On my great-grandmother’s quilts

Recently, I inherited three quilts that were made my paternal great-grandmother. They’re stunning, each meticulously stitched by hand with intricate swirls and hearts and flowers. As someone who doesn’t sew, I marvel over the tiny stitches, so detailed and uniform and yet different enough to show the human hand that made them. 

I didn’t know my great-grandmother, who died before I was born. I know her name was Sarah, and I know she was a mind-bogglingly prolific quilter. I can’t imagine the time that went into them: the king-size burgundy one covered in delicate white hand stitching; the many, many tiny scraps of fabric that make up the cozy patterns on the forest-green one; the subtle and almost-invisible stitching that covers the entirety of the one with cowboys bull-riding on it. They must have taken months and months, and she made so many quilts over her life that she must have been doing it near-constantly. I picture her, a woman I never knew, hunched over a mountain of fabric, tiny needle in hand, creating. 

Last week, I got pretty sick. A flu settled into me within the space of a half hour, and I went from doing my makeup and getting ready for the day to huddled in bed, shaking so hard I couldn’t move as my temperature spiked. I hate being sick for all the regular reasons, but I really hate being sick like that because it reminds me so viscerally of when I was getting chemo—the total and complete helplessness, the desperate waiting for it to pass, the niggling and constant fear that it will turn into something worse and I’ll have to go to my very least favourite place on earth, the hospital. 

The quilts in question.

A couple hours into that first day I dragged myself out of bed in search of more blankets, and my eye landed on the pile of quilts. I grabbed two—the cowboys and the green one, my undisputed favourite—and dumped them on top of my duvet. I nestled back in and found immediate relief, the weight and warmth of them finally making the shaking stop. I found comfort in them, and a sense of safety.

And I thought about my great-grandmother Sarah again then, in that feverish half-dozing state. When she made these quilts, did she think about how they’d be used in the future? About who would use them? She made quilts for her family—the cowboy one is the second in a matching set she made for my dad and uncle’s beds when they were very young. But I wonder if she had a brain like mine, thinking down the generations the way I think up them. I wonder if she ever thought her quilts would bring comfort to a great-granddaughter she’d never know.

I’ve been really blessed to have inherited a number of pretty remarkable things from my family, because there seems to be a strong tendency among a number of us to hold onto these mementos of the past. And I come, too, from a family of craftspeople. Sarah and her quilts certainly, but I’m also surrounded by woodworkers, painters, knitters—a list of crafts practised with quiet competency by the men and women of my family, through generations and across family lines. And I’m honoured to have some of the fruits of those labours: a sweater knit by my aunt, a wooden cutting board made by my uncle, a table built by my grandfather. 

But there’s something about these quilts, a unique kind of magic. 

I’ve been drawn to textiles for a long time, which is the excuse I use for the truly unreasonable number of scarves and blankets I own. Were I someone given to esoteric thought (kidding! You’ve read this blog) I’d say that it’s something about the weave of fabric, something that captures the memory. The archaeologist in me also comes in—fabric doesn’t normally survive in the archaeological record, but it has to have been something humans have been creating since almost forever. There’s no way we would have survived long without learning about string and needle, stitch and thread. Fabric is transient physically, but immortal in our collective memory. It brings us together globally, shared patterns and weaves and techniques popping up among disparate communities, as we all stumbled through history and developed handcrafts, as we moved from survival to creation to art. Fabric unites us, keeps us warm, allows us expression and identity. 

There’s a small tear along the seam of one of the panels in the green quilt my great-grandmother Sarah made. I wish I knew when she sewed it—fifty years ago? Eighty?—but it’s in remarkably good condition with no visible signs of mending. I’m no quilter, but soon I’ll sit down with some white thread and painstakingly stitch it back up, tuck that small rip away by hand, just like Sarah did. The thought gives me a strange sort of rightness, of kinship over the generations: two women, hunched over the same quilt, who will never meet. Brought together by that object, and needle, and thread.

Until next time.