The Quilt Shelf

The top shelf of my closet is where the quilts live.

I am not from a quilting family. My father's mother would make us comforters, as she called them, material patchworked together and then tied with many knotted strings rather than quilted. Often we would recognize material from a dress she'd made for us. She always made the same style, a drop-waisted short-sleeved dress with an inverted pleat in the front and a zipper in the back, in colorful cotton prints. I have to admit I did not like those dresses; the fit was usually not quite right and the style certainly wasn't "in". I can't remember how many of these dresses she made, but it wasn't many and they were passed down from me to my sisters as we grew. I can't remember how many comforters she made either, but those seemed to arrive pretty much every year.

Grandma didn't make this comfort, but it's a favoriteof mine,
found for $5.00 in someone's basement sale.

Those comforters were the extent of quilting in our family, as far as I know. I tried it once myself with woefully sad results because I didn't take the time or patience needed to do it right. Recently when I found myself saying that I wished I had learned to quilt, I had a new thought: one person cannot do everything and do it right. There are things I can do and do a pretty good job; there are other things that I should just leave to others to do, and admire and support their efforts.

So all of my quilts are ones I have found along the way at antique shops and yard sales and so on. I love each and every one of them, even the ones with worn edges and faded patches. I often think about the hands that made them, what kind of house it might have been and what the women would have looked like. Their work survives and continues to keep us warm.

These old quilts are a lot like the stories I tell. Most of the are old and worn, passed down from someone else, sometimes a stranger and sometimes a family member. Some are ancient traditional tales rubbed smooth from many tellings over many years. All of them are well-loved, and all of them are valuable for the warmth, laughter, history, and love they carry.

When I tell stories, I often cover a table with one of my old quilts. Most often it's the yellow double wedding ring one because to me that pattern is also much like stories--interlocking, weaving a pattern, one story leading to another.









Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.