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Mom's Quilt

May 8, 2016

Watching a movie with Mama on one of her visits, I noticed she was cold. I wrapped her in a lap quilt one of my friends made for me. Later, folding the quilt and returning it to me she commented on its beauty. I told Mama about my friend Betty who quilts all the time and how surprised and happy I was when she presented me with one of her quilts on my birthday.

“No one’s ever made anything for me,” lamented Mama, “it is beautiful.”

Well right then and there I decided to make a quilt for Mama. It actually took me two years to finish. I started when she was eighty-five and presented it to her when she was eighty-seven. She had tears in her eyes, she was so moved that I did that for her.

She wanted to know all about how I made it. Well I glossed over that – it was way too painful to explain to Mama all the mistakes I had made on her quilt.

 

Mama taught me how to sew when I was a little girl. The Barbie clothes she made for me were top shelf, designer specials. The ones I made with scissors and needle and thread were very poor knockoffs. Yet I loved both, the ones so prettily made and the ones made proudly by me.

In high school I took home-economics class and I am sure the teacher thinks she taught me how to sew. I was so proud be to finally graduated to Mama’s sewing machine so that I could complete my homework. After making pot holders and aprons in class, we moved up to our first pattern project – a simple button up blouse, with a set-in collar, short sleeves and of course, buttons up the front. Mom helped me pick out a pattern and buy the material and thread. She showed me how to wash the fabric first, in case it should shrink and then to stretch it diagonally from side to side to make sure the warp and weft threads were properly aligned – things the teacher never mentioned. We opened up the pattern package together and reviewed the directions. Mama pointed out a better way to lay out the pattern to save material – something I had been worried about as Mama had insisted we buy less material than the pattern called for. She then renumbered the directions and starred a few.

“You may need help in these areas, let me know when you are there and I’ll show you an easier way.” she promised.

In class, there were more girls than sewing machines. Those who did not get to class fast enough were put to baking muffins or scones, sometimes fudge, for a class snack while they waited their turn. I loved baking so I never rushed to class.

Well, with Mama’s guidance, I finished that project on time and even helped friends finish theirs. I not only learnt how to sew darts, set in collars and make button holes, I also learnt a valuable lesson in political correctness in allowing the home-ec teacher think she was the one who had taught me these fine skills.

 

I looked through library quilting books and magazines and settled on two fairly simple patterns. I read the directions and photocopied everything. Then I made smaller versions of each to scale on graph paper and figured out how much fabric I’d need. Off I went to the fabric store.

There I kept bumping into an older lady, also intent on finding fabric for quilts. This lady freely gave me advice and even found some bolts of fabric for me. She went out of her way to show me various filler material and explained the pros and cons of each. This was just like Mama, who loved to be the expert on all things and give out advice, even to strangers in stores.

Mama’s favourite colour is mauve – a light shade of purple, not quite violet or lilac. I bought fabric in various patterns of mauve mixed with yellows and off whites, as well as solid purple in a medium and dark shade and a few deep purple patterns. Like Mama taught, I bought just what I needed.

Leaving the store, the lady shopper patted me on the shoulder and cautioned me to work with a simple pattern, “just to keep all the lines straight, dear.”

Back home, I washed my fabric, ironed and stretched it and got out my scissors. I looked once again at my graphs. “Mmm, Mama would indeed love all these diagonal lines in this fruit basket quilt but maybe that lady in the store is right and I should stick with something less complicated.

I began sketching my own patterns and in the end I had a central square, turned on a forty-five degree angle, placed in a larger square. The larger square was made up of four triangles, using two contrasting colours. Once sewn together the brighter fabric would all align one way and the darker one the other, to give the effect of small off-set squares floating in larger, contrasting squares. Measuring my fabric, I now faced the puzzle of seeing if what I bought would work for this new pattern. I sighed.

Mama was so good at mathematics I thought, and even if she were here I couldn’t very well ask for her help as this was a secret project. How many times had I heard her say: ‘You’re a smart girl, you figure it out.”

So I did. If I made three large squares across and five down, it would work. It would mean the small central square would have to be different because I did not have quite enough of the fabric now intended for the smaller squares. So I set to work.

Other work projects came my way, the kind that pays the bills and I set my sewing aside. Mama’s eighty-sixth birthday came and went. She never knew how I agonized over not having finished my project. She was so proud of having just finished two more dollhouses, these ones for her great-grandchildren. These she made from plastic canvass, each was about two to three feet long and tall and about a foot wide. Each room had its unique colour scheme, flooring and wallpaper, all the furniture was made out of plastic canvass and there were flowers sewn into the window boxes and a little family to live in the house, complete with a little dog. She started each whenever a girl child was born and gave it on their fifth birthday. She liked to have them finished on time.

Mama always kept busy. She learnt to cook early in life, cooking in her mother’s home then in her own. Today she still puts on big meals for her seniors club and church functions. She still goes out for daily walks, sometimes for an hour, mostly for two or three. She still has a giving heart, befriending a homeless person who sleeps in a store doorway close to where she lives and making sure she has a sandwich in her purse every time she passes by.

Mama always had a sense of style and still sews, mostly amending what she considers flaws in store-bought clothing. Years ago, visiting her and dad, I came across some knitting – the lightest, softest wool imaginable in the softest colours.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She said with a smile and an enticement to tea and shortbread.

Only after much prodding did I get out of her that she was knitting receiving blankets for the local hospital. They wrapped stillborn babies in them before giving them to their grieving parents.

So I got back to work on my quilt. The central square was a very tiny log cabin, in deep purples and midnight blues. It represented to me Mama’s toughness and deep spirituality. The other small squares had four colours each and were sewn using an alternate colour scheme on every other one. This represented Mama’s complexity. The larger squares alternated from a soft mauve with off-white tiny flowers to a mauve and yellow swirly patterned square: Mama’s gentleness and giving heart. Three bands completed the quilt – a light purple and mauve inner border, a busy small deep mauve and yellow checkerboard and a deep purple outer border. The four corners had squares of the light mauve with the off-white flowers. Together they represented Mama’s sense of style and decorum.

One thing Mama hated on an outfit was if the front was decorated or patterned and the back left plain. So rather than finish the quilt with a flannel backing, I gave it a second quit pattern, alternate squares in deep purple and a funky tie-dye print made up of shades of blues, purples and greens. The back border did not have corner squares, just an inner lining in a midnight blue print and an outer solid purple border. Whimsical, child-like, even youthful, just like my Mama.

My quilt was not perfect. Not all the squares lined up square. Mama could have done a much better job on it. And I worried, getting it ready for gifting, if she would like it.

Could one quilt ever make up for all the lessons I learnt from Mama? How to be tough to survive yet kind, and friendly and to look out for the other guy? How to figure out life’s problems, be healthy and happy, enjoy life, create a loving home, be at peace with oneself and engage in meaningful work? I doubt it.

Yet the joy my Mama expressed on receiving her quilt, the meaning it had for her, made it all worth the self-doubts and late nights. Mama knew she was loved because someone had finally made something for her.

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