and harvesting her good-sized garden provided much of their food. She always raised chickens for their meat as well as their eggs. This was how women of her era worked outside the home!

She worked inside their home as well. Her garden produce was canned. Her clothes were homemade.

In studying her quilt, I wondered if electricity was available when she sewed it. Electricity did not come to our rural areas until the mid-nineteen-thirties. If that was the case, she may have used a treadle machine when she was not sewing by hand. This quilt, however, was entirely stitched by hand…such a labor of love!

The scale of her quilt astounds me. With only one-inch wide hexagons, she was certainly making the best use of her resources. Having been an individual who endured the Great Depression, I am certain that she would not have been one to waste anything. Making quilts was truly an old-time art!

Teaching by Example

My grandmother was not a teacher by career; however, I see her life as an example of her teachings. She was self-sufficient and thrifty. Saving the smallest scraps of fabric, even while tiny, eventually added up to something significant.

A saying from this era stated: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

It makes me think of the wasteful ways some of us have. Perhaps it is because of her that I repurpose, recycle and reuse things that some may simply discard only to clutter a landfill. I feel our grandmother had a hand in encouraging us to be resourceful as well as creative!

Text © Linda Wolfe